X-Enviro - Austin Meyer, creator of X-Plane, takes a quick first look. Monitor is a Samsung Super-Ultra-wide 49". Processor is i5-9600K running at 4.8GHz and video card is an RTX 2080 8GB.
Absolutely. I remember going back and forth with him a while back via email well before XP11, and he talked about his disappointment with the lack of good reflections in X-Plane. He was brutally honest about how he wasn’t a huge fan about how it looked even though I insisted I liked XP10. Lo and behold, XP11 is gorgeous. Really a one of a kind developer.
@@DeKarle1992 I think he meant it in the way that if you watch Q8 pilot's interview with Austin, he's incredibly dismissive of all of Fs2020s achievements and is very quick to shove aside x plane's lackings (yes, it's buggy and the tubeliners are crap, but then again, that's pretty much true for every single flight sim when it first comes out).
The creator of Xplane admitting his clouds are pathetic when compared to XEnviro. That's what I love about Austin, he pulls no punches and tells it like it is.
I love how receptive he is to add-on development. When your product is as solid a foundation as it is, there's no reason to cut out outside ideas. I think game simmers are going to migrate to msfs, (or DCS,) but practical simmers and engineer/designers are going to cling even more strongly to x-plane because of that willingness to support.
Yeah , it is awesome , *BUT not $69,- awesome !* I really believe , that IF they lower their price 50% , they will sell at least 500% more ! So in the end , they would earn MORE money ! It is better to sell 1000 copies at $35,- instead of 200 copies at $69,- !!! For now , It is just way too expensive !!! It's even more then the WHOLE sim !
Hi there =) Thanx for a funny video. If we were aware of the making of a video we would have prepped Austin a lot more beforehand. He got a list of known issues but I also know how busy he is. First off: xEnviro does not draw weather info from xplane at all. xEnviro is plainly live weather at this stage. It will have historical weather in the future but will never have custom weather. If we implement that it will be on Pirate Bay within 12 hours. xEnviro is so far the only weather addon that is not cracked and we want to keep it that way. Second, the artifacts and lava lamp clouds you see is a compromise for performance. So is the grain you noticed as well. We had to dial back the resolution to half of what we started with. Performance is being worked on and we have a path towards higher resolution and better performance. I have made several statements in the Threshold forums about what we have struggled with. Read it if you are interested. forum.thresholdx.net/topic/386-where-are-we-and-where-are-we-going/#comments 1.10 is just the start of volumetric clouds and the first fully dynamic noise rendered clouds in any of the major simulators. We still have a long road ahead of us to get where we want to be. But with some "hooks" and help from LR we'll get there much faster I am sure =) I won't hog the comment section here. If you want more info on xEnviro do follow the link above or join our facebook page: facebook.com/groups/xenviro/ -Magnus
You are the first to do volumetric clouds, well done, but Xenviro is just insanely overpriced. It’s a weather injection addon that costs a lot more than the base software it’s intended for!? Surely you can see there is something wrong with that?
@@spy2778 Nothing wrong with that. I wish it was cheaper but there are tons of examples where softwares cost more than the base products. The best example is Windows lol. And let's not about F2P type of businesses (DCS).
I really like Austin Meyer and thankful that he developed Xplane; he calls Xenviro not perfect, not yet but promising and awesome. I fully agree with him, I will also not go back to the default clouds and yes I love Xenviro too. Greetings to the developers.
The cloud mod probably defaults X-Plane to clear sky’s since it needs clear sky as a base before rendering the clouds. Wouldn’t want to have upgraded clouds blocked out by X-Plane ones after spending $69 on the plug in
xenviro 1.10 is amazing, and I sacrifice some settings to get it running well. And because xe not only does weather, clouds, water, the lighting looks crazy good. XE is a game changer and worth every penny imo. Once you experience 3d clouds, going back to 2D is blah, you miss the 3d right away. I'm in Austin's camp, i can't go back once you experience it. Yeah sure, its not perfect, but its light years ahead of 2d cloud solutions. And once Austin is on board to open up XP 11 a bit more for Magnus' team, its going to get a hell of a lot better, not only performance but looks.
