I've toured around the islands looking for large flat fields that can support a group flight. I found a nice big field at the eastern end of the big island, and another on the southeast coast. To help with situational awareness, I print-screened the top-down views and pasted them into a graphics program.

 

Funny... these look familiar... very familiar... extremely familiar.

 

Looks like MS is re-using some fairly big chunks of terrain to save on development time!

Yes, that us how it works. But they are not saving dev time... it's saving storage space and download time.

 

You will see similar textures all over the place: this is indeed how it works. It's not photoreal scenery! If you pay attention (which I don't advice because it spoils the fun) you will every texture (city, field, farms, forests) is repeated everywhere. This becomes most obvious when you go to the topdown view and zoom out as far as you can. I have to add though that Flight does a better job on being not too obviously repetitive then FSX

 

I am curious how MS is going to do this with other regions. In FSX textures were shared all over the globe: Orbx created a system to enable specific textures in specific regions but the problem was that you had to enable and disable sceneries for specific regions: you could only fly in ONE region! I wonder how MS will solve this: if Alaska and Hawaii share textures or not and if you can fly from one to another without problems in that regard (providing you have the plane for it, but let's not get started about that).

Wow, good catch. Of course, these things were designed and created to be seen from a cockpit (or at least from a plane's perspective) where you would never be able to spot repeated textures or terrain.

 

Just out of curiosity, have you google mapped these two areas to see if those areas actually look relatively similar in real life?

 

But ya, there are tonnes of shortcuts and file size savers that devs use to create this stuff. There's probably only 10 or 20 tree textures for the whole program, but you'd never realize it playing the game.

Yes, that us how it works. But they are not saving dev time... it's saving storage space and download time.

 

It saves a spitload of dev time too (speaking from coughmumble years of development experience).

 

You will see similar textures all over the place: this is indeed how it works. It's not photoreal scenery! If you pay attention (which I don't advice because it spoils the fun) you will every texture (city, field, farms, forests) is repeated everywhere. This becomes most obvious when you go to the topdown view and zoom out as far as you can. I have to add though that Flight does a better job on being not too obviously repetitive then FSX

 

Yeah, I have to admit that it's (usually) not obvious where they re-used textures, especially since a given texture looks different when it's pasted on different terrain.

 

Wow, good catch. Of course, these things were designed and created to be seen from a cockpit (or at least from a plane's perspective) where you would never be able to spot repeated textures or terrain.

 

Just out of curiosity, have you google mapped these two areas to see if those areas actually look relatively similar in real life?

 

But ya, there are tonnes of shortcuts and file size savers that devs use to create this stuff. There's probably only 10 or 20 tree textures for the whole program, but you'd never realize it playing the game.

 

Good idea. Here's a Google Map of the same coordinates from the first one. Quite different!

Even FS X and FS 9, 8, 7 used the land classification (land class) system of generic ground textures. As mentioned, this has numerous advantages, and even more, is the only practical solution.

 

However, what many may not know is that ground textures are not all shared between different regions of the world. FS X had 26 different regions (of which 3 were in Australia alone) and many of those regions had specific ground textures only used in that particular region. So, I suspect that Flight will be more of the same, and that Alaska will have its own specific ground textures that are very different from those used in Hawai'i.

 

However, it is clear that there has been great improvement both in the quality and in the variety of ground textures. So, we can expect Alaska to look very, very good with its generic ground textures.

 

Best regards.

Luis

D'oh!

 

I remember I did a show once (if you'll permit a brief detour from Flight talk) that involved an underwater voyage through a bunch of plankton. All CGI. Fish, Coral, the works.

A guy on my team, young, joker, very talented, came up with beautiful plankton textures to place on the long vine-like hanging geometry in the water. That was one of his dozens of tasks on the show.

The day came that the client, along with two marine biologists to confirm authenticity, came down to our test theater to view the work in progress.

Seconds before the show started, Jon, the guy on my team looks at me and says

"Hey Matt, you know the plankton in the first shot?"

"yeah"

 

 

"it's weed."

 

 

So, biting my tongue, and not strangling him there and then, the clients and the scientists loved what they saw. In fact, they were good enough to inform us after of exactly what species of northern plankton ours was. We chose not to enlighten them.

 

We figured it's all just pixels, and therefore it's all a bit of a deceit. We were happy, the client was happy everybody was happy.....and a rose by any other name.....all that.

 

Anyhow, funny story.

Check this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707102

It explains how the scenery system works for FSX.

The scenery system for MS Flight is newer, but similar.

I believe that flightsim developers should try to partner with Google for suing their 3D system

 

The Google GEFS is the best example :-)

^ Interesting. It was fun looping a DC-3.

Funny the texture topic was sitting here. I revisited Flight tonight just to have a change of pace from Prepar3D.. One thing I hope they do with Alaska is provide higher resolution ground textures. Not bashing Flight as I spent 100s of hours in it before getting bored and moving on until some new content arises. Anyway.. It's a GA aimed sim and even comparing it to FSX/Prepar3D default textures the ones in Flight at low altitudes look like someone went over them in Photoshop with a blur tool and are horrid looking. Yes, all my settings are at maximum/maximum/maximum/high/high. It's not really till about 5-7k do they start showing some decent detail. For low and slow flying though higher resolution textures are a must to really suck you into the atmosphere.

 

Anyway, had some fun buzzing around the islands tonight though.. After I climbed high enough. ;)

I agree with styckx, however that is because I have the privilege of having a beefy system.

As ground textures get higher res, the faster the machine has to work to load them and display them...some folks with weaker machines might have a problem, and great framerates are one of Flight's strongest attributes.

That being said, we can always hope for a higher res "high" or "maximum" setting.

 

Personally, the main thing I'm hoping for from Alaska is NOW NOW NOW NOW

 

just kidding, but ya, I'm getting pretty excited

As far as textures go, I am not sure why there are not higher resolution ones for people with more powerful systems. Personally I think they should just contract the GEX people and get it over with. :Thinking:

If you make the textures resolution one step higher, file size increases multiple times. And btw I already have some late loading textures now already so... I don't mind the textures as they are now. And I most certainly hardly ever fly at 5-7k...! To me things look pretty nice pretty quickly. It's obvious that the textures aren't as sharp as an Orbx addon high res airport, but they are more then sufficient to immerse me. I am 'sucked into the atmosphere' already, probably because of the great shadow and light system, which help a lot with that, more so then high res textures would.

I guess its all going to depend on what you are use too. For the broader gaming public, the current Flight graphics are going to be acceptable (mostly) but dated. They match FSX, and exceed it in some areas, especially lighting and frame-rate but there is little there (at least visually) that many will not have seen done better in other places.

 

I think Flight needs to be aggressive in its visuals or end up garnering all too many curious glances followed by yawns. I just find it hard to imagine that that sticking to 2006 FSX era textures in the here and now (for whatever reason) is likely to impress today's market for long; even for free.