3 hours ago, efis007 said:

The first image (XP11 without Reshade) looks like it was captured by a "pocket Polaroid camera".
The scene appears very flat, lacking dynamics, with little sense of depth, and the colors aren't beautiful.

The second image (XP11 with Reshade) looks like it was captured by a "professional Canon camera".

This illustrates how different people perceive these things - I can not see a difference between those two shots at all 😄.

But yeah, XP11 was not as realistic in appearance as XP12 is now, so I can see the desire to alter it´s appearance being stronger when using that.

I can also still understand that people want to change the looks of X-Plane to better match their preferences, but this must be done in a way that does not compromise stability.
Ideally Laminar would allow this natively in a safe way, but one of the design mantras in recent years was to remove options wherever possible (something I don´t agree with), following a "the less stuff to fiddle with, the less layman users can get themselves into trouble and then come crying).

4 hours ago, Litjan said:

but this must be done in a way that does not compromise stability.
Ideally Laminar would allow this natively in a safe way, but one of the design mantras in recent years was to remove options wherever possible (something I don´t agree with), following a "the less stuff to fiddle with, the less layman users can get themselves into trouble and then come crying).

I dont particularly agree with this.

On: "in a way that doesn't compromise stability"

This wasn't so much the issue, and definately isn't any better. The main change was to filter out the cases when the user (or a users plugins) was pulling levers that break stuff from their "why is this stuff broken must fix" pipeline,

12.4.1 got a lot more strict on this, which is why so many plugins broke. However, these plugins were for sure breaking stuff already, so once fixed (its beta, that is what betas are for) we should all end up with even better stability.

On the remove options thing: I wouldn't say so, the options are pretty much all still there, in fact with all the json api and websocket stuff that's been added, along with awesome options like 2D and VR specific preferences we have more options than ever.

They have guarded the options which are well known to send your xplane to ground services, like a software version of drive disc buttons, but they are all still there afaik.

Different opinion here, FWIW.  Second image is slightly oversaturated and unnatural.  Yes, it looks "prettier" but not realistic.  Real world is full of haze, smog, smoke, mist, etc.

I don't use addons if at all possible.  Yes, I have AviTab, BetterPushback and a lot of aircraft, but addons are frame killers and CTD threats as LR continues to improve their code and visuals.  But then I'm a virtual pilot, not a sightseer.  Scenery is incidental to the experience to me, not the reason to fly.  JMHO

6 hours ago, Litjan said:

I can also still understand that people want to change the looks of X-Plane to better match their preferences, but this must be done in a way that does not compromise stability.

Oh, there is, but it's prefixed with "sim/private".

5 hours ago, mldavis2 said:

Different opinion here, FWIW.  Second image is slightly oversaturated and unnatural.  Yes, it looks "prettier" but not realistic.  Real world is full of haze, smog, smoke, mist, etc.

I don't use addons if at all possible.  Yes, I have AviTab, BetterPushback and a lot of aircraft, but addons are frame killers and CTD threats as LR continues to improve their code and visuals.  But then I'm a virtual pilot, not a sightseer.  Scenery is incidental to the experience to me, not the reason to fly.  JMHO

Well, the first image looks dull, washed out and has a flattened look to it, it isn't any better than the reshade option! One of the reasons I don't use xp12 during day flights, it all looks like one big cartoon! I'm lucky enough to have the deck working in XP12 and 2024.

I use reshade for night flight, I cannot stand XP12 default night lighting, looks just as bad as 2024! 
 

 

Multiple systems from multiple people have shown extended lights to be possible in XP12 without being a detriment to performance. Why hasn't L/R given us lighting that extends out to the horizon, why do we have to us an addon? 

That in-and-of-itself would make night flight so much better.

49 minutes ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Multiple systems from multiple people have shown extended lights to be possible in XP12 without being a detriment to performance. Why hasn't L/R given us lighting that extends out to the horizon, why do we have to us an addon? 

Because they're a big bunch of meanies who just love reading the same complaints over and over and over and over and over...you get the drift.

Edited March 17Mar 17 by Bjoern

7 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Because they're a big bunch of meanies who just love reading the same complaints over and over and over and over and over...you get the drift.

Are they the same meanies that took school lunch money from the smaller kids years ago? 🤣

1 hour ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Multiple systems from multiple people have shown extended lights to be possible in XP12 without being a detriment to performance. Why hasn't L/R given us lighting that extends out to the horizon, why do we have to us an addon? 

That in-and-of-itself would make night flight so much better.

