Hi Everybody,

Looks like I'm not the only one tired of the falsehoods coming from Laminar, discord has finally started to call them out on an issue that has been broke for some time!!! and no that's not my rant/letter.

C/P

Hi Austin & Ben,

I apologize in advance for the following rant.

Once upon a time there existed XP11.

It had fixed jetways you could see on a master or external visual pc.

Then some clever plugin developer created SAM for XP11 & there were moving jetways
visible on both the master & external visual pc's.

Life was great.

Then over two years ago XP12 was released, with its own moving jetway system.

The only problem is the developer of the jetway system forgot about external visual pc's
and created a bug where said jetways are invisible at the arrival airport on external visual pc's.

Despite bugs being raised & acknowledged by Laminar over two years ago, promise after promise of it being fixed in the next release have not been kept. Promises made at Flight Sim Expo 2024 have not been kept.

Ben has just told me it will not be in the 12.2.0 release.

I once asked Ben if the jetways are drawn (but don't move) at the departure airport on external visual pc's why can't they be drawn (but don't move) at the arrival airport instead of being invisible.

He said they look better not being there, which I do not agree with. He also said it was not worth
the time & effort to make them visible (but don't move) at the arrival airport because external visual networking is just around the corner.

The problem is that the corner has taken over two years to get around with still no sign of the finishing straight being in sight any time soon.

Existing bugs should be fixed before new features are added.

If we can't have external visual networking can we at least have static jetways visible at the landing airport.

Rant over.

Regards,

10 hours ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

falsehoods

Folks tossing around words like these is one reason why devs for any product shy from conferences and public appearances. It's true that he shouldn't have said a thing, but they did also hire a networking guy. He does own the networking stuff. Literally. I've talked with him before. About networking bugs. That he fixed. I am unable to see this stuff never ever making it into the sim.

And I did still chuckle here. Why? Because this is hobby. I am not willing to believe that you take massive hits to your youtube view stats (and hence financial reward) simply because XP is out of sync for 5% of the stream on 10% of your fan base's computer monitor real estate.

Edited March 12, 20251 yr by blingthinger

P.S. as far as weather sync is concerned, do you happen to set the weather seed value on each of the XP boxes that you start up? At least the visible cloud structures should be identical if you do.

29 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

And I did still chuckle here. Why? Because this is hobby. I am not willing to believe that you take massive hits to your youtube view stats (and hence financial reward) simply because XP is out of sync for 5% of the stream on 10% of your fan base's computer monitor real estate.

Hi,

X-Plane is a professional flight simulator as touted by its owner Austin (it even has FAA approval for real world utilization) whereas the other base platforms are just games, so this is no hobby. As far as youtube I don't make a penny, not signed up for it nor have any intention of ever doing so, although that has zero to do with empty promises over the years. 

6 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

P.S. as far as weather sync is concerned, do you happen to set the weather seed value on each of the XP boxes that you start up? At least the visible cloud structures should be identical if you do.

Clouds match about 60% of of the time and usually only at one level.

I am not knowledgeable about the inner workings of the networking for external visuals, but it is obvious that it is not trivial to pass all the required information to networked machines that will enable them to accurately show the identical scene (from a different viewpoint).

It is not that far from the problems that go into creating a "situation file" (saving the simulator state) and the replay functionality. A ton of entitities need parameters to describe their state accurately - so that the same world can be recreated accurately.

The person(s) in charge with this have been very busy over the last years, and every feature added to X-Plane will add to the complexity of their task.

Ultimately the amount of people affected by this bug is extremely low. There are very few people actually running networked setups, and I believe only a fraction of that fraction is actually hampered severely in their enjoyment of X-Plane by the fact that jetway positions are not synced up between networked computers.

So - in other words - we all have our favourite "pet pieve" with X-Plane that we think is the one single most important thing to fix...and it is Laminar´s job to triage all these thousands of "most important things" and figure out what to work on next.

