Laminar Research Formally Announces X-Plane 12

This was interesting and I had a good lough when the weather engine details got explained :smiley:

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I know that they carefully choose what you can see in that video, but I have to say it looks pretty good.

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It also highlights systems depth that developers have access to right out of the box—no plugins needed. Multiple hydraulic systems are now modeled. Specific systems and controls fed by the respective hydraulic systems are also modeled. Plus (I think I recall) that FBW control laws are also modeled. Normal Law, Direct Law and Alternate Law with- and without protections revert accurately based on what’s working and what’s failed.

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The video looks really nice, but isn’t that a Boeing default FMS in that airbus?

Hopefully it will get ‘Zibo’d’ post launch and we’ll see a proper MCDU.

I doubt because ZIBO for years use default FMC. More easy to build a good 3D model and cockpit with some adding features and systems (what zibo did) than a very good fmc.

More like ‘Zibo’ as a term for ‘someone else comes along later and does work on it’ rather than him exactly. Maybe someone like the FBW team but on the X-Plane side will come along, as they built an open-sourced custom FMS?

Perhaps XP-12 will have it modelled, as it’s only a preview video - it might not be something ready for a marketing peek?

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Definitely not Boeing.

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Yeah, staring at it for a bit now I think it’s the common default X-Plane 11 FMC, which is a bit ‘uncanny valley Boeing ish’, but not really Boeing.

I don’t mind as it looks great for a freebie stock aircraft.

I have felt for a very long time that laminar was deliberately slow in advancing thier SIM because they always wanted to have something left over for the next version.

Accordingly I’m going to be giving some credit to Microsoft flight simulator 2020 for forcing their hand, and making them go far beyond what they probably would have ever done normally in a new version.

To be blunt, I don’t think they could have afforded to be incremental this time.

I am not so sure. LR have been fairly consistent in their development cycle. I am actually surprised at how XP12 doubles down on LR’s philosophy of prioritizing physics over beauty. XP12 is going to look a lot like XP11 and will almost certainly make a poor visual comparison to MSFS. And they are ok with that.

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what I am really curious about is performance. I am not ready to run it at 30fps. hope that vulkan implementation and optimization will be step up from XP11.

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I haven’t tried XP-11 in since last summer but the Vulkan thing is what allowed me to actually use XP-11 in VR. Was not playable for me on that PC until then. Slightly worse than FS2020 was for me, at least as of a month or so ago.

FWIW, for civilian sims I’ve found I prefer the ‘feel’ of XP over the alternatives. XP-11, at least with clouds that are on par with the other visuals (meaning they don’t stand out in a negative way) looks very good to my eye.

I’m learning to live with the fact I’ll never get the flight sim I dreamed of years ago. But that’s alright.

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thats actually the strange part :slight_smile:

XP11 is older software and even with vulkan it isnt better in performance than said sim. agree that vulkan made it usable on many subpar systems.
I just hope that XP12 will show some further improvements in this regard.

The logic fails me here

Why should older software perform better in VR, compared to new software?
The other way around would make more sense to me.
Newer software, like MSFS, takes advantage of newer tech, that wasn’t available before.
The way I see it, XP12 will probably perform better in VR because of lessons learnt in the VR implementation of XP11 and the later use of the Vulcan API.

life is not only about VR :wink:

I fly exclusively non-VR and have the same exp with performance. and saw similar comment elsewhere.

Was just my experience. There are so many hardware permutations out there. All I know is neither XP-11, before Vulkan, or FS2020 as of a few months ago were usable in VR.

Had the same thought [hope?]

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That was what @jross was talking about though
 :slight_smile: