tonywob

Thread locked upon OP's request.

Absolutely, I remember it in the early betas. It's definitely much better than it was, but still could do with a little work. Looking at the screenshots of FS2024 overall, it looks like there is some more procedural scenery, rocks, much sharper trees, etc. I'd love to see the vegetation (grass, shrubs) etc reacting to props and helicopters

It does seem to look better. The grass was always too long and it made me feel like each airport was trying to save money by not hiring a lawn mower and especially at grass strips it looked ridiculous (i could cut the grass with my prop)

Pinning this topic until after 12.06 is released as it's very useful information

Some of the larger developers will likely already have known about this new version for some time and are probably involved in some way getting their products ready. But for those in the dark, this will be frustrating news for those relying on the sim to make a living.

I'd be amazed if there is no backwards compatibility with at least scenery/airport addons. If this wasn't the case, this news would greatly reduce sales of new scenery almost immediately. Plus, what about all their own work on the World Updates, unlikely they'd throw all that away. Although hard to really tell from the trailer, it seems more geared to giving the sim a purpose/missions aka. career mode. So I'm hopeful that 3rd party addons will continue to work since the changes are more geared towards gameplay

No, X-Plane does not use ray tracing

We have no way of knowing this yet. I can't imagine it'll do very well for the price they're charging either, and with 2 hours of battery life and a tethered cable, I think I'm going to give the gen-1 a skip when it comes out next year

Closing this thread. This topic is going nowhere and it's time to move on

Can you post a screenshot with some examples of what you're seeing?

Not 100% true. It works in XP12 as well. If a scenery provides its own mesh and overlay it'll pretty much look the same, it's when you try to mix features (e.g. New trees with XP11 orthos) when things look wrong. The loading times are an issue though that LR are aware of. Let them know you want this.. The more people express interest the more possibility they'd be likely to consider it.

What is going with the mesh in the first shots? Must have been a bumpy departure :)

I could be wrong, but I think the two images in the first post have SSAO working correctly or at least enabled which is why the vegetation and everything just fits together nicely and looks realistic (The trees slightly darken the terrain they're on). It never really worked well in XP11.

Yep, it finally works

I have all my scenery on a portable drive that I share between Mac and Windows, and it works no problem, so yes it'll work fine on Linux/Windows as well

That's incredible... hard to tell it wasn't real :)

It does work, but it's the old trees and mesh is missing new features (bathymetry, soundscapes, season support etc),. I also think the orthos need a refresh with better imagery. I want to update it to XP12, but it's up to ORBX if they want me to do this now since they only concentrate on MFS these days.

What advantage does this have now over the default clouds? Does it allow us to set our own weather themes or use historic weather yet?

It was incredible, I absolutely loved season 3 and would even watch it again. I thought season 1 and 2 were absolutely terrible and actually can't believe it's the same series. I know it was 100% nostalgia and fan service, but still loved it

This looks pretty nice, considering it's just default scenery. The colours seem quite natural and fairly realistic. It does seem to be quite grainy though, as if it has excessive sharpening on it, maybe a filter the author used for the video

E-Mail sent, I'd like to go... not as a vendor this time, but I've enjoyed the past 2 times I've been. Hope to see you there again @Christopher Low

There is no single source for all of Europe, you need to mix and match. For Spain, the European layer in Ortho4XP should pick the ign.es imagery and automatically switch to various other sources for other countries, which is actually really good. You'll of course get a visible change between countries, but overall it works pretty well

When I was working at Orbx, we had to hire people to do this by hand, In fact, most of the GB aerial imagery I had to edit by hand to clean up, remove clouds, colour match, etc. I looked at various tech out there that claimed it could do it, but it really couldn't and was all vapourware or was harder work than just editing the original imagery. The UK imagery was horrendous to work with, and was like a patchwork field and was a huge amount of work to make it consistent. I tried various imagemagick scripts, trying to use Python image processing libraries etc with feature detection etc, and whilst sometimes it worked, e.g. if the cloud layer was very thin, it couldn't handle thick white clouds or cloud shadows. One method I used in the USA that did work: 1) Download 2 different versions of the same imagery, e.g. The USA has various years you can use 2) For areas that are covered in clouds or dark shadows, it's possible to use a mask to blend from one area to other, even using the bright white cloud as a mask to do this. This was pretty effective. 3) For areas that suddenly change seasons/colours, use a fading alpha mask to blend between the two areas so that the change in colour is much less noticable to the user. For colour blending, you still would need two sources and perhaps low zoom-level satellite imagery for a colour palette, and I believe MS do this. However, even Microsoft with all their money and resources couldn't find an effective way to handle this problem, and had to resort to default textures. Either way, with the recent explosion of AI tech, I don't think it'll be long before it's doable, but I doubt the tech would be made available to regular users like us.

It is, but I like them as it makes some of the larger inland lakes look good. This is why I reduced the water settings a lot to reduce the amount needed, so only larger lakes etc are shown Hugely depends on the area in OpenstreetMap where it gets its data from. Something like the netherlands can kill it :)

Yeah, that's a lot Here are the settings I generally use, and this normally keeps my tiles nice and lean: One of the biggest hidden killers of framerate is inland water and masks. You don't see the detail in the mesh, but all water features, even tiny ponds can end up being baked into the mesh and increasing the triangle count a lot without adding much, so I reduce these a lot and use the triangle budget elsewhere. I also limit the triangles to around 2,000,000 but may up those to a max of 4 million. These settings have served me well :) P.S. Ignore the "skip_converts" option... it should be set to false