Captain Kitten

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

Yep.. I have been pretty silent lately. With reason.. It's painfully slow at the moment... But some things have been solved and we're actually making progress. We're fighting the native sim to a large extent and have to make compromises. It still looks godd and still runs well so the hope is there. But the pace is killing us and we wish there were larger leaps to be made... But we have to work with what we have got. b65

If it were possible to do any of this without compromising security we would have. Trust me, we have thought about and discussed this to death internally.

Thank you for your kind words. Everything you describe and whish for is doable for XEnviro. But not in any way manageable by today's systems. We're constantly balancing performance with visuals with what you see already. But xe will not stop developing as long as the xplane platform allows for it. The limitations on the platform are already severe and thus cumbersome to work with at times. Most of the limitations are understandable in the sense that Laminar never focused (and still does not) on this area of the Sim in the extent we would like.

Xe will never offer this. Sorry. Once we do you will find xe on pirate Bay within hours. It's plainly not doable without completely desintegrating any form of security.