Hi Everybody,

While using X-Plane12 I haven't been able to get smooth performance ever since 12.b1. I've tried the graphic sliders on both sides at various positions and yet the problem persist. It looks like I finally found the culprit and it wasn't a plugin or addon product, it was the 3D Vegetation check box. 

Only way to get rid of the stutters/flickers was to uncheck this box, moving the vegetation slider didn't do anything to help curb the issue.

I do get small hesitations every now and then but it's nowhere near as bad as it was and I'm also running all the graphic sliders full right now.
 

 

Edited December 30, 20232 yr by Mike_CFII_MEL

35 minutes ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Hi Everybody,

While using X-Plane12 I haven't been able to get smooth performance ever since 12.b1. I've tried the graphic sliders on both sides at various positions and yet the problem persist. It looks like I finally found the culprit and it wasn't a plugin or addon product, it was the 3D Vegetation check box. 

Only way to get rid of the stutters/flickers was to uncheck this box, moving the vegetation slider didn't do anything to help curb the issue.

I do get small hesitations every now and then but it's nowhere near as bad as it was and I'm also running all the graphic sliders full right now.
 

 

think that is one of the xworld scenery packs, there is some stuff about that in the readme iirc.

25 minutes ago, mSparks said:

think that is one of the xworld scenery packs, there is some stuff about that in the readme iirc.

Thanks, I'll take a look at the read me. Although this went on before X-World, it's a fairly new install. 

so far so good, thanks everyone. 

23 minutes ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Thanks, I'll take a look at the read me. Although this went on before X-World, it's a fairly new install. 

so far so good, thanks everyone. 

I had something similar happen to me when I refreshed all my custom scenery and set up serving it all from zip files.

A blanket install of xworld hits perf pretty hard.

If you are fps chasing there are two or three of the "high detail" xworld folders you want to disable, and there is some procedure for integrating with XPs new forests properly. The documentation on this is good though from what I remember, Ill try and remember to start a thread on it when I get back next year.

Still possible its something else related (e.g. changes they made to the 3D veg since the initial release), they very recently fixed up shadows off the 3D veg, and that fix definately had a bit of a perf hit, maybe its worse at very high screen volume.

12 hours ago, mSparks said:

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)

 

I think you are confusing between GPU accelerated mesh as a general thing VS mesh shaders specifically.

Tessellation pipelines that subdivide the mesh are available since a long time ago, combine that with a noise texture to displace it, that is how X-Plane creates it's water, that's how I think MSFS2024 procedural terrain work, based on what they call their new features.

Mesh shaders are different stages with an endgame to completely replace the current pipelines, with "lower access" control, not fixed-functions, able to create more "interesting" & custom topology (tessellation can suffer from morphing for example as it's outputs is limited) & generally built for better use of modern GPUs.

Now, sure, there are practices that try the same idea that mesh shaders have, i.e. you can cull on the GPU without using them, like XP12 trees.

IIRC Nanite also does not rely on mesh shaders for what it does with a rather very similar concept, but if you want top-notch performance/efficiency/scalability, they are supported and can be enabled given you have the proper hardware.

20 minutes ago, Inu said:

Mesh shaders are different stages with an endgame to completely replace the current pipelines, with "lower access"

pretty much exactly what I said at the start.

->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

14 hours 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).

Whilst I don't personally like Adobe as a company (I hate subscriptions), Substance and Photoshop can save a lot of time and is why we now have developers producing some good content quickly (rather than in the old Sketchup days which was way more work and looked worse). As for directly baking inside Blender, there are plugins that'll do it automatically, but it's also relatively easy (Bake AO, Bake Diffuse, Bake Roughness (and then invert)). You are right that part is a manual process and baking metallic maps is something it doesn't support directly, but there are ways to do once you have a workflow established. The process is the same deal for MFS (and FSX, P3D). I can do both MFS and X-Plane textures easily these days from Blender/Substance, and have created scripts that can process and convert between them.

 

11 hours ago, mSparks said:

A blanket install of xworld hits perf pretty hard.

The problem with Simheaven is that it adds a lot of unnecessary objects that you simply can't see from a plane above 300ft, as well as draping textures over the ground. If you remove these two, performance is generally much better, especially if using orthos beneath. 

17 hours ago, Inu said:

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.

While this does explain the technical apects of the material model, there are ZERO practical examples to set up a given material using a freely available tool. 90 % of developers do not care about how F0 = 0 is unrealistic, but instead how to plug this and that into material slots and what to do to obtain a workable result for X-Plane without banging their head on the desk for hours trying to figure out a workflow.

