DeltaWho

You know... I had this whole bit written out to explain things (laced in with some minor Elmer Fudd ranting, and thoughtful prose). But then I stopped when I realised that most of you nailed the critical thinking... and do understand what decisions are taken in context to the wider simulator. We are not going to please everybody, but we are looking to serve everyone. As for graphics... no one is exposed more to the sim than the folks at LR HQ. We want the sim to continue to improve 🙂

- Yes, I mentioned NAIP and others above. But in the context of autoortho and mapenhancement which are using commercial sources, this is irrelevant - There's quite a lot of that functionality available as datarefs already. If one were willing, they could find the full tonemapper controls. X-Plane is already rather exceptional in how much it lets you tinker

Those pesky folks at Laminar are ruining everyone's fun 😈 It's pretty simple, if you ain't paying for ortho, it ain't yours. There are a few legal exceptions to the rule, and they usually revolve around government-sponsored schemes and your mileage will vary (NAIP, Copernicus, New Zealand... Netherlands...Spanish Imagery services... etc) Flight simmers have always had a dubious history with recognising what is actually legal or morally correct (See the recent debacle with FSLTL scraping Flightradar24 data*). The streaming APIs for ortho are very expensive, and buying ortho/photogrammetry outright is also expensive. Can't control what people do, but you'll have to do any of that without our help or affiliation. That's not really something up for debate from our side. *

Technically, you do (just not in the form you want yet) 😂 https://www.x-plane.com/kb/x-plane-12-3-2-release-notes/

Some already have it. There shalt be no excuses 🙂

As in "Binning off the gateway would be suicide"

That would be suicide

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/gis/data/raster-vector The only problem with this explanation is that it's sort of the reverse when it comes to simulators or games. GPUs like raster data. Its nice a simple data. 🙂

I'm not allowed to talk about the output, but we're moving away from the 20-year old DSF system. Which in short, is more performance-intensive and less flexible than what modern mapping standards offer today. We're going from a system that used to be dominantly pre-computed and prefers vector data.... to one that prefers raster data and can be a bit more dynamic at runtime.

What?!?!?! 😂 In case you are out of the loop, the entire scenery system is being overhauled. No-one is hoarding anything, simply there is an iceberg of things to work through.

Valid concern. But unlikely since - Elements are more "LOD'D" than before - X-Plane already does Frustrum culling to some extent, so you're already on the worst case scenario* - Smaller chunks means smarter thread/core dispatching. *I'm using an asterix here. I believe Sidney once told me there is an instance where you can get worse than that. And that's if a quad/tris extends massively outside your view frustrum.

The tldr is, Laminar is usually smarter than people give them credit for 😄 We are fans of our simulator. And while its cool that people come up for workarounds for engine deficiences (trust me the list is long. Memba FlightFactor PBR? Memba Librain? Memba X-Enviro? Memba Skymaxx? Memba SAM? Memba JarDesign Sound3D? Memba SASL?), they are not always the best solution for us. We've probably argued rings internally about a feature before you've even asked 🙂

Lets look at it like this (however with past attempts to explain windshield rain logic, I'm not sure how well this will go) This also touches upon a bit of next-gen scenery. Currently, the tile system in X-Plane looks like this... You're flying along and the sim will also load the 3 available tiles ahead or behind you. A system dating back 20 years, because there was no real alternative to modern mapping and visualisations like we see today. Each tile is roughly 25-30nm x and y. So their properties are huge ---------------------------------- This means that only the tile directly below really needs to be fully detailed (In terms of level of detail, not that it should or should not exist). The immediate problem here can be represented by your "field of vision", seen as this white cone from the aircraft. You eyes can only see whats in that cone, but in reality, X-Plane has to load everything not in that cone. That's alot of "stuff" man. ---------------------------------- And now, you wanna add even more lights way out in the distance... oh man. And with the current system, I have all that baggage behind me too? ---------------------------------- So I think most of you can see the problem here. 1. Current scenery is not tile scalable 2. Loading a tile means loading all the baggage that comes with it. 3. Any quick FOV movements means loading large amounts of data with it. 4. Alot of that work has to be done on the CPU ---------------------------------- So a big part of the solution here, is to just make everything smaller. We don't need these huge tiles. If we make the tiles digestible, we can feed them to the CPU/GPU much easily and make better use of threading. Furthermore, we can have a more LOD'able architecture. In this version, only the tiles that intersect with our FOV will get rendered. That's significantly less surface area than before, and we can use those resources to scale out further towards the horizon. Perfect! ---------------------------------- This is exactly what modern mapping software use today. Dividing things up into digestible chunks so it can be streamed and loaded locally on your PC. Even MSFS does this if you know where to look. It is a universal format. ---------------------------------- We are aware of night-lighting extension addons, which seem to place physical light.objs. I'm not going to pretend I understand how they work, however I'm going to assume... 1) Their origins are not usually within the tile itself 2) They have to overlap, which means overdraw There are other ways around it. The best is if you can just bake the LIT texture into your autogen or ortho. And some users have done that. We also ship FAR LIT textures with our current scenery.

ding ding ding

eeeeeeeeeeeh I wouldn't say that is specifically a limitation for them. Our clouds are seeded. You know how you can create a minecraft world using the same seed, and get the exact same world generation...

Same as yesterday, not in the sim yet. 🙂 When there is significant news, the roadmap will be updated

I have not seen any bug reports for live weather, only historical weather (which I believe you already have a ticket for?) if not, XPD-17312 Lightning is already explained as a limitation that can't be solved in the near term. Our networking person is not fired, but he also works on tasks beyond just synchronisation. So for the time being, there is nothing immediate.

So far, it's only extended to making memes about each other.

I had this chat with Mike Discord-side already. Get rid is maybe... a bit strong of a word. We don't have any plans to kill off reshade. But it does interfere with our rendering, hence all the Looney Tunes signposts that say "Big Hole here!" and "Are you sure you want to hit yourself with the hammer?" I do actually think there should be default "abilities" to tinker with this one day. I had this argument with LR the other day that "tinkerers are gonna rummage through our stuff if we don't give it to them." So post-processing settings is not a far-fetched idea. But our priorities are solely next-gen scenery. So for now... that's a no!

Maya (our in house cloud-spotter) loves flightgear

I'm going to be a pagan, I like MSFS. The teams in that camp work very hard and they should be commended. So should AeroFly and Infinite Flight (They really don't get the flowers they deserve) (ofc this would be more interesting if the investment budgets and tech were on equal footing, but ho-hum) It's nice to see alternate ideas for flightsim. And a substantial evolution from the FS2000 days, I started from.

Both!

The obvious "not now" inbound 🙂 https://www.x-plane.com/2025/12/x-plane-roadmap-update-december-2025/?_thumbnail_id=451804

pssssh, the goalposts keep moving 🙂 But yes, we have told scenery devs about the feature. And I'm sure there'll be more oppourtunities down the line.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2025/07/12-2-1-revenge-of-the-hangars/