737 and the future

[Tom Knudsen]

Ok, so we all are waiting for this excellent aircraft to be released, we are also enjoying X-Plane 10 now more than ever. Things are moving along and new airports, scenery, features are coming along on a daily basis. We had X-Plane 9 for more or less 2 years and we are flying X-Plane10 going on 5 years now with version 10.50 in the making. Which leads me into my question, how are you guys calculating the future in regards to development?

Take it everybody have wonderd about the next version of X-Plane, what type of features it will hold, what compabilites it will have to past versions and how easy it will be to port over new        developments like the IXEG. Since IXEG has been scheduled for release for what seems to be an enterity i am scared it may not make the X-Plane 10 big release. Scared because I don't know when or if LM is releasing a next version, also scared because it seems that the updates are now incremantal increasing by the factor of 10 which makes the next version a half way point.

Is this something you guys have calculated in regards to any release predictions and or have you planned the aircraft to meet i.e. a Vulcan API if ever implemented in XP10 or 11?

[Cameron]

You're way too far ahead of yourself Tom.

Put it this way: We know more about X-Plane and version 10/11 than the public does by a factor of many.

There are no concerns.

[Phantom88]

Don't be Scared........It's only a Simulation.

[poodster]

If x plane 10.50 is a half the half way point, and it has been 5 years since the beginning of x plane 10, then x plane 11 is at least another 5 more years. Which is plenty of time haha. 

Edited March 26, 2016 by poodster

[Ben Russell]

From my discussions with Ben Supnik;

- X-Plane may use Vulkan some day.

- IF it ever does, it will setup an managed OpenGL environment so that plugins will continue to work as they always have.

- Various flavours of OpenGL and probably Vulkan are available now to plugins if you can be bothered to do all the system calls to "spin one up".

We get a default OpenGL context to play in that supports almost everything you'd ever want to do with X-Plane so I'm really not sure if anyone bothers with a custom context.

 

Vulkan isn't some magic bullet, if anything it represents a massive hurdle in the way of small development teams to adapt to.

It basically throws out all the convenience of a driver for the sake of ultimate speed, if you want it and need it.

Epic needs it. They build Unreal Engine which is mind blowing in capability. Truly cutting edge.

 

How many small teams do you really want doing all the micro management of the GPU state?

Seriously; if nVidia and AMD have so much trouble publishing high performance bug free drivers for known systems like OpenGL that have been around for twenty-four-years how many average developers do you think have any hope of coming anywhere near those kind of performance figures?

 

I see Vulkan as a massive step forward for things like VR where latency is nauseating.

For us, working with X-Plane, we're far better using tools off the shelf with known limits, APIs, demos and documentation.

No ones even come close to the possibilities of OpenGL yet.

 

Just the idea of "Vulkanizing" something represents such a massive amount of GPU micro-management that I haven't even looked at the specs or docs.

It will be some years before there's any need. I'm still trying to teach artists about VBO's and Shaders.

 

Big teams, on big name games, all work in the same space. They can sit down in pairs, shoulder to shoulder and polish things out like you wouldn't believe.

Our teams? We're peppered all over the planet, working as lone individuals most of the time.

 

There are various effects in our products, shipping and otherwise, that utilise various mixtures of primitive OpenGL and OBJ8 hackery to work through the limits of X-Plane, the SDK, alpha bugs, FPS limits, customer hardware, etc.

We have plenty of work cut out for us moving them into "modern GL".

 

@Tom; you've seen some very small snippets of the stuff I've been working with, rain shaders and so forth.

I think you'll be amused with some of the things we unveil in future. There's a lot we don't show.

 

I think the IXEG 737 will be a transformative product for X-Planes future, in more ways than one.

[Tom Knudsen]

Quote

@Tom; you've seen some very small snippets of the stuff I've been working with, rain shaders and so forth.

I think you'll be amused with some of the things we unveil in future. There's a lot we don't show.

 

I think the IXEG 737 will be a transformative product for X-Planes future, in more ways than one.

Thank you Ben for that insight.

That pretty much answerd all my questions. I too have had some discussions about Vulcan with Ben, hense this post http://developer.x-plane.com/2016/03/what-vulkan-means-to-developers/ - Also did some tessellation discussion too.. To sum up, we have much to look forward to regardsless of what features next version will prove to provide. But actually I do look more forward to IXEG than anything else

 

Keep up the good work guys..