FS 2020 is our saviour right now and I remember a year ago, when every butthurt X-Plane fan was saying that FS 2020 will not be any better. Guess what. Literally, the vanilla/out of the box experience of FS 2020 is better in every single aspect and much much cheaper. X-Plane lived on 3rd party projects. I uninstalled X-Plane and wait for 18th of August. It's time for the new generation of flight sims, something every single one of us(lover of this "niche" genre of videogames) was waiting for. I am relieved that now you can get an unprecedented experience of the whole world without all that 3rd party shit. Of course I will not say no to a more detailed airport from a 3rd party developer, but now everything is in the details. 70 fucking dollars for X-Enviro is fucking joke! At the same time FS2020 is 60 dollars with volumetric clouds and weather like never before. Crazy!
@austin Laminar needs to intensify development of better skies, that means clouds and sky colour managment, and it needs to start doing something with the water. Just a side-kick: look at DCS's moving and splashing water behind the aircraft carrier. I expect X-plane to have at least the quality of that. Clouds are so essential, this should be really picked up by the Laminar team. It is my impression, laminar has a lack of vision, and/or is a bit too comfortable with the status quo. But Austin, this ain't 1995 any more, you must do the next steps, and you have to force your team to go for the next level. Don't compare to other products, x-plane is miles better, but compare to what there could be in the future, talking about dynamics (drivable cars, ships, ballons, submarine/diving/space rockets, mars rover), talking about Mars and the Moon (currently you have implemented the earth object only, with a physics model that relates to earth), talking about first person walking and acting (interaction of controllable objects). 1 million people asking for better walk arounds! (Crew entering airplane and sitting down in cockpit/cabin). X-Plane can be more than what it is now. Book a motion capture studio and get crews alive! sidekick: first person motion best seen in games lke COD MW2 or so. Persons (first person view) controllable with keys A for left, W forward, D right, C left, combination with shift key accelerates these. Unfortunately the 3rd party dev market is lame, they stuck to a few planes, some sceneries and some plug-ins. Armstrong was not that wrong, We need a LEAP!
I don't believe X-Plane has skinned animation yet (neccessary for bending legs, arms etc). At the moment it's just multiple separate parts bonded with joints. When they open up that side the sky's the limit for animated people, animals etc.
They need to do a complete weather engine, not just clouds, it’s not just the eye candy that’s needed but also all of the weather mechanics behind them, so you have the effects of updrafts, and see them in the clouds as well... when it snows you have snow on ground, on the planes etc..
@@MrTchou got you, despite i am putting the eye candy on top of the list because it is achievable sooner. you also need to consider that first of all the graphics have to be built - as a placeholder if you will, and then play with these objects driven by the weather engine.
Is it just me or do the default xp11 clouds look nicer than these (as Austin accurately said) lava lamp blobs?! And $70??? Bwaahahaa!! Austin rules! Such a great person! Thanks for amazing xp11! :)
add some sceneries, traffic and the other useful stuff that is needed for x-plane and the FPS goes down from 70 to 3. my i7 7600 GTX1060 can unfortunately not handle this product. Austin's presentation is on default xplane-setup. price is 70, not 50 as mentioned, and that appears completely overprized to my understanding. True Value is 39 USD at the max. Maybe teach the russians to price equal framereate, that makes it 3 dollaaaa then. currently plenty of bugs too. So, a clear no-buy at this stage. however, it's the right direction, desperately waiting for towering cumuli, 20 miles high massive cloud towers, so flying around miami and the caribean look as such. thank you Austin and Michael for the presentation. Really appreciate your initiative (both of you). standing by for REX environment force for a comparison, as they plan to hop onto x-plane. another approach is laminar could improve the clouds themselves, as they have the knowledge to do so, including a better fps-management than the ruskies. I would prefer this variant really. Get those artists drilled up a bit Austin :)
Maybe u have some wrong config, I have an i5 with gtx1060 and it's goes very well... 50fps with ortho4xp, xeurope, and much more plug-ins and sceneries
@@alexttube dont know what to say, never saw 50 fps on mine. guess i have loaded more stuff than you or so. have no comparison of setup of course. what is your most complex custom scenery?
