[Nothing here? I'll just start off with a general post]

8 hours ago, mmeares said:

I come back time to time to check the updates and just wanna make sure Im not missing anything. Upon arrival, will you guys have it posted in the Main thresholds download section or will it be available in a specific location somewhere else. Sorry for all the questions. I feel as if youre probably having to repeat yourself sometimes. lol! Thx! Looking forward to the new 7 3.

No worries
Regardless of where we host it you will find it here in one form or another.

[Nothing here? I'll just start off with a general post]

23 hours ago, Tal Shneiderman said:

Any updates on the release date?

We'll probably not go public with a specific date.

[1.14 development]

8 hours ago, jfwharton said:

So are you saying we will still have seasons, dynamic snow in Open GL?  Or will we loose it completely?  Seasons and Snow are the main reason that I was so thrilled with xEnviro.  If I loose that then I will stop using xEnviro and move on.  I hope this will not have to be the case.

After we go Vulkan seasons are gone since Laminar has effectively shut that down. So 1.14 will be the last one with the current seasons and it will only work in 11.50 OpenGL

[1.14 development]

8 hours ago, trq46 said:

Link to download the beta 1.14 ?

I have never said that beta is public.

[1.14 development]

14 hours ago, Cezary said:

Looks nice. I have no questions, everything is clear. I think that xenviro clouds looks much more realistic then MFS20. I hope u will add some more layers, maybe something like in this picture bloew if its is even possible to make, would be awesome. Fingers crossed for new 1.14.

Towering clouds are in, just not at that scale. Thunderstorms will be developed as soon as we have headroom. Vulkan will give us some. In addition to this performance update.

[1.14 development]

7 hours ago, flightime56 said:

Thanks for all the work, but I won't be downloading, why would I want to use OpenGL? I can't use OpenGL anyway with doing reviews....  I don't even have v11.41 in my computer anymore...  just more, and more wasted time? God this is going to take forever!

So you didn't read what I wrote? 11.50 has OpenGL in it - there is a switch. And there are reasons to why we don't go Vulkan yet - we need to finalize what we started first. Or all this time would have been a waste. Vulkan conversion won't take too long though.

[1.14 development]

1 hour ago, trq46 said:

Nice sir, and where the stuff ?

 

What? 

[1.14 development]

1.14 is in Beta

"When will it release?"
We never give ETA's (Estimated time of arrival). But we're in Beta now. So we are seeing the end of the tunnel.

"Will 1.14 be for Vulkan?"
No, reasons are several: We never anticipated that it would take this long and did a LOT in OpenGL that we just had to get finished before we get it all over to Vulkan. To add to it LR are not openiong up for us to hook in where we need to to keep all we have made so far in OpenGL. We will loose seasons, dynamic snow and wet aprons once we transition to Vulkan. Laminar has shut that door for us. We will probably be able to get that back in but it will demand a fair amount of work and an update on its own later.

"Will it work in X-Plane 11.50?"
Yes, 11.50 has OpenGL in it. It's a switch in the graphics settings. 11.50 has both Vulkan and OpenGL.

"When is update for Vulkan coming?"
1.15 is the Vulkan update. So, after release we start work on this immediately.

"1.14 took its time."
Indeed it did. This has been a hell hole in so many aspects. Several of the team members have dayjobs in "critical infrastructure" and we lost a good two months on that while adapting to the new life we partly still have. In addition we had so many challenges thrown at us from X-Plane and some old xE code that had to be rewritten.

"What's performance like in 1.14?"
5-10 fps. This update will benefit lower end systems more than higher end systems. It will benefit 4k users as well. Some lower end systems (GFX970) have reported a 20-30fps gain... BUT! DO NOT EXPECT SUCH NUMBERS! Keep your expectations in check. We now have a couple of performance sliders. You will be able to crunch your gpu quite heavily in 1.14 and trade visuals for performance.

"Is the grain gone?"
Let me be honest. Like any weather addon, xE1.14 will have its moments and it will have its not so fantastic ones. I don't want to talk any weather app down so I won't mention any. They all shine when they work and look off when not. We're of course aiming for the best visual experience and this will be worked on further for every update. Vulkan will give us some more headroom.

