Bakr

I remember setting behind my 14 inch CGA Monitor in early 90's, and playing MSFS version 2 on a late night. my imagination was going wild feeling myself flying at night (screen was totally black except for the white lines or airport run-way. the rest of details was filled implicitly by the brain - the pixel stars of the night..etc. But looking at these night snapshots up here .... have i had access to these at those days .... i would have been a faithful pilot by now.

The last snapshot - is an EPIC - wow!

One of the things that is sort-of pulling back in xp11 is its age scene light rendering engine, which gives a feeling that color space is dull and washed out, no matter what plugins such as shaderx or xvision tries to do.. for ex-enviro, the area i see it still needs refinement is the blending of cloud edges under certain light conditions, whereby it should be softer, but am not sure how will xp12 photo-metric new rendering engine will work out to change that. does xenviro benefit in terms of ray-marching from the new xp12 photo-metric rendering .. in case you have access to private alpha edition of xp12.

the last screenshots - are on a different plain than all what we have seen so far. we are moving in the right direction and the hard work is starting to showcase a pay off

this thread will soon heat up, having come that far, like the good days we had in recent release cycles. am always keeping an eye on this precious hiding place. having watched the last published video, i see it very much promising to end up better than msfs cloud depictions at near distance.

Greetings to the Great Team of XE the above screenshot - courtesy of its owner at YouTube video link below - has captured my attention. Especially to how the city lights penetrate the clouds from high above, - i hope this feature gets tuned and optimized in XE as it looks awesome. Best Regards

welcome to XE 1.15

Eagerly waiting to have the new thread section opened for XE 1.15 :) Meanwhile, enjoying videos on XE 1.14

a very interesting insight, despite we have heard that msfs2020 had a new physics non-flying-block dynamics. based on on your personal encounter - can you xplane (explain) how short was msfs2020 from x-plane with regards to flight dynamics... am eager to that (although not subject of this thread.)..

Do we have any early benchmarks using Xenviro with Nvidia RTX 3080 - ?

its a fact, without doubt, that clouds in 1.14 are on a total new level - far more realistic than all previous releases. Looking for X-plane 2021 with Xe 1.15...

From my observation, i see that xenviro renders the clouds not as individual objects, but as one object that is covering a big grid cubical area, that is why some square clouds used to appear. further to this, i could see sometimes a form of pattern, like the under-carpet weaving. as a scan in 3d space is run in order to generate a hologram. whereas i perceive that in msfs, each cloud is a separate object that has its own properties of growth, in a fashion similar to what "rex environment force" is doing (at least how they control size of clouds) the parameter that controls size of clouds does not exist in XE thus far, maybe partly because the environment is always based on real weather data. and/or because truly my above statement is true to say that Xenviro scans a 3d space to create a hologram of weather depiction based on data provided by live weather metar if am correct at all, while this approach has advantages, it might have some limitations, one of the advantages is the ability to render the whole atmosphere while not stressing the system, i do recall you mentioned earlier a half-rendering and full-rendering approaches, - i guess am pointing to the same notion. one thing i noticed, is that in general the clouds layer looking thin, or maybe our visual perception is polluted by exaggerated clouds in m$f$2o2o i sea that xenviro is still in its infancy, and has many more surprises in the very near future for the community to outperform the great new next-gen benchmark of msfs whereby the competition will eventually lead to visual development extrusions to catch up and set a farther new refined standard in realistic weather depiction. for example, currently xe needs more tuning (i know it is a matter of tuning and head-room) to be able to provide a scene like this photo (in Armenia) Notice the clouds have a large vertical scale and form pertaining to this cloud type, the last snapshots of 1.14 in this thread - are very very superior in terms of grain and granular definition of cloud noise at micro scale (frankly better than msfs), but at the macro scale, some more work needs to be done. we hope xe can produce these results in the short to medium term. Keep up the good works of wonder

Based on the last snapshots, i can see a level of cloud details never seen before , the formations of vapor(cloud) spread are more realistic - something that i knew you had it right from day zero mathematical formulas wise, but were not able to push in earlier releases unless you resolve on the performance optimization paths .... even though these are not representing final product, but congratulations .. the incremental effort is tangible over time. Based on above screenshots, XE engine can produce these clouds easily (similar to below photo), albeit there are still limitations in rendering pipeline and lighting system in the x-plane that may be addressed in plugins that tweak the environment parameters to bring more vibrant color

Re-attaching, after fixing exposure via Photoshop --- WOW