What do you think the chances of FS2006 having water that is trully reflective to the environment just like Pacific Fighters water?I would say 80%. Maybe not as detailed but hopefully alot better than the current water.

That is common stuff nowadays everyone is supposed to have it so unless FS 2006 don

Doubt it. PF uses Open GL, FS uses Direct3D. One sucks for simming, the other doesn't.What surprises me is that Maddox hasn't spotted the opportunity for a civil sim to rival FS, at whatever level. Allcott

You say that as though Direct 3D cannot offer reflective water? I think you will find it can match, if not beat OpenGL, its just that Flightsim is virtually the only game that doesn't really use features of the future, instead it works with features of last week.

A lot of games have been doing it by taking full advantage of the DX9 engine. Unfortunately, MS probably won't do it because some of their customers still use non-DX9 compliant V-cards and therefore won't buy new versions of FS.

>Doubt it. PF uses Open GL, FS uses Direct3D. One sucks for>simming, the other doesn't.>>What surprises me is that Maddox hasn't spotted the>opportunity for a civil sim to rival FS, at whatever level. >>AllcottNo dx 9 is actually more capable then Open GL. There is things you can do with Dx 9 which you can

I'm pretty sure Far Cry's water is PS 2.0 - I see it as it's supposed to be on my 9800, but my roommates' old GF3 din't show it correctly...There is no way MS will be able to get away with not taking advantage of the new generation video cards with FS2006. The game would look so dated compared to everything else that's out there now fully using DX9...

Hi Ryan,"There is no way MS will be able to get away with not taking advantage of the new generation video cards with FS2006"......I'm quite sure that the FS developers are as keen as mustard to exploit what is available as soon as it is practicable to do so. The envelope of realism is one we all want to see pushed to the limit but, like all good things in life, in the end a little patience reaps the reward ;) It will come.Mike

That's just incorrect. Take a look at the water effects in LOMAC which is a D3D based engine. They are better then IL2/AEP/PF and for those who have newer video cards the performance hit is zero.Of course with that sort of technology in the pipeline, one wonders why MS didn't incorporate it into FS2004.