X-Plane shining in last navigraph-result

[Franz007 521]

3 hours ago, jarmstro said:

Nonsense! How could scenery possibly be a problem in XP. Because there isn't any scenery! (Apologies, couldn't resist.😀)

No scenery vs. no Flightmodel; i have easily made my choice 😁 (sorry couldn‘t resist)

[jarmstro 2,405]

5 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

No scenery vs. no Flightmodel; i have easily made my choice 😁 (sorry couldn‘t resist)

It's a difficult choice. Isn't it. Mine was scenery. Because both sims are basically computer games and I've spent a lot of money keeping my PC up to date.

Edited December 30, 2023 by jarmstro

[Mike_CFII_MEL 797]

Since this will take nothing but time, going to reinstall XP12 from scratch on my center computer and leave the other two alone for now and see what I get.

[Franz007 521]

4 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

It's a difficult choice. Isn't it. Mine was scenery.

Having used „Fighterpilot“ for the C64 as my first sim, i can live without scenery as long as you give me at least one runway to land 😉

[jarmstro 2,405]

9 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

Having used „Fighterpilot“ for the C64 as my first sim, i can live without scenery as long as you give me at least one runway to land 😉

Haha! I did have a flight sim for the c64 but can't remember what it was? I do remember that after not too long the tape player chewed up the tape and that was that! Mind you, ever since, my wife has never understood why I could possibly want more than one plane!😀

Edited December 30, 2023 by jarmstro

[Franz007 521]

2 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Haha! I did have a flight sim for the c64 but can't remember what it was? I do remember that after not too long the tape player chewed up the tape and that was that! Mind you, ever since, my wife has never understood why I could possibly want more than one plane!😀

Excellent 😂🙏✌️ Yeah those programms running from a datasette…💪

[jarmstro 2,405]

3 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

Excellent 😂🙏✌️ Yeah those programms running from a datasette…💪

It takes me back. Certainly in the UK it was tapes. Haha. Great times. Now I'm about to say the most triggering, outrageous and trolling thing I have ever said so look away now!....

The best ever C64 game was Wizball! 😂😂

[jarmstro 2,405]

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

I'll put aside the sarcasm because it is a valid question.

mostly because by default there is a lot of numerical geometry in the ground textures, 10s of thousands of technically 3D surfaces each with their own texture. gpu + cpu APIs are pretty slow at this, and havent improved it for some 20 years. the .fac files they use for many of the buildings arent that much better.

faster is ortho - that replaces it with a well defined single object with LOD and one texture. MS does this by default. 

fastest is mesh shaders, which is one of several very sexy technologies that become (more widely) possible as they finish up getting the fundamental tech working they discussed in the dev q&as I posted earlier, while nothing has been officially announced here, I suspect/expect they will. Austin has talked around it a few times, this will probably be part of MSFS2024. Aces of Thunder aleady demod it hiding in the background of their announce trailer

pretty sure XP12 is already using it (or very similar) for the new water stuff that went live with XP12.

 

You are the best.mSparks. Seriously, you are the best.

[Franz007 521]

53 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

It takes me back. Certainly in the UK it was tapes. Haha. Great times. Now I'm about to say the most triggering, outrageous and trolling thing I have ever said so look away now!....

The best ever C64 game was Wizball! 😂😂

Haha, the best for me was Zack McCracken 🤷‍♂️🤣

[jarmstro 2,405]

7 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

Haha, the best for me was Zack McCracken 🤷‍♂️🤣

Hmmm. Don't remember that one?  I'm going to to check it out! But are you seriously saying that Wizball isn't the greatest C64 game of all time? If so I fear that you may be cancelled.😀

Edited December 30, 2023 by jarmstro

[Inu 86]

4 hours ago, mSparks said:

fastest is mesh shaders, which is one of several very sexy technologies that become (more widely) possible as they finish up getting the fundamental tech working they discussed in the dev q&as I posted earlier, while nothing has been officially announced here, I suspect/expect they will. Austin has talked around it a few times, this will probably be part of MSFS2024. Aces of Thunder aleady demod it hiding in the background of their announce trailer

pretty sure XP12 is already using it (or very similar) for the new water stuff that went live with XP12

 

I highly doubt XP12 already using mesh shaders, it was not available for Vulkan when they started working on v12 let alone for Metal that introduced them earlier this year.

I also highly doubt MSFS2024 will be using them, since their new procedural feature for geometry is literally called tessellated materials.

[Bjoern 1,158]

On 12/28/2023 at 9:08 PM, tonywob said:

Creating PBR materials is mostly child's play these days using tools such as Substance Painter with the built-in library and user contributed materials.

Substance is horribly expensive, ArmorPaint costs money as well and Blender's PBR texture baking still requires manual intervention to produce an X-Plane compliant material (which is hardly documented).

[mSparks 2,094]

50 minutes ago, Inu said:

I highly doubt XP12 already using mesh shaders, it was not available for Vulkan when they started working on v12 let alone for Metal that introduced them earlier this year.

I also highly doubt MSFS2024 will be using them, since their new procedural feature for geometry is literally called tessellated materials.

for XP there is debugging for the water mesh activatable from art drefs, you can turn on the wireframe, that looks like mesh shaders to me.

pretty sure the new trees are to.

aiui mesh shaders are where the majority of the mesh "only" exists in the GPU and is created by a shader.

And yeah, I also get there is more to it than just this.

no way they are sending all that geometry over the bus like they do with the conventional scenery.

As for metal, Austin has a fairly tight relationship with Apple, he was one of the few people who knew about the first iPhone before it was announced, which is how he got xplane on it almost for launch day. (aiui)

 

Edited December 30, 2023 by mSparks

[Inu 86]

19 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Substance is horribly expensive, ArmorPaint costs money as well and Blender's PBR texture baking still requires manual intervention to produce an X-Plane compliant material (which is hardly documented).

Reading this thread, generally I agree with you that some of the documentation is very lacking, this applies mostly for the scenery features.

For the material model, it is actually documented really well: https://developer.x-plane.com/article/the-x-plane-12-material-model/

All you need for PBR is 2 textures that you create however you want and know, packed in the normal map according to what this document above suggests. (Blue for Metals/translucent dielectric, alpha for roughness)

Creating the graph and saving it in blender is easy, you just bake to the appropriate channels.

Now, with that being said, internally, starting v12 XP will SPLIT the PBR textures & Normals to 2 different compressed versions of them, saving VRAM. 

Also, XP12 supports KTX2 packing with the modern formats.

An official exporter for all of this is WIP, pre-compressed Normal maps & PBR textures should help loading & paging performance, also once they are split, you can work on different resolutions. 

Oh and as side note, decals (Normal mapped as well!) for OBJs are finally coming, mentioned in the Christmas Q&A.

[Mike_CFII_MEL 797]

10 hours ago, GoranM said:

Maybe try that.  You don't have to install scenery.  Just install the base sim and run a few tests.  That's been one of the main things developers ask people to try when there are issues.  If we can eliminate a rogue plug in, by way of a clean install, then troubleshooting becomes a lot easier.

New install didn't do it and the only items added to the custom scenery folder are the extended lights and X-World folders. I removed those folders and let XP create a new scenery file, no change.