XP 10 Landscapes

[GoranM 3,762]

Some X Plane scenery for the ones that were dying to see it.http://www.x-plane.c...-10-landscapes/Edit: My bad. Andras already posted them in the other thread. Still worthy of it's own thread, though.

[fsx 0]

Looking more and more interesting.

[alpilotx 505]

And its getting better by the day ... the thing I most enjoy in the XP10 dev process is, when I have time to do a bit more extensive test flights . You know, with a highly procedurally created (driven by gigabytes of data, piles of algorithms and an extensive rule sets which I tuned for years) scenery even I have a lot to explore (and be surprised - hopefully more often in a positive than a negative way )

[h2egc 31]

@alpilotxCan you tell me if these were taken at extreme res on your system?And what were the AA/AF settings please.Thanks!

[alpilotx 505]

Yes, I usually fly with quite high settings. Though, you can't compare it all to XP9 because there are quite some new ones. Like the shadow settings (in those shots they were at MAX). Or the atmospheric rendering (of course on ... I will never again fly without it - it makes THE difference!). Screen res was at 1920, textures at extreme res, and max trees. And for AA ... well, this will be a bit harder to compare. With the atmospheric rendering, which uses deferred rendering (its common with many modern games), you can't use the normal AA modes, but only some post processing modes. In all the shots I used the FXAA version, which makes kind of a "smoothing of edges" (you can google for it). Its effect is quite good and it is not too ressource hungry. Otherwise you could only use (well at least that in at the moment). 4x SSAA (super sampling anti aliasing), but which would mean that XP10 would need to render the scene in double the resolution (4 times the pixel count) ... which might kill performance a lot (so I usually don't touch that).But with all these settings you get a quite good performance outside cities (with their gazillions of 3D objects and roads). With my GeForce 570 GTX + Core i7-2600K I come around 40-50 FPS (without big stuttering). Though in big cities this can drop to 20, but there, usually reducing the shadow distance helps ...Disclaimer: all these numbers are not official, and should only be taken as a "hint" what to expect (you can see them in the top left of the screenshots under FREQ). They can easily change at any point of the further development process as there are always things that change (or will be optimized etc.).

[MikeT707 1,181]

Andras,Is this fully XP10 or are some of the components XP9? Thanks.

[alpilotx 505]

Andras,Is this fully XP10 or are some of the components XP9? Thanks.

What I fly, is more or less fully XP10 (the pieces are now coming together)

[MikeT707 1,181]

Adras,Looks really great. By the way, did we (the X-plane community) hear at one time that the autogen trees were carried over from XP9, and that they would be worked on in future releases?

[Murmur 3,941]

Or the atmospheric rendering (of course on ... I will never again fly without it - it makes THE difference!).

What is exactly atmospheric rendering?Marco

[PingPong 60]

Andras, could you say whether XP10 will support 3d vision, specifically with regard to ground lighting(are they 2d sprites or not)Thanks

[Weatherman 193]

I must say that I'm really impressed by the atmospheric rendering. Together with the new weather system which is designed to avoid any unreal sudden weather changes if I understand it right this will bring us to a whole new level. To me, weather is a really really important part of flight simulation and is poorly simulated in the simulations available on the market. No volumetric clouds, no cloud shadows, no real weather systems in a way that you can fly around them without any sudden changes in FSX. If all this is realized in XP10 with a quality that is even close to the screenshots above, that would be amazing!Looking forward to XP10!

[alpilotx 505]

About forests: well technique will not change much (for the start) compared to XP9. This means, we will still use bilboard tree textures. The textures will not be the original XP9 ones, but we take those from my old forest project (a bit better but technically no difference). And the placement of forests will be far more accurate (which makes them look good even now). BUT there are ideas for overhauling the forest system (the tree rendering) ... though, this won't happen any time soon (and don't ask me specifics)Atmospheric rendering: well this is the new tech in XP10 which is responsible for a much more representation of the atmosphere (but can still be turned on/off). Its impressive and most of you will like it, as it makes the same scenery look much more real :-)3D stereoscopy: I don't know as it is more a question of the rendering engine, whereas I am more the global scenery guy. I think it was not possible until now (correct me if thats wrong) ... and I don't know if anything has happened in that direction.(typed from iPhone so maybe a bit too many typos in here :-) )

[MikeT707 1,181]

About forests: well technique will not change much (for the start) compared to XP9. This means, we will still use bilboard tree textures. The textures will not be the original XP9 ones, but we take those from my old forest project (a bit better but technically no difference). And the placement of forests will be far more accurate (which makes them look good even now). BUT there are ideas for overhauling the forest system (the tree rendering) ... though, this won't happen any time soon (and don't ask me specifics)

Will the scale of the trees be correct. I do see properly sized trees in many of the screenshots, but some of them contain trees that are way too large. Another question along these lines, would we be able to change the autogen trees ourselves. Last, would the density of the forests be thicker. Thanks so much for the information.

[alpilotx 505]

Lol, you ask so many questions. Well, obviously you don't know my original project with which I started "large scale" scenery development in X-Plane (started with V8). It was all about forests (which just plain didn't exist in XP8 - even though the engine was in place). And you can read a bit more on my website about it:http://www.alpilotx.net/So, of course you can customize forests big time. Usually this is done by the so called FOR files. The ones we have at the moment in XP10 are more or less taken from my previous project (XP9 version), and put in the right place. And the density of the forests varies largely ... it depends on a lot of factors which I so by design (depending on forest type, density, climate etc.). And they might receive some further tuning , but for the moment we are happy that they work and already look quite good (even if in some places not perfect).And the size of trees ... :-) ... well, thats a long standing discussion. Well, they are a bit larger maybe than they are in real life. This is, because with their height, their width changes proportionally too. So, to have denser forests (make look them denser), we often used the "trick" to make them a bit higher, so they become wider (this was especially important with conifers, which are usually rather high, but thin if looked at from the side). But, this can be changed ... tuned ...And one day (when all the starting issues of XP10 are sorted out and we are back to normal dev work), we might completely overhaul forests anyways (but as I told, this is not in the real planning phase ... only some first ideas).

[deetee 164]

Very promising! When the seasonal textures arrive I may just invest in a copy. :)