Sigmoid

Well, still I think some fine-tuning might be in order, if we have pines on the coast of Pacific islands. And though the lack of beaches lined by palm trees might be quite painful to all, the lack of all 800 geographic zones may only tick off dendrologists... but having American suburbs in Central Africa is almost Monty Python-level of absurd. And I'm not dissing X-Plane, perfect scenery clearly wasn't a goal so far. So really my question is, given that Laminar seems to be (and is professing to be) concentrating more on scenery now... is there some kind of roadmap for remedying the most painful problems with autogen? Like no socioeconomic or geographical city categorization. I won't throw a tantrum for the lack of teutonic cottages in Germany or Switzerland, but it has to begin somewhere... Say: North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe - Russia, Middle East, East Asia, Third World? Also I wonder if the system allows for dynamic extensibility... Like if someone models the typical architecture of New York City, with lofts, X-shaped brownbrick residential highrises and somesuch, and marks up New York City into proprietary autogen zones that correspond to his specific configuration...

Hey guys, how is this improvement coming along? Any chance of it getting into 2.25?

20fps is sorry performance indeed. (Let me guess, you just built a new computer with an i3... XD)

I wonder, is there a really good model of a small, trainer class single engine airplane around? A 152, or something comparable...

That is just plain sad... XD Thinking of the bleeding edge AMD processors of roughly ten years ago...

That logic is a bit off... A hyperthreaded core does NOT match the power of two non-hyperthreaded cores. What hyperthreading does is make context switching faster, which means you get as far as I know around 20% speed improvement when lots of threads are running concurrently. That is a lot, but not double. What might be confusing is that to the operating system, a hyperthreaded core "looks like" two cores. That doesn't mean it does the job of two cores, just that the OS won't have to do the scheduling between those two threads, instead the CPU itself will take over that task, which results in less overhead, and of course better performance as a result.

Btw... i3s have hyperthreading? Good for them. This is like saying that a Smart TDI also has turbo charging... Yes it does... That doesn't put it in the same league of a 4 liter turbocharged Ferrari engine.

I remember Austin talking in a video, saying X-Plane won't be too fast on the machine he's demonstrating on, because it's a single-CPU computer with ONLY 6 cores (sic!)... I don't know how the code looks, but the problem space has plenty of room for parallelization, and when the creator is saying that it's gonna be lousy because he doesn't have 12 (!) cores, I'm inclined to think at least some of that room was capitalized upon. And even if a single flight model isn't parallelized, I find it hard to believe that the autogen would run on the same thread as the flight model. Also what about weather, ATC, and most modern applications have a separate UI thread (or several UI threads), then there is stuff the OS does in the background... Really, I find it hard to believe that a modern computer wouldn't be better off with 4 cores. (Or 12 for that matter.)

Apparently you don't know much about multicore performance. The problem space of X-Plane definitely warrants an i7. The actual code is another thing, but I think it must be decently parallelized. Blender uses the GPU for most tasks, so it's no wonder that the CPU isn't loaded. i3 is dualcore, I wouldn't really consider it for anything even mildly CPU intensive. i5 and i7 are set apart by hyperthreading, which allows an i7 CPU to switch between 2 threads on a single core at hardware level, heavily reducing the OS overhead in heavily parallelized applications like servers - or flight simulators. So you're wrong, X-Plane can squeeze every bit of power out of an i7. The only case when I'd go below that is if I didn't have enough money for one. If you have the money, it's worth it.

Are there any good scenery packs that DO NOT use sattelite or aerial photo imagery for ground texture? It's something I'm personally averse to, I prefer green grass to blotchy sat images with rooftops and treetops stretched onto the globe. I found some packs that do exactly that, are there any that don't? Also, I'm wondering if anyone uses the HD mesh. Is it still maintained?

I think right now, one should definitely wait for the new, Haswell CPUs.

It's not the roads that are wrong, it's the shoreline. The islands are missing in XPlane. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.216&lon=-122.157&zoom=13&layers=M

That, of course, is obvious. There should be some way to write a proper validation code in a way that the computer would understand... 99% of all bridges in the world are straight or uniformly curved, single roads with both ends on dry land. They rarely terminate, split or loop back into themselves over water.

In the demo, there is a lake south of KSEA with several roads in it.... And I don't mean bridges, they are suburban cul-de-sacs. You should add a functionality to the terrain preprocessing tools, so that if roads are in water without being marked a bridge or a tunnel, it would at flash a warning or something.

My 2.2Ghz quadcore Macbook Pro does around 13 fps with everything turned up to chock full. However, I need to bring it down significantly to get a stable 25-30 fps (everything between "default" / "a ton", grit and bump maps off). So in the future, turning detail down won't make roads and buildings disappear, only make them simpler? I guess it would make a lot of sense for VFR. Seattle looks pretty rural on my computer right now.

