This is what our flight sims could look like

[Rocky_53]

Erm guys, are you serious? Sure, this demo is extremely impressive, but surely you aren't suggesting it would be suitable for flight simulation! It all looks so.. toy/game like, not at all as immersive and more real as Outerra. I tried to imagine flying in this kind of environment and I couldn't get out of my mind that it would be like flying in a fantasty game and not a flight simulation. So sure, as a demo to show the degree of detail and what the engine can do etc. fine, but the textures would have to be completely different for me for it to even resemble anything like a flight simulator. IMO Outerra for use in flight simulation knocks the socks off anything else I have ever seen...

 

[simmerhead]

Erm guys, are you serious? Sure, this demo is extremely impressive, but surely you aren't suggesting it would be suitable for flight simulation! It all looks so.. toy/game like, not at all as immersive and more real as Outerra. I tried to imagine flying in this kind of environment and I couldn't get out of my mind that it would be like flying in a fantasty game and not a flight simulation. So sure, as a demo to show the degree of detail and what the engine can do etc. fine, but the textures would have to be completely different for me for it to even resemble anything like a flight simulator. IMO Outerra for use in flight simulation knocks the socks off anything else I have ever seen...

 

It's just a color saturation thing. Turn down the gamma and the game effect is almost gone.

 

Looks impressive for cities as well:

http://unigine.com/products/unigine/success/ai3d/

[Guest John_Cillis]

Erm guys, are you serious? Sure, this demo is extremely impressive, but surely you aren't suggesting it would be suitable for flight simulation! It all looks so.. toy/game like, not at all as immersive and more real as Outerra. I tried to imagine flying in this kind of environment and I couldn't get out of my mind that it would be like flying in a fantasty game and not a flight simulation. So sure, as a demo to show the degree of detail and what the engine can do etc. fine, but the textures would have to be completely different for me for it to even resemble anything like a flight simulator. IMO Outerra for use in flight simulation knocks the socks off anything else I have ever seen...

 

 

I downloaded the latest Outerra demo (my old one did not display the grass, for instance). While fps is outstanding compared to MSFS or even the Valley demo, the world still looks plain compared to Valley. I guess I'd have to wait for an Outerra based sim, where more of the world is modelled and more 3d objects are available, to make a fair assessment of the program.

 

John

[simmerhead]

Problem with Outerra is that it seems to be going nowhere and will be outdated before it amounts to anything.

[Rocky_53]

Interesting points. You know, with Orbx in the throws of releasing FTX Global, wouldn't it be great if they could get together and use the Outerra engine combined with Orbx landclass and textures and create the next generation of flight simulator. They could call it Orberra! :smile:

[JonRD463]

These tech demos are great, but what happens to all that visual fidelity when you have to also calculate physics, fluid dynamics, avionics logic, and all those other under-the-hood details involved in simulating flight?

[Rocky_53]

These tech demos are great, but what happens to all that visual fidelity when you have to also calculate physics, fluid dynamics, avionics logic, and all those other under-the-hood details involved in simulating flight?

Hmm, good point, one that I was thinking about myself. Add in a load of AI traffic, ATC, Ezdok, TrackIR and REX Essentials+ running with 8/8 cloud and heavy rain and then what happens to this puppy!

[mgh]

Well Unigine for a start, then would speak to those who I consider SME's to tell me what they would like to see. Important if I was trying to develop a software ecology like iOS and its app store as my commercial model. APIs and standards would of course be open and the detail would come from those discussions. That's what I'd do based on my background in enterprise architecture.

 

Where would the flight dynamics, ATC AI, weather etc models/engines come from?

[HansRoaming]

Where would the flight dynamics, ATC AI, weather etc models/engines come from?

 

Refer you to

 

A2A, PMDG, Eaglesoft and other high end aircraft, REX & Opus for the weather, VoxATC for the ATC, FS2Crew, Aivlasoft EFB with Orbx, Fly Tampa etc doing the scenery and it would come together all very nicely.......

