Captain Kitten

xE is GPU dependent. Automatically "Scaling up" is not easily done. Especially with the necessary increase of sampling resolution, which has the main benefit of higher detail. That is impossible without going back a few steps and redo a lot of what we have done since ca b50. We will do this at one point in the future, but not with the introduction of Vulcan. The expected benefit of Vulcan is very overrated by the community. The cautious approach towards Vulcans benefit for the simulator is also stated by Laminar on several occasions. Right now our main focus is to get xE established on its new track and move along the roadmap.

This has been answered in the past. Nothing for xplane is Vulcan compatible. All you can do is prepare for it. We are prepared. Besides. Xplane won't leave open gl and only be Vulcan from the day Vulcan is introduced. All addons will have plenty of time to adapt to Vulcan. So no need to panic.

Qwqaholic is right. XEnviro is 9/10th gpu dependent. Maybe more.

I am looking into another live stream. But it's hard to find time for it. With the expo coming up and Threshold being a media partner there we have our hands full. In addition we are whipping up some new concepts to keep Threshold floating economically. Sadly the people who have been supporting us through subscriptions, donations and store purchases stand as a surprisingly low percentage compared to the vast influx of new members and readership. Our statistics on page views and usage of the forum is staggering. With that costs go up so Thresholds survival is of high priority right now. But, If I do get the time for a stream I will. One more video is in the pipeline though. Performance will not be a part of it. Performance will be mentioned when we see that the rest of our tweaks don't affect it all too much and we can say that this is how performance will be. It is still better than 1.09

b71-b73 Beta tester screenshots.

b71 mid progress Whats going on? The team has been working non stop the last weeks. Andrey has been working an insane amount to squish bugs, implement remaining features and ironing out conflicts that occur. That man is imperessive! The bug list is getting vanishingly small, populated by few but hard bugs. Alongside and especially lately the layer mixing and channel adjustments have taken a much larger portion of the development process. This means that we are steaming ahead. Where are you on the Nürburgring? We're back on the track and we are full throttle on the straight towards the last bends before the finish line. We think we have passed Tiergarten and are on our way towards Hohenrain. It's still very foggy and we don't really know where the first chikane after the straight is. But we have confidence in the tools that were sharpened and we should be able to cut the corners just right. So give us an ETA! Slow down there Jose. We won't show them cachonas to the chikas just yet. Right now we need to test everything even deeper and try to keep an eye on performance and stability while finishing touches are applied. A clean shave must be confirmed before we present. But.. Enough metafores! Back to work. We can smell a release candidate on the horizon. Here have some screenshots *runs back to lab

Short update on where are we and where are we heading: (betaversion at time of writing: b70) I have to stop arguing with jellyfish on the Internet. Just takes too much time and energy. Energy we need to get this over the finish line. We are fighting hard with grain. There are some issues we need to overcome. I'll list a couple here just to let you know what we are working on. Shimmering: Distant clouds shimmer uncontrollably. We have a "blur slider" now that mends this somewhat but it's a tricky one. (Somewhat linked to banding) Grain: The grain is a direct result of a huge performance gain. Blur helps here as well but you loose a lot of detail. Banding: Distant clouds have bands that make them look like horisontal stairs sometimes. Blur helps a lot with this. Resolution: This is somewhat self explainatory. This is linked to all of the above as well. Performance: Well - we are in a good spot now but would like to fix the above issues and what ever we do we either hit a wall of performance hits or xplane starts acting up. (oh did I blame xplane? Jellyfish fights keeps surfacing in my head) But yes. Explained above somewhere. In any case we have some dilemmas and compromises to look at and are yet again at some crossroads where we need to decide. NO WE'RE NOT GIVING UP. THIS IS NOT A LETTER OF RESIGNATION (talking to the jellyfish again) I am just trying to stay open and honest about where we are. "So when do you release??" Let's see if you know the answer to this... Yep - no release date. We're so close though. So close. Majority of the work has been done. The above are the only main issues we have. We might decide to bite the apple and release this with one or two items still open. We will be working on xE after 1.10 too so it's not like we're abandoning once released. But we'll have to take that discussion internally. Ahaanyways, I'll leave you with a couple of screenies from b70. Sometimes it just looks great and we whish everyone would be able to experience the good moments. We just have to minimize (hopefully squish completely) the immersion breakers. Stay classy (*fighting jellyfish = fights you just can't win)

b70