After a longer period of silence from the developers, a post has been made on the Threshold Forums announcing the release of a new version of xEnviro – v1.14. The long silence was explained to be due to unspecified restraints earlier this year that the developers did not expect. As originally expected, this update brings solely performance improvements to the addon.
Unfortunately, as the update development took part during Vulkan beta testing, the developers did not want to build on an unstable platform, and therefore xEnviro v1.14 is not compatible with the Vulkan rendering engine. We can expect Vulkan compatibility to come with the v1.15 update.
With Vulkan we will probably see another headroom for fps but do NOT expect too much here
Magnus – Threshold Forums
After Vulkan we’ll probably have a look at multi screen support, VR compatibility as soon as it’s reasonable to do so.
Magnus – Threshold Forums
The community was reassured, that the upcoming updates will not take as long as this update took to release. This was explained that was because the previous updates were very broad and complicated, but were necessary.
A rough road map has been included in the post:
- 1.15 Vulkan
- 1.16 Spherical buffer
- 1.17 Low level fog
- 1.19 Precipitation volume | Atmosphere shadows
- 1.20 Thunderstorms
- 1.21 Night environment
As part of the performance update we have added three sliders that directly affect quality/performance. These can be adjusted live while flying!
Magnus – Threshold Forums
In addition, missing dynamic seasons were addressed in the post. It was mentioned, that the dynamic seasons will not be present in Vulkan version of xEnviro. Further, this was written:
If we manage to convince Laminar to give us access to what we need in Vulkan, then we will add that in as soon as we have it back! As it stands now that is a discussion we don’t have the energy or time to take now.
Magnus – Threshold Forums
xEnviro can be purchased through the Threshold Store for approximately €59.
Thanks Full-Flight for reminding us about the event at our Discord server!
Source: Threshold Forums
