Watching a science-related TV show today, one of the scenes was at the observatory at Mauna Kea... surrounded by snow.

 

Hey Microsoft, WHERE'S OUR SNOW?

 

:LMAO:

 

Yeah... one thing great about the big island... you can ski in the morning (when there is snow, obviously) and go to da beach in the afternoon. :dirol:

Ups!

 

Probably it'll get there when Alaska becomes available!!!

Mauna Kea actually means "White Mountain."

Ups!

 

Probably it'll get there when Alaska becomes available!!!

 

Ya... right...

I for one am glad they didn't try to do snow in Hawaii.

It was a strategic decision, and a good one. making snow look good is very difficult in a real-time game engine, and even more difficult if you want to create snow cover in various iterations of depth. For a place like Hawaii, where snow is NOT the norm yet occurs at certain altitudes at certain times of year, it's a lot of work/resources to satisfy a small point...frankly, the only snow I've ever seen in games that looked OK to me were in games that used engines specifically designed to use shaders conducive to snow. (like how the Bioshock engine was designed from the ground up to do real-time water)

Better to leave snow out of it in the case of Hawaii, and make the non-snow ground look as good as possible.

 

I am guessing, and hoping, that with the Alaska DLC, snow will be prioritized and allocated resources accordingly. I'm still in shock at the size of Alaska, and the fact that there has been little-to-none procedural landscape in Hawaii..... man, what a task.....

Don't expect 'simulated snow' or 'various iterations of depth' in Flight. Snow in Alaska (at least what you see lying on the ground) will simply be snowtextures. You will never see snow slowly covering the ground. It's there or it is not. Just as it is in FSX. So they might as well have added it to Hawaii in the appropriate season.

 

About hoping 'snow will be prioritized and allocated resources accordingly': I certainly hope not. Snowtextures are fine with me. I rather have systems that have to do with flying and planes prioritized! I don't need no real time snow to bring down performance.

It's true that any snow you see in games or any real time application is based on texture. Unless it's a falling particle system, it's texture work. If you are lucky, and the engine is built for it, that texture includes diffuse color information, normal bump information, specular information, etc. Bear in mind however that that snow texture has to -

A: merge with non-snow, namely as you travel down the mountain, the snow becomes more and more sporatic until it's completely gone, and that requires oodles of hours to create said textures, which is where the 'iteration of depth' means, (I REALLY don't want to see white border with green in a hard texture line) and

B: interact with light properly, or at least reasonably. This is called a shader, as you probably know. If their snow season/location is to look reasonable, anywhere on par with their non-snow environment, a different shader will be used. (their water is an example of a special shader)

That being said, I agree, in the case of Alaska, it will only be a multitude of textures with simple color information. However, creating these textures for these massive landscapes probably constitutes a huge amount if not the majority of their man-hours, and I merely point out that allocating company resources into snow in Hawaii would have logically caused a deficit of attention in some other aspect of the application.

 

*sorry I feel compelled to add: This is all only my opinion. I think that while the distribution of labour in the production of Flight wasn't perfect, it was pretty good. I personally would have also nixed additional textures to include snow.

I would assume that MS will merely paint the snow onto the scenery similarly to Hawaii's green vistas. But yeah, I could see the merge as being an important factor.

Yep, that's totally how it's done. Bear in mind that in the case of 3D terrain, the 3D geometry that is being painted on is actually exceedingly simple. The painting process, or texturing, is actually most of the work. (of course trees placement and buildings are additional work)

Snowy plus non-snowy vs only non-snowy is basically double the work.

Quite different from creating a plane, or a plane interior, where there is obviously a great deal of geometric modelling, rivaling the amount of time put into texturing.

I dunno....I love looking at Flight's environment/lighting so much, I'm happy to accept one seasonal version for every square kilometer, as long as it looks great! Again, that's just me.

Well, as noted elsewhere, we know there are seasonal variations coming because we've seen the same location both with snow and without.

 

So yeah, at least double the workload. More, if they are going beyond simple "summer" and "winter" versions.

 

But I'd bet on just two versions... With and without snow.

Yep, that's totally how it's done. Bear in mind that in the case of 3D terrain, the 3D geometry that is being painted on is actually exceedingly simple. The painting process, or texturing, is actually most of the work. (of course trees placement and buildings are additional work)

Snowy plus non-snowy vs only non-snowy is basically double the work.

Quite different from creating a plane, or a plane interior, where there is obviously a great deal of geometric modelling, rivaling the amount of time put into texturing.

I dunno....I love looking at Flight's environment/lighting so much, I'm happy to accept one seasonal version for every square kilometer, as long as it looks great! Again, that's just me.

 

And actually even more than that, given that day and night times are different textures.

The snow in Alaska will probably be a weather theme.

ahahahah :LMAO: