Microsoft Flight Webisode #3

[darem 84]

I'm not comparing Outerra with FSX, what I am saying is give this engine to a 3rd party scenery makers and let see what would happen.....like I said before the main players interested in Outerra engine are all in the flight simulation business....Outerra is not I repeat NOT in the scenery business.

A procedural engine doesn't feel well when mixed with custom scenery...

[dtrjones 356]

Mixed feelings...It looks like more densely packed autogen with some water effects that REX/ASX/FEX cannot give us in FSX.I also noticed a brief shadow moving across the wind during the flight... perhaps cloud or terrain shadowing?Still I have my hopes up for something yummy!

Mixed feelings maybe but its early days, I think the latest video is pretty cool. You can clearly see the trees are more like 3d models, thats going to make a huge difference, they are animated much better as a model, can reflect light - see the shadow cast between the valley - some light reaching the forrest floor, nice effect. It also looks like they've got reflections plugged in, which is going to add a nice touch to the next set of screenshots when they come out. I love the way the tree shadows move in the wind, its a very neat effect when looking at the silluette of the tree shadows on the ground. Good spot on the shadow moving accross the plane, pretty sure thats from the surrounding scenery however wouldn't that suggest the sun is setting / rising which doesn't appear likely in the video...All very promising and a lot of new stuff coming out from Microsoft this early in the development cycle. For others out there - getting a little tired of people saying its like FSX or using the FSX engine, please please please be patient, stay stum for a little while longer and give the developers a chance to work there magic, if its like FSX in 12 months time then fine, I won't be meeting you in the hanger at boeing fields but I'll wish you all the best anyway....Cheers,Dave.

[Attila 2]

There is far more to a flight simulator than just rendering the terrain. How much of the CPU/GPU power is being used to render these videos and how much is left to simulate/render everything else?We can push the rendering to very realistic levels in a sim, but then do not expect the rest (flight dynamics, weather, AI, etc) to be anywhere near where you want them to be.I would say that I can compromise on how trees and water look from a few thousand feet, but not on how clouds look and weather is simulated, not to mention the real important stuff like how well flight itself is simulated.There are plenty of things that can be improved upon in FSX, but terrain graphics quality really isn't a top priority for many people. Given the processing cost of some of the things people are asking for (ex: cloud shadows) these features should never even be considered before we get proper simulation of ground effect, slip, spin, etc, without a 3rd party developer having to spend weeks on figuring out how to do these for a few planes.

[mgh 89]

There are cheap BMW's and expensive Toyota's, what's your point?:(

What was your original point then?

[Mike T 211]

Hey guys,Microsoft has posted this new webisode of "Flight" to their showcase. I don't know if it'll be on the actual Flight website itself, but nevertheless, enjoy!http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/098672e6-98fc-43b6-92f5-b424696e40ccPersonally I love the new mountain scenery but I want to start seeing more than just scenery, such as atmosphere, airliners, etc.What are your thoughts?

1. Water is about the same as you have with FSX and REX installed2. Love the landscape casting shadows on the plane3. Love the landscape casting shadows on itself.4. Love the huge amount of autogen trees, crip textures and near field haziness as one would find in a humid tropical environmentHowever, it is obvious that FLIGHT will be evolutionary vs FSX and not revolutionary. It certainly is "nice"...but how nice?The question will be will the evolution be enough for me to spend thousands of dollars buying all of my FSX addon's again? Will it be evolutionary enough for me to spend hundreds of hours customizing my envionment from scratch again? Will it be evolutionary enough to wait years and years for developers to re-release new versions of FSX aircraft and scenery?Assuming FLIGHT get's released this year, PMDG 737NGX will be less than a year old and LDS 757 will be only a few months old (if at all). So far I'm not jumping up and down and drooling so we'll just have to see what the finished product looks like. I think that for FS9 users this will be much more thrilling especially if they skipped going to FSX. For heavily invested FSX users...well..again, we'll have to wait and see the finished product. Personall, I don't want to see any more shots of Hawaii because it is obviously a "detailed area", what I want to see is Po'Dunk Idaho and that will really reveal what the rest of the FSX world looks like.

[strider1 575]

I think your doing Microsoft a huge disservice - ok outerra has slopped runways, dense trees and clear, scalable computer scenery. Outerra can look pretty, but others would say its pretty mundane. All the examples I've seen make it look like very old fasion CGI graphics, Tron of the FS world (and not the new version either) not a world I wouldn't want to explore it at all. Also simmerhead, i like your posts and I know you do recognise the work Microsoft are doing - but I do remember you saying Flight looked cartoonish.... You can't get any more disney than outerra LOL. Please don't get me wrong, outerra's ok but its far from anything real regards SIM'ing is concerned - its modelling in the vids is very basic, and based on graphics its still no DCS A-10C Warthog.Cheers,Dave.

