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Come on now 🙂 I think he means what you get out of the box. With that being said, I agree some there is some hypocrisy here, if there was no demand for 3rd party addons in MSFS then we would not have so many addons for it.

Hopefully, never. I don't care about watching my house real footprints, as far as scenery accuracy is a concern, I care about what is in the VFR charts, that's it, anything beyond that is just pure "eye candy" hence no reason to be limited to blackshark assets that have subpar quality and can only create limited shapes. LR should invest in new shading pipelines for scenery plausibility; a new mesh system (that can make roads affect mesh as well), moving the vegetation meta-data to raster based-images to place 3D through masks & more OSM content to make cities recognizable with quality, instanced & regional art assets using the same powerful autogen scenes concepts. For scenery accuracy, in a world where LR can deliver at least 1 point per building data, by default (AGP VS facades footprints) I'd hope they just gateway roads & autogen scenes placements, creating an updateable scenery data base, just like they did with airports. For larger structures, facades can be used, just like they do now for tall buildings.

BTW, why I can't edit my comments? Sorry about the many typos 🙄

Again, this has nothing to do with AI. You have an image, you have it's rgb values properly keyed to place roght details (green is probably grass etc..). You have a mesh, then you have a slope sensitive shader working to place the correct details. Non of this data needs any AI magic, just normal procedural rules in the shader. If you want further insights, shoot a DM.

You are mixing 2 different aspects here. 1) What kind of ground texture you have to begin, generic or satilite imagery. 2) Procedural rules that are applied to place high-freq detail, typically color keyed, slope-sensitive shaders etc.. Second part is already possible now in default SDK in other sim as well, it's just last time the ground texture there got a large update it was a decade ago. Anyway, if you want discuss technical aspects a bit more, we can do that in private, let's not dive into what other engines can do 🙂

This has nothing to do with AI placing any pebbles. Tessellated materials work by subdividing the mesh to smaller pixel size parts then the new geometry gets displaced based on a greyacale height map (i.e. flat high-freq image). The only thing AI does is try to apply the right materials to right kind of surfaces, probably with less accuracy than artist driven masks. Honestly, nothing that can't be done with some quality normal maps. But yeah a cool feature indeed.

What gap? It's the same workflows, same tutorials, same knowledge, everywhere. No secrets in creating PBR assets. Thats what industry standard means, everyone does the same, no hidden secrets from any freeware developer. Art assets are extermely verstaile. And if, one insist he can't, lots of free materials, many of them free to use even for a commercial purpose, no need to own quixel or substance. And since i'm assuming no one is trying to create those extra-stylized materials i'd argue that virtually every PBR material you need to create a simple scenery for X-Plane (or any other simulator) is available for free as well, almost ready for the job. Where the data is stored on texture channels differs between engines, thats it. Note my comment is about PBR assets, not suggesting LR documentation is perfect, it is far from it. But for a simple scenery that this freeware developer want to create, everything is crystal clear imo, beyond that, its asking others to do the job for you.

Creating PBR assets is 100% identical for any engine, game or simulator, the only difference are those documented technical aspects and the channels packing that LR came up with for their engine. Its the same industry standart workflows everywhere and there are plenty of free tutorials and tools. Frankly, LR should not teach developers how to their job.

I think you are confusing between GPU accelerated mesh as a general thing VS mesh shaders specifically. Tessellation pipelines that subdivide the mesh are available since a long time ago, combine that with a noise texture to displace it, that is how X-Plane creates it's water, that's how I think MSFS2024 procedural terrain work, based on what they call their new features. Mesh shaders are different stages with an endgame to completely replace the current pipelines, with "lower access" control, not fixed-functions, able to create more "interesting" & custom topology (tessellation can suffer from morphing for example as it's outputs is limited) & generally built for better use of modern GPUs. Now, sure, there are practices that try the same idea that mesh shaders have, i.e. you can cull on the GPU without using them, like XP12 trees. IIRC Nanite also does not rely on mesh shaders for what it does with a rather very similar concept, but if you want top-notch performance/efficiency/scalability, they are supported and can be enabled given you have the proper hardware.

Reading this thread, generally I agree with you that some of the documentation is very lacking, this applies mostly for the scenery features. For the material model, it is actually documented really well: https://developer.x-plane.com/article/the-x-plane-12-material-model/ All you need for PBR is 2 textures that you create however you want and know, packed in the normal map according to what this document above suggests. (Blue for Metals/translucent dielectric, alpha for roughness) Creating the graph and saving it in blender is easy, you just bake to the appropriate channels. Now, with that being said, internally, starting v12 XP will SPLIT the PBR textures & Normals to 2 different compressed versions of them, saving VRAM. Also, XP12 supports KTX2 packing with the modern formats. An official exporter for all of this is WIP, pre-compressed Normal maps & PBR textures should help loading & paging performance, also once they are split, you can work on different resolutions. Oh and as side note, decals (Normal mapped as well!) for OBJs are finally coming, mentioned in the Christmas Q&A.

