The billboarding scheme for cloud puffs has been rewritten for X-Plane 10; for the most part you should not see puffs spinning or reorienting themselves as you move the camera.  However, while poking at the cloud puff shader, I managed to induce this picture on the left.  The weather system makes some of the best bug screenshots.

(The post was originally labeled “bug or tornado”…I changed it because it seemed obnoxious after what happened in Joplin, MO – just me being a jerk from the East Coast.  A few days later we were hit by a series of Tornadoes fairly close to home.)

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

11 comments on “Bug or Hurricane?

  1. I don’t think this hurricane is so bad as you’re always in the middle of its eye. But other than that, billboards are evil. They just can’t behave normally. 🙁

  2. FWIW, I thought the tornado bit was pretty funny, and the town where I was born got flattened by the Alabama tornado outbreak this April. (Barely missed my parents’ house.) I guess I have a sick sense of humor.

    Could you not use a similar system to the new propeller billboarding scheme to eliminate the problem of billboard “gimbal lock” at high viewing angles by fading in an above/below sprite?

  3. I see tantalizing glimpses of beautiful clouds behind that pic! I’m looking forward to more ‘good’ shots of the cloud system, as that adds to the feeling of reality as much as a well lit house (but not Dorothy’s house).

  4. Hello Mister Supnik !!

    I love to come frequently on your blog, loads of infos, resolved bug etc.. that’s interesting, really. But I have just a simple question :

    Could we have, just one time, a screenshot of X-Plane 10 as how it looks now, with full graphic option ON,to see how it looks for the moment, to see plausible cities, new generation planes, blades of grass etc !

    For the moment, we only see bugs on X-Plane 9 world. I know this sim is away to be released, but those kind of screenshots would really be appreciated. Thanks a lot, have a nice day.

    1. I’ll answer this and say what I’m pretty sure Ben would say. We’re not posting “marketing” type screenshots yet because NONE of us have a complete picture of the the sim just yet. Think of a car without paint or trim yet. It’s not going to be very sexy to look at. That doesn’t make it any less fast or less powerful or less equipped but…still not going to turn many heads.

      Believe me, when we have something attractive to show off, we will.

      1. Chris beat me to it. 🙂 I don’t want to stop my regular flow of work to pre-integrate partly done art elements, only to create a picture of “the whole sim” in progress that everyone is going to then obsess over nitpicking when there were a ton of to-do items on every element in that shot.

        The pictures I have been posted are usually designed to illustrate one _particular_ aspect of the sim, often one that might be of interest to third party developers.

  5. I think the scenery ones with the houses and yards and sidewalks are what you want. Weather is still in progress and we’ve had some videos of ATC and global lighting. What else is there?

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