Longranger

Yes and no. In a lot of cases you can´t solve a problem in one go. Instead you have to establish a new infrastructure that will only make sense at a later date. But I don't expect a huge amount of performance 9increases before X-Plane 11.0 goes final. Most improvements will now target the new clouds. While they work quite good in a lot 0of cases, some people seem to have real problems. I woulöd think the new clouds could become the death sentence for GPUs with only 2 GB of VRAM.

I don´t think the turbulences are the real issue. The whole dynamic of a water landing in X-Plane 10 was wrong. In reality. No plane can start directly into the air. First it floats. You start to pick up speed but the drag is extreme. If you reach a critical speed, something changes. All planes hav a step in their floating bodies. If you reach a certain speed the plane no longer floats, it goes up the step and "flies" over the waves like a speedboat. The surface of the water works like a solid body and the plane more or less stands on the surface. In this state the drag by the watter decreases. Only due to this reduced drag the plane can reach a speed where its wings can carry the plane. If you land on the waterthe process works in the opposite direction. You touch the water and you skip along the surface, till you you become so slow, that the surface no longer carries your weight and you sink till your floats are so deep in the water that they can carry the whight of the whole plane. X-Plane 10 only kinew the states: It floats in the water-> it fliesl.To even allow a water landing you had a certain control to directly set the height of the waves (on the whole planet). If I see it correctly at the moment the height of the waves is determined by the wind.

X-Plane 10 didn´t even knew the difference. And this is not really a part of the beta. 11.0 won´t have 3D water. What you see and use is no more than a foundation or a place holder for a new physics layer. So there is no bug to fix, instead they have to finish the complete engine.

The whole watereffects at this moment are work in progress. In the beginning they had hoped that the 3D water ( http://developer.x-plane.com/2016/10/developer-blooper-reel-water-world/ ) would be ready. It will also need a renovated water physics layer.

Yes and no! The foundation of X-Plane is always the mesh. Contrary to FSX, this base Mesh isn´t ony responsible for the height profile, but also for the land classes, it controls the AutoGen, the roads and so on. And you can only have one Mesh per 1x1 Degree square. Word2X-Plane is an overlay. It is placed on top of a mesh file. It doesn´t really care what kind of Mesh is below it. But it can stop the AutoGen if it wants in certain locations. Ortho4xp is something different. It is a tool that conects a base Mesh with a photo texture. It removes most of the landclass information and generates a new Mesh. If the new Mesh is placed with a higher priority than the old mesh it will be loaded instead of the old mesh. You can use an HD Mesh or UHD Mesh as its base mesh but it will always generate a new mesh.

X-Plane 11 has a particle system, but at the moment it isn't used for normal effects like contrails yet.

NVidia Shadow Play can´t record Full Screen OpenGL. Since X-Plane uses OpenGL there is nothing you could do about it.

In a way they have already started. THe major problems of the NVidia and AMD cards are no longer there. But the major performance problems right now are the CPUs, not the GPUs. They want to modernize the complete graphics interface, when they move to 11.1 . We will have to see how far this gets better results. Austin also wants a more linear performance in 11.1

Especially at a time, when the valid SDK is nearly 5 years old. Even Laminar couldn´t give you an X-Plane 11 SDK, since it won´t be written till X-Plane 11.1 is final! That´s a problem that most people don´t understand. The plane´s at this time are far from finished. They can experiment with the PBRs and the basic flight behaviour, but there are few things, that they can really do right now. While there are several airliners already updated to X-Plane 11 they are more or less still part of the beta. They all have an FMS by Philipp Muenzel, who is also responsible for the new default FMC. Since this FMC will be the background system for nearly every new FMC in X-Plane he simply had to check, if these functions can support all his previous works.

Every flight simulator has the problem that a lot of work has to be done by a single CPU core, and this process is also responsible for the GPU dispatch. Furthermore X-Plane 10 was more or less written for simple unified shaders. It only needs big GPU, since it needs a huge amount of VRAM, but it doesn´t need the real GPU power. This will probably change a bit in X-Plane 11 with the new PBR shaders and features like tesselation for water and so on. That´s the main reason why the PBR renderers were so damn interesting. Moder GPUs were developed for shaders, like these..NVidia and AMD were the big sponsors for these features.within the 11 run X-Plane will probably start to support Vulkan, too, although it is unclear if the Vulökan Version would have advantages compared with OpenGL.

Well,I don´t think that they would only sell a simple set of HD textures. They wouldn´t really work without procedures, when to use which texture. But it would certainly be a much smaller problem for Rex, than for Orbx.

Well, X-Plane claims, that it uses the HD Mesh, so how are you so sure that you don´t see the HD Mesh? The differences aren´t so huge. What do you see and why can´t this be the HD Mesh?

