Murmur

I think I read XP will be ported to Metal too, alongside with Vulkan. Metal should be the Vulkan equivalent for Mac.

Hmm... That post is quite old and when I was still experimenting with the sky textures. Now, as far as I remember, the cloud color is determined by the 2 squares at the bottom of each sky_colors.png texture. The left one is the diffuse light of the clouds (i.e. light due to the sky, and hence uniform), while the right one is the direct light (i.e. light due to the sun shining on clouds, and hence variable for each cloud puff). This texture is then modulated according to 2 datarefs (cloud_diffuse_gain and cloud_ambient_gain). So, if you want to make the clouds brighter, you can either: .) edit the square textures in the skycolors.png. For example, if you want brighter diffuse light in clouds at dusk (morning and evening), you should brighten the right part of the left square texture. .) increase the cloud gain dataref. But this will brighten the clouds uniformly (it's like if you're making the whole square texture brighter, so you will het brighter clouds even during daytime). The direct light square texture should be black when the sun sets, of course (no direct light anymore after the sun has set). Finally, with regard to the old post of mine you quoted, if I'm not mistaken, those two stripes I mentioned (".dark color variation of clouds" and ".light color variation of clouds") should actually determine the color when _inside_ clouds (greyed out), respectively at the bottom and at the top of the clouds, and not the color of clouds themselves.

That is a good assurance that performance will be always optimized at the very best (that's probably the right thing to do), but this closed model becomes a limitation for the 3rd party ecosystem. Unless maybe they implement "building blocks" for aircraft systems (like you mentioned days ago, I think) allowing a compromise between optimized performance and flexibility in modeling more complex systems. But this should expand to avionics too. Customizable avionics/gauges is essential.

But you can't say if it's mostly due to the systems modeled, or to the less complex virtual cockpit/external model. I bet you will get a better performance on the default KC10 or C130 than on the Aerolite though. And those two have more complex systems than the Aerolite, although not using external plugins. But they don't have a virtual cockpit, which also explains their high performance. Another example: Falcon BMS has probably the most detailed aircraft ever, down to its last system, with 2 MFDs and a HUD, multiple indipendent weapon sensors (Radar, FLIR, TGP, etc.), a fully modeled FBW computer, etc., and at min visual settings, on my old laptop I get 100+ FPS in VC. With the headroom AFS2 currently has, modeling more complex systems could be doable without excessive drag.

I think the strobe lights issue is intentional. It should simulate the self-reflection of strobe lights when in fog or in clouds. AFAIK, real pilots may turn off strobe lights when in fog or in clouds to avoid the blinding reflection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-collision_light#Strobe Regarding the HD shadows, are you referring to internal cockpit shadows, or outside aircraft shadows? Maybe a screenshot would help. There are simple tweaks to improve shadows quality and radius, although the more detailed the shadows, the bigger the load on GPU.

Kudos to the pilots.

I think (as HiFlyer) that the rendering engine of Aerofly FS2 remains the most efficient one. Probably not by the large margin it has today (because of the missing visual features I previously mentioned), but still capable of more performance for a given visual complexity. I am glad that IPACS entered the flight sim market with a new paradigm, i.e. having max performance as their first priority, whereas for the last 20 years the conventional paradigm in the flight sim industry has been: "You get 10 FPS at max settings, 20 FPS are enough, and more than 30 FPS is too much" (an approach brought forward by the flight sim designers themselves). Fortunately things are changing, also thanks to the rise of VR requiring at least 45+ FPS and ideally 90+ FPS. I'm not very convinced when people say that adding more (non visual) features in AFS2 will diminish performance. I think the performance on today flight sims is mostly bottlenecked by the rendering engine and the visual features, not by the other features. Compared to P3D, FS9 had basically the same capabilities in terms of AI, ATC and aircraft systems complexity, but on a top end PC you'll probably get hundreds of FPS in FS9 with maxed AI. I also think it's not necessarily a matter of "no free lunch", what I mean is that we're still seeing limitations for example in P3D (blurries, terrain pop-up, etc.) probably because when the original code was written, the limited PC capabilities made the loading of terrain textures and mesh in chunks a necessity. So there could be reasons why new code could indeed be better and more efficient. I like the approach of IPACS, and given their little staff, they've been very quick in converting AFS2 to Vulkan.

First flight sims I had the chance to watch and play were SIMULATORE DI VOLO (original title SOLO FLIGHT) on a Commodore C128 of a friend: http://specialprogramsipe.altervista.org/gioco.php?collana=com_64&console=c64&codice=simulatore_di_volo&id_rivista=4 and R.A.F. (original title ACE OF ACES) on a Philips VG-8020 MSX 1 of my cousin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Aces_(video_game) First flight sim I owned was F/A 18 interceptor for Amiga 500: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/A-18_Interceptor First flight sim with a non-arcade flight model was Birds of Prey for Amiga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_Prey_(video_game) First civil flight sim was A320 Airbus for Amiga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A320_Airbus_(video_game) And first "modern" flight sim, with realistic flight model, was Flight Unlimited II for PC:

Fact is AFS2 engine is still missing several visual features, namely terrain self-shadowing (producing flat and unrealistic terrain lighting when the sun is low), water effects (water in AFS2 is a texture), global lighting (not even landing lights), atmospheric scattering, etc. None of them can be deactivated in other sims (and most of them have been there for something like 15 years, whereas AFS2 is missing them). So a 100% comparison cannot be still made. Neverthless, I think IPACS have always had performance has their first priority, so I think it will keep (all or at least part) of its performance advantage. I'm not predicting a precipituous FPS drop, just noticing that a truly 100% comparison cannot be made for now. Interesting to note that Rob Ainscough (in a post in the video forum) said that before Vulkan, he had 45-60 FPS in AFS2 with everything maxed (I assume with some add-on scenery)...

That's absolutely false. Try setting 30 fps locked or unlimited fps on a 120 Hz monitor (or even a 60 Hz monitor) and you'll see a great difference in smoothness (of course the flight sim should be set to provide 120/60 fps if you do that experiment). I've even seen instances in which people are able to tell the difference between 120 or 144 fps.

Harrowing!

Could be mistaken for P3Dv4. Except for the clouds: I've never seen such good clouds in P3D as those I've seen in FS9.

Reading the words "realistic" and "immersive" together with the words "20 FPS" makes me want to stick my head in the oven too. 😂 But hey, to each his own.

Lilium Jet is my favourite among them.

I thought it was the Patrouille de France or the Red Arrows and my first thought was: "I have to admit that looks nicer than any figure from the Frecce Tricolori", but then I recognized the MB339... 🙂 Must be a new figure? Also, the two aircrafts doing the barrel rolls seem to have the landing gear extended.