X-Plane 12 made News - Streaming Scenery

[VirtualAviator]

Although Austin Meyers, lead developer of X-Plane, down-played this bit of news by saying it's a low priority, it's big news in my opinion. He said Laminar Research is looking into streaming scenery. He did not provide any details so we don't know what this may looks like but this is a reversal of earlier comments by Meyers. The comment was made in and adhoc video published a few weeks ago.  I don't expect to see this feature anytime soon.

[daemotron]

Philipp Ringler also hinted that there would be a significant change (with regards to scenery) coming later down XP12's release cycle. It was back at the Aero exhibition, in April 2022. Here's the video (in German, so I'll provide a transcript below) - check out from 8:35 onwards:

Julius: And now for the last question, which of course I have to ask: How do you deal with the competition, i.e. Microsoft Flight Simulator (if you can call it competition), which has pretty strong visuals and offers scenery streaming? Are there any plans to go down that road as well at Laminar?

Philipp: We're going to do something about the scenery system, however not for X-Plane 12. We already broke compatibility with weather addons, the whole weather system is completely new, and no stone was left unturned. If we would now go and tell people that all their weather (addons) don't work anymore, and they also had to bin all their scenery and airport addons on top of that - well, we just can't do that. So, something will definitely happen in the area of scenery, but not for X-Plane 12.0 (he emphasized "point zero" - translator's note). In due course of the time X-Plane 12 is the current release (keep in mind what we added in X-Plane 11 in due course of its release cycle), so in due course of X-Plane 12's release cycle something is going to happen with the scenery system. Just don't expect to install 12.0 (he emphasized "point zero" again - translator's note) right after release and have ortho scenery out of the box. That's not gonna happen.

 

Edited December 16, 2022 by daemotron

[VirtualAviator]

Thanks for the translation.

Phillip's response sounds ambiguous. I'm not sure if he is saying not for X-Plane on the version 12 platform or, perhaps down the road like in version 12.6. My guess is that he means in differ versioning number (i.e. XP12S (where S denotes streaming) or XP13. Either way, it's something to look forward to.

Although it has no value, I enjoy glancing into what might be coming.

Edited December 17, 2022 by VirtualGAaviator

[daemotron]

Personally (but that's not more than crystal ball gazing) I would interpret it in a way that some changes are going to come already in X-Plane 12 (just not in 12.0, but in 12.x). What these changes are and if they actually prepare for streamed scenery, I have no idea. Maybe Laminar will just focus on providing an API, and leave the actual scenery streaming to third parties (in my book, Orbx would be suspect no. #1 for this). Maybe they come up with something of their own. We will know once Austin decides he can tell the public.

[VirtualAviator]

3 hours ago, daemotron said:

We will know once Austin decides he can tell the public.

Yeap.