On 3/19/2026 at 8:38 PM, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

1. Right now XP12 looks like a cartoon during day flight, I would hope the images/textures are "NOT" what the developer created, but what they were forced to settle on! using

In what way do you think it looks like a cartoon? I'd appreciate more details. The lighting, atmosphere or the terrain?

14 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Honestly I do not understand why we need AI in every thing, its in just about every new app, new processes all doing the same thing stealing CPU cycles I do not wish to give them. When is enough enough

As you have no control over how Big Tech will grab more of your money or personal data, the only solution is switching to open alternatives.

4 hours ago, Maya2 said:

In what way do you think it looks like a cartoon? I'd appreciate more details. The lighting, atmosphere or the terrain?

Ground terrain, roads, starwars type rain, three colors at night, gigantic light bulbs on all the lights just to name a few.

Edited March 23Mar 23 by Mike_CFII_MEL

1 hour ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Ground terrain, roads, starwars type rain, three colors at night, gigantic light bulbs on all the lights just to name a few.

Obviously never watched bugs bunny

2 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Obviously never watched bugs bunny

Sure I did, my favorite was the use of air brakes! 

15 hours ago, Mike_CFII_MEL said:

Ground terrain, roads, starwars type rain, three colors at night, gigantic light bulbs on all the lights just to name a few.

I mean the terrain is well known at this point, it's being worked on. The team, including me, has been working on the terrain for quite a while.

I have some potential improvements to the star wars type rain.

What do you mean with "three colors at night?"

Edited March 24Mar 24 by Maya2

3 hours ago, Maya2 said:

I mean the terrain is well known at this point, it's being worked on. The team, including me, has been working on the terrain for quite a while.

I have some potential improvements to the star wars type rain.

What do you mean with "three colors at night?"

Night lighting basically consists of three colors, with golden/yellow being predominant, followed by white. Can't see that getting much of an update since the lighting in xp12 is limited and multiple 3D objects use the same light source.

 

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Edited March 24Mar 24 by Mike_CFII_MEL

On 3/24/2026 at 9:02 AM, Maya2 said:

I mean the terrain is well known at this point, it's being worked on. The team, including me, has been working on the terrain for quite a while.

I have some potential improvements to the star wars type rain.

What do you mean with "three colors at night?"

The terrain has not been worked on; you mean; is stuck in the past. Laminar is too slow; do not release any tool since long time; rather than give the 'privilege to few' to no making' any terrain let the X-P users have a go at it; rather than keep it all behind the walls. This is not good for X-Plane.

Edited March 25Mar 25 by Marc22

On 3/23/2026 at 9:03 AM, Maya2 said:

In what way do you think it looks like a cartoon? I'd appreciate more details. The lighting, atmosphere or the terrain?

Hi,

The more I think about it, cartoon isn't the right word, XP12 looks more like a matte painting. I know that Laminar doesn't like reshade, so two options if they want to go that route... 1. add filters into the XP12 for end user use or the easier solution I believe, get X-Plane 12 setup to use Nvidia app filters.

The top screen grab is default xp12 and the bottom shot is with my edits along with reshade.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iojWRx6xcxRBVMZ0_JtS46R2usq2Phhw

Edited March 25Mar 25 by Mike_CFII_MEL

18 hours ago, Marc22 said:

The terrain has not been worked on; you mean; is stuck in the past. Laminar is too slow; do not release any tool since long time; rather than give the 'privilege to few' to no making' any terrain let the X-P users have a go at it; rather than keep it all behind the walls. This is not good for X-Plane.

The new terrain rendering engine will hopefully bring better, more user friendly and - moire importantly better documented - editing tools as well.

Edited March 26Mar 26 by Bjoern

On 3/25/2026 at 7:31 PM, Marc22 said:

The terrain has not been worked on; you mean; is stuck in the past. Laminar is too slow; do not release any tool since long time; rather than give the 'privilege to few' to no making' any terrain let the X-P users have a go at it; rather than keep it all behind the walls. This is not good for X-Plane.

What?!?!?! 😂

In case you are out of the loop, the entire scenery system is being overhauled. No-one is hoarding anything, simply there is an iceberg of things to work through.

2 hours ago, DeltaWho said:

What?!?!?! 😂

In case you are out of the loop, the entire scenery system is being overhauled. No-one is hoarding anything, simply there is an iceberg of things to work through.

Ignore him.  99% of his content is in the MSFS forums.  

2 hours ago, DeltaWho said:

the entire scenery system is being overhauled.

Do we have any specific details on this overhaul?  I was pretty happy with the scenery from my add-ons, better in some areas over MSFS, and a little worse in others, but overall XP12 with add-ons looked pretty darn good.

22 hours ago, SayAgain said:

Do we have any specific details on this overhaul?  I was pretty happy with the scenery from my add-ons, better in some areas over MSFS, and a little worse in others, but overall XP12 with add-ons looked pretty darn good.

I'm not allowed to talk about the output, but we're moving away from the 20-year old DSF system. Which in short, is more performance-intensive and less flexible than what modern mapping standards offer today. We're going from a system that used to be dominantly pre-computed and prefers vector data.... to one that prefers raster data and can be a bit more dynamic at runtime.

49 minutes ago, DeltaWho said:

We're going from a system that used to be dominantly pre-computed and prefers vector data.... to one that prefers raster data and can be a bit more dynamic at runtime.

I’d probably need more details to make sense of this …  Ray Tracing is vector based so somewhat puzzled by your statement.  No need to clarify if you’re under NDA … I’m sure it’ll be a good step forward and looking forward to whatever we get.