Well, it isn´t really "subjective". Our brain is used to constantly correct movements. You have to learn this, when you start to walk, drive your bike, drive your car or fly a plane.Once you have learned it, you no longer concentrate on such movements. When you detect, that you don´t go into the correct direction yor brain compensates by itself. But you normally feel the pressure from your seat or your motion sensors.. On a flight sim you don´t have these additional inputs. You only have to rely on your eyes. This process is rather slow. A pilot feels the pressure that wants to pull him from the wanted direction and the body reacts without any further consultations to the higher brain functions. If you walk with a friend down the street and talk with him, you don´t really think how you walk. Your body does it by itself. And it constantly corrects something. This is the main reason why a real plane is better to control, than the flight in a computer. Our body is used to handle such things. In fact, this is one of the dangers. Our body believes that everything is under control and we feel safe. We don´t really feel how small our amount of control really is. How fast situations change. I think this is one of your problems. You aren´t used to compensate, but if you don´t compensate you have less and less control. If we consider that no plane developer was able to enticipate the changres in the flight model and that there is still no consideration for shadowed control surfaces (if I amnot completly wrong I would expect, that the horizontal stabilizers shadow parts of the vertical stabilizers), I don´t see anything really wrong at the moment.

Well, as Janov already said. Nothing strange in this behaviour. And while your plane is really slow the rudder won´t have any effect, you will try to overcompensate. You need some speed till the rudder really works. If you try to control with the rudder till it really works you won´t reach a stable situation. Either you overcompensate and your speed still increases: You go to the right. If you don't compensate enough the airflow on your rudder, decreses-> The effectiveness of your rudder decreases...If you stand the rudder has no effect if you don´t have nosewheel control. If you are really slow it has some effect, The faster you go the better your rudder works.

In Theory: Certainly. If we imagine a pilot who goes to full power in a second it would mean tha6t the stabilizers and rudder don't have any effect, while the slipstream pushes with full power at the stabilizers. If the tail moves even slightly it would mean that the plane starts to turn, while the pilot can only try to stop with the wheels since the rudder doesn't have a significant effect to control thze direction. But in reality: No one wants to torture an engine and you feel that the controls don't really have any control about the plane. So you increase the throttle slowly, the slipstream is much weaker but the plane starts to pick up speed.. You slowly feel that the controls gain authority. You increase the throttle but while the slipstream is stronger the stabilizers and rudder can work against it. But how do you really recognize the amount of rudder control? You don't really look at your feet. Instead you look at the runway aqnd don't really care as long as thew controls don't grow to big. If you drive your care you look at the street, not at you steering wheel tio control your direction. And you don't thiunk about if it is the sidewind, the runway, torque or slipstream that tries to interfere, you simply push against it. And if we now look at X-Plane 11 pb8: I use it as a game and give full throttle and you go haywire, as you could expect accoring to the theory. But if I slowly increase the throttle you more or less stay on course, while the plane picks up speed. While you don´t feel the controls or the engine you see that the controls are working and increase the throttle, while you try to stay in the correct direction but now you don't have any problems to maintain the control. The rudder is more than enough to stabilize the plane. Is it correct? How shall I know? Is it plausible? Yes..

Well, the difference is: IIn many cases the dome lights can be dimmed, as well as many other lights. So if the plane expects a dimmable light it would mean that it needs its own axis. So it gets very difficult to offer default controls for every such situation. It can still be done.It might take a few lines of LUA code. An aircraft designer can change the type of control, that he wants and can even offer its own custom controls. In such cases you recognize why plug-ins like X-assign were developped. But you first have to configure your controller for a new plane. But try to dim a light in the FSX. It doesn´t rerally simulate these lights, instead it can only switch through an array of light textures. X-Plane on the other hand can even direct some map lights to the position that you want. It is a well known problem: If you come to X-Plane and expect a super FSX: It doesn´t work this way! In a lot of cases the controls and options have a totally different history and background. You can try to work around some of these differences for a small period of time. But in the long run you will simply have to learn the real X-Plane controls, and which setup you really want to use. They simpy have a different background.

The texture size is only a very rough indication how much memory you really need! Your descriptions could really indicate that you are running out of VRAM.

Many planes deactivate parts of their exterior if you are inside the plane, for performance reasons. Change to the exterior and try to generate the icons.

Not CPU! The idea is shader based on the GPU. At the moment X-Plane is rather tame on the processing power of the GPU. X-Plane 11 will change this in the long run.

No, this a totally different issue. There can be multiple w2xp/osm sceneries be active at the same time, sotherer objects have to be loaded and multiple objects can be drawn inside each other. But there is ALWAYS only one mesh active per location, all lower placed meshes of this location are ignored

I am not sure if this will be as simple, as you imagine. In X-Plane the mesh is tightly interwoven with the rendering engine. The HD Mesh doesn´t really count since alpilotx uses thre same systems that are used for X-Plane itself, sometimes even newer versions. Since Orbx doesn´t have this kind of access, they have to be prepared that every Update might break their mesh. The other meshes, that you see around are only slightly modified versions of the standard- or HD Mesh. For OrbX this probably would be a bit risky, so I would expect something in the directon of texture replacement, their own AutoGen and so on without modifications of the base mesh..

Well, there is a huge difference between the start of X-Plane 10 and today. In the past days developershad to tweak their aerodynamic models to somehow counter these effects. Today they simply override it.

And how often had you seen in that time that customers "dictate" the features. Instead we are more or less following Ben Supniks plan.

Exactly how long do you use X-Plane? If you would ask for customers that dictate. X-Plane would have had seasons for a long time. But since we are talking about a niche market, the customer influence is limted, since the developer have to predict how expansive a feature is, and how to implement it.

Well, they fought against this feature for more than 3 years, with exactly these arguments, but many users claimed to know it better... They finally gave in in X-Plane 10.50. And I don´t think that they will take it back. It is one of several control options, so it is the jobof the designer of the aircraft, to choose, which control works best.