Hi poeple, found this link from an Xplane user which has a really good reflection of the Alaska pack and shows off areas which have good tree coverage I think - click on the video for the review.

http://xsimreviews.com/2012/07/01/ms-flight-alaska-overview-ep-1-seasons/

 

Cheers,

Dave.

I'm lucky too and I agree!

 

I will have to third that one, the shadows are indeed very nice!

Just for fun I TWEAKED the cfg (don't hit me)... and added more trees to the scenery. It looked better imho but guess what... even at places that weren't completely utterly dense... I got stutters... Odd, because there ARE places where I have seen more trees WITHOUT stutters. Adding trees clearly disrupts the current balance in the game. Yikes... Back to default.

 

Fun to know though that some FSX tricks still work...

 

Not so fun to know is that adding things brings down performance... Do we really want AI and so on? I am NOT saying (!) Flight uses the same old system (just look at the shadows) but it seems clear that adding stuff brings down performance. (I also tried the Max density setting to get more trees in the distance and Alaska really begins to get into trouble then.) I know some of you think the system is so good that adding options won't bring performance down but I doubt it.

Of course adding more trees and shadows impacts performance but the nice thing is that it's mostly GPU dependent. So provided your cpu is up to the task you probably can still maintain the same level of graphical detail and still add in some ATC, AI or whatever stuff that's done by the cpu.

 

It's more probable to have some cpu headroom than gpu in this game it seems. Before with my hd 6950 I had to back off from max shadows and max density or get 20fps everywhere. With my new video card those settings don't hurt performance anywhere near like it did before. Of course I still get the 20fps and max gpu usage with low to the ground fly-bys on cities and dense forest areas. I might dial it back in but with the smart v-sync in the game it's not that choppy so I'll stick with more eye candy for now B)

Oh, I don't think there's any doubt that adding more processing and rendering tasks will impact performance. The questions simply become "how much?" and "what eye-candy will I trade-off for different eye-candy?"

Just for fun I TWEAKED the cfg (don't hit me)... and added more trees to the scenery. It looked better imho but guess what... even at places that weren't completely utterly dense... I got stutters... Odd, because there ARE places where I have seen more trees WITHOUT stutters. Adding trees clearly disrupts the current balance in the game. Yikes... Back to default.

 

Fun to know though that some FSX tricks still work...

 

Not so fun to know is that adding things brings down performance... Do we really want AI and so on? I am NOT saying (!) Flight uses the same old system (just look at the shadows) but it seems clear that adding stuff brings down performance. (I also tried the Max density setting to get more trees in the distance and Alaska really begins to get into trouble then.) I know some of you think the system is so good that adding options won't bring performance down but I doubt it.

 

Well..... above and beyond the shadows and the general tree density, another thing to take into account is that the tree texture resolution is a lot higher, and beyond that, them thar' trees is moving in the wind. In the future, I am hoping that they move to take advantage of some DX10 or 11 features that offer less object overhead and greater graphics efficiency's.

 

I wonder what Flight would look like with Tessellation, for instance? Realtime procedural clouds with God-Rays?

 

 

Well, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for some of that, but its nice to dream of. Meanwhile, on the beta site, one of the programmers mentioned more than once being aware of certain issues that he had not had a chance to work on further yet. Hopefully he will get that chance.