40 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

Minecraft cloud 2.0

Yeah. And they've said multiple times in past release notes that these were fixed. This time around it got a more grounded, hands-thrown-in-air treatment:

https://developer.x-plane.com/2025/04/12-2-0-chockingly-good-fun/

"Cloud formations/Square clouds (This has been a persistent thorn in our sides, and won’t be addressed in 12.2.0. However, we are planning more improvements to this later this year)"

cloud quality: max   - "the best clouds in any ....flight sim"

as I said before: "only if they are finally constantly everywhere and at every time of day "the best" are they really "the best of any flight sim."

like here:

Edited April 13, 20251 yr by turbomax

2 hours ago, turbomax said:

cloud quality: max   - "the best clouds in any ....flight sim"

as I said before: "only if they are finally constantly everywhere and at every time of day "the best" are they really "the best of any flight sim."

like here:

Yeah unfortunately cloud formations are still the same as before right now, in other words, pretty hit or miss - this update was to improve the lighting and I believe we managed to do a good job at that, but without the proper formations to "show off" that lighting of course the entire experience is going to be hit or miss too. Depending on the situation sometimes you can get cloud visuals you won't find in any other sim, and in other cases you will get clouds straight out from Minecraft. The cloud formations are going to be addressed in 12.3 as it requires a full redesign of the cloud volume system, the current system unfortunately seems to be a dead-end regardless of the band-aids we apply on top.

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by Maya2

49 minutes ago, Maya2 said:

this update was to improve the lighting and I believe we managed to do a good job at that,

yes, fantastic job. truly convincing and much nicer than in MSFS. best for me in twilight and under MVFR conditions. and to be honest, the lighting is the main reason I switch from MSFS to xplane12 from time to time. 😄

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by turbomax

4 hours ago, Franz007 said:

That’s what I said: if you fly low and slow over a city it may add to the immersion. Otherwise it’s just a hype. I am working with digital twin cities using photogrammetry and there is always rendering issues. We even see them in that video. And it’s not made to be used in a fast moving environnement like a game. Perhaps in 5 or 10 years. Orthos are something different and used for the ground textures. Asobo throws some hyped technologies to the face of their users to test a new technology and then some think it is absolutely necessary. It is not, at least not when flying airliners.

Like I said: Photogrammetry is in its infancy stage, rendering issues will have to go through its growing pains just like XP12 is going through its growing pains as I type this. I've flown a 737NG around New York city with photogrammetry, so speed doesn't have anything to do with the addition of photogrammetry into the mix of immersion. I've seen some amazing approaches with a 737 into KJFK, KLGA, KEWR.

That hyped technology is absolutely necessary if one is practicing any real world dead reckoning in XP12. It's not possible using their plausible world.

2 hours ago, Maya2 said:

going to be addressed in 12.3

You really shouldn't say such things?

1 hour ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Like I said: Photogrammetry is in its infancy stage, rendering issues will have to go through its growing pains just like XP12 is going through its growing pains as I type this. I've flown a 737NG around New York city with photogrammetry, so speed doesn't have anything to do with the addition of photogrammetry into the mix of immersion. I've seen some amazing approaches with a 737 into KJFK, KLGA, KEWR.

That hyped technology is absolutely necessary if one is practicing any real world dead reckoning in XP12. It's not possible using their plausible world.

It’s absolutely not new. It exists since several decades. And yet you will still see performance issues, because it needs time to build up when going through the network. If you download a limited area on your HD and fly only in that area, it works. But it’s not solid enough in a dynamic environnement and costs quite a lot of fps. Btw. streaming everything has been the big disaster/mistake of 2024 because of it’s low reliability. And again, for me, this is really not an area Laminar should start to invest time into. I wouldn’t have turned it off the whole time otherwise. There are way more important things to implement than that, that’s why I said that I hoped they wont go down that rabit hole, just to follow a hype that adds little to nothing. It doesn’t make sense in my opinion wanting to have 2 exact identical sims. Each of them should keep their areas they focus on.

