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X-Plane 11.50 Flight Simulator Bringing Vulkan Support

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  • #11
    I'm not on the civilian type flight simulator, but if I was, I would happily reserve 1 or 2 TB of storage instead of relying on streaming. And knowing the king of person that like flight simulators, they would too. Nobody wants to put 1/2h on a flight for it to end on a stupid internet connection hiccup.

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    • #12
      That would eventually be 6 To instead of one or two. But yeah, it is what people already do. Sometimes on SSD because some hardcore simmers spare no expense. ^^

      Those flight sims - X-Plane 11 included- have big modding communities and you have plenty of detailed sceneries. Some free, some commercial. All those high resolution orthophotos take place.

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      • #13
        Flight Simulator 2020 will be in completely different league than any X-Plane in foreseeable future however. Forget Dx11, all AI assisted terrain procedural generation thing (based on satellite images) will make it ultra realistic looking. Devs said there will be offline mode for FS btw, streaming hidef assets is not said to be mandatory.
        One thing that worries me is potential move to subscription based pricing model (it has not been announced yet). As for X-Plane, it didn't take them too long to implement Vulkan, as hard as it is. I wonder about performance gains, whether there are any (it is not a given, it can vary greatly depending on implementation).
        Last edited by reavertm; 12 October 2019, 11:43 AM.

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        • #14
          Allot of developers will refuse to even test vulkan out even if the engine their using supports it. Good example is the HUGE amount of Unity3D games forced on OGL under Linux with no Vulkan support despite it being a compatible unity3d vulkan engine build. Its a mystery I will never truly understand.

          PS. And I don't believe its because "the code is hard", these are engines which have tested and pre coded vulkan support, there is no coding needed really.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by theriddick View Post
            Allot of developers will refuse to even test vulkan out even if the engine their using supports it. Good example is the HUGE amount of Unity3D games forced on OGL under Linux with no Vulkan support despite it being a compatible unity3d vulkan engine build. Its a mystery I will never truly understand.

            PS. And I don't believe its because "the code is hard", these are engines which have tested and pre coded vulkan support, there is no coding needed really.
            Developer intransigence is a Thing. In general, people literally don't like to learn new things and they will make any excuse not to do so. And yeah, Vulkan is actually hard because it requires levels of knowledge about the underlying hardware OpenGL/DX-11 and earlier didn't require. "Vulkan is hard" is enough to get people to not even look at it to see if any extra work is worth the trade off - assuming the developer knows concepts like threading, concurrency, parallelism, etc that for a very long time was abstracted away by DirectX. Not all developers actually have the fundamental knowledge to do DirectX 12 and Vulkan correctly even if the framework has it built in. You still have to test your product, competently diagnose bugs in either your program or the engine, and give usable bug results to the engine people. There's way too many coders that believe using a framework removes the need to understand what's going on in the system below your own personal code. It doesn't.

            For examples of developer intransigence happening in the past, you can take a look at the history of the Ada language. Ada failed to gain traction with people because "everyone just knew" that a language "developed by committee" was bad and you couldn't tell them otherwise (common languages are developed by committee by at least some degree- yes even C). Then you had the DoD and NASA mandate it, that made things worse. Developers don't like to be told what to do. Some developers wouldn't even look at the language before spouting off and pontificating on how bad it was. Those that did look at it often didn't like it because it was more verbose than most existing languages so it could be easily read by novice and expert alike and tended to not assume the developer knew what they were doing with any given statement. Which, if you have read any technological and security history, is almost always the case. People make and will always make mistakes.

            For the record, I've written programs in Ada, and while it's definitely verbose, it's also not as bad as its very undeserved reputation would suggest. It mostly suffers from a lack of instrumentation popular languages take for granted.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by reavertm View Post
              One thing that worries me is potential move to subscription based pricing model (it has not been announced yet).
              Pretty sure it's subscription-based, at least for HD content.
              The interesting question would be if it'll be counted by months or by flight hours.
              As for X-Plane, it didn't take them too long to implement Vulkan, as hard as it is. I wonder about performance gains, whether there are any (it is not a given, it can vary greatly depending on implementation).
              The linked blog post doesn't go into detail on that topic, but it's quite clearly implied in the post that there are performance gains.
              It's also clearly said that it's only the start of Vulkan on XP11, since they tried to reproduce what OpenGL does.
              In the future (after validating the Vulkan renderer) they'll move away from that.

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              • #17
                In another blog post they already talked about Vulkan tests and they had some performance improvements.
                Last edited by Dedale; 15 October 2019, 01:10 PM.

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