Bjoern

You can set datarefs all day, but without some cloud layers to block out the sun, fog from an inversion layer is all you will get. Do it the proper way and simply set the weather instead because it's a much more organic, flexible and non-hacky solution.

🤷

I doubt you'll find many, if any, Pimax users here, especially with X-Plane 11. Your best shot at support might be the #xplane-vr channel on the official X-Plane Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/x-plane-official-1072974189906108509 Or the XP11 VR forums at: https://forums.x-plane.org/forums/forum/380-vr-in-x-plane-11/ Note that X-Plane 11 is end of life, so any bugs with newer hardware are there to stay.

I hold the switch at "Start" until the APU EGT needle twitches. Then the APU will start right up.

You can roll back to the latest stable release at any time.

It will.

Stick with the freeware version for now until Pro gets its first major update some time this autumn.

Huh, indeed. Funny... The bug report form is here, in case anybody wants to report it: https://www.x-plane.com/x-plane-bug-report-form/ Make sure to verify the issue with a default XP12 aircraft. Makes it easier for Laminar to reproduce.

For comparison, I am a big fan of ZL14 orthos because EOX as a source has them color matched and cloud free out of the box and a pure land tile is around 500 MB. But generating tiles is a huge pain because both OSM and EOX are throttling their connection requests to not be ground down by some external LLM constantly trying to leech their data. As hard as it is to say, but in its current form of delivery, Orthographic offers no advantage because each tile still takes up space in the region of ZL15+ orthos. But I'd argue that the gap for better terrain is still there - regardless of when we will get a new default scenery from Laminar. The current default terrain doesn't cut it ("default is fine" fans, no neeed to reply to this), orthos take up too much space, AutoOrtho or MapEnhancement have their "always" online drawbacks and it's essentially the same imagery as in O4XP, which means color matching and cloud issues (depending on Zl and provider). So if you deliver your tech as pure DSFs with a texture library, you'd sit in the gap for a space-efficient, more detailed alternative to default terrain. The O4XP DSF for +52+013 is 42 MB with Sonny's mesh. With the required ground texture polygon definitions, you'd end up at around 50 MB per tile, which is a far cry from the 500 MB ZL14 and 2.7 GB for Orthographic's ZL16 (not counting the texture library). For the entire globe, the tally will likely be around 300 GB (at worst). That's less than what ZL14 orthos for Europe take up. Think about it.

@MarStrMind I've checked out your Orthographic tile around EDDB. The polys and footprints match well with X-World and it's overall a good demonstration of your information extraction tech from OSM and sat data. However, I think that the delivery format as what essentially boils down to a ZL16 ortho tile with generated textures instead of sat imagery is very space inefficient and frankly offers no advantage over simply generating a straight ortho tile. Since you already have all the terrain feature polygon data extracted, you can, however, try to bake these polygons straight into the DSF file and have a pool of generic textures (and links to default textures) that are assigned via library.txt (which also allows users to easily swap out or edit textures to thewir taste). X-World is doing this in parts for meadows and some other terrain features. This has the massive advantage that you only need to ship your DSFs and a library, decreasing the required storage space to a fraction of an ortho tile. For further experiments in that regard, I suggest getting in touch with SimHeaven, as they've figured out how to set up XP's DSF generation pipeline to bake their polys into the DSFs. Maybe the both of you can even team up to generate a base terrain for X-World that incorporates your poly extraction tech and essentially replaces XP12's global scenery.

So basically the underlying generator that would result in a "Global Forests" like scenery if it was run on ortho tiles spanning the entire globe. Curious how it'd fare with ZL14 as input. From your track record, I'd be surprised if you did not. 😉 (I also use AI to assist in projects, but I review each and every line of code it generates.)

If I see a piece of code commented with typically verbose AI phrases, I doubt that the code has been properly reviewed by the person who prompted it, especially when the end result promises to do something that the underlying engine can not (for very good reasons). Rendering engines are complex affairs. A core feature like motion vectors requires a very thorough refactoring or even rewrite.

Everything about this and its source code smells of AI vibe coded slop. I would tread extremely carefully.

So this is basically going to be a scenery, to be used like Global Forests?

If it's a bug, it's with Zibomod, over which LevelUp has no control. Have you tried not using the TO/GA-Button on takeoff and simply push the throttle lever forward to the N1 % instead? (Enable hardware N1 marking, or whatever the setting is called to make it easier.) This is my standard technique and does not cause the bug.