I highly doubt XP12 already using mesh shaders, it was not available for Vulkan when they started working on v12 let alone for Metal that introduced them earlier this year. I also highly doubt MSFS2024 will be using them, since their new procedural feature for geometry is literally called tessellated materials.

What are you implying here? Because X-Plane 10 & 11 did have 2/4/8XSSAA, as promised in this almost 12 years blog post. Back then, X-Plane moved from forward rendering to deferred, you can read more about problems in AA as a result in google, as it is a big problem and a source for lots of research in the entire rendering industry, not just X-Plane. Now in X-Plane 12, those are the big culprits in shimmering, a fair amount of them will be fixed in 12.1.0.

Not sure I get the sarcasm. Both items will be worked on, AA improvements are coming in 12.1.0, TAA for specular artifacts will be worked on as well once they have motion vectors, all clear according to the charts. Mesh shaders are a revolution for the geometry pipelines in rendering engines in general, much more exciting that Ray tracing or any other RTX feature imo, don't you want better scenery as well?

Indeed rendering quality should be improved. But when talking about this topic one needs to be a bit more specific, generally, there are multiple shimmering sources in X-Plane: 1) Any texture with an alpha Transparency/Translucency i.e. fence, trees and many other texture effects. 12.1.0 should bring MSAA for that as well, this should help a lot. 2) MSAA bug, it was not in the right "photometric values", will be fixed in 12.1.0. 3) Shadows, smoother shadows are coming in 12.1.0. 4) Specular/Reflection aliasing, the real solution for this will be TAA, planned after motion vectors as the chart says. 5) Ground texture tiling bug: There is a bug with the tiling shader that X-Plane uses for some of the ground textures, it is already fixed according to the bug tracker, not known when it ships though. IIRC it happens mostly using Nvidia GPUs when using anisotropic filtering. 6) OBJ tint attribute: X-Plane can tint objects to create some art variations however there is a bug in that particular attribute as it randomizes every frame; look at the street cars especially, they change brightness every frame/when they OR the camera moves. LR are aware, not sure where it stands. All together create the shimmering look, are completely different issues, all known by LR, I have no doubt they will be solved.

Compared to MSFS, much less accurate. But for VFR flight, accurate enough, you have all the needed vectors, mesh comes from real world data, landclass data is covered as well, anything you see on typical VFR map, is in. The ground textures are accurate in general as well for what they are trying to depict based on landclass, this includes different types of patterns for example in agricultural lands. With that being said, the mesh itself, leaves a lot to be desired. Those who remember aipilotx HD meshes, may recall that the more geometry X-Plane's mesh has the better the landclass is & ground looked more photorealistic even using default textures; that is because in X-Plane, landclass data is hooked to geometry to define what type of land to use. A new mesh system will immediately make X-plane's scenery look 1000X better, good news, Laminar are painfully aware of that.

There was a comment in facebook in one of their last posts. 12.09 coming, it is mostly a small hotfix update + some scenery fixes.

Yes many awesome stuff. Also every "block" in this road map opens some new possibilities i.e. actor OBJs might open up FMOD & Particles for DSF objects. I also wonder what are those "???" features? If I had to guess for one of them, possibly a new OBJ format? They did mention they were working on that for new animations and other features.

I would not hold my breath for major changes in the new scenery-recut. Last time it was mentioned, they were mostly working on missing water bodies (EGLC is a known example) and fixing some runway nonsense when they were close to water. Speaking of runways & adjacent water, I'm almost sure tides "simulation" is coming? there was a preview at the org months ago that I can't find now, but 100% confident that is something that I saw.

Hey Guys, New at Avsim, used to read a bit here and there but mostly been following X-Plane in Discord. Unfortunately lots of the discord news for X-Plane are not being communicated in here so hopefully this thread will add some content around. Anyway, for those who don't know, there have been some recent multiple Q&As in Laminar Research's discord with some VERY interesting news. First, this is the transcript of the previous one, with Ben & Sidney: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13JkolLoebjceCGurDspg3ioijLhUuX-V9gKVDvcJGb0/mobilebasic#heading=h.lb4ymtifd380 This chart is kind of self-explanatory I believe, note that this is NOT everything planned, this is just their plan for the internal engine in general, also, not everything here is coming in the short-term. The collector is coming in 12.1.0, while next stages are already under heavy WIP. But here is one of the most interesting quotes from the transcript, by Ben Supnik: As one can understand, Laminar are planning to implement Mesh Shaders. Mesh Shaders are available in Vulkan & Metal, which may make them a perfect fit for X-Plane. This piece of information really caught my eyes. For those who don't know what they are: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/introduction-turing-mesh-shaders/ So it appears Laminar are planning to be the most modern engine out there by the end of this process, as I'm yet to see any other competition going THIS modern, not including the recently announced 2024.