tonywob

How I take it... despite MS now dominating the market: X-Plane 12 has still sold more copies than X-Plane 11 in the same time period when the other sim didn't even exist. Even if this just accounts for everyone who owns X-Plane 11 upgrading to 12, it still shows that the sim has something they want. We're still comparatively early in the X-Plane 12 run as well, with many things still yet to come. How this translates into sales for addon developers is another matter. There is no denying that we simply aren't seeing much new these days, and maybe the store will be one way LR can attract back high quality developers to the platform.

Yep.. I remember the bathymetry being one of those things that they promoted, but in reality, nobody (average simmers) cared or used it :P I'm in it for the visuals

No, 3D water is already visible somewhat in the default scenery, e.g. Bridge supports can be seen under the water, it's the reverse, bringing this ability to orthos as well. What remains to be seen is how/when LR will add reefs, different water colours, etc..

Sure, none of this is under NDA so I can talk about it... I've been working on this in older scenery, upgrading XP11 ortho tiles to XP12. In X-Plane 12, there is an additional bathymetry raster and triangle properties that is used to set the elevation for the sea bed and the height ratio of waves. For my work, all I did was fix the coastline so the coast and water snap together correctly (so there is no black gap and void) and I added the bahtymetry maps already in the global scenery DSFs. There were also additional changes I had to do to get it work, such as subdividing triangles on the coast. The result works and waves are back and no gaps, but it's an overlay colouring the water and not true 3D depth (i.e. Seabed under the water), mimicking what we had in X-Plane 11. In Oscar's video, this is very different, it's actually orthos under the water, which is why this is such great progress, it gives a real 3D effect to the water, and I can imagine this will look stunning once people start generating Caribbean islands, reefs etc.. The bathymetry maps are very low resolution and don't need to be high resolution, but there are sources available that cover the globe, e.g. https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gridded_bathymetry_data/. For lakes, at least in my own scenery, I simply set the centre of the lake to -50m and give it a fairly steep drop, and it works fine, as I don't think there is any global data that is accurate enough. For the coast, it was enough to just use the default maps already provided. With further changes to water and turbidity coming in future versions, there is a lot happening in this department.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2024/02/blog-post-walk-of-shame/ I think most people know this, but thought I'd share it here for discussion

Screenshot here:

Not bad for a dying, final-nail-in-the-coffin platform

Indeed.. when I first met my partner (She's Polish), she was also very direct and didn't butter things up, I'm used to it now, and it's just a cultural thing, but it was definitely jarring to start with and we had a few funny arguments over it

Pretty interesting the reactions over this store that I'm reading. Some people are afraid it'll kill the X-Plane.org community and move people away. These stores have had multiple opportunities over the years to innovate and move with the times, e.g. by creating an application to manage their products, but haven't, and the place has pretty much looked the same for as long as I remember it. However, I've never really had any bad experiences with the store itself, apart from dead-links on old products no longer working. The fact that software such as Skunkworks updater exists should have raised eyebrows with the store owners that something was needed. Either way, LR isn't forcing anyone to use their store, and developers can continue to publish wherever they like. Whilst I also miss Janov here, he also had a way of provoking users on the forum. He would often post exactly what he thought (e.g. If he thought the question was stupid and too simple), and it would come across as sarcastic and rude, often provoking a lot of anger and complaints from users. He does the same over at X-Plane.org as a moderator and I've seen a lot of complaints about that as well. If X-Plane.org are worried about losing their community, they should also work on this as well.

1) Probably the biggest one is a new entity called "terrain objects". WED 2.6 can convert and load very detailed meshes (DEM, LIDAR) that can "patch" with the default mesh + orthos (or anything else, for the matter of fact). I don't believe this actually removes the terrain underneath it, so it's still possible that it'll conflict with the default terrain. It's good for creating islands and areas of high detail, but they'll need to make it work so that the autogen, trees, roads etc all use this as well. This approach has been used by Frank Dainese for his mountain sceneries, so it works pretty well for the most part. 2) Exclusion zones can be polygons, works on roads only for now. From the screenshots, they're still rectangles, but WED splits up the polygon into rectangles for you to get a more accurate shape.

Yes, no problem.. I even have FSX and P3D still installed as well, but rarely use them. X-Plane doesn't even install, it just sits in a folder you can move around as you please.

