Crash Fixing, Airports, Photometric Lighting

It’s been very busy here internally, but a few things to mention.

X-Plane 11.55 – Crash Fix

We’re focusing almost all of our effort on future technology, but Stairport reported a bug severe enough that we went for a patch: X-Plane would randomly crash when plugins use the new “instancing” drawing APIs.

The instancing APIs are the Vulkan-compatible way to draw objects from plugins, the way to add particle effects via plugins, and will someday support sound as well. Simply put, instancing is meant to be the foundation for plugin-created dynamic content. Third parties did a great job of switching to instancing to be Vulkan compatible when we released X-Plane 11.50, so having this API be rock-solid is really important.

With X-Plane 11.55, correctly written add-ons should “just work.” The interaction between instancing and datarefs does sometimes confuse developers, so I’ll cover that in some nerdy detail in a future post.

The Latest Gateway Airports

While we were cutting a hot patch, we took another set of airports from the X-Plane Airport Scenery Gateway – 11.55 features over 1000 new 3-d airports and 443 brand new airports. I remain amazed at the Gateway community’s progress and results.

X-Plane 11.55 release notes can be found here.

What Is Photometric Rendering

I’m excited to finally be able to talk about something I’ve been working on for a while now – the new photometric lighting pipeline. Here’s the preview video Chris and Thomson made:

X-Plane’s lighting and rendering have leveled up several times – in X-Plane 10 we moved to HDR with global lighting, and in X-Plane 11 we introduced Physically Based Rendering.

I know this kills, but it’s too soon to talk about release dates. I can say a little bit about what you’re seeing in the video though.

First, the new lighting pipeline is photometric. What that means is that color values during rendering match real world values (in real world units) through-out the entire rendering process. Rather than say “1.0 is a bright thing, and, um, 4.0 is a really bright thing”, with photometric rendering, there are real answers. The sun is about 120,000 lux. The blue sky might be 8000 cd/m^2. A landing light on the 737 might be 200,000 candela at its peak intensity.

The idea behind photometric rendering is to have all elements of the scene be calibrated to real world values so they all match each other. That cloud should match that sky and that airplane because they’re all in the same units. No more tweaks to try to make things match.

We shipped an HDR renderer years ago, but the new pipeline is, well, more HDR. A lot more HDR. Because we’re working in real world units, we have to maintain a wide HDR image from beginning right to the very end when we tone map. The result is that every part of the scene can have a wide dynamic range.

While our shipping pipeline dims displays during the day by darkening them (to give the appearance of wash-out), the new pipeline simply draws everything in real world units – the camera is simply set for day time exposure (set in real EV units like a real camera) and the displays look dim due to the camera.

The new pipeline features a new tone mapper – one thing you might notice from the videos is that color with the new pipeline are richer. This is partly because the new tone mapper (which works well with real-world illumination values and is HDR-display-ready) does a better job of preserving saturation.

Sun and sky colors in the new pipeline are driven by a new atmosphere and sky simulation – they’re not painted textures. We get the sun color from the composition of the atmosphere and the relative position of the sun and scenery.

Finally, the new pipeline can run screen space reflections (SSR), dynamic exposure, bloom and other effects (still to be previewed), all running with real world photometric HDR values.

Why Photometric Rendering?

The photometric renderer gets us a bunch of visual quality improvements and new effects that were high on our TODO list (and, based on the feedback site, yours too.)

Photometric rendering also serves as a foundation for a bunch of other features that are high on our priority list. That will be a topic of a future preview and a future blog post.