 

Build a pluggable architecture and refactor common elements into the base engine over future itterations. There are a number of engines out there as these guys + Majestic etc are bypassing a lot of FSX codebase and you learn what you need by talking to your ecosystem, they tell you.

[simmerhead]

These tech demos are great, but what happens to all that visual fidelity when you have to also calculate physics, fluid dynamics, avionics logic, and all those other under-the-hood details involved in simulating flight?

 

I'm sure it would be just fine for us who fly low and slow, but I'm more about the scenery than the flying.

 

Interesting points. You know, with Orbx in the throws of releasing FTX Global, wouldn't it be great if they could get together and use the Outerra engine combined with Orbx landclass and textures and create the next generation of flight simulator. They could call it Orberra! :smile:

 

He he. The good thing about Outerra is that it makes landclass obsolete.

[tttocs]

Sure, this demo is extremely impressive, but surely you aren't suggesting it would be suitable for flight simulation! It all looks so.. toy/game like, not at all as immersive and more real as Outerra.

 

Thanks Howard - you've just articulated what I thought after running it as well. From technical and artistic perspectives it's extremely impressive, and I love the fact that on my system (modest CPU, good graphics card) it runs incredibly well - smooth with high framerates at high settings. I'd love to be able to take advantage of what my card can really do, other than for just anti-aliasing. And I'd love to have those raindrops hitting my plane's window, and, and... But unlike the OP, I still had no problems going back to FSX. Dunno, maybe my mind compartmentalizes differently, but I view this as a really nice graphics concept demo and nothing more. My mind wasn't saying anything like "wow, this is the next flight sim for me".

 

Now, if someone would translate that into a flight sim proof of concept, I might feel differently.

 

Scott

[mgh]

That still doesn't explain who's going to build the core simulator - the graphics are only a part of it. The companies mentioned develop addons for the existing simulations.

[Guest John_Cillis]

Thanks Howard - you've just articulated what I thought after running it as well. From technical and artistic perspectives it's extremely impressive, and I love the fact that on my system (modest CPU, good graphics card) it runs incredibly well - smooth with high framerates at high settings. I'd love to be able to take advantage of what my card can really do, other than for just anti-aliasing. And I'd love to have those raindrops hitting my plane's window, and, and... But unlike the OP, I still had no problems going back to FSX. Dunno, maybe my mind compartmentalizes differently, but I view this as a really nice graphics concept demo and nothing more. My mind wasn't saying anything like "wow, this is the next flight sim for me".

 

Now, if someone would translate that into a flight sim proof of concept, I might feel differently.

 

Scott

 

What's interesting about the Valley demo is that with my modest card, it averages about 24-25 fps and peaks at about 37 fps in some locations. It proves to me that 24-25 fps can be extremely smooth and stutter free in appearance even though it's lower than the peformance of FSX on my system. When you break apart the Valley demo there aren't a lot of 3-d objects being displayed--i.e. the flowers, ferns, grasses, rocks etc repeat themselves. But they are truly 3-d--the trees are much more detailed than those in Outerra. I don't think this level of detail would be needed in a flight sim. According to Nvidia Inspector, the Valley demo does a pretty decent job of utilizing the gpu. When I am running FSX, Nvidia Inspector states my gpu is only at 25 pct. utilization. My fan speed is also low whereas it comes near max speed in the Valley demo.

 

John

[JonRD463]

I'm sure it would be just fine for us who fly low and slow, but I'm more about the scenery than the flying.

 

Well, there's still fluid dynamics and physics to consider, both of which require a good chunk of processing power to do well. It's one thing to see the visual effects of weather, for example, but it's what you don't see-- i.e. the computing cycles needed to simulate the way the weather affects a body that's already moving through the air under aerodynamic forces-- that affects the performance.

 

BTW, interesting choice of username if the flying bits aren't that important to you.

[gizmosellsbunnys]

These tech demos are great, but what happens to all that visual fidelity when you have to also calculate physics, fluid dynamics, avionics logic, and all those other under-the-hood details involved in simulating flight?

 

Agreed, prefer the coding to handle these things efficiently. It may looked nice, but will it run nice or efficiently.