Leaderboard

Hey guys linked is a full resolution image of UM 3D, with the new HD mesh from Alpilotx we finally have the ability to place textures in the urban environment with population density..... Now that I have some time off work, no worries Ill be enjoying turkey, I thought it a good time to play around.......Very early look but the concept is sound... http://i.imgur.com/SUvYJfD.jpg

The F16 series: Took her up to 40 000 around Zurich I think Click to enlarge!

727-100, experimenting with the God Rays

Little bit of GA love.. the beautiful Carenado C90B skimming the clouds over beautiful Lausanne, Switzerland! The depth the clouds add for VFR flying is great, better feeling of altitude.

Hey guys, before I post any pictures Ill post my comp specs and my SMP settings. My hope with this thread is to show you how amazing SMP can look and to help tweak your settings so its run well on your comp. My current setup is an i5 4670, MSI GTX 760 4gb, 8gb ram and I use a 1080p 144hz monitor. Xplane 10.25 64 bit on Windows 7. For Xplane settings I use Very High textures, HDR with 4x (2x when SMP gets heavy), draw distance Very High. I use OSM which uses a bunch of FPS.. but no HD mesh or orthophotos. This is my standard setup which gives me solid FPS in most situations. Since SMP is new I am still tweaking all the time. For SMP settings the only things I recommend are Cirrus reso med/high, and Overcast on med. God Rays usually off. Tweak the rest to your visual liking. Also experiment with the different cirrus textures.. I found using Real Weather settings is really brutal if there is a lot of overcast. Ive been using Random weather and then tweaking like adding a nice cirrus layer. Turning off HDR is the only thing that makes this gross overcast look slight better, but I still get massive FPS drops. I just avoid flying in this type of weather. If you want to do IFR and fly with no vis, might as well just disable SMP for that flight. This was my first flight with SMP and what got me so excited about it. Many more pictures to come I promise

We have identified the issue and will be reporting how to work around this for users until there is a patch out. It will be a simple work around in the meantime.

This shot is from yesterday afternoon, actually, but I just got done flying the BK17 so I'm technically OK as I did fly it today, too.

That solves the sharp sky-horizon transition problem! I did not know that volumetric fog could effect that transition. As a long-time private pilot I very much appreciate what SMP does for my X-Plane flying. Weather (and clouds) is such an important part of general aviation. Thank you for the assist John. I am a big SkyMaxx fan. Here's my morning flight around Tucson.

Nice to Lugano in the ATR

Seriously though you have a great eye for screenshots!.......

Presenting x-httpd, a simple web server plugin for x-plane. x-httpd is open source, written in C and C++. The code is from 2005 so it needs a fair bit of work but it is functional. I have placed the project under the GNU Affero GPL license version 3. (Affero stops people from running a server with custom mods and not sharing the custom server source. This plugin is a server resource, it needs the Affero license variant.) What's x-httpd good for? x-httpd can be used to create web-apps that interact with X-Plane for use on your tablet smart phone or additional monitor. x-httpd does not come with any "cool" web app content at this time. Eventually this plugin should allow for remote IOS content, remote CDU, remote popups, etc, etc. The CRJ already has a built in web server for its Remote CDU functionality. This project gives the community a web server to build similar content with. I know some Javascript and HMTL, how can I use this? Download and install an x-httpd binay when they're made available*. * The plugin still needs a little more work before I want to release a public build. Create your HTML/script content inside the folder X-Plane/resources/plugins/x-httpd.x-plugin/root/html/ Interact with X-Plane using these commands: /get?dref=sim/foo&type=float returns: { result:true, type:"float", value:3.21, dref:"sim/foo" } /set?dref=sim/foo&type=float&val=3.21 returns: {result:true } Do you support Linux? The code is written in a way that should be trivial to port to all three operating systems. The aim of this project is to provide a basic web server that can allow all X Project AIm? Remove the roadblock stopping people from building some awesome remote instruments using modern browsers. Project Source code etc: https://github.com/benrussell/x-httpd

