Captain Kitten

Still Jetlagged... And soon going back to sleep. But I managed to scramble the winners of the screenshot competition. Sorry for the delay on that. And the winner is: . . . . . . . . Do NOT make me choose first, second and third place. This wa hard enough. All winners are uploaded to the store as store images in the Threshold store. Which was the mediocre prize I could offer. https://store.thresholdx.net/products/xenviro So the winners are (I only have your forum name): sergio V1_Lewis tylenolwithwings umi Nightflyer

Known issue stated before and at release.

Not sure what part makes you say it's a bold statement. Or what made you react with sadface. Fact is that xE is yet to be cracked and a demo version would break that isntantly. I don't really see the boldness in that. It's rather a firm safety fature. Microsoft sure has stired things up, but if they have the flightmodel and all other things in place to be a good replacement for X-Plane remains to be seen. It has a lot of boxes to tick off before I even consider making it my primary sim. And we will not stop developing just for the possibility that it might.

Sorry for the late announcement of the winners. It will be done. I just need to get the time for it.. Expo had me exhausted and I'm exploring Florida for another week and a half. I'll be back though. (also with updates on xE 1.11 progress)

Remind me of this when expo is over.

Feel free

I can decline that straight away. We will never have a demo version for xenviro. Several reasons for it: we don't have time to even look on to how we would do it and second is security. 1.10 is heavy. It's just the way it is at this stage and I suggest you wait.

Wow. Just woke up in Orlando to some seriously good Screenshots. I made myself a workload here. I'll draw the winning Screenshots later today. Until then keep coming

Lets have a screenshot competition. Best 5 screnshots will be used on the product page in Threshold store. ONLY 3 per post! and ONE POST EACH! and xEnviro of course I'll draw the winning screenshots when I have landed in Orlando

We have released 1.10. Please remember the above and that this is the start of volumetrics. https://www.thresholdx.net/news/xev110

This is the beginning of fully dynamic noise rendered clouds in advanced flight simulation So, we're well in to the in release candidate run. I will need to prepare you all for what's coming. The latest screenshots are from xE and how it will look at release but xEnviro 1.10 will release with a set of known issues. This is the first run of fully dynamic noise rendered volumetric clouds in any major sim environment. This is completely unproven grounds and in large new technology crammed into a shoe box. So this is where we start. 1.10 will have issues and it will have compromises. (Can't repeat that enough - but I also repeat that it does not stop here!) Let me explain (and this is important): Lets distinct between issues and features by design that appear as a necessary or unavoidable issues. Something that we have to keep in existence to keep our final design inside the required frame of performance or visuals. I have called these compromises before. Like with grain.. We just cannot make clouds look nice and have high performance at the same time. Not today. We can't have a slider or toggle for it either since the change in resolution goes deep in to the code. Grain is unavoidable and exist by design as a trade off for performance. Same goes for low detailed clouds and a few other visually related artifacts. We don't like it but this is exactly how it should look in the final product.. Grain is just a very distinctive example but we have a lot of small features that don't look or perform exactly as they should in the ideal product but they exist in the current form just because this is the maximum of what we can have in the current environment. We could go and fix the gap between xE real horizon and xplane water polys but either distant pink mountains (those with no textures applied) emerge or add more extensive haze lowering the visibility range. We would then have a constant visual limitation of 10-20 km.. So we're choosing between three things - we chose to let some pixels of some grey color exist above the sea providing they are not visible all the time depending on the actual visibility. These are some of the compromises: (unwillingly implemented or tolerated features by design) Haze blending on mountains Haze blending and covering the edge of dsf (which is hell to get right in x-plane) Haze covering clouds Clouds cutoff with depth test Clouds depth test with airframe Entire pipeline depth test with aircraft lights Gap between xE horizon and XP horizon Here is the list of known issues: Known issues or bugs are there because we need to move on and some were discovered too late. We just don't want to go back to beta and xE is usable as it is now. You have waited long enough and 1.11 won't be far off. Precipitation follows camera Unnatural cloud formations at high levels or squared sectors of clouds Snow coverage may appear in the regions where no snowfall encountered recently Default X-Plane night triggers lights artifacts Performance is heavy but better than 1.09 (4k users will get a significant hit) To round this off: These are just a few of the challenges we have struggled with and will continue to work on after 1.10. Along side the roadmap. We usually find ways around and mend these issues and compromises but we have come to a point where we have to say enough is enough. xE is where it can be enjoyed as long as you take in to account that it (as with any other weather addons) has it's limitations in its current state and with current average user systems. The difference is that we are now on fully dynamic noise rendered volumetric clouds. And we are now starting the run to perfect this technology so we in the future can experience a visually breath taking, living and well performing environment engine. This is just the beginning. We want more. The xEnviro team