Thanks It seems it takes some getting used to... XD I'm sure everything can be done, it's just that some things aren't where I'd expect them to be. For example, I made my acquaintance with the view axes, and they work fine with a gentle touch. Maybe I'll make a camera control plugin in Lua or something as a final solution...

I'm a bit confused by the world detail settings, mostly by the separate roads and objects dropdown. As far as I know, X-Plane got its road-and-object data from Openstreetmaps. What is the logic behind the number of roads setting, what kind of logic does it use to display or not to display a certain road? Or does it "make up" new roads on high settings that aren't in the scenery? Also, what about objects? So far I'm unable to set it up within the fps sweet spot of my computer in a way that Seattle isn't dominated by fully improved empty lots (ie. a street map without buildings), or on the other hand, be full of buildings that do not have roads leading up to them! A ton of roads / a ton of objects: citiscape ruled by fully improved empty lots. Default roads / a ton of objects: lots of suburban homes without a road.

Yea... Point is, I'd like to keep off the keyboard as much as possible. I assigned the "view left/right" and "view up/down" axes to two joystick axes, which works in 3d view, even if it's extremely jerky. It doesn't work in 2d panel view. And "use the arrow buttons" is no help here, when I want to line up for a landing or something similar, it would be nice if the axes just simply worked, and I could use the joystick. Yep it seems the 3d cockpit was so ugly because the Cessna 172 is an old model.

Hi! I've been flying around in the demo version of X-Plane 10 for a short while, and my experience is extremely mixed. My main qualms: - The selection of actions at joystick setup is painfully missing some obvious operations, like cycle through views, zoom in/out, etc. - I wanted to set looking around on the joystick on my gamepad, which resulted in a jerky, oh-my-god kind of movement in the 3d view. No smoothness at all. - No looking around in 2d panel mode. - The virtual cockpit mode is ugly beyond description. (Really, the Laminar guys should just take a look at FlightGear, and the kind of cockpits they did. Terrain in Flightgear looks like crap, which on the contrary is good in XPlane 10. So I guess the two sims should just learn from each other.) So anyway, I'm thinking that maybe there's a plugin for that. Is there any plugin that might help me get a "better view"? It would be awesome to get a proportional shifting view control (ie. the joystick controls the movement of the viewport, not the viewport itself - push it up a little, view shifts upward slowly, push it up a lot, view shifts upward fast). Also, since 3d cockpit doesn't look usable, at least not in the Cessna 172, it would be nice to be able to look around in 2d mode. In Flightgear, the panel just disappears if you look in some other direction except straight ahead. That would be fine... Also, any plugin or tool that is generally known to improve user friendliness would be welcome. The UI of XPlane 10 has been exceptionally unwelcoming so far...

I definitely don't want to spend above $400 on graphics, as it seems overkill given that I'm not such a huge gamer. Beside flight simulation all I normally play are 2d stuff like Cave Story and the like. The main reason I was looking at the 640 was that it seemed to be the only single-slot card worth a mention, but looking at the results, I guess nowadays you don't get decent power out of anything smaller than a truck. And since the price difference between an acceptable card and a crappy card seems insignificant compared to the price of the computer, I might as well go with an acceptable one. ...BTW, it seems that a used GTX 580 with 1.5GB costs exactly the same as a new GTX 660 Ti with 2GB. According to benchmarks, they are identical... Then, from what I gather, the 580 has four times the clock speed, and quarter the cores of the 660 Ti...

Graphics cards still confound me. Funny how a new low-end card is vastly inferior to an older high-end card available for the same price. I wonder why they made the new card in the first place, instead of just selling older models as the low-end, like Apple does with the iPhone. Maybe for reduced power consumption, I guess...

Part of the problem is that nVidia is no longer a Mac Pro thing. The new iMacs are ALL nVidia-based. (Starting to see the upside of Windows. I'd finally have FL Studio... heheh... To be honest, I'm majorly pissed at Apple for their "gentleman adventurer" approach to drivers and generally backend and boilerplate features. I've been one of the discoverers of a critical OS X bug that causes CREEPING DATA CORRUPTION on volumes larger than 1.5 TB. That bug is YEARS old, Apple knows about it, and no, they don't know when they will fix it. And they sell iMacs with 3TB disks. Add to this the adhesive sponge fastened iMac screens, and suddenly I'm feeling nostalgia for the unversity days of Linux PCs built from scratch. I was a kid when Apple first went to the dogs, I wonder if we're experiencing the same now that Steve isn't with them anymore.)

I know that talking about anything below the absolute top is kinda taboo in this forum, but I'm wondering about the GT640 GPU, specifically this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130796 It has 2gigs of RAM, PCIe3.0, seems pretty cool compared to that it's definitely not a gamer card. How would X-Plane 10 run on this hardware?

Things seem to have gone sour around OS X. I'm actually tempted to install Windows 7 as a main OS on my Mac at this point. Since the only thing that is really-really OS X specific in my life at this point is iOS app development, I guess I could run OS X Server in a vm, and with that be free of the dual boot menace. XD

"Waist" their money? LOL.