X-Plane 11, the detailed flight simulator is finally closing in on an update that will bring in Vulkan support as detailed in a new developer blog post.
Firstly though, the upcoming X-Plane 11.40 update is going to be focusing on the physics. They've spent a good six months going over their physics system as part of an upgraded and currently experimental flight model. The new system will not be the default in the 11.40 update but it will eventually replace the current flight model. If you're interested in learning more about that side of it, see the video included below (Vulkan info below the vid):
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The more exciting part for Linux fans of this sim is likely the Vulkan API addition coming with X-Plane 11.50. This is going to be a huge change, making it more modern and prepares X-Plane 11 for future enhancements as the foundation of what comes next.
It won't be done quickly though, as they said they expect the beta period for Vulkan to "be a relatively long one" but they want to get it out the door and started this year. Sounds like their team are quite excited about using Vulkan (and Metal for macOS) as they say a lot more of what happens compared to OpenGL will be directly inside their own code. They claim what happens inside the drivers are "more predictable, bounded, and can be viewed via modern profiling tools". They think it "should be straightforward to get the information we need to really make the Vulkan renderer scream".
For those of you interested, I've started following their developer blog posts to keep an eye on it for more information on when X-Plane 11.40 and X-Plane 11.50 will actually release in full.
You can pick up X-Plane 11 on Steam and the official site.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: Mountain ManQuoting: ArdjeThe bigger question for the flight sim world is when does MS 2020 come out, which is the only title that will bring me back to Windows for gaming if it does not run on Wine/Proton and which looks bonkers amazing and which could make XP 11 somewhat irrelevant...If all you care about is eye-candy then X-Plane might become "irrelevant", but X-Plane has always been the king of physics and flight dynamics.
But before you declare MS Flight Simulator 2020 the king of graphics, the trick is actually very simple: orthophotos, a trick that has been around for years, and you can add for free to X-Plane 11, assuming you have the time to generate them from publicly available satellite imagery resources, and the several terabytes of hard drive space to store them. My hunch is that MSFS 2020 will not store the considerable amounts of data on user's hard drives but will be an online-only title that will pull down the data only as needed.
And while orthophotos generally look good, they come with certain problems, such as textures sometimes being oddly stretched over surface geometry, "baked in" shadows that don't match the in-game lighting, dynamic roads not lining up with the photos so that you end up with oddities like cars driving through buildings, generated 3D structures that don't line up with the photos leading to flattened buildings, visible seams between photo textures where they don't perfectly line up, and so on. And, yes, every single one of these problems is visible in the MSFS 2020 trailer, but the deliberately fast-paced editing makes them hard to spot.
What I got from previews is that they are doing some autogen-stuff from open-street-maps like X-Plane is doing it.. And that can be good-looking in some areas (if you fine-tune it), but it won't all over the globe (OSM data is not perfect, I do recall a couple of places where i.e. an automatically generated bridge would suddenly have a 20m step in the middle to match adjoining terrain heights). When looking at X-Plane's "home" terrain it also looks absolutely amazing, but that's not representative for the whole globe. So, as MSFS development doesn't have thousands of terrain "designers" I'd expect huge differences in quality between popular and other areas.
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Quoting: peta77What I got from previews is that they are doing some autogen-stuff from open-street-maps like X-Plane is doing it.. ...but it won't all over the globeAs I replied to someone earlier, they've released all the details on it. It will not be autogen based on open maps, but will be faithful representations based on streamed Bing Maps, 2 pedabytes of data worth, with algorithms deciding on 3D building representations based on Bing Maps appearance. And it WILL BE THE ENTIRE WORLD. Anything Bing Maps has done will be in the game. More populous areas will have higher detail maps and they'll do more customized maps of high use areas (Paris, NYC, etc). Want to know how good your favorite areas will be in MS2020? Check out how detailed the Bing Map is now.
Alpha hands on previews by journalists, who could on their own select anywhere in the world to fly (their hometown, where they work, where they went to college, landmarks, etc) were stunned at the level of 3D detail far in excess of anything in existence right now. They said it allows for true VFR flying now... And this is just the alpha. Looking forward to it!