"Will the price change with this update?"
The price will not change and every update is free for existing customers. This goes for all updates within the 1.xx versions of xEnviro.

"Where can I download the beta?"
Our beta runs are not public.

"Can I be a beta tester?"
Maybe. If you want to be a beta tester you can sign up in that thread under announcements in this club.

More questions? I'll add them to this QA if I find them to be good

Here are some tease shots:

[Nothing here? I'll just start off with a general post]

5 hours ago, trellbrown23 said:

 

 

Yeah, if you're not nice you have no room here in this forum though. There are plenty of reasons why people stay on XP10. Economy being one of them. Everyone is allowed to ask questions and you are not moderating this forum. So chill.

[1.14 development]

[1.14 development]

[1.14 development]

Tearing is confirmed behind us. Closing items one by one now. Yes, still not final look - thing is - last work before locking down will be a detail pass so artifacts will occur until the end of the test fase.

[1.14 development]

We're actually seeing the last corners of the track.. I don't even dare to say that we're lifting the gas pedal at Tiergarten getting ready to break for the shicane at Hohenrain... Those of you have followed along know what I'm talking about. 

 

Sorry for the low resolution on these. Images. More to come. Soon. 

[1.14 development]

Oh man.... this has taken some serious time... We know! Trust me we know. And I am very much aware of my absence in the past weeks but I needed some time off to hget some distance from the "X-Plane is dead" morons than now luckily have more or less left X-Plane.

With my position in Threshold I have had MSFS for about a a year already and have known what is coming for a long time. I know that X-Plane is not dead. We have hopefully gotten rid of some scum that only crave visual stuff and not in depth simulation of aircraft. MSFS will get that. Don't get me wrong. MSFS looks and feels great! But it will take some time before you can use a good G1000 or an in depth airliner. When that comes, I don't know, but I know that X-Plane will be used by many for a long time still and might never leave. (Whats wrong in having two sims anyway). And we're not leaving. We're going to finish the xEnviro roadmap.

And I sadly don't have any concrete news yet. But some positives are present. Many have mentioned that development time has been slow. Oh that could not be further from the truth. Time has been long - but development has been ongoing constantly on an increadible amount of workload since the release of 1.13. Well, almost constantly anyway. Covid happened.. That robbed us of one or maybe two months of work in total because several of us have "vital proffessions" and priorities shifted. And it still does impact us a lot still since members of the development team have been directly affected by Covid. I'm not going in to details on that but we're pressing on regardless!


*Not representative of final product.

This is hopefully one of the last times you'll see that disclaimer. But we're still in test versions so the images are in fact not representative of the final product yet. We are approaching Beta though and we are assembling the different features that are still lying around in pieces. Tesitng them one by one to see that they still fit in to the 1.14 we want to have.

We're over the hard challenge we got with tearing. It's not mended fully but will be basically gone under assembly. So I choose to be optimistic enough to write this update.

So, these images are still not representative of final product. There are artifacts that you can see if you look closely and attributes missing to make them look the way they will at release. In fact they won't look like the end result before final test - and first beta assembly. Which hopefully isn't very far off now. I dare to say weeks in stead of months.

Even though this is not a visual update you will se a pretty severe visual change in the clouds. This comes from the fact that we have had go deep in to the code to make some profound changes. The one with the most impact has been "semi full volume rendering". This path opens up for unlimited layers of clouds but will be fully exploited when we have entered Vulkan. We will keep the automatic reduction of layers to maintain performance. However most should see several layers where threre are more since the layers have less impact than in previous versions..

Performance:

It's not easy to say what performance gain you will get from 1.14. We have seen everything from 5fps increase to an insane 30 fps gain on an old gfx card. Older cards seem to benefit the most from the performance paths we have finished. So what this means for your setup depends on so much. Prepare for the lower prediction of 5 fps for your case and be positively surprized if you get more.

Vulkan

Yes, we will go Vulkan after 1.14. 1.15 will be our Vulkan assesment. No it will not take nearly as long as 1.14. This performance update has been hell. We are prepared for the Vulkan transition. There will be some features that will not be available in Vulkan... We have tried to convince LR to give us the tools we need for these features but they seem as stubborn on this as the time they told us xE would not work in Vulkan at all. We will still fight for these features but we will get 1.14 out of the door first.