 

3 hours ago, tonywob said:

Whilst I don't personally like Adobe as a company (I hate subscriptions), Substance and Photoshop can save a lot of time and is why we now have developers producing some good content quickly (rather than in the old Sketchup days which was way more work and looked worse). As for directly baking inside Blender, there are plugins that'll do it automatically, but it's also relatively easy (Bake AO, Bake Diffuse, Bake Roughness (and then invert)). You are right that part is a manual process and baking metallic maps is something it doesn't support directly, but there are ways to do once you have a workflow established. The process is the same deal for MFS (and FSX, P3D). I can do both MFS and X-Plane textures easily these days from Blender/Substance, and have created scripts that can process and convert between them.

Establishing workflows with enough experience isn't an issue. The issue is Johnny Newface over there, working on his favorite airfield as his first foray into content creation for X-Plane and still unwilling to pay for any utilities. And as I see it, X-Plane's documentation simply does not adequately cater to him, providing at least rough and practical guidelines from start to finish. Same if Johnny was an aspiring aircraft developer. There is no cohesive, official narrative on how to make an aircraft for XP12 with everything that's included, i.e. flight model, fmod, art assets (Dan Klaue's tutorials are out of date. Period.).

If "the other simulator" cares much more adequately to the needs of prospective developers in terms of tools and documentation, there's no wonder why it gets all the add-on attention.

6 hours ago, Bjoern said:

there's no wonder why it gets all the add-on attention.

More like most of the users over there could care less about fidelity, just like pretty, that why it gets so many users, im sure carenado is doing well over there, Xplane users are far more fussy, as I have said before, just look at the comments they get, even from people who have no idea about how the real thing works. Far different user base.

You wait till ms2024 comes out if Austin is still faffing about like he is now, by then I’d say xp12 will be a dead dodo.  Just my opinion

Edited January 1, 20242 yr by fluffyflops

8 hours ago, fluffyflops said:

You wait till ms2024 comes out if Austin is still faffing about like he is now, by then I’d say xp12 will be a dead dodo.  Just my opinion

Well we will remeMber you so we can see that mud on your face. Prophets of doom, how many of them have faded away. MS must pay them well.

Thx to João Galaio ( @GalaioSilva😞

offensive initials not allowed happened to X-Plane 12? - Addendum - YouTube

Which pretty much goes in the direction of what I find - total users should be added between XP11 and XP12, more than in multiple version examples like those of P3D v2 to v6....

There are still a LOT of XP11 users not using XP12... Probably a good deal of those didn't even buy XP12....

A similar result should be interpreted regarding P3D v5 and v6, and v4 and v5 last year....

Will probably also apply next year to MFS 2020 and 2024....

 

Edited January 1, 20242 yr by jcomm

21 minutes ago, jcomm said:

total users should be added between XP11 and XP12,

If you do that then Laminar now has as many users as Microsoft....

Are you sure you want to do that?

39 minutes ago, mSparks said:

If you do that then Laminar now has as many users as Microsoft....

Are you sure you want to do that?

Cannot be added that way OFC, because there are users with both XP12 and XP11, but as the guy on the video says, one of the characteristics of the XP user base is "stability". They are more or less faithful to their preferred simulation platform, and have various good reasons for that, from being cross-platform to having a superior flight model and overall physics and base systems modelling...

Contrarily to what the survey results may suggest XP is, nonetheless, superior in user base to DCS World, surely superior to my preferred general purpose flightsim ever - P3D - and I believe it will keep that way and continue to grow...

Edited January 1, 20242 yr by jcomm

1 hour ago, jcomm said:

They are more or less faithful to their preferred simulation platform,

Aircraft, imho. They have their favourite bird (or 5.. ), and occasionally dabble in something else. People generally don't really care what platform serves it at all imho.

survey says most are putting 2 to 3 hour sessions in 2 to 5 times a week. But imho that is less "xplane for 2 to 3 hours, 5 times a week" and more "sparky744 for 3 hours 3 times a week, and the VSL R44 for an hour twice a week". At least projecting my personal experience.

In that sense I can believe they add to similar/close to msfs, at least in term of survey respondents - What aircraft is there you can fly in MS 5 times a week for 3 hours? From what I read on the MS forum trying to do that leaves you with only the rudder and ailerons working 2 and a half hours in.... as good a reason to try similar aircraft on another platform as any.

OTOH, MS does have a lot more users than say xplane or flightgear who spent more time downloading it and updates than actually flying an aircraft - but none of them would be invested enough to answer the survey.

Edited January 1, 20242 yr by mSparks