Michael Rempel

I bet there is a bit coin miner out there who will try it and claim it is possible. I know a few guys with thousands of dollars worth of GPUs just sitting around now cuz they figured out that bitcoin mining is a never winning proposition these days. To people who are scheptical and whiny, the change being made is a) vital, and b) really hard. Take it from a guy who has been writing software for over 40 years. The new stuff is way harder to get right than the old way. But it can be done well, and more efficiently. Vulkan is a lot fussier, a lot more complex (many times more) and it takes a lot of time to learn it, and then make it work. Real world programmers always under estimate the effort they will have to make software. I have been designing estimation software, and doing research into it for decades. The fact remains constant in the industry. The real average completion date is 2.2 times the estimates at the beginning. And that does not count projects that fail to deliver at all. Crudely said, learning a whole new core paradigm for an upgrade like this adds 70 to 250% to that number. From what I can tell, if there was some discussion loosely by devs or management way back when, then they are right on schedule. The real schedule. In fact from what I know, which is quite a bit despite not knowing anyhing internally, they are doing a phenominal job. The way it is being built seems clear and pretty clean. They dont have side effects all over the place, so it is well architected. And I really like the way the plane physics works in the air. It feels right for the most part. Audio isnt great, but it is improving. And we cant mess with gravity on a budget. It is a good sim. Now they need to get everyone on to the better parallel compiler, and do some work on inter dependent object management to go with that. Render priority switching from 2d to 3d for example. Taking away 'the numbers' from end users to give them sliders that go from 'sparse' to 'dense' object population, but keeping the meaning of that relative to the machine being run. These days you get to see what is under the hood of this vehicle, and you can tune it yourself. That means you can blow stuff up yourself too, but you can play. Microsoft always tries to hide that from end users. I dont know if it will go well for the cockpit guys who want real hardware for every function. X-Plane is a really nice core hunk of software that runs the fine line between completely open and a dog's breakfast, and totally closed. It is growing like mad, and I am appreciating it more and more. So hang on to your hats a while. Things will go slow for quite a while, till the sim is mature enough to go very fast. And it will. It is coming, this old man has seen it before. Nobody on the team will promise it, but you wait. I expect great things from this team. Let me end with one comment on the fix list. Rewrote the OpenGL bridge between X-Plane and plugins to fix a number of design limitations and bugs. This fix is not trivial. This fix means the team cares a lot about maintaining the existing way of doing things. An old analogy in the software industry is to build a new airplane while still keeping the old one in the air. A fresh start is way easier, but not feasible when you want to keep your community happy. This is a so-called brown field situation. Those are always harder to do, more expensive, and they take longer. I get it that the troll who started this should keep quiet. This is not for him. This is for the rest who are not sure if what is happening is good or not. No it isnt good folks. It is fantastic. Cheers.

You should look at the WED tutorials on Youtube. Jan is really long winded, but he explains it all in detail. He also gives you instructions on how to get your WED update approved for X-Plane, and he seems to know a lot about the upcoming stuff in WED. There are lots of tricks and gochas to understand. As well he goes into some detail about limitations in X-Plane that a lot of people dont like. For instance, airport runways need to be flat. And you need to be able to taxi on them. I like mountain flying and finding a flat runway with a decent simple approach is often super hard. The reason to fly these is to work out the landing without pranging real hardware. You cant do that in the mountains with X-Plane. From what I understand the next release will be even worse. The presumption is also that all runways are well maintained. False in the mountains. Carry a small pick, shovel, and chainsaw for new spot landing, even if it looks fantastic from the air. If nobody knows about it, and nobody lands there, there is likely a good reason.