X-Plane 12 again
Dec. 28th, 2024 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinMy sister-in-law was so kind as to give me the download code for X-Plane 12 for Christmas. I'd previously found its graphical improvements not quite impressive enough to justify the purchase, but the new lighting and shading model really shines when the lights go down in the cit-tay, and the sun shines on the baaaaaayyyy:
It's also much better in garbage weather with rain and such, though that is harder to convey in a still image.
Graphically, they're playing a probably impossible game of catch-up with Asobo Studios' Microsoft Flight Simulator and its real-time streaming world derived from Bing Maps data. X-Plane still uses the old model of a static world stored on your computer, and relies on optional downloads from its user community (both freeware and commercial) to flesh out the parts of the world you really care about with add-ons. But that also means it's far less dependent on some outside server infrastructure.
But this computer can't run Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The San Francisco pictured above uses the data that ships by default with X-Plane. I was actually using a very detailed free add-on for San Francisco with X-Plane 11, which didn't have any special landmarks for that area in its factory download (so while the basic geography would be there, all the buildings and bridges and such would have been generic "autogen" assets). You can see that in X-Plane 12, a few landmarks like Salesforce Tower and the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge are represented pretty accurately, but there are still a lot of autogen buildings there.
The basic global geography download includes more or less accurate street layouts and coastlines for much of the world, but the shapes are relatively low-resolution polygons and one thing that does tend to take me out of the simulator immersion is when that's hard to ignore. You'll see a coastline with realistic-looking soil and vegetation, but following unnatural precise angles (in a place where human intervention shouldn't have created that in reality). The same is true of roads. The curved lozenge shape of the block across the street from me is there in the database, but sharpened into a parallelogram. I actually think they could do a lot to improve the basic visuals just by automatically putting some subtle curves on street bends and intersections, though they may be afraid of any deterministic process to do this going wrong in some situations.
I haven't tried using the scenery add-on I was using before in here yet, but I suspect it would work fine. Most of the scenery and aircraft add-ons for X-Plane 11 do work here, though some add-on aircraft that predate version 11 don't work or work badly. Some of the authors have made updated versions that use new features in X-Plane 12.
Users have created many libraries of free objects to use in these add-ons, and one of the frustrations of free user-created add-ons is that they often have a lot of external library dependencies which are hard to manage. I've noticed that the most popular add-ons tend to be the ones whose dependencies are simple or nonexistent. It seems like everything like this eventually evolves to needing a package manager.
It's also much better in garbage weather with rain and such, though that is harder to convey in a still image.
Graphically, they're playing a probably impossible game of catch-up with Asobo Studios' Microsoft Flight Simulator and its real-time streaming world derived from Bing Maps data. X-Plane still uses the old model of a static world stored on your computer, and relies on optional downloads from its user community (both freeware and commercial) to flesh out the parts of the world you really care about with add-ons. But that also means it's far less dependent on some outside server infrastructure.
But this computer can't run Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The San Francisco pictured above uses the data that ships by default with X-Plane. I was actually using a very detailed free add-on for San Francisco with X-Plane 11, which didn't have any special landmarks for that area in its factory download (so while the basic geography would be there, all the buildings and bridges and such would have been generic "autogen" assets). You can see that in X-Plane 12, a few landmarks like Salesforce Tower and the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge are represented pretty accurately, but there are still a lot of autogen buildings there.
The basic global geography download includes more or less accurate street layouts and coastlines for much of the world, but the shapes are relatively low-resolution polygons and one thing that does tend to take me out of the simulator immersion is when that's hard to ignore. You'll see a coastline with realistic-looking soil and vegetation, but following unnatural precise angles (in a place where human intervention shouldn't have created that in reality). The same is true of roads. The curved lozenge shape of the block across the street from me is there in the database, but sharpened into a parallelogram. I actually think they could do a lot to improve the basic visuals just by automatically putting some subtle curves on street bends and intersections, though they may be afraid of any deterministic process to do this going wrong in some situations.
I haven't tried using the scenery add-on I was using before in here yet, but I suspect it would work fine. Most of the scenery and aircraft add-ons for X-Plane 11 do work here, though some add-on aircraft that predate version 11 don't work or work badly. Some of the authors have made updated versions that use new features in X-Plane 12.
Users have created many libraries of free objects to use in these add-ons, and one of the frustrations of free user-created add-ons is that they often have a lot of external library dependencies which are hard to manage. I've noticed that the most popular add-ons tend to be the ones whose dependencies are simple or nonexistent. It seems like everything like this eventually evolves to needing a package manager.