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Quoting: iiariQuoting: peta77What I got from previews is that they are doing some autogen-stuff from open-street-maps like X-Plane is doing it.. ...but it won't all over the globeAs I replied to someone earlier, they've released all the details on it. It will not be autogen based on open maps, but will be faithful representations based on streamed Bing Maps, 2 pedabytes of data worth, with algorithms deciding on 3D building representations based on Bing Maps appearance. And it WILL BE THE ENTIRE WORLD. Anything Bing Maps has done will be in the game. More populous areas will have higher detail maps and they'll do more customized maps of high use areas (Paris, NYC, etc). Want to know how good your favorite areas will be in MS2020? Check out how detailed the Bing Map is now.
Alpha hands on previews by journalists, who could on their own select anywhere in the world to fly (their hometown, where they work, where they went to college, landmarks, etc) were stunned at the level of 3D detail far in excess of anything in existence right now. They said it allows for true VFR flying now... And this is just the alpha. Looking forward to it!
So next MSFS sounds like an impressive flight sim. But having the map data source online definitely can be a problem, depending on your internet connection. So the should be having a good caching strategy or a prefetch functionality for it to be still usable even if you live in a region with bad internet. That's why I really like it that X-Plane is still available as a DVD box. Downloading the (U)HD meshes just has always been a big thing where my internet connection was "unavailable" for a couple of days. And even that still isn't enough to do real VFR in X-Plane. So it will be really interesting how good their strategy will perform. But, whatever the results will be, it surely will have an effect on the development road-map of X-Plane. I really hope they are able to keep up with the competition and can provide similar quality with the next big release as I definitely prefer to be using my Linux-PC.
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Quoting: peta77So next MSFS sounds like an impressive flight sim. But having the map data source online definitely can be a problem, depending on your internet connection. So the should be having a good caching strategy or a prefetch functionality for it to be still usable even if you live in a region with bad internet.Yes, your connection quality will matter quite a bit. My best bet is it'll be like Stadia, where you'll need 35-50 Mbps for best performance and about 10 Mbps to participate at all. Or maybe not that much, given that ortho scenery works quite well with older drives, not requiring SSD's.
Regarding other options, they're way ahead of you :). You'll be able to fly completely offline (which reviewers said even that version was better quality than our existing options) and you'll be able to pre-cache your frequently flown areas for use without streaming as well, limited only by your storage space.
Unless this is going to run on Steam like FSX, I really doubt we'll see it work on Linux, even on Wine. If it's the genre redefining title it seems like it's shaping up to be, I'm fully prepared to buy a totally extra Windows PC just to run it (and, of course, run everything else on my Linux rig :) ).
Last edited by iiari on 20 October 2019 at 5:21 am UTC
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Cyba.Cowboy Oct 20, 2019
Quoting: iiariQuoting: ArdjeQuoting: SkipperroMan... I'm collecting everything with Vulkan support and I have X-Plane on my wishlist for a long time, but I'm not as big of the simulator fan to pay freaking 65$ for it. I would rather save it for Kerbal Space Program 2.I have X-Plane also on my wishlist. I did have some fun with Euro Truck Simulator, but I guess X-Plane is more realistic. And I actually don't want that.Quoting: EhvisCompletely different beasts. ETS2 is still a game. It's open ended, but the simulation level and mechanics are still geared to have fun even without skill. X-Plane is not a game, it is just a simulator. I think most flight simulator enthusiasts will tell you that flight simulation is a hobby. With matching time consumption and expenses. I have many hours in various X-Plane version, but haven't done too much of it lately and I'm getting rusty to a degree where I couldn't even get my B727 started any more. :DYeah, absolutely what @Ehvis said above. X-Plane is a hard core sim to the level that flight schools actually use dedicated commercial versions of it to train future pilots. There really is no "game" here unless you buy mission or sim-economy mods, which people say are a lot of fun but I just don't have the time for...
Call it "geeky", but this post just sold me on X-Plane, 100%... Knowing that this Linux supported flight simulator is so in-depth and complete makes me want to rush out and buy it now - except that right now, I only own a laptop with above-average gaming capabilities - so it will sit on my "wish" list for the time being.