Yes but I think they are simply waiting for the new scenery-generation to be released before adressing that part. Knowing a bit their view on things resp. their approach, I can imagine that offering an extended nightlight-mod would be some kind of hack-job affecting the future stability or opening a whole new can of possible bugs because of possible bad interactions etc. So I guess they prefer to offer it "well done" and stable rather than trying a quick fix that may break other things. And I would guess that will only be the case when the new scenery-system will be implemented. Just my personal guess 🙂

More too the point, most havt got a clue what they are doing, set things to stupid settings than blame laminar. Laminar would rather deal with real bugs rather than have to deal with peoples ignorance. And im sure most prefer it that way.

13 hours ago, Litjan said:

This illustrates how different people perceive these things - I can not see a difference between those two shots at all

This is exactly how Reshade should be used; the differences between the two graphics should never be too extreme, but rather slightly different.
We can compare Reshade to a "makeup kit for women": it helps highlight the beauty of the face by correcting a few (but effective) fine details.
And it's no coincidence that I've only used Reshade with XP10 and XP11; that is, I used it on simulators that had a less than attractive "face" that needed makeup.
With XP12, however, we have a face that's already convincing by default, so makeup isn't necessarily necessary.

14 hours ago, Litjan said:

I can also still understand that people want to change the looks of X-Plane to better match their preferences, but this must be done in a way that does not compromise stability.

I agree; stability comes first.
If Reshade compromises XP12 stability, it's best not to use it.

4 hours ago, Franz007 said:

Yes but I think they are simply waiting for the new scenery-generation to be released before adressing that part. Knowing a bit their view on things resp. their approach, I can imagine that offering an extended nightlight-mod would be some kind of hack-job affecting the future stability or opening a whole new can of possible bugs because of possible bad interactions etc. So I guess they prefer to offer it "well done" and stable rather than trying a quick fix that may break other things. And I would guess that will only be the case when the new scenery-system will be implemented. Just my personal guess 🙂

ding ding ding

Lets look at it like this (however with past attempts to explain windshield rain logic, I'm not sure how well this will go)
This also touches upon a bit of next-gen scenery.

Currently, the tile system in X-Plane looks like this...

You're flying along and the sim will also load the 3 available tiles ahead or behind you. A system dating back 20 years, because there was no real alternative to modern mapping and visualisations like we see today. Each tile is roughly 25-30nm x and y. So their properties are huge

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This means that only the tile directly below really needs to be fully detailed (In terms of level of detail, not that it should or should not exist). The immediate problem here can be represented by your "field of vision", seen as this white cone from the aircraft. You eyes can only see whats in that cone, but in reality, X-Plane has to load everything not in that cone. That's alot of "stuff" man.

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And now, you wanna add even more lights way out in the distance... oh man. And with the current system, I have all that baggage behind me too?

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So I think most of you can see the problem here.

1. Current scenery is not tile scalable

2. Loading a tile means loading all the baggage that comes with it. 

3. Any quick FOV movements means loading large amounts of data with it.

4. Alot of that work has to be done on the CPU

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So a big part of the solution here, is to just make everything smaller. We don't need these huge tiles. If we make the tiles digestible, we can feed them to the CPU/GPU much easily and make better use of threading. Furthermore, we can have a more LOD'able architecture.

In this version, only the tiles that intersect with our FOV will get rendered. That's significantly less surface area than before, and we can use those resources to scale out further towards the horizon. Perfect!

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This is exactly what modern mapping software use today. Dividing things up into digestible chunks so it can be streamed and loaded locally on your PC. Even MSFS does this if you know where to look. It is a universal format.

 

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We are aware of night-lighting extension addons, which seem to place physical light.objs. I'm not going to pretend I understand how they work, however I'm going to assume... 

1) Their origins are not usually within the tile itself
2) They have to overlap, which means overdraw

 

There are other ways around it. The best is if you can just bake the LIT texture into your autogen or ortho. And some users have done that. We also ship FAR LIT textures with our current scenery.
 

The tldr is, Laminar is usually smarter than people give them credit for 😄

We are fans of our simulator. And while its cool that people come up for workarounds for engine deficiences (trust me the list is long. Memba FlightFactor PBR? Memba Librain? Memba X-Enviro? Memba Skymaxx? Memba SAM? Memba JarDesign Sound3D? Memba SASL?), they are not always the best solution for us.

We've probably argued rings internally about a feature before you've even asked 🙂 

9 hours ago, DeltaWho said:

In this version, only the tiles that intersect with our FOV will get rendered. That's significantly less surface area than before, and we can use those resources to scale out further towards the horizon. Perfect!

Wouldn't that leave flicker/stutters while making any type of turn since X-Plane has no idea which way we will maneuver the aircraft and has to wait until we begin the turn to add the data?