I'll update again as soon as I have more.

Until then, Keep safe and happy landings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1.14 development]

7 hours ago, Pageois said:

Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘irrelevant”-   “XEnviro, a week after MS FS 2020 launch.”

How is this even close to necessary. If you have left for MSFS then be my guest. No need to come here and be rude.

[Nothing here? I'll just start off with a general post]

If you want to ask something, comment, -what ever

[SERVER DOWN TIME!]

!!SERVER DOWNTIME!!
Servers will be down for yearly maintenance in the time period between 01:00 and 05:00 Zulu (UTC) (Tomorrow 12.08.2020). Expect empty weather briefing and no weather to load in this time period.

[1.14 development]

12 hours ago, Bakr said:

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

 

Your assumptions are far off. These are not in any way objects. MSFS clouds are made from the same technology as xE. It's noise rendered volumetrics. And that has nothing to do with 3d objects. The limitations right now is performance.  Once we have the performance headroom we need we will unleash xEnviro - we haven't even started on shapes.

[1.14 development]

[1.14 development]

9 hours ago, trq46 said:

hey ask asobo how to make it, they do better, and my guessing is about to go right, v 1.14 is released after msfs 2020 :DDDD , but still xEnviro great too for xplane, i'm glad owning it n will play it with xEnviro 1.14 soon, either fs2020 for scenery and weather, fair, both have proc n cons. 

We know exactly how they do what they do. Headroom and more resources is 90% of it.

[1.14 development]

12 hours ago, Yorkshire said:

 'Clearly X-Plane is dead and you will be moving on and not look back at any of this.'

Respectfully, you are wrong on that one - and thank you for the link - which I have listened to, and found it a very interesting conversation. I have not pre-ordered FS20 and have no plans to do so. I was fortunate enough to get on the Alpha program on the 2nd trawl so have had it on my system since January. Respecting the NDA I am under, I won't say why I won't be buying into it, however I had already come to my own conclusion with the question that the Podcast started with - is it ready! Whether I will indulge myself sometime in the future remains to be seen, but it's not a priority. I did buy into P3D v5 some months ago but XP is my sim of choice and I spend over 95% of my flightsim time in it, and know because of all the features that it has got right, will continue to do so. 

I sincerely hope you and the team manage to resolve the remaining issues and can release the update for all, myself included, who are waiting. I can quite understand the challenges you are under in as much that it must be almost impossible to create an update when the goal posts move week by week, as well as battling against limitations set by XP itself. I wish you well, and I am still with you.

I salute you for a constructive conversation. I do tend to talk to not only the one who is writing these comments but a "broader audience". A bad habit I guess from "defending" our choices and explaining for the 100's time why we have chosen the paths we roll down. Personally I will be using MSFS as well. But I will be using the sims very differently and development of xE will continue as planned.

I'm caustiously optimistic that we have solved our main problem atm and that we are approaching a better overview towards beta assembly and that the assembly won't deliver additional surprizes. So no real update yet.

[1.14 development]

I hope to have a thorough update soon. Just had some time off and we're very soon back at it as usual. We have had some breakthrough on the tearing issues but I'm hesitant to say that we're through that hurdle. Once that is done with we'll be speeding towards beta assembly though.

In the meantime - some screenshots from the layest test flight. Winningen to Innsbruck in the fantastic SR22 by Torquesim!

[1.14 development]

4 hours ago, Yorkshire said:

I think one of the dangers is that some/many might start losing interest! From this thread it seems 1.14 was started on Oct 30th 2019. To quote Cpt Kitten in the first thread post 'If we were to get everything to where we want it to be before we release we would not be releasing for another 6 months at the earliest' It is almost 8 months now - and we have had to be content with a succession of images that 'may not reflect the final product'. And looking at what was not promised, the same post said:-

'So this update will NOT include:

VR
multi monitor
Night environment
or any other elements on the roadmap
free beer (sorry)'

And most importantly, somewhere in the thread it was said that this update would not cover Vulkan, that would wait until update 1.15 or 1.16.