Does X-Plane support all those fancy flight simulator input / output devices (such as all the stuff Logitech sells? What about virtual reality headsets - are they supported under Linux-based operating systems?
If those things are supported, I could build a pretty slick - Linux powered - flight simulator in my garage... ;-)
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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyDoes X-Plane support all those fancy flight simulator input / output devices (such as all the stuff Logitech sells? What about virtual reality headsets - are they supported under Linux-based operating systems?
I think most things are supported. Couldn't name one that isn't. And with a bit of work, you can add devices with images and definitions yourself since it is all config files. Although Logitech does not represent what is fancy. You could spend thousands on high grade yokes and throttle quadrants. :D Not sure about the cockpit stuff though since a lot of it is driven by plugins.
VR headsets are supported on Linux via SteamVR. Although getting the Index to work is a bit fiddly at the moment is it won't actually map its primary trigger. Which you need to actually map something.
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Cyba.Cowboy Oct 20, 2019
Quoting: Mountain ManI agree that competition is a good thing.
Gonna be picky here, but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is not expected to support Linux-based operating systems though, so technically, X-Plane has no real competition...
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Mountain Man Oct 21, 2019
Quoting: Cyba.CowboyNot on the Linux platform, at least; unfortunately, Linux is only a tiny sliver of X-Plane's overall sales, so frankly, we're lucky Laminar chooses to support it at all.Quoting: Mountain ManI agree that competition is a good thing.
Gonna be picky here, but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is not expected to support Linux-based operating systems though, so technically, X-Plane has no real competition...
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: Cyba.CowboyCall it "geeky", but this post just sold me on X-Plane, 100%... Knowing that this Linux supported flight simulator is so in-depth and complete makes me want to rush out and buy it now - except that right now, I only own a laptop with above-average gaming capabilities - so it will sit on my "wish" list for the time being.Oh, no, you should do the opposite and definitely buy it. It might actually run reasonably well on low to medium settings. I've read of it even being quite playable on low end hardware. The problem is you shouldn't expect to upgrade graphics or mods all that much. And don't think some hardware tweaks here or there will help, as an additional issue with XP11 is the code is older, utilizing a single core only no matter how many you've got and passing very little through the GPU. So some users, like one of the posters up above, are frustrated that monster i9's with 2080 Ti's are limping along at 25 FPS with beefly graphics mods and that doesn't represent a dramatic improvement in FPS over their old 1050 Ti gaming laptop. The code just can't do much with the better hardware. That's where MS2020 will be a game changer potentially, being coded for the machines of today...
Quoting: Cyba.CowboyDoes X-Plane support all those fancy flight input / output devices (such as all the stuff Logitech sells? What about virtual reality headsets - are they supported under Linux-based operating systems?I can't speak for VR, which I don't use, but yes, all the other toys work very well and the sim overall runs via easy to understand and modify scripts, configs, and .ini's, and thus is perhaps the most infinitely configurable title I've ever played.
If those things are supported, I could build a pretty slick - Linux powered - flight simulator in my garage... ;-)
Last edited by iiari on 21 October 2019 at 3:31 am UTC
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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyI can't imagine even the hardest core, Richard Stallman worshiping Linux flight sim fan wouldn't do a dual boot or get a new machine to run MS 2020 when it comes out (assuming Proton doesn't work). I mean, dating myself here, I'm a flight simmer back to C64 and Apple IIe days, and MS2020 seems to be what we've all been waiting for our entire lives. It looks that good. Also, the dev team has been doing astonishing communication with the community, with near weekly updates and vids, and some of those vids have been terrific. They have an amazingly candid and detailed timeline online that they update regularly. They're also fully planning to embrace the third party mod community which has kept FSX and P3D alive all these years, very directly opposite the stand-offish reputation that Laminar XP has with that community. MS seems fully aware of current FSX and XP weaknesses and are addressing those. The only ones I can see being disappointed would be those using VR, as they've said they don't expect that working on release.Quoting: Mountain ManI agree that competition is a good thing.
Gonna be picky here, but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is not expected to support Linux-based operating systems though, so technically, X-Plane has no real competition...
Last edited by iiari on 21 October 2019 at 3:39 am UTC
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