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by Franz007

1 hour ago, Franz007 said:

It’s absolutely not new. It exists since several decades. And yet you will still see performance issues, because it needs time to build up when going through the network. If you download a limited area on your HD and fly only in that area, it works. But it’s not solid enough in a dynamic environnement and costs quite a lot of fps. Btw. streaming everything has been the big disaster/mistake of 2024 because of it’s low reliability. And again, for me, this is really not an area Laminar should start to invest time into. I wouldn’t have turned it off the whole time otherwise. There are way more important things to implement than that, that’s why I said that I hoped they wont go down that rabit hole, just to follow a hype that adds little to nothing. It doesn’t make sense in my opinion wanting to have 2 exact identical sims. Each of them should keep their areas they focus on.

Show me a flight simulator on the market from decades ago where photogrammetry is available and in use by the masses. I've been flying since 1985 and I've never seen this technology in use in any of them before 2020 hit the market. 

@Maya2,

since you will be at it for 12.3, it would be great to finally get the clouds visible at night, even when there's no Moon.

City lights and other forms of scatered light that illuminate clouds during night are missed 🙂

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by jcomm

2 hours ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Show me a flight simulator on the market from decades ago where photogrammetry is available and in use by the masses. I've been flying since 1985 and I've never seen this technology in use in any of them before 2020 hit the market. 

I was not talking about flightsims but about the technology. There hasn’t been any other flightsim using it because, again, it’s not really meant to be used in such a highly dynamic environnement.

1 hour ago, jcomm said:

@Maya2,

since you will be at it for 12.3, it would be great to finally get the clouds visible at night, even when there's no Moon.

City lights and other forms of scatered light that illuminate clouds during night are missed 🙂

Reflections from city nights on the clouds or from the aircraft-lights below 10´000ft would be a great thing to have. But apart from that, during a pitch-dark night, we can’t see any clouds at all in real life.

7 hours ago, blingthinger said:

You really shouldn't say such things?

It's planned to be addressed this year, as per the public roadmap. I just misremembered it as 12.3, sorry about that.

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by Maya2

5 hours ago, jcomm said:

@Maya2,

since you will be at it for 12.3, it would be great to finally get the clouds visible at night, even when there's no Moon.

City lights and other forms of scatered light that illuminate clouds during night are missed 🙂

BTW I won't be working much on the cloud formations fix, which is why I couldn't even remember the correct timeframe for it 😅 (In hindsight I should've checked it instead of going by memory, once again I'm sorry about that.)

The city lights etc. illuminating clouds are definitely on the roadmap, but with no estimated timeframe right now.

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by Maya2

2 hours ago, Franz007 said:

I was not talking about flightsims but about the technology. There hasn’t been any other flightsim using it because, again, it’s not really meant to be used in such a highly dynamic environnement.

think its more that the technology itself is still immature. 

waaay back when it was announced photogrametry was "flight sim ready" we did some tests importing photogrammetry into XP11. The results of those tests were probably the #1 reason I was so pessimistic for anything not XPlane.

Basically, the import was doable, there were reasonably solvable issues around texture coloring and you could actually get it in with decent framerates.

However,

The precision of the underlying data simply wasn't and still isn't there, very clear from those first tests that as soon as you get close to photogrammetry the whole illusion falls apart, and that was going to be a huge issue in a community that goes crazy over a few pixel colors out of place at 100m. The enormous size of the data needed to get close even to XP11 default scenery was going to be a massive burden that couldnt be overcome.

Photogrammetry needs a lot more technological development before its ready. imho.

Meanwhile I am very, very, very happy to see LR instead put the effort into the cloud system, lighting, shadows.

Seriously 

"omg".

1 hour ago, Maya2 said:

BTW I won't be working much on the cloud formations fix, which is why I couldn't even remember the correct timeframe for it 😅 (In hindsight I should've checked it instead of going by memory, once again I'm sorry about that.)

The city lights etc. illuminating clouds are definitely on the roadmap, but with no estimated timeframe right now.

No problem, I didn't actually even assimilate the part of your message where you mentioned an update was comming with a given release.

For me it is good enough to know it's on the ToDo list 😁👍 and since the other sim is already on a new version I would easily accept it for xp13 only.

Edited April 14, 20251 yr by jcomm