Rain effects

[jkeye]

Can anyone please confirm whether the plane has windscreen rain effects that work in VR in Vulkan?

Thanks

Jay

[SneakyDanish]

Hi, librain didn't make it into release version, but will be added soon.

[jkeye]

5 minutes ago, SneakyDanish said:

Hi, librain didn't make it into release version, but will be added soon.

Ok thanks for the clarification. Will these be integrated for vulkan(as with the TBM) or only OpenGL compatible?

Edited January 9, 2022 by jkeye

[Rodeo]

Same developer as the TBM, so same functionality thankfully

[Rodeo]

The reason several other aircraft don't support Vulkan via librain is their developer's unwillingness to build librain from source (due to the notion -- perceived or otherwise -- that they'll be more accountable for support requests against their build of librain if they do so).

[EnQ]

On 1/9/2022 at 5:08 AM, Rodeo said:

The reason several other aircraft don't support Vulkan via librain is their developer's unwillingness to build librain from source (due to the notion -- perceived or otherwise -- that they'll be more accountable for support requests against their build of librain if they do so).

Is that confirmed? There were a few people on Github who managed to compile librain but that alone didn't seem to be enough. The last time I wanted to take a look if I can support in some way I actually managed to finally get it compiled (for some time libacfutils was a bit difficult to get working, that was already my third attempt). While everything was compiling (libacfutils takes a long time to prepare) I dug deeper into the source code and figured that it probably cannot be enough to just recompile everything as the shaders looked incompatible with Vulkan and looked non-trivial to port (which meant I would have to read deeper into 3D programming first). Just one week after that small success, X-Plane 12 had its reveal presentation and showcased weather effects and (if I remember correctly) giving credit to Saso for librain. I'm not sure if that means Saso also actively supported integrating the effects natively to XP12. At least it would have perfectly explained the silence on librain. The improved and native weather effects of XP12 are just around the corner, so I also immediately stopped pursuing any plans for maybe looking into it any further after that announcement (not worth the effort any more; it seemed I'd have to read so much about shader programming that XP12 is public when I might have finally achieved something).

For the same reason I wouldn't expect any addon developer (including projects Saso is working on himself) to continue on librain. It's basically the same as for the weather radar (with what Laminar showed so far, my guess is that XP12 might drastically change weather-related APIs). Expecting that most users will switch to XP12 as soon as it is available, any effort put into what already is predictable to become just legacy support for XP11 now is basically a waste of time.

Edited January 12, 2022 by EnQ

[Rodeo]

I must admit never trying it myself, sorry. It also depends on whether the aircraft was built to use librain via datarefs vs. linking to the library directly and using its API (in the latter case, you might also need to be able to rebuild -- or at least relink -- whichever plugin is calling librain; which in the case of payware aircraft isn't possible). Which aircraft were you trying to update librain for specifically?

[EnQ]

I remember having completed building libacfutils and librain in a Docker container but I don't recall if I actually also put an .xpl file into an addon's plugin folder (it probably would have been the Zibo as it looks like librain can easily be swapped out). Arriving at that point already took at least a full afternoon (for the third time...) and while it was compiling I read deeper into the source code and found that the C code probably looks good already.

There were at least 2 reports on Github and/or .org forums by other people who were faster and actually tested librain after the latest commits changing anything regarding Vulkan. According to those comments the plugin would successfully load into X-Plane but the effects were not displayed correctly. While the container was still building I looked into the shaders, got surprised about the complexity (as I said I have almost no clue about shaders) and stumbled across several websites trying to explain generic compatibility issues between shaders originally written for OpenGL and Vulkan. Unfortunately I could not find anything like a migration guide and everything just got more confusing the more I read. By the time the code finally finished compilation I just called it a day, the weekend was over and the next week XP12 got announced, so I simply abandoned the idea.

As some private beta (developer beta?) appears to have started for XP12 in December (there's a protected release notes page in the knowledgebase) I doubt that it's worth spending any more effort on librain. I wasn't able to use librain for more than a year now so I can as well just wait for XP12.

Edited January 16, 2022 by EnQ