Takling about rain. Currently, when we enter in Replay mode at normal speed, the rain is realistic as when we follow the plane rain drops are horizontal (because of the speed). But once we play the replay at slow motion, the rain drops fall vertically even if we are flying at the speed of 400 mph. There also there is room for improvement.

Yes, the particles are billboards – the author picks the shader, and yes there is a shader involved in their display. (On any GPU capable of running X-Plane, a shader is ALWAYS what ‘draws’ stuff – there is no way to draw without one.)

Third parties can customize the size/movement/look/behavior of the particles and their textures.

Rain – we’ll see. Our main goals with 11.30 are to (1) ship the particle system to third parties and (2) replace the old non-customizable particle system. It does not do rain but it does do all of the other FX.

We’re developing metal concurrently with Vulkan – the timeline should be almost exactly the same. Also, “deprecate” does not mean “delete”; we expect XP11 to work fine on Mac for the foreseeable future.

OK, I might have misunderstood how XP’s new particle systems works. Doesn’t it use shaders to create visible effects like rain in the current version? I was under the impression that the new particle system would build on that in a more extensive/detailed manner. So let’s see if I got this right. The new particle system uses 2-d textures/billboards (like skycolors_.png or lights.png) that are placed in a 3-d scene/XP, right? Are there any shaders involved in creating/displaying those new effects? If that’s the way the new effects work, then I think that’s pretty much the same thing that FSX does.

On a side note, does this mean that devs/3rd parties can change/switch billboards with their own to enhance effects? Would this be possible on a local/per aircraft basis or just globally for all of XP?

And my last question would be whether the depiction of rain will change with the new effects as well. Will rain drops get bigger, more noticeable and possibly editable? Thanks Ben for any insight on this 😉

Also interested as I am working towards an iMac which will run X-Plane 11. Sounds suspiciously like that might not be a good idea.

Also, as I’m not a plane maker, I don’t understand what’s this “table” thing for the particle effects but PLEASE, make it so that there is a default setting for the plane but also the ability for the final user to change the values. This “table” should be a text file that we can modify. I have seen so many times third-party plane maker doing it completely wrong for their plane.

I really think that X-Plane, right now, should be developed for the next hardware to come. We should be able to disable some effects but now that the GPUs are more and more powerful, it’s about time to foresee what X-Plane should look like in 2025 in terms of graphics.

Overall performance should be pretty good, but like OBJs, authors have enough control over the system that they can kill performance if they choose to. I don’t know what FSX/P3D tech you are comparing things to – the particles in X-Plane are 2-d billboards with 3-d positions, which is almost universally how these things are done.

Hi Steve,

Right – the point o the experimental flight model is that it is _not_ stable or versioned – it gives us a way to “beta” a new FM iteration over a longer time period than a regular beta. Right now betas for large patches are ~ 8 weeks of full beta, and while this time is longer than LR wants, it is too short for any useful feedback on the FM, especially since authors avoid the beta until the end due to other stability issues. The experimental FM lets us beta what is probably 11.40’s FM all the way from 11.30 through to 11.40, publicly. This is why there’s no PM-save for it.

Once we have something stable, where we think the math is right, _then_ we’ll do real versioning. Doing version-compatibility is time consuming for us (we _do_ do it this though and did quite a bit in v10) – this is why we want to validate that the new FM stuff is correct before we have to support it in a version indefinitely. The experimental FM was driven by neither Austin nor I wanting to be stuck with old versions that were wrong but had escaped the lab.

With that in mind, I do not expect breaking changes in the non-experimental FM in 11.30.

The other thing to note is that any time a feature is orthogonal, we don’t have to version. So we don’t have to version the 1-spool jet engine when the 2-spool is introduced because it’s a different engine model. You get compatibility by not changing your engine type, and if you resave as 2-spool, expect different FM output – that’s sort of the entire point of the NEW engine model.

cheers
Bne

Here’s a link to the new particle effects part of the presentation:https://youtu.be/lTOfbFMOxjo?t=2848 it will answer most of your remarks. 😉

I cannot wait for the new particle effects to arrive and based on what was shown in the presentation, I’d say that effects will finally be on par or even superior compared to FSX/P3D, well done LR!

I’m just curious about performance as shader-based particle effects tend to be much more fps-hungry and than FSX’s 2d texture effects. The smallest amount of chimney smoke in GTA V literally splits my fps in half, hopefully XP manages to be a bit more efficient in that regard.
Oh well you can’t have all, can you.