Captain Kitten

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

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.

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

!!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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

All good.

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

@Freddy De Pues sadly decided to withdraw all of his content from our forum. I do not have the answer to why he chose to do so.

It's really not. It is based on the conditions and has been tweaked for realism based on what real pilots see. We speak to many pilots in addition to Andrey being a 737 pilot. It will be looked at but we will not change the fact that it is dynamic and that you will find yourself in hazy conditions.

Wow - this makes so little sense my brain hurts... How do you know that the performance is bad for you when you don't own it? And if you don't want to see screeshots, just don't visit... You'll know when it's relleased regardless. And your beta comment? We have a signup topic for the beta team. Even if it's not a public beta we still need testers. These kind of comments and non logical approaches is part of why we don't do public betas in the first place.... You're basically frustrated that development takses time. I get it. But we have to relate to reality and that includes the fact that development plainly takes time. Just the way it is.

You're wrong and not wrong. Grain will always be there. But we have come far in reducing its presence. We don't do public betas. And it will be released when it is finished. When that is remains to be public on the day it releases Not ready for video clips yet. We still struggle are working hard with tearing. Some progress is done though so when it's ready I will be making some videos. This might have been a coincidence. But when you add a large variety of functions in to a program that displays something as complex as weather you will at some point get the experience that the program creates fenomena on its own. You'd just have to tweak it or make small additions to make it more real. Anyways, thanx for reading it all - next update I will probably keep all the updates separate with no comments from others - just to keep it tidy. bonus (t89):

Please read what I write.

Cjangelog is continously updated

Wait, what? Still ignoring artifacts? Good.

Details you say? Let's hope we can stay with this level. Ignore artifacts..

Yes, they do look alright... but I can assure you it's not finished yet. We're still in the trenches, fighting X-Plane walls and xEnviro's hunger for frames. We have some issues we need to get sorted before we move on. Some are severely rooted in X-Plane (no Vulkan won't help). One of the issues is something you currently see in released versions: 1: Cloud outlines, borters around clouds against terrain, water or other backdrops. When we now have almost gotten rid of grain (hope you have noticed ) The outlines becomes even more severe. We are working hard on getting this sorted but it's not an easy one with the limited tools. 2: Another one is tearing. Like a "chopping up" of all the clouds under movement. This one is a dealbreaker and has to be fixed or refined severely. How much we are able to fix this remains to be seen. VR is out of the quastion in this state - it's out of the question regardless on this performance level too but once we have transitioned to Vulkan we might have enough to both fix this and VR. 3: Performance is in focus as it has been all along. Since we had to do the deep dive and break everything apart before we got back to this stage, we have to reassess where we are performance wise. So, more on that later. 4: Several small bumps. We're chugguing through the issues. Sometimes it's like trying to flatten a water balloon. You hold down one end and it cones out on another fix that and something emerges on a third end.