2005: The year of FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2006

[oqvist 11]

To be honest I would settle for LOMAC graphics really.Photorealistic water was the most funny thing though except HALO 2. But it

[B777ER 2,560]

Tom,Is that a white Lab? I want to get one but they are hard to find here where I live.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

:) Send me enough money and I will find one and ship it to you! No guarantees or warranties of course. Cat comes free. :)

[Guest lemonadedrinker]

What I would like to see modelled is an Emergency program which can make all sorts of things happen or not as you fly. I know there is something in FS9 which can make an engine fail etc etc, but this program would include, or rather would be, one in which you would never know what was going to happen or when->>Passenger falls ill and you have to divert...>>Airport you are going to shut due to fire in terminal and you have to divert...>>An engine packs up suddenly, but is an intermittent fault- should you carry on?.. There are a thousand things that could be included and you'd never again know if you'd land where you'd got clearance to! You could of course turn it off if you had somewhere particular to go! This seemed to tie in on another post about keeping interested in simming and as I'm too daft to write a program I put this idea into the ether in the hope that someone might be interested to look further into it and see if it had any merit. :9

[Mike T 220]

"Look to the future do you. Never your mind on where you are"- Master Yoda, Empire Strikes Back

[Guest lemonadedrinker]

Ah, yes, Master Yoda..This reminds me of a Haiku, or was it a Coypu? " Life is like a drop of water on the underside of a lotus leaf- fragile, contained, complete, yet ready at any moment to fall to Earth. Be sufficient with what you have.">>from Professor Branestorm's "Lucid Moments". Poetry from the Daft Side.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Okay Mike, whatever you are drinking or smoking, I want some!!! :)

[KJConlon 17]

I can see it now $59 for FS10, $39 for new AI traffic, $39 for new PMDG, and $1800 for the new AthalonFX needed to run it all. That $59 program will end up costing about 2 grand. Better start saving. ---Tom wouldn't it be nice if MS could debut FS10 at the AvSim Conference :)Blue SkiesKevin http://virtual.united.com/sigs/iad_so_320-1.png

[oqvist 11]

>I can see it now $59 for FS10, $39 for new AI traffic, $39>for new PMDG, and $1800 for the new AthalonFX needed to run it>all. That $59 program will end up costing about 2 grand. >Better start saving. >>>---Tom wouldn't it be nice if MS could debut FS10 at the AvSim>Conference :)>>Blue Skies>Kevin >>>http://virtual.united.com/sigs/iad_so_320-1.pngNo without the FS 2004 limitations the default aircraft will be better than any one out there today so we won

[oqvist 11]

BTW here is a video that sums up all my wishes quite well http://www.cae.com/www2004/Video_Gallery/TroposHIGH320.wmv

[Guest christianholmes]

I actually think Bungie did a great job with the Halo 2 engine- The engine is not the reason that the graphics aren't as good as newer PC games- The XBOX itself is. I'm sure if they made a V2 XBOX with a GeForce 6800 Ultra, and P4 3.8 that it would be incredible. The cutscenes in Halo are crazy. They've squeezed every ounce of juice of of that system.That being said, The Far Cry engine would SUCK for a flight simulator. Imagine the islands in Far Cry extended 60 miles out- your framerates would be laughable. Same with Half Life 2. There are techniques that are used in First Person shooters such as Quad Trees which really help with framerates, but you can't do quad trees in a flight simulator, and that is one of the reasons our framerates suffer compared to shooters. You know how long it would take to render quad trees for the whole FS world? It would take hundreds if not thousands or millions of years. Rendering the quad trees for a Quake II level on today's hardware can still take overnight.First person shooters use canned worlds- FS uses the entire planet save for a few degrees at the poles.I personally think the FS graphics are pretty good. Yes, better water would be nice. And they could make real waves, maybe for a few hundred meters of the water that you are over.There has to be compromise with flight simulator. The biggest thing I think the scenery engine needs is better LOD support. And maybe NURBS rendering for surface interpolation. Ok, geeking out now...The ATC engine is by far my biggest complaint- It just doesn't support features which it should by now. It should optionally be voice controlled too. Not the cheesy add-on type of "Press ONE" to navigate the menus, but real embedded speech recognition for arbitrary commands.

[oqvist 11]

No HALO 2 engine would suck far more than the Far Cry engine. I am kind of puzzled about you are pointing the viewing distance as negative on it!!!Flight sims require huge viewing distance thus they are so demanding to render and why fps games prior to Far Cry cheat out on it. Far Cry still do but in a much smarter way that is not as noticeable. How many fps let you snipe from 1 km away??? HALO 2 with the viewing distance of Far Cry you would get like a third of the performance. Also Far Cry water would be really nice in FS 2004. But water is easy to get nowadays to look fine. Far Crys is actually 1.1 not even PS 2.0 water. But fps games are of course not usable for Fs 2006 without modifications so you can

[Guest christianholmes]