http://www.simcoders.com/

Ok there seems to be some confusion with a couple people about running the addon Sky-MAXX Pro. It's simple HDR needs to be turned off and I'll prove it with a pretty simple test. There is from what I've read going to be a seamless integration with X-Plane in the very near future but again I have only read that. I'm somewhat of a graphics pig and HDR being off bums me out but sometimes you need to give a little to get a lot. Now, as far as this test is concerned I'm a beta tester (Windows version of Sky-MAXX Pro) so part of my job with this was to point out issues or bugs if you will with data and screenshots. I worked very closey with one of the team John so I do know what I'm talking about and just trying to help out so please bear with me. OK my system specs: Intel i7 2600k @ 4.4 GhzCorsair H80 water coolerASUS MAXIMUS IV EXTREME IV motherboardMSI GTX 680 4gb DDR532gb Gskill "Ripjaws" 1866 ramCrucial 256 Gb SSDHITACHI Deskstar 7K1000 (1Tb? HDD 7400 RPM)Rosewill BRONZE Series 1000W power supplyWindows 7 Ultimate 64 bit The test model I used was X-Plane10 64bit running the default Baron B58 at 10,000' out of KGRR (Gerald R. Ford Intl) by Mr. Brian Godwin, scattered clouds with a base of 8,000' to tops at 10,000' and using the chase view camera. The scenery is slightly behind me over fields so it's not too heavy. Test #1: X-Plane default clouds with HDR (OFF)Test #2: X-Plane Sky-MAXX Pro with HDR (ON)Test #3: X-Plane SkyMAXX Pro with HDR (OFF) No other plugins were turned on or used at the time of any of the tests and screenshots with fps count were all captured with Fraps. Here are my X-Plane settings with both HDR on and off and all the comparison screenshots with text explaining the test:

Got it. You're already awesome enough for answering in such a short time. Will confidently wait.

Will try and report! Thanks John! EDIT: the workaround seems to be working. Not ideal but still good. Waiting for the patch. EDIT2: ...but I randomly get black clouds...

Looks very promising... Staying tuned.

I love how you keep pushing the boundaries with this products. The changes just make the scenery experience a little more real and enjoyable to fly. Keep up the good work.

Interesting, marcc many thanks!

...tears of joy roll down my face, as I experience screenshots of an ace. John's right, you have a knack (and a computer capable) for taking screenshots. Beautiful work. What are your shadow settings?

Hi. Thanks for quick reply. I will test different options. Thanks again. PS BTW, is the Gizmo64 folder created when installing your plugin or it is something coming from another installations???

Great! I am glad we were able to find a solution......

Thanks for the prompt reply, John, but you know what? It's Thanksgiving. Take a day off. I'm hangaring the sim for the day myself, so no rush. Have a great day!

Free Scenery: www.alpilotx.net

Thx lol, but its YOU who made this thing dude!

o_O

Here is the list of user submitted airports (as with version 10.25): http://wiki.x-plane.com/Beta#X-Plane_10.25_Beta_1 As a starter for more good freeware (and payware) scenery I suggest: http://forums.x-pilot.com/topic/4989-the-only-good-scenery-scenery-map/ Cheers Flo

Just the ability to more realistically render our own ACF's contrails would be amazing, if feasible. The current implementation in X-Plane makes the modern airliners I fly feel more like a B-52 on takeoff

Suggests even more something is amiss in his install similar to that of Mitch.

By and large, I agree with this. But there's a more substantial failing on Laminar's part here that few ever talk about. For the new global lighting system to work, as I understand it, HDR must be enabled. I think that's where a lot of people lament turning it off. They feel they will loose one of the biggest improvements to the FX flight environment, and so without it, what was the point of the upgrade? Yes, there is more too it than just the lighting, but significant allure was built on those sexy night shots of lit billboards and headlights spilling light onto adjacent grass, and of course the airport environment where, when pulling up to the gate, taxi lights illuminate the terminal ahead. VERY sexy. But get into the air and Laminar forgot what it's supposed to look like from cruise altitude. I might as well be flying over the ocean as over a densely populated area of land. The brightness from the ground is unacceptably dark. Further the gamma adjustment system is hopelessly broken. Adjust it during flight (I know a restart is theoretically required, but not really I've discovered) and it might help, or it might not. It's schizo in that regard, and if you forget to reset it at the end of a flight, you're screwed on the next, where you WILL have to do a restart to get back to a baseline gamma setting. Laminar needs to develop an adaptive gamma system that accounts for day and night, period. I flew from Washington DC to Madison, WI one evening earlier this year - on a real airline. The flight had us over Lake Michigan somewhere around Grand Haven and making land fall on the WI side just north of Milwaukee. It was a clear night. The entire southern shore of Lake Michigan was outlined in that golden sodium vapor light. The Chicago area was ablaze! Little lines of sparkling spun-gold light for all the major the N/S streets. Fly that same route in XP? Forget it. Nothing but black. Making landfall at MKE in XP10 is perhaps what it might have looked like back in the gas-light days. Laminar has GOT TO FIX THAT. I don't know if flying in non-HDR yields any greater nighttime lighting brightness. I'm still a dope running HDR.

