Litjan

Please don´t be surprised if I don´t react to further posts from you - I simply can´t read them 😂.

You are likely right, and the developers at Laminar are likely wrong, they disabled ReShade in error, I guess. They don´t know the next thing about coding and X-Plane, should have asked you for advice, I guess.

As stated multiple times before - ReShade introduces bugs/crashes for many users (not all), but the logic "if it does not work for you, do not use it" - while sounding logical and pragmatic - blows right past the large majority of users who then either turn to Laminar Research for "support" or proclaim on the social media/forum venue of their choice what a "buggy mess" X-Plane is and how they "can´t even finish a flight" before it crashes on them. I would love to live in a world where people are knowledgeable, smart and sensible. This one isn´t the one. This is the one where a product needs to be "foolproof" to field it. Guess why.

What was your airspeed? If you fly faster than maybe 200kts TAS, usually raindrops do not "stick and run" on windshields, they pretty much blow apart when they hit and run off too fast to really see. Given the Zibo´s quality, it is possible that they tweaked the parameters of the windows in the "rain inspector" (you can do that, too, by going to the developer menu) and set certain parameters that affect how rain behaves when it hits the windows.

The "I am not upgrading" or "I am going back to..." guys are living on borrowed time - there is one way, and that is forward. Incompatible plugins and add-ons must be made compatible or removed - most already have an update if they need one. The future of X-Plane going multicore for better performance depends on this, so there is not arguing, the rules have been valid for almost a decade, plugins devs have infringed on it at their own risk (and the customers/users damage). In the worst case scenario of a dev not supporting his illegally coded plugin, it will have to be removed. You can "try" to stay on 12.4.0 - but you will not be able to enjoy future improvements and endure the constant update nag - it is up to you to decide if this is worth it or not.

According to my preliminary testing of 12.5 most conventional aircraft will continue to fly just the way they do now, and even most helicopter´s changes are minute. This is not one of the "old" flightmodel update patches that required all planes to be re-tweaked. The current flightmodel is already very good, the changes are about handling certain edge cases better.

I guess someone dipping his toe into the X-Plane water is always a good thing, but I have to think of the millions of potential customers watching the show and then stuff like "Oh, and this camera system I simply don´t get..." or "I haven´t figured out replay...." make it sound like X-Plane is lacking or being overly complex in those areas. Which is ludicrous, because on of THE strong areas (over the competition) is the camera and replay system. I also guess it´s fine if these statements come with moderating caveats ("I have not looked into how to set this up, I heard it works great when one does..."), but if I "showcase" a software to potential other users, it makes me (as someone preferring/knowing/working on it) cringe when I hear things that do not correctly present it, especially in areas where it shines. Then again, for many of these "My channel is totally geared for MSFS users, but hey, lets pretend to have an open mind and try X-Plane - so we can find out that MSFS is so much better, so please click like and subscribe if you enjoy me pointing out how it really isn´t any better in any area" videos I am not in the target audience.

I guess there is always value in "trying" something new (my wife may disagree, though).

I haven´t watched this one - but some of these "I have tried X-Plane, this is how it is!" videos make me cringe. Where have the times gone when someone did not feel ready to lecture viewers until he mastered the subject?

They have an internal bet running how many times they can get you to post the same complaint, someone has a lot of beer running on "at least 500 times" and that guy is holding back the fix for the shimmering scenery.

Ultimately both technologies (creating "fake" frames and making the picture more "realistic") have their pro´s and cons. I could simply show the same frame again, call it "doubling" my framerate and that would be bad. But if I make an educated (and most often correct) "guess" as to what the next frame will look like, then yes, this is a real boost to framerate and visual quality. Same for making the picture/lighting more realistic. If the AI is good enough to take the base picture and enhance it in a believable way (this is nothing else than the current "hacks" that are getting used to not to have to do real ray-tracing, like SSR, bump mapping, etc.), then yes, it would be a boon. The limitation to both techniques comes into play when the AI is asked to create content out of "thin air", to guess something that is not present in the base data. Its like showing a house in a satellite picture, saying "this here is a house, please make a model out of this, so I can see it from the side as well, not only from the top". But there is zero information in the sat picture about the color of the walls, the windows, the door. So the AI will have to come up with something. Is that "something" better than nothing at all? Yes. But would it not be better to have real data about the walls and windows? Yes, it would. So the danger here is that game developers (and Nvidia) take the easy path. Let AI take care of the content creation and "guessing" what the next frame will look like - instead of requiring real data and actual calculations...which can lead to slop, randomized content, made to look "plausible". Which is - ironically - exactly the same thing that X-Plane´s default "plausible" scenery does right now. The data says "there is a village here" and X-Plane´s algorithm places random houses. They are not the correct houses as per reality (and someone familiar with the village will see that right away), but to someone not familiar with the real village, it will look ok. Same principle as DLSS5.

I am honestly curious why you keep using a platform that you despise so much? Night lighting, graphics, multi-monitor support, all I hear from you is how bad it is? There are many options out there these days and the big guy in the room is known to have way superior graphics (not debated by many, including me) - so would this not be the obvious choice for you? It would certainly make reading these forums more pleasant 😆

I am not sure if this limitation applies to DLSS5 as it was introduced now - this is not about injecting (predicting) frames, which requires motion vectors to "predict" where the pixel will be in the next frame, this is taking a picture, telling AI "spruce it up!!" and then showing the spruced up one instead of the original...as far as I understand. Kinda like a shader you run on your iPhone when making thumbnails for your only-fans account 😇. "Remove wrinkles and hair! Add more hair here! Make this here a lot bigger, this here a lot smaller..."

