See "the FTX technology" here: http://fullterrain.com/about.html

 

Your company (culture) sounds much like 1980s American Airlines - absolutely no place to work at (for me).

Bjoern, as you probably already are well aware of personally, or not, the American Corporate Culture, is quite brutal, there is no 'love' in the corner offices, and if you are not a premium producing member (grunt), HR is sniffing at your heels to shoe you out the front doors. Flipping burgers pays a lot less than anywhere requiring an elevator to reach your desk, but there is much less stress, less guys and gals not coming in Monday morning, because they died of a stroke or heart attack, and/or developed some form of cancer due to their stress load, etc. I can't wait for the day of retirement. I just hope I am there to see it, and that is no joke. Wasn't joking in any way....

 

Work Stress: Bad

Retirement Date: Good

 

I'll look at that highlighted link after I post this to you.

Not sure if you're talking about the ground textures or the autogen trees themselves.

 

The FTXG textures are the same 1024x1024 pixels (1m/pixel) textures as GEX and indeed the default FSX textures too. What it comes down to is artistic skill, making every pixel count and contribute with something to the final texture.

 

As for the autogen trees, since they're just flat texture sheets, using an "alpha channel" for transparency, it's very easy to fake detail like branches with almost no FPS hit. For the GPU, it's very simple, it's just rendering one additional "color" (the alpha channel), in addition to the regular Red, Green and Blue channels. The RGB channels provide the detail, the Alpha channel tells the sim which parts of the tree is "see-through".

Food for thought, thanks!

In my opinion there were a lot of things ACES didn't know about their own platform at the time MS discontinued FS development. That's evidenced by the fact that drawcall batching didn't come along until SP2/Accel, and further evidenced by the fact that most of the default libraries that were batched still contain LODs which of course are rendered useless when drawcall batching is employed. That incidentally is why you see the flickering in 90% of the default terminal buildings and such, the main models and the LODs are fighting over the same real estate in the sim.

 

Was ACES simply too lazy to remove the LODs prior to batching the libraries? I don't think so - in reality I'm guessing they didn't fully understand and therefore didn't remove the LODs because they assumed they would still be working. There is a horrendous amount of superfluous geometry in the default libraries because of the LODs, I removed the LODs from my own personal copy of "vehicles_aircraft.bgl" for example and the filesize of that library dropped from over 20 megs down to about 11 megs. An additional performance gain could have been realized in addition to that gained by batching if ACES had removed the LODs as well, and with a side benefit of flicker elimination. At the time they were trying very hard to improve the performance of FSX to quell the noise from the FS community with regard to performance and IMHO if they had realized the LODs were no longer necessary they would have taken the necessary steps to remove them. Therefore the idea that addon developers have refined the sim beyond what ACES had the knowledge to do in 2006 is entirely valid as far as I can see.

 

Just my .02...

 

Jim

Thanks Jim, appreciated your contribution. Cheers!

Yep, MCX. No, didn't see a huge improvement in performance if any at all, possibly would have if aircraft models were placed in much higher concentrations, but batching itself makes the few extra polygons here and there not quite as important as they were to us in FS9. It's an ongoing project, I've processed several other libraries as well, mostly just to get rid of the flickers though. I've also found a lot of cases where the flickers weren't caused by LODs, but rather just some really f**ed up modeling.

 

I think you nailed it re: ACES and time constraints/ignorant/impatient management and that's likely left us with a lot of hard-coded issues as well that could have been fixed if they'd not been under so much pressure to get it finished up and released to the consumer. That's how the world works more often than not from my experience though :smile:

 

Yeah, overlayed polygons are a prime cause for flickers. Shows how little time ACES had.

 

 

 

Bjoern, as you probably already are well aware of personally, or not, the American Corporate Culture, is quite brutal, there is no 'love' in the corner offices, and if you are not a premium producing member (grunt), HR is sniffing at your heels to shoe you out the front doors. Flipping burgers pays a lot less than anywhere requiring an elevator to reach your desk, but there is much less stress, less guys and gals not coming in Monday morning, because they died of a stroke or heart attack, and/or developed some form of cancer due to their stress load, etc. I can't wait for the day of retirement. I just hope I am there to see it, and that is no joke. Wasn't joking in any way....

 

Work Stress: Bad

Retirement Date: Good

 

Maybe you're just working in a company full of arseholes?

 

 

No, i never uploaded it but check your PMs.

 

May I check mine, too.

Yeah, overlayed polygons are a prime cause for flickers. Shows how little time ACES had.

 

 

 

 

Maybe you're just working in a company full of arseholes?

 

 

 

May I check mine, too.

Well...company name notwithstanding, it represents uh...er...the CORE of blue stock Corporate America. Perhaps subjectively, they are all in the 'arsehole' mode...  Hmmm...retire early, take a pension reduction....perhaps do a stint as a Walmart Greeter...and the rest of the time fly, ride a bike, read, listen to music, play the guitar, try painting....hmmm.....sound's better and better as I type...and then there is Bob's intention of buying a Motor Home......hmmm....."Hey Hon.....wanna travel?".....

Heh. Well, happy counting down the days then, I guess?

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The simple reason Orbx did a better job of the textures relative to MS ACES is the same reason A2A did a better job with the 172 and PMDG with the 747 - specialisation, time and new more capable hardware. A saying along the lines of standing on the shoulders of giants comes to the mind.  The alternate (and better) question the OP may ask is how no one else has managed to make a more feature rich simulator since FSX a few years ago.