Comments on: Rumors of My Death…

By: chris

chris — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 12:20:25 +0000

In reply to willzah.

i reccomend XP Orbit. add on to help with visibility distance

http://secure.simmarket.com/taburet-xporbit-for-x-plane-10.phtml

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 03:42:17 +0000

In reply to NLS.

This modernization is setting the ground-work for _future_ development.

We could get all of the GL features we needed for X-Plane 10 using a mix of GL 1.x and 2.x. The parts of the sim that have to be fast are all shader based, but for example the UI still runs using GL 1.x fixed function rendering, and the sim uses 2.x uniforms (because it has for the last five years).

To use GL 3.x on Mac we have to drop 1.x, because Apple doesn’t support ARB_compatibility. We didn’t have time to do this before, but now I’m finally getting to some of the work of moving off of 1.x permanently. (This work also couldn’t happen during 9.x because v9 supports non-shader hw.)

By: NLS

NLS — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 19:18:55 +0000

Kind of curious about one thing.
X-Plane 10 is a rather new product (for X-Plane lifecycle). It was supposed to be mostly new code (and some things from ground up). So what the heck is OpenGL modernization? Wasn’t “modernized” already and with eyes in the future?
I mean I would expect a post like that (the OpenGL part) somewhere in vX.90 development cycle getting ready for major version X+1.
Maybe you can clear this a bit?

By: willzah

willzah — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 05:28:32 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. So stoked! Knew it was coming sometime : )

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:53:29 +0000

In reply to willzah.

Yeah – in 64-bit we’re going to grow the loaded DSF size so we can support higher visibility. Not sure when we’ll ship that though – probably not in the next update.

By: willzah

willzah — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 18:00:57 +0000

Hate to be the guy who always goes here, but….. now that we are clear and far into 64bit zone… any chance that we will see an increase in .dsf view distance to 100 mi for those with plenty of ram? That plus the current planet render on clear days at FL380 would stomp the competition. (p.s. still loving the 3d planet render to 100 miles and how it looks, now if only we could get some 2048, or 4096 _nml maps……JK)

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:47:29 +0000

In reply to Tonka. There's one serious hitch: AC3D lacks the fundamental 3-d editor features that Blender has. There are a handful of specific OBJ features that were added late in v9 that are not part of the ac3d UI editor, but then there's the serious problem that ac3d doesn't have native animation, native normal map preview, baking, non-destructive editing, etc. :-(

By: Tonka

Tonka — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 22:21:00 +0000

In reply to Steve. The X-Plane Object Properties could do with some work to prevent the massive slow downs in AC3D when normal geometry is selected. (Normal as in not a rotation or translation) Normal map support might be nice, as well as any other features needed for scenery creation to bring the AC3D plugin in line with the blender tools.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 20:59:24 +0000

In reply to Jim Zane. What functionality do you think is missing that you need, Jim? I found some stuff just recently that I had *no* idea was available. It was dependent on the selection mode.....some things for surfaces, lights and stuff.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 16:32:56 +0000

In reply to Jim Zane. Not right now, no.