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Flyinside XP

PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:14 pm
by Tony
Some sad news today from Dan =

It is with regret that we announce the discontinuation of FlyInside XP. It's been over two years since we first launched our plugin for X-Plane, bringing X-Plane 10, and then X-Plane 11 into virtual reality, opening up a whole new world for flight-simmers. Although we've worked hard to support many engine updates over this time, as of X-Plane 11.30 we are no longer able to provide our own VR integration.

From a technical stand-point, X-Plane has closed off their shaders. Without shader source code shipping with the simulator, there's just no way for us to properly inject VR. We spent a lot of time working on a solution, in an attempt to achieve 11.30+ compatibility, but over the last week we've determined that it simply isn't possible to make this work reliably.

We're researching the possibility of turning "FlyInside XP" into a lighter layer which sits atop native VR while providing virtual window imports, Leap Motion hands, and some of our other features. It's largely unknown how this will work though, or how long it could take, so in the mean-time we're discontinuing sales of FlyInside XP. Anyone who ordered in the last month (December 25th 2018 or later) may contact support@flyinside-fsx.com. We're offering either a full refund or a transition to any other FlyInside product of your choice, including FlyInside Flight Simulator.

Technical Details:
As part of their transition to Vulkan, X-Plane now ships shaders as precompiled "SPIR-V" byte-code. A large portion of FlyInside's rendering interception works by rewriting shaders on the fly. We invested a huge amount of time in creating a "shader decompile -> edit -> recompile" system, but over the last week it's become clear that it simply isn't a feasible approach.