A few hours ago, Laminar Research has held a Q&A session on Youtube, Livestreamed with allof the team members present, answering and providing information on how the team is progressing on the upcoming v11.30 update, and a future updates pipeline. Many of the questions provided by users are commonly asked questions from the X-Plane community, such as Seasons, the Citation X, Water rendering, and Vulkan - so the session definitely brings closure to many questions tht were repeatedly asked around the community.

Forum user Ðŗąçø has kindly produced a summary of all the discussed content and new information from the session.

Summary:

• Vulkan: End of year window is going to be a very tight deadline; great for increasing CPU usage and reducing stuttering; addons that draw in 3D (not objects) will need to be adjusted for Vulkan (planes, scenery and 2D addons should just work); Vulkan does not use the current .glsl shaders
• 11.30: New shaders that will work with Vulkan; private alpha should be released this week; cloud transparency bug fixed last night; jet engine wind milling to be improved
• SLI/Crossfire: Unlikely to ever be supported as it's just a waste of time; not very effective; hard to get it working
• Particle system: Windshield effects unlikely to be modelled without 3rd part hack (because they aren't really particles in a 3D sense, so hard to add); scenery support is on the roadmap, but may not ship in 11.30
• ATC system: VFR and real-world procedures biggest requests; will be an ever-evolving thing; work has begun by re-doing the voice system, which has unearthed a lot of unknown bugs; will use Text-To-Speech to do voice, then post-process it in FMOD -> faster to code; bugs will then be fixed and also flying into mountains
• Scenery: To have FMOD and particle system eventually; to become compatible with things such as IVAP
• Seasonal textures: Likely never going to happen (it's just too time-consuming)
• Night lighting range: Still unknown due to performance issues
• Citation X: Discussed, nothing new mentioned. The team were about to release the Citation X, but it did not meet quality standards, so it was blown off
• Sea planes: Austin (Founder and King) will get seaplane rating soon, then he'll get the data he needs
• Brown tiles bug: [A bit like the XPLM bug] Hard to reproduce, but DO FILE MORE BUG REPORTS IF YOU GET THEM
• Water: To be improved at some point
• Tail dragger ground handling: Now better in 11.30 due to better aerodynamics
• World Editor (WED): Next version to include OpenStreetMap and other data
• Mobile: Update this autumn; aircraft will be improved, but much the same as desktop: time-consuming

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Laminar Research has also noted that the team was in talks with DarkSpace, the developer behind xEnviro, supplying them with the information needed to fix xEnviro's cockpit camera issues.

Thank you Ðŗąçø for writing the summary! Truly exciting times ahead for X-Planers!

You may view the full session on Youtube:

PART 1:

PART 2:

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