XSB, Older Systems Support and claims not to make

[Christopher Collins]

Just to make things clear, when you submit a issue to the XSB website, you must read the submission instructions otherwise I won't respond to you directly - failures to follow instructions in earnest result in no direct response. This has been my policy since I put up the reporting page and it's clearly set out on the page.

 

Sometimes I get some really strange claims from users. Sometimes these deserve public statements.

 

Today's bogus claim:

 

(in regards to the simulator rate enforcement feature)

"... it should be changed because XSB is marketed to Mac users who don’t have the most powerful devices"

 

Let me deal with this claim right here and now.

 

First, I do not market XSB to anybody - it's a hobby project, and it's provided as is, gratis, for users who are capable of using it.

 

Secondly, if there are individuals who are misrepresenting XSB, then they can take responsibility for their words - I shall not, nor am I obliged to - it's lunacy to suggest otherwise.

 

XSB is an add-on for X-Plane, and X-Plane itself works across a range of differing systems depending on the version of X-Plane you are using.

 

With any version of X-Plane, add-ons you install will change the requirements depending on their requirements. This includes scenery.

 

XSB's big sole requirement on top of X-Plane is video memory and a tiny bit of CPU time - it requires more video memory to handle the CSL textures. Large traffic environments? larger overhead. Can't help it. It's just the way computers work.

 

Because it increases the simulator requirements, you really need to make sure everything is running quite comfortably before you add a pilot client to the mix. This said, XSB2's requirements should work out better on most systems than XSB1.3's as practically all of the audio and voice processing is now handled in a separate thread, which means the audio mixing and decoding no longer eats into rendering CPU time.

 

Also, XSB 2 supports both X-Plane 10 and 11. We can absolutely support older systems, as long as they're running an appropriate version of X-Plane. We cannot magically make X-Plane perform better, and as I indicated above, if anything, XSB may make X-Plane perform worse.

 

X-Plane 11, right now, out of the box, requires a fairly performant system - more critically for RAM and CPU than GPU (although a bad GPU will also produce issues) - a lot of people seem to miss this point. Based on data I've seen so far and my own experiences, I've a fairly high certainty that a lot of performance problems users experience are based on having the CPU-dependent settings set too high for their systems on top of any other issues their system may have.

 

It is my personal opinion that Laminar understated their minimums for 11 (although they are technically correct as it can technically run on such systems, but it's extremely hard to get them to run in real-time), but from my own experience, their recommended is about right as a starting point.

 

X-Plane 10, on the other hand, is still supported by XSB and will be for XSB 2's lifespan. You can still buy XP10 from Laminar, and I believe aerosoft is still selling media for it. Whilst XP10 is an older simulator, if you have an older or lower performance system, it may be a better choice.

 

In either case, with either version of the simulator, if you cannot run the simulator with adequate performance because you haven't attempted to correct any rendering settings for the addons you have installed, or even haven't made the effort to set them correctly to begin with, that's entirely your problem - please try to address that first - Laminar has posted guidance in their manuals, and there are links here on this forum linking to those items and to tools that may help. Please actually read the Laminar manual as it is quite insightful as to how to determine what you should change to improve your performance.

 

If you think there's a error in the detection, then you must submit the evidence required as set out by the known issues post (it's the almost the same for such claims with XPilot - just I need the usual XSB reporting details too, such as the unmodified/intact Log.txt). Once I have that in hand, I can [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ess if there's a bug in the detector or not.

 

Trying to make arguments that are not grounded by data or reality will not get you what you want.