Sorry, you lost to "dark cockpits" in this round 😉

 

7 hours ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Clouds match about 60% of of the time

Is that with or without those seeds values set?

8 hours ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

so this is no hobby

It's a hobby for you.

The few using the sim professionally in this context are perfectly happy humming along on 11. That world moves as slowly as cold tar. They'll move to 12 when it's ready and certainly don't go around on public forums claiming LR is full of liars. That's fussy spoiled brat behavior.

4 hours ago, Litjan said:

I am not knowledgeable about the inner workings of the networking for external visuals, but it is obvious that it is not trivial to pass all the required information to networked machines that will enable them to accurately show the identical scene (from a different viewpoint).

It is not that far from the problems that go into creating a "situation file" (saving the simulator state) and the replay functionality. A ton of entitities need parameters to describe their state accurately - so that the same world can be recreated accurately.

I've worked with numerous companies over the years beta testing the latest for XP12 being Traffic Global. It took two to three months to find the issue with disappearing aircraft on the external computers/views. When "I" found the issue that had to do with the FOV, Jim had it fixed the very next beta, can't be that difficult! 

3 hours ago, blingthinger said:

It's a hobby for you.

The few using the sim professionally in this context are perfectly happy humming along on 11. That world moves as slowly as cold tar. They'll move to 12 when it's ready and certainly don't go around on public forums claiming LR is full of liars. That's fussy spoiled brat behavior.

It may be a hobby to you but not to me, that's why I spent over $100 thousand dollars on my professional sim, developed by a company that makes hardware for real world companies like Southwest Airlines, GE Aviation, NASA, Air Canada, BAE Systems and the like, just to name a few! 

Only thing missing from my setup is an attached FAA school and a commercial license from Laminar.

4 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Is that with or without those seeds values set?

Never read anything, anywhere about setting seed values in XP12. Also it's not just the clouds, it's the rain, lightning, dusk and dawn lighting as well. If one suffers from a seizure disorder, better stay away from bad thunderstorms while networking multiple computers. The numerous mismatched lighting strikes  over multiple screens could trigger a seizure! 

 

Edited March 12, 20251 yr by Mike_CFII_MEL

1 hour ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Never read anything, anywhere about setting seed values in XP12

--time_seed=1 --weather_seed=1

Essentially setting the seeds for the internal random number generators. In the case of weather that's what gives random variety to the cloud structures. I'm not certain what time_seed directly affects (maybe strobe start points or even ground traffic routes in time?) but it would be interesting to see if setting both of them on all your sim boxes syncs the visuals in any way. You can use any integer you want. Doesn't have to be 1 (though, why not just use 1) but does need to be the same on all the computers.

You'll see these cli args show up in the Log.txt after writing a weather dump. Maybe setting both will help with the lightning dance club? If it did come out to close-but-not-quite fully sync'd, you'd probably also want to try enforcing the frame rate limiter. Lightning might be tough to sync at that level.

And of course, maybe also they wont help your use case at all... I suppose for this to work, each XP would also have to start in perfect unison...hmmmm...but not sure if that means right at XP startup? Or does it matter when the flight situation is finally fully loaded? Would take some experimenting.

Edited March 12, 20251 yr by blingthinger

Oh, and apparently there's an art env var sim/private/controls/render/tickle_cubemaps that will manually trigger the lighting to update. If you set up a lua script to set it to 1 every few seconds or so on all the boxes (e.g. every 20-30 sec), you'd end up with better lighting sync. Maybe have the main box send a network packet to the other secondary boxes to trigger it? I think there's also a slight FPS hit when that goes off though, so use wisely.

Edited March 12, 20251 yr by blingthinger

I'll have to have a look at that, thanks. I'll let you know what happens, hope it works.

Hi,

The three computers are a match but the view is still a mismatch, always seems to happen to one visual. It's always some cloud layers match and some don't.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mOonChWt3pQsYFoTxH-qIdNhYe-ojvdV/view?usp=sharing