Outerras ocean looks alot better then Flights ocean ! Ocean Rendering !!!!

[dtrjones 356]

1. Water is about the same as you have with FSX and REX installed

I'd be very surprised if the water modelling was finished. They've changed the textures to suit the ambiance of the day night cycle, shadows seem better portrayed on water too. I believe they have still to work on the water modelling and textures so we'll just have to wait and see what they come up with.

The question will be will the evolution be enough for me to spend thousands of dollars buying all of my FSX addon's again? Will it be evolutionary enough for me to spend hundreds of hours customizing my envionment from scratch again? Will it be evolutionary enough to wait years and years for developers to re-release new versions of FSX aircraft and scenery?

I think Flight will be slightly different, I can see many people running Flight along side a heavily customised FSX, why not. This was a consideration with FS9 and FSX, but I can see Flight bringing in a few different angles and I think even the hardcore FSX'er would want to run Flight side by side just to see, the bottom line is its peanuts to pay for relatively speaking so why not have both.

Personally, I don't want to see any more shots of Hawaii because it is obviously a "detailed area", what I want to see is Po'Dunk Idaho and that will really reveal what the rest of the FSX world looks like.

Hawaii has a good veriety of scenery so Microsoft are using this place as a base for creating new technologies. I'm not sure you get what Microsoft have demonstrated so far. Hawaii might well be a detailed area, but most of the tech demos we've seen are based on default scenery, that's whats so pleasing - the tech will then be used all over the world, obviously with some regional variation of autogen and textures. The only custom scenery really has been the night time shot, but that appeared to include some FSX building autogen which I'm pretty confident will be updated anyway. We did also see some custom airport buildings as well and they looked amazing.However the 'detail' and custom scenery really has yet to arrive, I can't wait to see what Microsoft cook up!Cheers, Dave.

[Guest veeray]

I think maybe what veeray was digging at is that software development (in this case FLIGHT) is often held back by the need to be backwards compatible.Bryan.

Often it's held back. and often time It ends up being a big waste of the developers time to even support legacy products. And besides Microsoft broke/deprecated enough of DX9 intentionally that it's not even possible.

[dmaher 0]

1. Water is about the same as you have with FSX and REX installed

Actually Flight's ocean appears to use higher resolution textures.My pet peeve is FSX's low res wave maps...Flight's looking very good ;)

[Scoggs 0]

Ii thought it looked quite good. Looks very promising IMO. Just out of curiosity, did the video stutter for anyone or is that just me.

[HoratioWondersocks 4]

oooh!Those videos are so tantalizing .Actually they are shorter than tantalizing ,you naughty Msoft peoples.Andy

[ccaughie 0]

Looks nice to me, my only concern is that it looks kind of jerky, in much the same way that FSX videos tend to look jerky.Obviously this could be to do with the way the video was captured, but if the sim were smooth I'm sure Microsoft could figure out how to make the video smooth.Early days of course, but I do hope they work on this. Silky smooth motion would make a massive difference to the sim even if nothing else changed from FSX.Colin

[phillroath 1]

Well Flight is suppose to help Games for Windows... part of that is selling more copies of Windows 7. I say I'm going to enjoy it because when it comes time I'm sure people will come up with the wild and clever complaints on why their 10 year OS should run the latest Windows titles.

OK - that makes sense. Guess I'm one of the rare ones, I load a new flight sim and see how much I can maximize it and then start to decide if that's good, or do I spend a little of my kids inheritance and get the latest in computers.I agree that those who keep an older system going like me should not complain if/when the new does not give super duper performance out of the box. Phill

[FlyingsCool 3]

Price of a bicycle .....

I WISH I could get a bicycle for the price of Flight :)

[fly_like_an_eagle 10]

who needs outterra when there is Wings of Prey?http://www.airwargame.com//eng

the best and all-you-can-eat autogen - mega tons of it, cloud shadows, fantastic rain drops in VC, most realistic colors, highest framerates, no stutters, best graphics in any pc based FS simulator I have seen. too bad it is military. this is what I will compare FLIGHT's graphics against. FLIGHT preview videos are lame compared to this already 1 year old game.just download some 720p versions of the Wings of Prey videos from youtube and play them back from harddisk so you can enjoy the smooth as silk frame rates, or better yet, download the free demo version and do some touch'n goes, simply breathtaking.This is what FLIGHT should have been, or looked like.