Gulfstream

The sky color in this image is extremely realistic. There is still a banding issue but color-wise, I feel this is spot-on. Whatever algorithm is being used for the lighting/atmospherics is impressve. What's also impressive is that this is still being achieved with such a small team. MSFS2024 reportedly has over 500 people working on it. Not all developers, but still. I can't imagine how you can keep pace with that ... but keep going.

Maybe it's just the software engineer in me but looking a patch notes compared to what people are discussing makes no sense. Either the patch notes aren't inclusive of what went out in the patch, or what everyone is reporting is just the placebo effect. For clouds, the only two things I see that should be affected are the pyramid clouds and clouds during the replay. XPD-13975 – Pyramid clouds appearing randomly XPD-14034 – Changing weather/Cloud conditions not displayed correctly in replay mode As to shimmering, FPS, etc. I don't see anything in the patch notes that has anything to do with this. I'm used to this though. 30+ years of flight simulation leaves you jaded ... I'm probably just getting cranky in my old age. I've just seen too many "seems like I'm getting 1-5 more FPS / FPS is worse" or "things are blurry / things are much sharper!" posts after every update. This isn't a jab at Laminar, those patch notes are solid and it looks like it addressed numerous customer-facing problems. Just not the ones people are discussing in this thread.

I have a CPL and plenty of hours. This is very nice. I've already complimented XP12 on its atmospheric lighting before, it's the most realistic I've seen. Now with these new side-by-sides and this image, I see they have moved the bar higher. Between the reduced saturation of the sunset, to the subtle blue hues on the snow-covered terrain, to the color coming off the panel. The cirrus clouds look great too. I'm a also a big fan of the competitor but it proves you don't have to wear the jersey of one team or another. Tired enough of it in politics, don't need it in flight simulation. Looking at you, mSp ... ah, nevermind ... I'll show myself out

Same time/day/location in both? I'm just wondering why the sun is above the horizon in the first, but below it in the second. If it's a reasonably close comparison, 12.06 really nails it and I was already quite impressed with the lighting already in XP12 vs. MSFS. Obviously the clouds are much better between these two, and all three are far more realistic. Less purple/orange. Second row image in 12.06 absolutely nails it from looking like real life, and the back-lit clouds in the third row are also a major improvement. ...

A flight simulator will never be a big "AAA title" like you are thinking, by the very nature that it is flight simulator. A relatively niche market compared to things like MMORPGs or shooters. They took a big gamble of the future of the franchise by spending a lot on development and the end result shows. The engine is certainly AAA-quality. I've worked with the SDK, I know the technologies behind it. They take a cut of marketplace items and will release new versions of the simulator. The engine will almost certainly be put in use for other projects. The thing that bothers me the most is the bashing about "10 year commitment" somehow meaning "everything's free for 10 years!", and bashing the release of a new paid update after 4 years. X-Plane goes from v11 to v12 and it's praise all around (even though you have to pay for it). MSFS goes from 2020 to 2024 and it's "this is proof it's dying" or "this is so unfair!". What's up with that? Well it's because I'm in the X-Plane forum. And certain folks certainly have blinders on. I used to pay for every new version of X-Plane. Used to.

All I see are the stats from 2022 at: https://navigraph.com/blog/survey2022 With it at 75% market share. I wouldn't call that "barely survived", I'd call it the dominant market leader. I can't wade through 16 pages of this thread unfortunately. Are there newer stats? It doesn't matter about the Steam stats, of course there's a drop-off since launch. All titles do this. Amazon's New World went from 913,027 to 12,074 in 2 years. Now that's quite the accomplishment! I guess we'll wait for the 2023 survey and see. I still check in with X-Plane to see the progress. Curious what the latest beta brings to the table.

Aged like fine wine. Or something like that. 😉 FS2024 was just announced, so not sure about that whole "dated" thing. To keep this on topic and relevant to XP, I'm still rooting for XP to stay alive and well, because competition is good. And I still think it has a better lighting engine (most of the time, outside of a few issues). But obviously, "the fall of msfs as it becomes dated" was and is absurd.

It was stated in interviews, they also note on the careers page they have 260 employees working on 3 projects, and Microsoft Flight Simulator is the main one. So that seems about right.

The point seems to be that people are unsatisified with various outstanding issue in the current version of Flight Simulator 2020 and they feel that this is almost a slap in the face from Asobo to have been putting in all this effort into Flight Simulator 2024 when they should be working on the to-do list of open items for FS2020. If that's not the point, then feel free to clarify. I still say that is completely unfair, they have every right to release a new version of the simulator after 4 years and if you don't want to buy it, don't buy it. They said they will continue to work on the outstanding issues in the current product. I never heard this sort of thing using MSFS literally since the 80s, every single version. Each one was buggy in its own way but then the next one came out, and it was better. So it got purchased. And on, and on, for 20+ years. But for some reason now, this is different. You can't do that anymore. It's not "complete". It's not "what we paid for". Then simply refuse to purchase anything further from them, as you would with any other product you are unsatisfied with. If you look at the entire thing for the marvel of a project that it honestly is, I'd say paying another $70 or whatever for the next version is a no-brainer. I've paid more than twice that to add on airplanes in other simulators.