Managing expectations Allright, here's the deal. This will sound like an excuse to some people but I don't care. I know haters will yell and twist my words, but I'm not talking to them. I am talking to the ones who follow along and actually read what I write and have written so far. I appreciate the endless support some have given but I am not specifically writing this for you either. This is for anyone who wants to know what you actually get and I hope you can understand that we will not be finished with xEnviro when we release 1.10! Yes, the screenshots you have seen are the real deal. xE1.10 looks fantastic and does do a good job over all. But if you start looking for faults you won't have to search for long before you find something. Just like every other weather addon out there you will still have your moments of bliss and your moments of "what the heck". Hopefully more of the bliss part. You have probably seen clouds that were fantastic with nice detail and fine whisps in earlier versions. And then the clouds look lumpy and low detail now. I have dripped a screensot here and there with obvious flaws so I could explain what we are struggling with in development. And have explained before that the development is not linear. The quality of the clouds and the resolution of them (and haze) is a prime example of it. The clouds have been a major concern all the way along side performance. Where performance always runs away with the longest straw. This is what is possible: In the video above I fly through clouds that look like clouds and they have nice whisps. (Dec 16, 2018) This was in the late stages of the test versions. (xE1.10t91) and we drove my PC to the limit but still with averaging 20-25fps in that video. [ My system specs are in my profile. ] But we could not carry on with that setup since there was more to be implemented and other systems did not cope well. Here is an example of what you will find if you search for faults: From above the cloud intersections with terrain will be even worse. Especially up close. Grain is very present at times, there will be some flickering of clouds in the distance and you may experience some banding. So, known issues: Grain (result of noise rendering. Only resolution will help) Banding (Solution same as grain) Terrain blending Low detail Some flickering Performance is generally fine. But lowest end systems will struggle. Only solution to performance now is to increase one or more of the above items. All in all there is a lot of room for improvement and we can remove all of these issues. But improving one item will either exaggerate another item or lower performance. It will all get better over time and AMD's leap in performance (We'll see the 7/7 - 2019) will hopefully make decent systems affordable for everyone. It's about time. Yes, Vulcan will help. But we won't put all of our eggs in that basket just yet. (And yes - we are prepared for Vulcan not compatible but prepared. OpenGL won't vanish straight away either so no need to panic) This tech is new to us and is an ongoing trial and error in the X-Plane environment. We have done some isolated experiments along the way though. We have tried 2 buffers with 3x resolution and it runs faster than one buffer with 2x resolution. The results were convincing. We have a chance to improve performance and reduce grain, banding and intersection with terrain. 3x resolution wont be as crisp as 2x but it will look almost the same as 2x with blur applied. We can then use blur to hide grain again. We know we can get the same quality but with better performance and less artifacts as it is today. But if we can get tripple buffering working smoothly we get even less grain and less artifacts with the same performance. But this takes time. At least 6 months. So this will be the plan going forward along side giving patches for 1.10 and following the known roadmap. Thing is. We're not only developing xE for this release. Since X-Plane is a moving target we have to look into being able to adapt to it a few crossroads down the road. It has taken a lot of time. We are very aware of that. But now we are wrapping up the beta and preparing for rc1. I hope b79 will be the last beta. Tired of waiting? Try developing this... You'll know what tired actually is. I'll just repeat what I started with: we will not be finished with xEnviro when we release 1.10! We are not satisfied. We have seen what xE can do. It is so much more than what you will see in 1.10 I'll sign off here. We have a beta to test.

b78

Personally I like the xEnviro night sky colours better than the mix in with the default night sky, but you'll have the option now to see stars - albeit somewhat with a compromize - until we start working on night environment which will be a later update. Night environment will be a complete overhaul of the dusk til dawn hours.

b78

b78 Here you can see the grain we have been fighting and still will be fighting after release. The only remedy is better performing systems and environment for xEnviro to work in.

b73 beta tester screenshots b75 beta tester screenshots

Still is that card. Full specs here: https://forum.thresholdx.net/profile/3-captain-kitten/?tab=field_core_pfield_1

b75 Many obsticles have been overcome lately and RC candidate is coming closer. Next week will be hell for several team members and we're unsure if we can make a lot of progress. We'll hang in there once we get time but we'll see. b75 looks great and I hope it won't throw that many bugs back at us during testing. This is over London by the way. with GBSouth by ORBX and I'm hovering around 30-40 fps. Getting there

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