The Turd painted and polished up very nicely. Painting shortfalls are more than made up by its fun/difficulty level. I will (eventually) manage to land it in something smaller than Oregon..... I've become a Jedi at getting it to do this....

I'm sure you can run SkyMaxx at better than lowest settings, Tom, which would in turn be a considerable difference. My PC is OC @ 4.6Ghz and 4gigs on the GPU , have No issue with fps, just dont care much about xp clouds. Kinda perticular and purhaps a bit wierd about simulation and graphics, but thats just me.

We did not touch anything to do with the default real weather load system. Real weather has always lagged, but to some it may not have been as noticeable till now (will depend on your system). Part of the reason it would be more noticeable for you now is because when the weather changes X-Plane is instructed to draw a new set of clouds, and unlike default clouds, SkyMaxx Pro has no two clouds alike, so you have some computer thinking going into how it should render your new scene. X-Plane is responsible for how this loads. It's actually Laminar we are waiting on to make HDR easier. At this time they do not allow plugins to read render state in HDR, which causes tone-mapping to have more of a bloom effect. Many customers have invested time into configuring SkyMaxx Pro and have actually been able to make HDR look really, really good. HDR also does multiple flight loop frame calls that can be unnecessary to the plugin, so if you have a lower end machine it can effect performance. Laminar is going to be working with adding new items into the SDK so we can have better control of these things. We are at their mercy on this front. We are looking into this one further. At first glance I believe this is tied to a dataref to kill assets from Laminar, so again there may need to be changes made on their end.

Haha thanks. I built to stay beefy for a while but it's already starting to get outdated. This addon though will help anybody no matter what their specs are. I did this test because I've seen a few people that are having trouble using is and basically it's because they refuse to turn off HDR. They may have other issues but I'm seeing the HDR thing.

OK so the basic results of my testing are TURN OFF YOUR HDR (for now) and enjoy this wonderful addon. Guy's not once in the history of X-Plane10 has anything impacted frame rates with clouds on like SMP. This addon has done more for frame rates in my humble opinion than any update done by laminar yet. You've got amazing 3D clouds, beautiful skies and added frames with clouds. Whats not to like ?

It is just standard x-plane FOV settings; however, there are view settings in Planemaker that control not only the camera position of course, but also the "tilt" of the camera up or down and we have set this value specific to our cockpit based on Jan's input. A lot of authors do not tweak this value, but leave it default and as such, do not provide an optimal view for the aircraft they are modeling IMO. TomK

Most humans will lead-sight their objective as well. The thinking that we're purely passive and just sit there soaking up the G's is just plain wrong. To get it right the view needs to pan UP when the G's are piled on, as though the pilot is looking into their turn..... The vibrations are a neat effect... if you need something generic. With projects like IXEG it'll just get in the way.

Hi! I have a question about the Field Of View used in your videos. This may sound strange, but one of the things i like the most in your addon is the Line of the windows top borders. It is straight compared to the monitors top border so to say. In almost every addon the windows are to high and you can never see the overhead and the glareshield at the same time. In the IXEG model i get the same feeling as when entering the cockpit of a real 737. (Yes, i am an adult but always try to get a chance to talk to the pilots or look in the cockpit when i board / get off the plane hehe), that it is very crowded and compact. Have you altered some FOV values in the Cold and Dark Videos, or is it standard X-Plane. Because i need to know how to get EXACT that FOV as in the videos.