Gulfstream

All you have to do is look at the official Steam statistics, from their own site, to see what the numbers are. Linux has 1% market share and OSX has 3%. I am also seriously doubting 5 million installs of X-Plane on Linux, but that is a topic we don't need to get into. Windows is on 96% of gaming desktops. And this is not "important"? I was a heavy Linux user in the 90s. In the 30 years since then, the Linux desktop share has declined.

This is completely misleading. It's the #1 OS because it's used as I mentioned, by throwing it in a rack in some huge cloud datacenter among the other 1,000,000 Linux headless computers. That also includes mobile device usage. That is not representative of Linux as a desktop operating system. I use Linux daily, I use it in Microsoft's Azure cloud to run Microsoft .Net Core applications. That doesn't make me a "Linux user".

There is a reason that Linux is only on around 2% of desktops. It's been around for decades. If it was a great, free experience, it would account for more than 2%. It has its roles, these days its primarily running headless stuck in a rack for cloud computing. Yes, Valve is releasing their Linux-based handheld, but that is neither here nor there. And Apple has it "under the hood", but those are not proper Linux desktops.

What a bunch of FUD, you should know better than this. I'm currently holding the "title" of Team Lead / Software Architect / Senior Developer on a very large web project with .Net Core REST APIs and an Oracle SQL database. I use Windows exclusively, as I have for the past 20 years. The closest thing I get to leaving is when I run Git Bash. I also use it exclusively for 4k HDR gaming / flight simulation and have zero issues. On this topic, I also happened to update to Windows 11 and have no issues with that either. That cost me $0. And it's used by literally billions of people. One major flaw and you have entire businesses going down with it.

How can you ever get an accurate sky depiction above an airport based on METAR? If the airport has a 100 foot thick of fog laying over it, and METAR is reporting 0 SM VV010 ... how does it know this is only 100 feet thick? And what layers are above that? It can't, in real life the only way the tops are known is due to PIREPs. The only think they could base it off would be guesses around the temperature/dewpoint spreads and temperature decrease with altitude. But that's all it can be, a total guess.

There are always going to be technical limitations to this that I don't see how they can work around. For example, a mountain valley airport may have a METAR reporting 0 visibility due to an isolated pocket of fog sitting over the airport. When you climb out of it at 100 feet, it's severe clear everywhere. What would an algorithm do in this case? How would it know to transition this when on an approach? In real life you'd see the valley shrouded in fog from miles away, but the simulator won't know how thick this fog layer is. I've flown into airports where the automated AWOS is reporting 0 visibility because the end of the runway it's on is fogged in. The other end is clear.

That first shot isn't "significantly less than 3 miles visibility" from what I can tell. It looks fairly realistic to me if the METAR thinks that 10 SM is actually 10 SM and not CAVOK. I can make out the ground in the distance and that is further than 10 miles from you. What is your DME showing and what altitude were you at?

I want to know more about this. It sounds like they want to model things like thunderstorms as they track in real-time. That would be amazing.

I took my first discovery flight at my local airport in 1994 after using MSFS many years prior. Everything in the cockpit was familiar to me, I even knew about ILS approaches, which I wouldn't need to learn for another year. I got the PPL in 40 hours, went on to college and a commercial pilot's license, and never looked back. It was the sim that got me into the flying. I can't imagine what it's like now with MSFS2020.

The biggest hurdle they will have to cross is going to be the terrain, which seems to be carefully missing from videos so far on the lighting and clouds. MSFS has a huge leg up here due to the satellite imagery and the ability to use AI to automatically place 3-D buildings based on their foundations in images, even where OpenStreetMap is not available. X-Plane can likely get the buildings in the correct places, in some places, via OSM. They won't be able to do satellite, so I feel the ground (roads, buildings, etc) is going to be the most difficult part to drag into 2021. I'm curious to see what they come up with.

We know people have been clamoring for certain graphical upgrades that have been shot down repeatedly, usually under the "we're building a simulator we can't focus on 'eye candy'" category, year after year. This has been going on for so long, legions of defenders are quick to throw suggestions into the "we don't need eye candy". And then MSFS 2020 comes out, and it raises the bar graphical bar 10-fold. X-Plane forums were once again full of "that's a game" and "who needs eye candy?". Now all of a sudden we have proper atmospheric lighting, forests of trees and 3D clouds coming in XP12. This didn't happen because they finally got around to it. Yes, this required Vulkan, and with a small team that takes time. I'd be curious when they were aware Microsoft was working on an new simulator. There was some resting on laurels.

I was just reading through some threads on "another" forum from only a few years ago regarding X-Plane's clouds. Everyone was mentioning how we need 3D clouds but that LR wasn't listening, and others coming to the defense that this "simply isn't possible" and "would kill every machine's frames". When it was pointed out at the time, and this was years ago, that other sims do it without an issue, there was all sorts of excuses from the naysayers that "those don't deal with real time weather", "the abrupt transitions are necessary due to the complexities of X-Plane", etc. What did it take to get clouds like this in XP12? It took competition, simple as that.

