Ben, thank you for such a detailed post, appreciate your openness and honest!
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Thanks a lot! This definitely settles the argument that’s been flooding the internet regarding X-Plane!

There’s a lot to unpack here. There are two separate “decisions” and also some luck.

First, pretty much all of the _timing_ of this is just random luck. Sidney has been working on the new shader compilation strategy for quite a few months now and we’ve known we were going to go this way for a very long time. The decision to do this was totally not related to any third parties – basically we found the best engineering solution. Since we never intended to “keep shader hacks working” we did not say “we can’t do this best solution because of the third party shader hackers”. Indeed, the decision to NOT support shader-edit compatibility is strongly motivated by the need to make these kinds of major shader changes.

Second, my communication with Yuri has been _very_ poor on my end, and this is not an isolated incident. My in-box is just a flood of emails, some of which get under-answered or never-answered. I don’t feel good about that at all, but I haven’t had a great solution…I can’t stop my regular job of coding to just answer email, and the number of developers just grows as X-Plane grows. For what it’s worth, we are looking at creating better channels of communication to try to avoid devs being left in the dark, potentially with other LR people helping to unload me.

In the case of shaders, there is at least one third party (I think _not_ X-Vision) who emailed to ask about getting shaders reloaded and I think I replied with “you shouldn’t even be editing our shaders”. I gave myself a TODO to write a post like this one, and then (see above about time constraints) didn’t get to it or months..finally Sidney took it off my plate. So this is a case of me not communicating enough with third parties and not getting the info out widely enough, all due to time constraints – see above about having other LR people help out.

Settings.txt has a massive disclaimer saying “this file is for hacking, not add-ons”. We never clearly labeled the shaders…I think we assumed that the total lack of documentation or public mentioning in any way would disqualify them from being considered “an SDK” but in hindsight maybe our wording needs to be stronger. This is a bit tricky because there’s a lot of private stuff in Resources and labeling it all would be tedious.

The decision to _not_ support third party shader hacking is simply an inevitable one. We can’t have a rendering engine that gets better in major ways _and_ third party shader hacking. Vulkan is sort of the poster-child for why this is the case. We literally have to rewrite the shaders or they won’t run on Vulkan and Metal – there was no way compatibility was going to be maintained. But we also saw this with FlyInside, which (from what I can tell) hacks up our shaders; when we shipped 11.10 and 11.20 (and shipped changes that moved us toward native VR) we saw their add-on crash X-Plane during beta as they modified shaders that were already changed. LR can’t reasonably be expected to have no native VR support to maintain add-on shader compatibility.

Could X-Vision be built into X-Plane? I have no idea, but I can say this: I would _never ever ever_ expect any third party to simply _give_ us their work. Third parties owe us _nothing_ in terms of contributing to the core sim*. If you’re a third party and you make something, it’s yours! So there isn’t really an active _decision_ to “not include X-Vision in X-Plane” — it’s _not our code_. I can email Yuri and ask him nicely but given that he put a lot of time in, apparently didn’t understand that the shaders would change, and that I didn’t reliably email him in the past, if his response was “you can shove your email up your ass” I would not blame him _at all_ or hold that against him in any way.

Finally, it should be noted that all product discussions we have with third parties are held in confidence for the benefit of the third parties, so _if_ we ever have a constructive opinion with a third party shader hacker about integrating their work with X-Plane (and I’m not hopeful – see above that it’s their work and their add-on), it would not be something I could talk about here.

It should also hopefully be clear from everything I’ve said about our communication, timing, intent, and expectations about third parties that there is _no_ financial incentive or win here for us breaking third party shader-based add-ons. It is just the inevitable consequence of us moving to Vulkan and third parties building add-ons on parts of the sim that are not stabilized APIs.

* There is one exception: sometimes when a third party wants to use our art _directly_ to make an add-on, we strike up a deal where they use our stuff and later we can use theirs. But this is a very intentional quid-pro-quo that’s designed to be fair to everyone, and we agree to this privately up-front.

X-Plane is not a game, it is a highly complex numeric simulation!! That’s why it’s okay to fly it in the office during work hours. 😉

I think the real issue when it comes to shaders and art controls is NOT whether it’s a game or not. It’s that X-Plane is a platform for content.

In a traditional game-engine based game, there is ONE version of the engine used to make the game, and thus the content authors know everything about it and it never changes out from under them. This in turn means the game engine can expose all sorts of controls and tweaks because there is never any attempt to have the game keep working across major changes to the engine. The game can simply choose to not take new engine updates past a certain level of complexity.

In X-Plane’s case, the content and the engine are totally decoupled and the content isn’t even all packed at once. This eliminates a number of tricks and optimizations that game engines can take.

I don’t think there is malicious intent here, nor do I think people will simply dump X-Plane over xVision. The work with the shaders in 11.30 is necessary to progress the sim forward.

What’s really needed is simplified and non-invasive “post-processing” settings from which we can control the sim and some artwork. Photographic features such as exposure, contrast, ambient light etc. It makes more sense to address something like this after Vulkan (the entire atmosphere and environment of X-Plane needs a re-write imo, to accommodate new seasons, weather/clouds, trees, lighting.) Lets get Vulkan first and 11.50, and then Laminar will have the overhead to decide on the new features and eyecandy.

+1

Thanks!

I agree it is completely valid to approach this question from this perspective. I don’t have that much hours in airplane or on the top of the mountain, but when I do I always look outside and in my mind compare what I see to what I see in X-Plane. I find that X-Plane matches what I see in reality quite good. That doesn’t mean though there is no space for improvement. I personally do not want ANY customization to be available in X-Plane. What I want is X-Plane to match as close as possible its visual representation to various atmospheric and time conditions and be it adjusted to calibrated monitor with wide color space gamut.

With introduction of all those shader and art assets modifying add-ons, especially those that have ability to have profiles, although in few instances they manage to bring some improvements, it is usually not in all conditions and with some of their profiles they create completely unrealistic or utopia worlds, where everything is so green, blue, colorful and nice like you wouldn’t want to look outside of real window ever again. I don’t get it that people say it is in the eye of the beholder, since there is only one base line in real world and there are no sliders to tinker with. I assume people think that that or that looks more real because of their lack of real experience (time spent in real aircraft or mountain) or their perception is based on sources they used in the past and consider them as representation of baseline (like FSX/P3D or Youtube videos from cockpit views recorded with non professional camcorders). And finally, X-Plane is professional simulation software, it should simulate environment as closely as possible and not turn into cartoon fairy tale flight experience or sepia color movie flight.

So the question arise, with substitutional and questionable improvements to the look of the simulator from the community being limited, will LR take the responsibility to bring in some improvements to the look of the simulator? As there is space for improvement, do you have plans to improve things on your side? One quick example that comes to my mind are dawn/dusk skycolors in X-Plane as I did not see purple ones in real-life yet.