But what simulator has been, on release, realistically simulating airliner ops? This was always the realm of 3rd parties. Sure, it comes with defualt aircraft, but nobody that does this seriously flies default aircraft. They have to wait for groups like PMDG to come along. And given the secrecy of the release, tight NDAs, tough deadlines, and an entirely new platform, it was obvious it was going to take 2+ years before these started showing up. I mean, the guages alone are running on WASM/JS ... totally unfamiliar to anyone having development for other platforms. State of the art, however. Anyway, now they are, and I'm sure it will only ramp up from here with the quality 3rd parties. They will follow the leader, and this is the leader.

You don't have to. Nobody's forcing you to do anything. If you use [other simulators] you could also stay on older, "broken" versions if you want. "pay again for the sim we were originally promised" ... if you don't think you got your money's worth by this point, don't buy it!!! This isn't that difficult.

Asobo is a large company. Flight simulator has a large development team (200+). If you think the people responsible for updating the satellite terrain data and creating "landmarks/POIs" are the same ones working on DX12, ATC, or the weather system, that's simply not the case. It's not like they say "Hey, Bob, can you take a break from triaging the ATC bug list and help us import this Hawaii geospatial data?", or "Joe, we need you to take a break from the low-level DX12 optimization and create this row of shacks in Polynesia". People are just making wild, crazy assumptions at this point.

I would actually disagree. I'd say it was. I've been using MSFS since the 80s and never thought I'd see anything like FS2020. Not just the visuals, the modernization of the entire platform. X-Plane user since v8 or v9, and P3D. When MSFS came out, sure it had its share of bugs. Nothing too crazy for a brand new product. It was always the same old arguments. "[other simulator] has better aerodynamics!", "this is 'on rails' and is using the same system as FSX!'", "this flies like an arcade game!". I don't know. I'm a certified commercial pilot and it seemed pretty decent to me, it certainly wasn't on rails, "using the same old code", etc. Now? Obviously light years ahead and more apparently coming down the road here.

It's likely the same engine for things like World Updates, I wouldn't be surprised if they are backwards-compatible, we'll see. Regarding aircraft, they already said the vast majority in the marketplace should have no issues with FS2024, so even if they do, it's likely some minor changes in the grand scheme of things. I still want some quality, older heavies to start cold and dark on the cargo ramp, far on the outskirts of the airport. Give me a cargo DC-10 I have to climb up the stairs to when it's 20 degrees below zero and gusts to 40. That's my kind of flying.

What is the "full potential"? They state they will continue on bugfixes and improvements for FS2020. It's just so strange comparing this to literally every flight simulator ever released. None of them have been perfect. Yet the new version comes out. Flight Simulator 5.0 in 1993? Not even remotely perfect. But then came Flight Simulator 5.1. Not perfect. And then Flight Simulator for Windows 95 in 1996. Not perfect. And on, and on. You had to purchase them. And they were better then the previous version, so everyone did. X-Plane is on version 12 and is not perfect. I'm not sure why some are expecting FS2020 to stay as "the version" until it's completely, utterly 100% perfect. That's not even a realistic target. It, like every flight simulator before it, will get "versions" released. I'm actually surprised this was a 4 year gap. That's a good thing. I thought it was going to be every 2 years.

They release, by far, the greatest flight simulator ever. They give 13 world updates for free. 12 simulator updates, free. But no, let's bash them because they release this as a new version. Odd how X-Plane goes from version 11 to 12 and everyone's excited, but Flight Simulator goes from 2020 to 2024 and it gets comments like this. Like they can never put out a new version and actually bring in some income to continue the excellent work. Nope, 2020 should be the last version ever and everything should be free, forever. That's just not how it works.

That's Windows PowerShell, a super powerful replacement for the regular command line. I thought Linux types loved command line stuff, and not pointy-clicky? Either way, you can drop into Bash if you prefer. So that's it on this topic. The answer to your question of "can you mount ext4 drives on Windows?" the answer is "yes", you can. 👍

Yes you can Mount a Linux disk in WSL 2 ... the default filesystem type is "ext4". Requires Windows 11 Build 22000 or later. If you are into USB sticks and Linux fun you should check out Tails (based on Debian GNU/Linux). Combine that with Tor and you're the master of your own domain. I've been around the block.