Looking at the bigger picture, FS2020 is 3 weeks away. It has volumetric clouds that look the deal. P3Dv5 has been released and it's TrueSky incorporation has been done well and gives volumetric clouds and very acceptable visuals. And possibly/probably XP12 will be announced this Autumn, and they know what they have to do - and weather/clouds will be on their agenda. Vulkan is at beta16 and a release candidate will not now be too far off. When it goes non beta, I expect the majority of the XP community will then upgrade (I fly 95% of the time in the beta releases with few or no issues). So when 1.14 is released, who is it being released to? Personally, I don't want to go back to 11.41 and inferior frame rates & stutters that Vulkan addresses. We will then apparently have to wait for another few weeks/months for a workable upgrade to Vulkan? And the flight community may have moved on or be waiting for an XP12 release before Christmas - that is speculation!

I say all this not as criticism or to be negative, I think XEnviro is a terrific addon, but, given the bigger picture I have to ask - is it in danger of missing the boat?

What boat? Clearly X-Plane is dead and you will be moving on and not look back at any of this. Next updates are free so what would we miss? What are you missing when we update?? If you want my thoughts on MSFS and the impact it will have listen to the "Inflight 23: Let's Talk FS2020" podcast. You're NOT looking at the bigger picture. In fact you're narrowing it down considerably. You'll know why I say that when you have listened to the podcast.

Take my answer as straight forward and no "feelings" attached if it feels blunt. People tend to get hurt and call me a wounded ego when I answer straight up. But the constant MSFS doom announcements are getting tiresome as hell. I'm fed up with constantly defending the fact that we don't just do "x" or "y". When none of the suggested paths make any sense. IF we even get suggestions of a path forward. And not just some criticism of being late. Which is valid. We are late. This update plainly takes time we didn't think it would, since it has halted on problems we didn't know existed.

MSFS is coming regardless of what we do. So if we were to take that in to any calculation for what this update is about, we would be complete idiots. In fact, if we were cynical about it we should now wait until after the release of MSFS and let the hype die down before we even consider releasing. That we won't! It's like everyone believes that MSFS is the end of all other flightsim platforms. I'm under NDA from Microsoft so I can't talk much about it but there will be a usage for all other sims for a time to come. Visuals is not everything. Just like visuals isn't everything that we try to vcreate in xEnviro either. People tend to forget that we make this for proffessionals. The end goal is a tool that we want to be able to use in the long run. This is not a quick buck for us! If it were we would have charged for every update.

I have kept everyone in the loop on what challenges we have faced so you all know exactly why it is taking this long. The 1.14 update items is not something that we can ignore or just push aside. All development further depends on it. Vulkan included. You can use 11.50 in Open GL mode. If you don't want to do that and stay with Vulkan then that is fine. To be honest I can't care about who "can wait" and who "can't". Development is in a set path regardless of how you or any one else might "feel about it". It's like yelling to someone to finish their homework while they're clearly neck deep doing it.

If we were to change course now - what would look like?? Revert to 1.13 and go with that to Vulkan? Then what? Start over with what we have to do anyway to even be able to develop further? (Which we are doing btw)

And what about XP12? Is that something we're supposed to fear as well?? When LR starts to look at weather they will be forced to deal with the same obsticles they don't want to fix for us. So we'll be there. 10 steps ahead of them at every turn they take. And we'll welcome them to the fantastic wonders of noise rendered Volumetrics.

So, what am I to do? I know exactly what to do. Press on , finish 1.14 and update you all here on the progress and challenges we likely will face in the next updates as well.

[1.14 development]

14 hours ago, jfwharton said:

Sorry, my bad.  I thought I had read something in this thread that a release wasn't expected before the end of the year.  Going back through all of the postings I could not find that statement so I was wrong with what I posted above.  Sorry.

All good.

[1.14 development]

15 hours ago, jfwharton said:

They mentioned before that it probably won't be out before the end of the year.  In the mean time I"ll keep using 1.13 and at times switch over to another weather engine.
 

Completely made up. I haven't said anything of the sort. I don't give ETA's and that is still the answer.