Fair enough, but I wish more free FS2020 projects were developed out in the open. If you have no plans to monetize anything, why not throw the code up on Github and let everyone take a stab at it? You can reject any incoming pull requests if you don't like them, and I'm sure these licensing can be mitigated somehow. Require a propriety binary in the package that has a separate license. It worked for Working Title, they ended up getting hired by Asobo!

Why can't we (and by we, I mean me included, I'm a software engineer with a aeronautical background) do something like this out in the open? This is 2021, the vast majority of "free" software is on GitHub and can be contributed to by anyone who is willing to take a stab at it. Look at Working Title. https://github.com/Working-Title-MSFS-Mods/fspackages I don't understand this sign-up/email gating ... and I especially don't understand people on here defending this as "if you don't like free software, don't use it!". That's fine, except there are better ways to develop free software. Perhaps in my free time I should look into this.

I'm a senior software engineer, Aero. Sci grad and a licensed US commercial pilot. I'm just curious about the technology at this point and seeing where they go. I am sitting on the sidelines. I find it unfortunate Enhanced Skyscapes came so late in XP11 with XP12 due to bring this all in natively. That's a heck of a mod that was really needed many years ago, could have made a fortune I'm sure. We are all very familiar with the default XP11 cloud system, which has been stuck in the past for far too long. I'm curious how all these new features are fitting in to the core XP code base. Especially regarding frame rates. On paper, they shouldn't impact frames that much, if anything they may even increase frames due to using modern technology and not the 2D billboard sprites everywhere that hammer frames.

We're clearly not porting flight simulation to that platform. My argument stands.

You can lay off the FUD. We're talking about "gaming" / "simulation" platforms ... not IOT cameras on a bookshelf. I'm sure you realize this, let's not make this even more confusing.

I guess, who knows. I've been in this industry since I first learned to program on a PcJr (with a side detour of getting my commercial pilot's license and an Aero. Sci. degree). I run Linux but at this point it's limited between an Apple M1 machine and via WSL2 under Windows. Otherwise, for gaming/simulation it's Windows on a headless laptop with an ancient 1660Ti card. If the crypto miners would stop for a little while and allow us to buy proper graphics cards, I'd get a 3060. Everything is still very fast. I'm not sure why regular users would consider switching from Windows to Linux unless they enjoy pain. And I say that knowing the deep internals of both operating systems. Linux is not intended for casual end-users, no matter what distro you go with. Windows 11 moving the start bar to the center was enough pain for me, but believe it or not I left it there. You can teach an old dog new tricks. My brain will catch up.

As much as I would love to believe in all this, there is also reality. That the vast majority of PC gaming is done on Windows, because it can easily be pushed to extreme limits at 4k resolution with all the GPU bells and whistles necessary. Even with these phantom "junk services", because the operating system understands when to prioritize for gaming. It's a massive market share they can't ignore. Microsoft knows where they are going. Game Pass, Direct Storage, Auto HDR, etc. And they have already completed the "if you think about it, a console is just a PC in a fancy case" part of this. Random benchmarks can be thrown around saying that git is faster on Linux than Windows but that is all forest for the trees, especially on a forum like this.

I have used Git daily over many years on extremely large enterprise systems. First, what kind of benchmark is this? I find it so strange. It certainly has no relevance that would impact X-Plane or any other flight simulator. Git is blazing fast for everything, how is it measuring Windows at 56.13 seconds for a "common Git command"? Every time I have git on the CLI everything completes within milliseconds. I'd love to know what "common git command" that one is. I would have left this career a long time ago if every git command took 60 seconds. I suppose I should dig into the actual benchmark, but it doesn't matter. This is irrelevant.

Good catch. Yes, that makes no sense as it is currently. Should be Departure/TO and Arrival/FROM as you mentioned.

Absolutely outstanding. Took flight simulation from being mired in decades old platforms straight into today.

Let's not get hyperbolic here. I'm a developer across all platforms for 25+ years, I'm now deploying Microsoft's .Net 5 to Linux servers in a competitors cloud while juggling VS Code and Visual Studio, all under Windows 10. I have zero complaints. From AAA gaming to handling my insane daily tasks as a software engineer, I have no issues with Windows 10. NONE. And that's pretty crazy at this point. Not to drift off subject, but VS Code is a impressive bit of engineering. This is essentially an HTML/CSS/JS program with a few bits of Rust and C++ thrown in where needed. Run it on Mac, Linux, Windows ... could be the future of operating systems, forget things like Qt. Notice how Asobo is using WASM and HTML/JS for panel gauges? I can hear it now ... "I can't believe they had to embed Internet Explorer into the the cockpit to use HTML" Obviously nothing like that but you'd have to be on the bleeding edge to understand what is happening across this industry.

AC Valhalla does this pretty well.

That's some good stuff!