Visual immersion is a big focus of the latest update for X-Plane 12. The new 12.2.0 beta update brings with it upgrades to visual rendering, cloud rendering, cockpit lighting, performance improvements, and more. It’s quite the upgrade so here’s an overview of what you can expect.

New sky, new lighting, more!

This latest update is very visually focused and with good reason as X-Plane 12, though an enhancement over prior updates, is still playing catch-up visually with the rest of the industry. The latest updates look to be helping things along.

Cloud rendering is one piece of the puzzle and Laminar Research are reporting that the clouds now have more realistic shadows, a new algorithm creates better looking cloud formations, and new scattering effects give the edges of denser clouds those characteristic silhouettes. Clouds also cast shadows on other clouds and ambient lighting is reflected by the clouds now too.

Another element that’s seen an update is the lighting system. Laminar report better colour accuracy and more natural lighting.

Another big change to the lighting is the addition of what Laminar are calling “exposure fusion” and which might otherwise be described as a kind of HDR lighting solution. Compositing the dark and light scenes together and better exposing the end result looks to have solved the long standing dark cockpit problem.

They’ve also made changes to how clouds are rendered on screen and which clouds get more priority for details and which don’t. The rendering issues that appear around aircraft infront of clouds is apparently fixed now.

Point lighting is also improved with enhancements letting them render more lights more quickly.

Other updates

That’s not all because there are a few other features that they’ve been working on. Weather effects now appear on roads with rain, puddles and snow now appearing on those surfaces too. Airport ground textures have been upgraded with a new decal system leading to better resolution of painted surfaces.

There are ATC upgrades with better VFR handling, a new request start-up call, and improved options.

New options for braking, parking brakes, and wheel chocks are available for aircraft designers with several Laminar aircraft getting the treatment in the beta.

To top that all off, the X1000 has been updated with more realistic STAR entry, AGL altitude support in VNAV, smoother panning, and more versatile user-defined waypoints.

With all of that in mind, this is a beta and there are likely going to be some issues sorted out as the developers work to get 12.2.0 ready for the full release. They also warn about some plugins and modifications causing trouble with the new lighting schemes so you may want to run a clean version of the sim when trying the new setup out.

Read the full report over here!