@@piloto_loco I have many many addons and ortho and scenery, maybe one of the most complex or best for me is LGKR from Flytampa, here I get around 37-40 fps depending of zibo or tollis a319
@@alexttube mine are the metro areas around LA, MIA, NYC, and of course the same zibo or tollis which drag fps i agree. However seems i gotta find the one big fps killer which is none of the mentioned, comparing to your setup, i would not blame any single of the add-ons either, it has to be a combination of things i guess (including other windows programs or configs to be suspects). thanks for providing comparison. last question, are you using some rendering addon like reshade? (this thing is consuming quite a bit)
First time seeing Austin - (only know him from a way-back, excellent review of the Columbia 400) - did not know what to expect but wasn't surprised. Seems to still love his product as much as I do. My box does not have the oomph to run this plugin, but the only thing I use the clouds for in X-Plane is make a stratus layer and see if I can drop into an airport using various navigation tools which X-Plane lets me do marvelously - Thanks Michael - very informative and now I'm off to see some of your other vids.
I love X-Plane but add ons do drop frame rate a good amount I mean scenery ones etc. I have a 2700x and. Gtx 1080ti. He is getting half frame rates in the air do not want to think what it is like on the ground taxiing around an airport. Lol
Dear Austin Meyer, in the next Patch, it is possible to insert the possibility of flying with two PCs, on the same aircraft, with the old FSX, it was possible to share the aircraft, as a pilot and co-pilot. Thanks Fabio.
That's a wise man right there. I actually pity those who bought X-plane addons for all that money. FS 2020 is our superior saviour. Can't wait for August 18th.
And 1 year later, FS 2020 , cheaper than a shitty X-Plane addon, with unprecedented visuals, weather and scenery. And this, I think, is the best outcome for every single flight sim enthusiast.
Weather cannot be set to custom with xEnviro. Even setting the slider to max refresh time and setting manually it overrides. I was given the reason that by allowing custom weather selection it allows the plugin to be "cracked".
In the few years I’ve owned Xplane, the vast majority of my time has been spent dealing with bugs, crashes, incompatibilities, frame rate problems or just inaccurate simulation. I’ve run out of count of the amount of times that I’ve spent hours loading and flying a flight, just for xplane to crash before I commence final approach.. I’ve spent so little time actually flying that it’s been heartbreaking! The announcement that Microsoft is re-releasing MSFS is the best news I’ve heard in years! I’d happily trade off very slightly better prop-wash dynamics in xplane for a stable sim that has volumetric clouds built in. The guys at Laminar are all clearly nice people, but they seem to spend far too much time tweaking little things & adding Lego scenery, without focus on the bigger picture, & to what their clientele are asking for...
NEMES1S You may be right, but a quick look at the forums & it’s clear I’m definitely not alone. I also build pc’s so I’m not completely unaware of what I’m doing. Are you running xplane vanilla? ie. absolutely no addons? Without addons id admit it’s pretty stable, but then pretty boring... I’d obviously love to stay with xplane rather than give Microsoft more of my money, but Laminar seems to idle along at a snails pace. Even in this video the creator of xplane admits that their clouds are awful, but is quite happy to let Xenviro fleece us for $70, while he fiddles around with mundane tweaks & seems to have only one guy working on the port to Vulkan/Metal.
@@spy2778 I am running the Zibo 737 and couple of tiles of Orbx scenery, and several plugins. I have a 1060 and it, and it runs at around 30 fps. But sometimes the game can be a bit weird, but not unplayable.
I'm brand new to X Plane 11, 16 hours of time on it, and I'm very impressed! But I've spent more time "studying" which add on's to get that will improve my local area (NW Oregon KPDX area) so it looks more like my real location. There are soooo many add on's that I'm completely overwhelmed! Those clouds look amazing, but my video card, which I just upgraded to Nvidia's 1660 Ti by MSI, although a great card and buy for the money, it's not up to the 1080 ti's standard, let alone the 2080's! Do I probably wont be able to have sufficient horse power to keep my GPS up with it. But one thing at a time. This channel has been a great help and WOW I love that monitor and flight setup!