In light of staying on the good side of the moderators, and since I have nothing to add to XP12 start-up times across platforms, I will say this. I've been working with Windows since v1.0. My first computer was a PcJr in the 80s. Flight Simulator since v3.0 in 1988. X-Plane, P3D and others since. I got my commercial pilot's license due to Flight Simulator. I am intimately familiar with how the internals of Windows memory management work. From the Cache Manager, flushed pages, 256 KB cache slots in system address space getting handed back to user-mode. This whole thing is a highly optimized, choreographed, and robust dance. Has my Windows every crashed? Yes, although I haven't rebooted this one in over 2 weeks and I can't ever recall getting a BSOD in the last 5 years. It doesn't become sluggish, glitchy, "weird", or anything else. It feels the same today as it did 3 weeks ago and I'm jumping between development environments, tools, communications platforms, browsers, AAA games, constantly. If I somehow come across as some sort of a Microsoft "word not allowed" you really don't know me. My other machine is a Mac M1, so there's my Linux. And WSL under Windows as needed. I prefer to stay working under Windows, even with the M1. I have it setup as I need it and it's a reliable workhorse. I use them all, I have to, they pay me to. Now, back to those load times ...

That's fine, to each their own. If Windows was a stuttery, bug-filled, crash-prone disaster it wouldn't be running on 1.4 billion machines right now. Every office place would be total chaos. 98% of home users including my elderly father would be unable to easily use their computers (he has no problem with Windows either). I'm just saying let's keep things in persepective. If you're microanalyzing linux vs. mac vs. windows file access times to help measure the start-up of X-Plane, you are way out of my realm of expertise. If something is going to take minutes, I don't care about whether or not some low-level system call or API is 32ms faster on Linux. And I sit in front of these silly Windows computers for 12+ hours a day writing software that helps run this crazy planet.

I would just like to point out that anyone saying the "screenshots look fine" is totally missing the point of what the vast majority of the complaints are. It's the anti-aliasing, the shimmering, the wavy lines on the ground, the oddness to the clouds due to AA. When you take a screenshot, all it is doing is transferring byte-for-byte from video RAM to a file on your disk. None of the above will be seen. Of course the screenshots look "normal". It's the simulator in motion that's the issue. And despite everything mSparks seems to say, yes, there are issues with anti-aliasing big time in XP12. And all this talk about VRAM usage is insane! There are people running 4090s and we're talking about VRAM!??! That's a non-starter. Oh, and mSparks, again with: Yeah, those bugs in Windows where you request files at address XYZ but it sends you the ones at ABC. 😂 Please man, this is getting absurd.

Is this really necessary? To give you some background, I'm a former US CPMEL/IA and I also worked at N90 NY TRACON, a Level 12 ATC Facility. Then I lost my medical. 😠 So for the last 20+ years, I've been a software engineer, mostly working under Windows. I have zero issues with my current build at the moment (Windows 11 22H2 OS Build 22621.1702). I use it as both my daily driver for highly complex software engineering as well as AAA gaming. No crashes, no stutters, no slow load time. The thing just works. On a three-year-old-laptop with a 1660TI. Sorry, I had to chime in with this stuff. I use Linux too, mostly under WSL, but these "Linux is the best, Windows is totally unusable" posts are ridiculous. There is a reason Linux holds 2.76% of the desktop share in 2023. It's been the "year of Linux on the Desktop" every year since around 1991. Ok, rant over. Resume whatever it was we were talking about. 😂

What's up with the clouds jumping around and shifting positions so suddenly? Is that just how it is at the moment? Also, the way that fence draws in during the landing is very odd. Just two things I noticed. I still like the new lighting engine.

I'm just following along here without any real skin in the game, but I don't understand how mSparks is so insistant that this problem simply does exist. Pages and pages of threads on it, YouTube videos that clearly show the issue, confirmation from Laminar and developers on Discord, etc. So, going with the fact there is a problem here, and that X-Plane 12 should implement TAA and end this discussion, we encounter a common problem with the platform. The code base is literally 20 years old, and I can almost guarantee you that implementing TAA, due to the requirement of motion vector information, is a daunting task. I obviously don't have access to the internals of the X-Plane rendering pipeline, but you can imagine how far it's been stretched from its humble beginnings. When they moved from OpenGL to Vulkan/Metal, that alone must have been a massive undertaking given the size of the staff involved (one? Was it just Ben??). I have no idea what it would take to re-write the core of the graphics pipeline to support modern anti-aliasing solutions. One of the reasons MSFS looks as good as it does and handles AA so well is because it was built from scratch with all of these various technologies in mind. Want to run DLSS 3 on your 4040 at 4K with framerates through the roof? Not a problem. I don't know how they plan to address this, but I'd imagine it's not exactly on the "back burner". And to continue to come into these threads and claim this doesn't exist because you haven't seen it in a screenshot yet is absurd. These issue manifest themselves in motion. How are you supposed to see "shimmering" in a low-res screenshot?

I'm just a casual observer in this thread but I just wanted to say I agree about Ace Combat 7 ... whatever wizardry they do is very convincing. Unfortunately, as you mention, that's not the same thing as a flight simulator that has to try to nail this whole lighting thing 24 hours a day in all sorts of weather. I'm sure XP12 will get it sorted out.