I know with the likes of MFS and X-Plane 12 our sims and addons are the best they've ever been and I wouldn't change that now :) As someone who doesn't really like flying larger aircraft, I look back fondly on the days of FSX, and mostly because of Orbx scenery and long gone devs such as Earth Simulations.. The regions and little GA airstrips felt super immersive at the time and it was a time when developers were constantly trying to push the limits of what FSX could support, e.g. I remember seeing Russ's texturing work and seeing just how detailed, high resolution and realistic they looked. By today's standards, most of this is standard and expected now, but at the time there was a lot of hype over products as developers discovered new ways of doing things. The community also felt more helpful and connected back then (although it could just be that nostalgia feeling). It was a time of discovery, and it's difficult to describe (although others in this thread have posted similar) X-Plane 9 was the sim that got me into development, so I also remember that fondly, however from a purely simming perspective, it was definitely FSX (Although I have used FS since MFS2000) Either way, I'm really excited for MFS2024 because it looks like it's going to cater for the low-and-slow flyers like myself, adding amazing detail to the scenery at a low level. I might finally get that Alaska bush flying simulator I've been hoping for

The scenery based ones will get individual blog posts from Ben, as apparently the slides won't make much sense on their own. So hopefully we'll see these in the coming days/weeks

It was an invite only seminar event for developers, so yes fairly niche. Most of us are on a developer group on Slack, and I think the invite was sent to everyone on there. Sadly, many of us couldn't get time off work to attend, so hopefully anything relevant/news will be released over time.

I agree, and it would force devs to up the quality of their products. The amount of products I've bought only to find out they weren't as expected, buggy or I've used only once would mean I would be making a lot of use of this feature, and probably saving a lot of money.

If it means we no longer need activation/product-key windows, gizmo, skunkworks updater, airfoil labs updates and other things, it's a big win for the user experience. It works really well on MFS, so I hope similar that can be repeated here and that the revenue sharing is competitive.

Yep... the DRM part is interesting as well, hopefully this will include a way to protect scenery from piracy as well. Hopefully more details soon, but some things I'm hoping for: Freeware as well as payware Dependencies (e.g. Download libraries etc) Rating system

Posted officially now on Twitter This is great news, we just need more 3rd party products now :)

I've purchased quite a few planes lately (for both X-Plane and MFS) and most have been fairly disappointing in the end with the quality and shortcuts taken (Some are also very good, so it's not all bad). I get that different people see importance in different things, but it is starting to show (or maybe my old age is :P). I'm really waiting for someone to create a really nice Bonanza or Cessna 182 for either platform and I'd buy these in a heartbeat, but I'm also becoming more wary of what I spend my money on these days.

I've noticed a bit of a downside with the JustFlight planes, specifically regarding their sounds. There's this repetitive loop on the engines, and when it resets, there's a noticeable click that's hard to ignore. It might be a minor gripe for some, but personally, it gets on my nerves. It feels like not enough attention is given to the audio aspect, and I've observed a similar issue in their MSFS products (which are still very good). On the flip side, I recently rediscovered AirfoilLabs, and I must say, their quality is top-notch. I got their Cessna 172 NG, and despite already owning around 6000 different Cessna 172s, this one stands out as the most immersive and well-modeled small GA aircraft in my collection. The sounds are great,the effects make the plane feel alive, and the array of options for managing, maintaining, and dealing with failures are simply mind-blowing.

Impressive... the effort they're going to is pretty incredible

There is no free speech on a private forum, so MS and others have the right to remove content they don't want on there, whether we like it or not. If we don't like it, we can simply chose not to use the forum, or in extreme cases, the product), or go elsewhere less moderated I don't use or read the official MFS forums, so my understanding of the context is limited. However, it's possible that they are trying to avoid the repeated reporting/pushing of the same bugs and issues. Online forums/social-media often experience a phenomenon known as mob mentality, where one disgruntled user's complaint can trigger widespread outrage, even among users who were initially unaffected. This can escalate to demands for refunds and other actions, a thing I've personally experienced on numerous occasions. Once a bug is reported and presumably ticketed/acknowledged, having multiple bump threads and complaints is likely not going to improve matters. They've already prioritised issues based on some internal process and have a roadmap planned out (including MFS2024), and likely don't consider the issue important enough right now.

I'm not in the UK anymore but I've been to this event twice (once as an exhibitor), and would certainly attend again

Yep.. to get snow to appear on the orthos, it needs the season maps adding. But the orthos will also change colour as well, e.g. greens become more brown

This is superb.. just taking it for a test spin around northern Washington and it works a treat