I'm in the same area...any luck with addons that make KPDX and surrounding areas more realistic? I've found a Portland scenery addon by htakeo on x-plane.org that I've been using.
Check out Orbx and their upcoming Washington state scenery for X-Plane. It is BEAUTIFUL. Oregon is in the development pipeline and will be available later this year, likely in the fall. After that is Northern California and then Southern California.
@@caribbaviator7058having volumetric clouds is a pretty demanding feature to implement, unfortunately x-plane's engine is far from next gen so honestly as long as I can get above 25fps im not bothered. to illustrate my point though the new MS2020 also uses volmetric clouds but because it actually utilises modern tech including such a feature doesn't leave anywhere near as much a hit on the performance
I can 60FPS in MSFS with High, and Ultra settings in most aircraft, locations, Weather etc. The render latency is where the serious fps drops are coming from.
I prefer FS Global Real Weather and Skymaxx 4.8. They are made to actually work together and the weather is very nice and fps are very good. By the way I also own X-Enviro but don't use it because of the earlier builds stability problems and now fps in 1.10. Will I recommend or use in the future sure if they fix the fps issues and by the way XVision will not work with X-Enviro but will work nicely with FSGW and Skymaxx .
regardless of exenviro's short comings i still love using it, and i love Xplane and the team behind it all, thank you for making this video and sharing it with us. the future looks bright for all
Being on a MacBook Pro, I had to return to XP-10 so I can keep the framerate in the range of 25fps or so. With the weather set at clear with no clouds and visibility down to about 5-6 SM, it does a fairly good job of being useful, BUT the problem is within about 15 seconds, the clouds keep crawling in, knocking the framerate down to the low teens with the visibility moving back up to 20+ SM, I took out all of the preferences, all of the plugins which involve weather, and it still continues to do that. This is enough to stop me from "flying" until I can afford a far better speed GPU with a Windoze machine. I even contacted X-Plane but have received no information back from them, so not sure exactly what to do. I wouldn't mind getting X-Enviro, but that is only going to knock my framerate down further. Any suggestions?
Which MBP? Even the models with discrete graphics adapters don't exactly have high end cards.. XP is extremely demanding. On my Ryzen 2700X and 1080 Ti build, it struggles to churn out more than 40 FPS at 1080p. I haven't ever bothered installing it on my mid-2015 MBP.
I was wondering my X-Plane 11 has been messing up as far as the controls landing gear won't come back down to get ready to land my thrusters are messed up don't have the power to take off and my autopilot turns its self off when ever I make a course correction. I have the rudder peddles and the thruster controllers 4 of the flight panels and a flight steering forgot the name but they are all the same brand. Also would I and am I allowed to delete my copy and reinstall it on the same computer. Sorry my comment is so long but I need help fixing my X-Plane 11 please help
FS 2020 is our saviour. I pity those who recently bought X-Enviro at 70$ (more than X-plane and with pityful fps ,quality/lighting) VS Microsoft Flight SImulator 2020 at 60$ standard edition (a whole sim with better performance,scenery,weather,engine etc, vanilla - out of the box perfection)
@@junogopik3808 MS2020 is just a pretty game, it’s not even close to as good a simulator as x-plane. The weather is not realistic. Flight dynamics are GTA like.
I really like Austin. So down to Earth and honest. I have the same monitor CHG90 but I find myself flying on a Samsung 65" 4K and it works amazingly well. I built a custom watercooled PC. Just swapped my 1080ti to a 2080ti last month. CPU is a 8700K. I have a moderate overclock on both and I get awesome FPS on the 4K screen with everything up quite high.