Thanks for the eye exam!

This illustrates how different people perceive these things - I can not see a difference between those two shots at all 😄. But yeah, XP11 was not as realistic in appearance as XP12 is now, so I can see the desire to alter it´s appearance being stronger when using that. I can also still understand that people want to change the looks of X-Plane to better match their preferences, but this must be done in a way that does not compromise stability. Ideally Laminar would allow this natively in a safe way, but one of the design mantras in recent years was to remove options wherever possible (something I don´t agree with), following a "the less stuff to fiddle with, the less layman users can get themselves into trouble and then come crying).

KPHX right now, vis 50.499sm. Sorry, can´t post a screenshot due to the ancient forum technology used stubbornly here.

It is probably a scale thing. How many people own a desktop computer capable of running X-Plane in a satisfying way? How many people own a smartphone capable of running X-Plane mobile in a satisfying way? How much money do you have to spend to buy either? Just for Android it says "10+ Million downloads", for Apple it says "Over 1 million downloads". This is likely accumulated for "since X-Plane mobile came out", so the current user base is unlikely 11 million users. How you define "wildly popular" is likely varying from person to person. According to unverified internet data, roughly 5 billion people use smartphones these days, so 10 million downloads means that 1 person out of 500 has downloaded it (0.2%). I don´t know if "downloaded" equals "bought", but I doubt it. So an adoption rate after the initial test of maybe 1% would further wittle the "wildly popular" statement down into the "barely anyone uses it" region, let alone "how many use it regularly today". Then again, if you make 5$ from every sale, even 10 million meager sales can be nice 😄.

I assure you that this is not an accurate statement 😄. It is like saying: "If this guy didn´t love his job, he would quit!"

...and it is super sweet of you to let poor XMAN know how he can circumvent the protection that Laminar instated to protect users like him from himself... because that might eventually lead to them taking the --allow_reshade away for everyone. So be carefuly with giving a scalpel to a kindergarten kid who has trouble cutting out the cardboard dinosaur with the plastic scissors that are safe to use, figuratively speaking. He will cut off his fingers and then someone will make scalpels illegal. It has happened to SAM already, so don´t say this will never happen 😅.

I am not sure if many people on here can answer that, as most are likely dedicated simulator users that would rather chop of their pinky finger than use an XBox controller or use X-Plane mobile, let alone both together 🤣.

In my opinion, there is one further aspect to using reshade: It is an acquired taste. If the effect that you get with reshade was so much more realistic or better, Laminar would have adjusted their art-controls to be like that a long time ago. The majority of users do not want the reshade look and are fine with the way X-Plane looks (except for maybe the haze thing). The reshade crowd falls into two groups, one is the "tinkerer" that can never be happy with anything "default". The other is the "postcard world guy", who wants his X-Plane to look "nicer than the real world, more vibrant, shining,...". In my opinion this is like using (too much) sugar. Yes, everything is sweeter with it, but its bad for you and if you are not used to it, you won´t miss it. I mean sure, whatever floats your boat, but once people start having problems with X-Plane that frustrates them (see this thread) or become a burden to Laminar´s support...it evolves into more than "everyone can use what he wants, right?".

Then you will have to totally wipe X-Plane and reinstall it. If it is still "dark" after that, you either have to adjust your monitor...or you don´t like the realistic way that X-Plane portrays in-cockpit brightness (maybe you played "another" flight simulator a lot recently and are used to it´s lighting?) and it is just the way it is.

That is both a quick fix and a short-lived fix, especially if the plugins causing his problems do not get fixed and updated, which he may be the only one being able to report that. It´s akin to taking a back road, noticing that it was washed away by a flash flood, and then just taking another road without telling anyone. Laminar is tightening the reins on the way plugins are coded, that is necessary to make future (and the current) performance improvements possible. The rules that they are JUST NOW enforcing have been valid and in place for years, but the code was lenient to let them pass and devs had - wittingly or unwittingly - taken advantage of that. It is akin to fueling your car with bad fuel, you get away with it in an old stinker, but not on a modern, highly efficient F1 engine. Laminar is maintaining a Developer Slack, all devs, payware, freeware, shareway can join there and these changes have been announced well in advance, together with "early testing versions" to make sure your content will work in upcoming betas (not even to mention final versions). If someone cares about his addon, that is the path to take. Alternatively, now is the time to get notified and bring the coding of your add-on/plugin up to current day standards. It can not be ruled out that some old stuff - where the dev has moved on or lost interest - will fall by the wayside. This is the price of progress. The log.txt may tell you which of your plugins is the culprit, if it does not, you will need to employ the process of elimination. You can try to speed it up with going "this half - that half", remove 50% of your plugins, check for crashes, if still happening remove the other 50%. That way you can narrow down, keep doing that to track down which one does it, then contact the dev (you CAN file a bug report to LR, but going to the dev or the plugin is faster and more reliable - LR may not take it upon themselves to seek out devs, unless the plugin is widely used and considered very important to X-Plane´s ecosystem).

Reshade is a an add-on that is known to be highly invasive and causes instability, crashes, malfunctions. These are so severe that Laminar decided to ban it from running. You have to actively add a command-line switch to allow X-Plane to start with it on, all complaints and bug reports, no matter how unrelated they may seem, are then voided and nulled, coming from your installation. The problem remaining with this arrangement is that users tend to either forget or actively deny that they "enabled reshade" and will still endlessly complain on forums like this about this or that perceived bug or problem with X-Plane.

Yeah, this video is two years old - but thanks for these "breaking news"!