JoinFS should accomplish what you are describing, it takes into account the latency between peers and compensates for it. It also uses Austin’s planes (i.e. the ACF planes in your airplane folder) instead of the Vatsim/IVAO compatible CSL’s — so as long as your friends have the same planes installed you will be able to see the same plane the other has, which is basically the same thing as you have now currently, except that you don’t need to setup a VPN or configure a NAT rule on your router.

The only thing I could probably see Native X-Plane networking having over JoinFS is if you want to do air-to-air combat in X-Plane. But then you have DCS for that 😉

still needs to be recompiled with the new SDK to do any thing with it

I’m sorry you feel that way Rob, the fact of the matter is we are not disgruntled DCS players, many of us are pilots, some of us are actually former professional airshow pilots.
This makes developing custom aircraft that we fly a requirement and not easily obtainable in DCS. X-plane provides a consistent flight model and system design environment consistent across all aircraft design. DCS contains compartmentalized flight models depending on aircraft and does not have consistencies from one design to the next.

The fact of the matter is it takes years to develop custom aircraft for DCS, that same aircraft can be developed for x-plane much quicker and with much less fanfare and red tape. This is important because the air show teams involve all fly custom developed aircraft.

We magically appear at the livestream, (as well as this forum and in my private correspondence with Laminar) because we care. I’ve been an x-plane user and developer privately since the very first version. And I would be willing to discuss this with you anytime. those online services that you recommend do not allow us to fly the close precision formations that we require, this can only be done through direct networking using predictive packet delivery algorithms to compensate for latency. A technique that DCS uses and that I know x-plane was working on. So it’s not unreasonable to ask the question about the status of that work.

Hmm … the only people who seem to be biting at the bit for this are some disgruntled DCS users who seem to magically appear every time there is a Laminar Dev Live Stream; I’m not sure why this is?

Meanwhile, here’s a selection of popular Multiplayer plugins that lets you fly with other simmers from different platforms:

Vatsim
IVAO
PilotEdge
FSCloud
JoinFS

The first 3 have ATC coverage which adds to the on-line experience, the last 2 are basically free flight and are popular with some of the Twitch streamers.

Not if it already passes depth data.

even if it does it needs to be recompiled with SDK 2.0 for it work

yeah ASW 2.0 need access to the z buffer now this lets predict motion better so it can work up to lower frame rates then before something that would really help with xplane

Here is a link to the announcement in case you are wondering what I am referring to:

https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-asw-2-point-0-better-accuracy-lower-latency/