Question to simmers. I fly a 172 with a Garmin 430 and dual Garmin G5 Displays. What would be the best way to get this setup in a Simm? Is using my iPad for Gauges possible? I would purchase a realsimm 430 unit like this. If G5 is not possible in a 172 can I get it in another aircraft? I want to have my instrumentation on a iPad and just the Sky on the monitor. I have very little use for using keyboard and mouse when practicing with the 430. I like the tactile feel of buttons. If not possible could I at least get an HSI instrument on the iPad that talks to the HSI not just an older style VOR needle Instrument? Sorry about the amateur questions but I have never been into home simms. I have an interest now that I see some of these new devices hitting the market. I also fly twins and 182s but mostly 172 that I have easy cheap access to. I want to also hook into for flight on my iPad mini.
Well, if people want to support new technologies by buying this product, sure go ahead, maybe it will be perfected with your money and will be the new standard in some time. But now? Shaving foam, lava lamp, weather from a different planet (+artifacts) for 70 bucks. No, thank you. I prefer weather that is made with older technologies but actually looks immersive from more than one angle.
I think that it is not fair at all to engage X-Plane owner to propagate a certain product. If you both want to be objective then you have to check also other developer weather plugins! Beside this, 50% reduced fps and sheep clouds are not the best show. We should better wait and see what will come next before spending a lot of money...
Plus on a normal monitor would be less significant of a frame rate loss. That screen is nearly doubling the resolution being so wide, probably slightly less intensive then running a dual monitor system.
@@Alex-us2vw I'd imagine it depends what's causing the FPS drop- if it were the physics and interaction related to the clouds then you'd expect the FPS drop to be proportional on all Sims regardless of their specs. But if it was the actual rendering of the weather then as you said it would be worse on that display.
Exactly. I have always said the clouds look great from underneath. But from above, yuck. And yes, a good cloud texture package has at least 3 distinctive cloud type appearances: cumulus, Cirrus, and stratus. These clouds seem to look like more stratus than anything else.
so MSDS 2020.. clouds remind me of the artist, Maxfield Parish's clouds.. X-Planes clouds are ok.. but not amazing. There have been times when I was flying with local weather on..and sunset was happening that was breath taking . Just xplane clouds
I will probably buy Xeviro because i need these lights that looks real! I have seen trailers form Thomas Rasmussen and he uses Xeviro for his trailers. He says it’s great but only if you have a good pc. Which I don’t have as my pc is a gaming laptop and not a desktop:(
With an i7 and a powerful video card you can flight in a really good enviroment. Xenviro looks fantastic. The main problem of the current simulators is a lack of enviroment quality. In the sky as well as at the ground/airports. Also they seems not to manage well plugins with a drastic drop of fps. Waiting for fs2020.
I actually don’t think default XP clouds are all that bad. I have always thought that XP is better at generating flat, strataform clouds- that completely obscure the sky- than MS has ever been. Altostratus readily come to my mind.
xEnviro has issues, but I feel like the performance is tolerable. I think expecting such a huge improvement in cloud quality without turning down some sliders and sacrificing a bit of ground graphics is not very fair. I wouldn't sacrifice 30FPS for better clouds, but I totally would turn down some graphics setting in X-Plane to make a compromise.
Never owned X-Plane as I'm a user of MS/Lockheed sims, however after viewing this video I will purchase X-Plane as I want to support Austin. X-Plane also looks very nice.
I think you will be impressed with XP. It includes physics one would never think about, including tire friction. One time, many moons ago (XP-9?) I was showing one of my co-workers at All Nippon Airways about it. The captain was most impressed. I started it up at Akita airport on an icy runway with no engines running. Because of the crosswind blowing rather strongly, the plane started slipping a bit. He was impressed! To impress an A-320 captain takes quite a bit.
Austin is a great dude. If you haven't seen his documentary on how the patent system is being abused, it's a really great watch. It's called "The Patent Scam". Never thought I'd sit down to watch a feature length documentary on patent law, but it was one of the best things I've seen this year.
IT's basically Google Earth in a really nice rendering engine. But of course the question is: how much of a real sim is it, will it be subscription based instead of a one time buy? Looks pretty good though!
