…between myself and X-Plane’s deferred rendering engine.  It is a battle to get correct alpha blending behavior when scenery objects fade with distance.  Current casualties include a good chunk of the existing HDR shader code and my sanity. Once there is a victory (no guarantees it will be me) we’ll cut beta five.

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.

12 comments on “Beta 5 Hinges on the Outcome of the Great War…

  1. Good luck with the cut..

    PS.. Hope you can consider to have a slider option for HDR coloring, the existing daylight HDR seems to be a bit to much, so an user option such as cloud slider would be excellent 🙂

    Anyway, again best of luck with the alpha blending

  2. Ben,

    I’ve fought such coding wars myself.
    Keep up ! What you have already achieved is really impressive for the technically inclined minds.
    X-plane is a technical wonder. Making it multiplatform is indeed insane !
    I sympathize.

    PS: not sure it’s related but I’ve had pain due to rounding errors in the shaders lately.

  3. Incidentally, kudos are due to the weather team. The clouds and random algorithms are superb. Even the turbulence is quite good although wind gusts at altitude in the clear is somewhat suspect (I’m not talking about CAT). Things could be improved if random generation is based on the previous generated weather plus a random change factor, and not randomly starting from scratch on every launch. Which brings up another point:

    I would’ve thought the random weather preference to still be set on relaunching the sim, but a few times I’ve checked showed it reset to uniform for the whole world.

    I tend to fly acf that rattle, jiggle and break so anything overdone stands out. Today I skirted the edges of a large cell and everything worked together nicely. Later I flew directly into a red zone (at imprudent speeds) and the outcome was equally seamless and expected (though catastrophic). I’d say we’re in a sweet spot.

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