Here I was, flying F16 down the West Australian Coast, looked up, and was at over 60FPS, clouds are delightful, and its only getting better.

Just like you pointed out, the way XP12 "paints the skies" has progressed in the right durection and nowadays there are circumstances under which I consider it even ahead of MSFS 2020.

I also particularly like the way airports, the lighting systems and effects like those of patches of water are modelled.

There are other aspects more directly related to flight modeling such as the way X-Plane models rotaries, which I find second to no other platform I've tried, including the custom helis of DCS World.

 

Zibo mod looks very good now with the cockpit lighting.

I love how far everything has come along

5 years ago I was mostly complaining about stupid bugs

3 years ago I thought the best I could get out of it was good

This weekend I was mostly

No faff, no complaints, no bugs, first attempt, I can almost forget about the simulator and any set up and just jump in and fly,

love it all, with a VR headset that costs less than a cheap monitor, what's not to like?

4 hours ago, mSparks said:

love it all, with a VR headset that costs less than a cheap monitor, what's not to like?

Color me intrigued. Which one and how much setting up is required?

7 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Color me intrigued. Which one and how much setting up is required?

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/309618-psvr-on-fedora-39-with-xplane-11/

you can pick them up as new for less than $100

VR for another day. I can but concur - giving a freeware Dash8 100 a work out in Southern Victoria. Almost perfect skies, winds and immersively realism, yeah that little hut at the airport is not an exact replica but hey its there and it looks good along with the rest of the default. Zipping along a moderate FL's the FPS counter running at 60+. I can also say to watch a very old freeware (XP10) be rebuilt over the past years to be basically a payware quality XP12 aeroplane in the sim has also been transformative. Flight fidelity is very very high. You do wonder how much better can it get - I know but this level of simulated flight is just good, very good. Perfect no but hey whats coming to change out a few things will also be transformative. 

 

Edited July 2, 20241 yr by coastaldriver

What I hate about X12 🔥:

 

We need a Q300 and a decent Twotter in xplane though the RW design Twotter has had some nice community mods.

mjrhealth - Mr Manky has the Q300 and the Q400. New updates on them all very soon - more systems added (lights, bells and whistles). They are all of equal quality - the Q400 gives the FJS a run for its money!

The Omarza mods for the RW Twin Otter - basically cure all its ills and make it a native XP12 bird now. Its AP will always be crappy!

23 hours ago, mSparks said:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/309618-psvr-on-fedora-39-with-xplane-11/

you can pick them up as new for less than $100

Not in this country. Best I've seen was around 100€ used.

Your driver is only for XP's Steam release, right?

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Best I've seen was around 100€ used.

still cheaper than a cheap monitor?

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Your driver is only for XP's Steam release, right?

I don't have XP bought from steam if thats what you mean....

SteamVR is an application in its own right from steam (free) it looks like this

My driver (a hacked version Christoph Haags openhmd wrapper and openhmd, modified to fix all the bugs I found) is for that, it allows you to add the PSVR as a headset to steamvr, so when you run steamvr it switches on the headset and you get a VR display in the headset (different views for each eye) plus head rotation and location tracking - i.e. when you start SteamVR you get

In the headset, where you can look around

With SteamVR running you can then switch to VR mode in (any version of) xplane (normally greyed out), which then makes X-Plane use SteamVR for the display instead of a window/monitor.

->technically Christoph Haags driver, which is an openhmd "wrapper" for steam - steamVR and openhmd do most of the heavy lifting, openhmd is the result of some hackathons aiui.

openhmd does "all headsets", but its PSVR support was lacking (wrong parameters, not accepted good pull requests) so I bundled everything I could find working into one repository.

22 hours ago, mSparks said:

still cheaper than a cheap monitor?

Fair.

 

22 hours ago, mSparks said:

SteamVR is an application in its own right from steam (free) it looks like this

My driver (a hacked version Christoph Haags openhmd wrapper and openhmd, modified to fix all the bugs I found) is for that, it allows you to add the PSVR as a headset to steamvr, so when you run steamvr it switches on the headset and you get a VR display in the headset (different views for each eye) plus head rotation and location tracking - i.e. when you start SteamVR you get

In the headset, where you can look around

With SteamVR running you can then switch to VR mode in (any version of) xplane (normally greyed out), which then makes X-Plane use SteamVR for the display instead of a window/monitor.

->technically Christoph Haags driver, which is an openhmd "wrapper" for steam - steamVR and openhmd do most of the heavy lifting, openhmd is the result of some hackathons aiui.

openhmd does "all headsets", but its PSVR support was lacking (wrong parameters, not accepted good pull requests) so I bundled everything I could find working into one repository.

So basically you have to configure SteamVR, and always run it when you want to run XP in VR? Is there a solution with less overhead?

32 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Is there a solution with less overhead?

well, that's why most of the openhmd devs switched to monado - openXR has the full pipeline definable by the headset. However Laminar haven't built XP with openXR support for Linux yet.

But tbh the "steamVR overhead" is very much overstated imho, the main thing it adds to the mix is reprojection when the sim is sub 60fps (which you lose with any of the alternatives), that warps the render surfaces for each eye as your head rotates, even though the sim didn't send a new frame - generally giving you a smooth "look around", do still need the sim in the 30s 40s else

without that you learn very quickly why Sony have a 120fps minimum for their VR games.

What I like is the self-contained, offline nature of the program. Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that there are many things that are better with a cloud connection, and some that are simply impossible to do offline. However, I appreciate that in 2024 there are two distinch approaches to building a flight sim - one that is heavily going cloud-native, and XP which continues to target fully-offline, cross-platform play.

XP is easy to install, easy to validate, easy to backup, and easy to play with zero connectivity. Everything "just works".

I know XP will continue to add cloud-based features (and they should and must!) like the store, and other things (scenery? ATC? planning?) but I hope that Austin and team approach it from a "offline-first" perspective and do NOT make the offline version a watered-down version of the "real" XP.

Beyond that, I think XP 12 is a HUGE update to 11, and I really enjoy using it. I bought it on pre-release launch day, and while MSFS is my primary sim, I do enough in XP to appreciate the steady improvement to where it is today. Absolutely looking forward to the next year or so of development from Laminar.