Yh, I love xplane, but as an air traffic controller, I suffer not having realistic ATC, xplane's ATC is rubbish even compared to FSX. You guys have been doing a good job, but if you guys don't upgrade to vulkan soon, and make the sim more immersive, like better looking water, better ATC etc. Microsoft Soft flight Simulator(2020) will be the end of you guys. No hate though, I love xplane 11, i'm just saying many of current xplane 11 user, like myself, transferred from P3D/FSX because of better performance and graphics and more realistic flight model, Flight simulator(2020) now has better graphics, better weather, we hope they've rebuilt the flight model, you guys are gonna lose a lot of simmers, you have a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it. Just my opinion, cheers.
I agree X-Plane could use more in the "hooks" department. The plugin API is somewhat sparse and primitive. It's not always possible to know what mode the simulator is in from the lack of messages when state changes occur and the lack of documentation associated with related data refs. It would be nice if we could access vertex and texture data in real-time. I speak from experience, having written a plugin for my BD-5J freeware plane. I know, I know, Laminar is a small company and I don't hold this against them. They do what they can when they can.
Yup. Skies and water need major overhaul. This together with Seasons would draw many from P3D, and their huge investments in that sim. I wouldn't even worry about FS2020. Even if its as good as the videos, it's Microsoft, and I for one, will never trust them to not abandon it again, sometime down the road.
I’m running a i7 8700 and a rtx2080 with 32gb of vengeance ram at 2666mhz (not 100% on ram speed) can get good fps in small planes etc but was wandering is it worth me going up to i9 9900k? Or sli 2080?
Hey, if someone pirates on X Plane 11 will they get banned from using X Plane 12 if they purchased it like off steam? That’s what happened to my friend.
If a GTX 2080 and i5 9 series can only acheive 30 fps with those visuals... Austin and his team have a lot of work to do on engine optimisation or MS Flight Sim is going to completely blow it out of the water. Simply adding Vulkan is not going to be enough.
might want to look further into software development rather than just thinking a plugin rendering those visuals is all it ends up being. there is much more to gain in the backend and its not as simple as drag and drop a folder into custom scenery and bam xplane cloud update.
@@Elios0000 The demo we did was GPU-bound. The CPU was not the limiting factor. MOST systems are CPU-bound, but GPU can be the issue in certain situations.
@@xforcepc not it wasnt AT all look at the frame times also shadows should not kill the cpu like they all this shit should be done in shaders now not on the FUCKING CPU LIKE ITS THE FUCKING 90's still
How do you get X-plane to run so smoothly? I have a fairly good PC but my sim is a very fast slide show, contacted X-Plane support who are quite frankly, absolutely useless!
@@xforcepc Hey thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I have a GTX 1080ti and an i7-8700k, I have my settings configured so that I'm apparently getting 60fps but it's just not at all fluid like this, also my anti-aliasing is horrendous which again I don't understand why, any help would really greatly be appreciated
@@xforcepc I have it OC'd to 4.2 ghz, my frames are jumping from 35 to 58 every couple of seconds which is making it stutter, the only setting I have maxed is number of world objects, the rest are 1 off the top, reflection completely off and no shadows on scenery. my anti aliasing is so bad everything with an edge is shimmering, it doesnt even look good anymore and im just not enjoying it anymore it looks like absolute crap, i spent a lot of money on my computer simply to run xplane and its actually putting me off flight simming
Oh well , that's pretty pathetic considering the quality/performance of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 . And you have to pay 70$(more than the sim X-Plane itself) for this low FPS mess that X-Enviro is. At the same time, with the vanilla - out of the box MFS 2020, you get something 1000 times better in every single aspect ,at the mind-boggling price of 60$ for the standard edition. You don't need a brain to make the right choice. But 70$ for X-Enviro , something so primitive and outdated? No fucking way I would ever give my money for that and believe me, I loved X-Plane, but now it's time is over(even with Vulkan).
This is a 1 year old video, that means the add on was probably in development longer. I don’t know if it makes sense to compare with MSFS2020. FS is clearly going to look the best from a graphics stand point.