Sorry, I wasn't saying that the HALO 2 engine would be better- I was just saying that I think the engine is decent for a GeForce 3 with a 733 processor. I don't think any First Person Shooter engine would be better. I think we're agreeing on that.The Far Cry engine uses some serios LOD modelling, which is a good thing for a flight sim, but I still don't think it would be good enough for a flight sim.The problem is really perspective- With a First Person shooter, the level has boundaries of which you can't go out of. It only has to look good inside the edges of the level. If you accidentally clipped your way through one of the boundaries, you see a mess of incomplete models and floating objects, which look fine when you are where you are supposed to be. Flight Sim has no boundaries. You can go everywhere. They can't clip objects easily.I think FS does support LOD however, can anyone confirm this? If that is true, I think the problem is that FS supports several model types (GMAX and the old one) and inherently that will slow it down. I've noticed that framerate hog airports don't seem to have any LOD objects however. Jetways just pop into view at full polygon count. If there were 10 different models- say a jetway that was just an 8 side box with 32x32 textures that popped into view at 10 miles, and then load a higher res version the closer you got, it would help tremendously. The terrain does this inherently, but high detail tiles don't seem to load soon enough- which is why the terrain can be so blurry.I'd like to see MS release a utility that would autmatically create LOD models for scenery that is already installed- i.e. if the developers didn't bother to do it. I know you can do LOD in GMAX, but I does the scenery use it, or just aircraft?On this topic, it would be possible to create rough quad trees for airport scenery, for when you are in the airport boundaries. For example, if you are sitting behind a building near the airport fence, FS will know that you can't see the control tower, and won't render it. Currently, all the scenery is considered viewable (unless it's out of your field of view). But then there is the framerate problem on final- If you are outside the boundary, it will still render everything. The scenery wouldn't be optimized until you actually cross the scenery threshold.For anyone that doesn't now- A quad tree is a CPU intensive routine that basically goes through and systematically places you at various points in the scenery, and then "looks" around in random directions. It uses collision detection to see what would actually be viewable. For example, it places you on the end of the runway and casts a line-of-sight ray at the contol tower. It calculates the position of all the other scenery, and if none of the rays actually hit the control tower, it figures you can't see it, and builds that into a file. The downside is, that file can get HUGE depending on the fidelity of the quad tree, and can take a long time to render. Also, if the quad tree is not built of high enough fidelity, and you will see objects popping in and out of view. Maybe the contol tower is visible, but the ray just didn't happen to cast in the direction it is visible- maybe there were buildings blocking 40% of your view too it. It has to use some random casting however, becuase creating a true fidelity quadtree would take eons. That would mean it would place you at every pixel on the airport, and cast a ray in every direction. So if the airport was 2 miles by five miles, and it used a foot as it's interval, and scanned every 1/10th of a degree azimuth and 1/10th of a degree for 40 degrees of elevation- it would need to do 76,032,000,000 collision detection routines (with every polygon in the airport) for each airport! so for a 100,000 polygon airport your CPU would be rotating, transforming, and running collison detection on 7,603,200,000,000,000polygons! YIKES! For each airport! The quad file would probably be several hundred megs (it doesn't need to record every the results of every ray- just the cumulitive results- basically, if even 1 ray connects with the object, it will be visible, if none connect, it won't)Ok, stop getting all excited :) The upside would be a 300% framerate increase at detailed airports, but like I said, it wouldn't do anything for the city off in the distance. So if you were at JFK, and had a high res quad tree solution, as long as you were looking at Manhattan, it would be rendering that- unless of course you did a quad tree for Manhattan that went to 20 miles out- yeah right).This is our dilema, and the reason flight simulator will NEVER have graphics that run as well as first person shooters. All we can do it hope the video cards can overcome the scenery/aircraft developers desire to create.Now I can see a use for an add-on card- What if the card did a sort of "realtime" quad tree? Basically, FS would upload all the geometry to the card (it wouldn't need textures), and the card would do line of sight calculations on each object (so it wouldn't be per-polygon, but rather polygon grouping- like the control tower object). If there were a couple hundred objects, it would be feasible the card could do those calculations in realtime, and then tell FS what not to render. That would be pretty sweet.

[JonRD463 146]

>Completely new graphics engine will mean ALL scenery,>aircraft, and just about all other addons (and defaults) that>have a visual representation will no longer work.Well, the "tough luck" answer to that would be that it's time to move on. Games advance, and the old goes out to make room for the new. It's this demand that 5 year old addons still work in new versions that, IMO, keep FS from pushing ahead further than it does. I think a two-version cycle would work-- that is, have two consecutive versions with backwards compatibility, then revamp the whole thing to better take advantage of newer technology.>>Even the rumour that this would be done for FS2002 caused>massive complaints (back when noone had even seen a beta of>FS2002) and hundreds of people chiming in they'd "never buy>it"...I think we all know that the "never buy it" group is in the minority. This goes even further to include those who say things like "If it doesn't run on my (insert 3 year old computer of your choice), then I'm not buying it!" I say these types have no idea how the games industry works. Bottom line here is if you're happy with your current setup and addons, KEEP IT! No one forces anyone to keep up with the Joneses.>Or maybe an old ship that was restored by over time replacing>every single piece of the original wood and fittings with new>wood and fittings. Is that still the old ship?Okay, what if nautical technology produces a hull shape that offers greater efficiency as it cuts through the water, which improves performance? Sure the old ship may be fitted with the latest construction materials, but the all-new ship would take advantage of the latest in research and development. I guess I'm not so concerned because I don't own any payware, and don't have to worry about an investment falling into obsolescence. Im an amateur computer geek, so constant upgrading and tweaking is a given for me, despite what software I run. I'm used to complete overhauls in game sequals in everything from the Command & Conquer series to good old Quake, so the idea that newer games need newer computers isn't as preposterous as I've seen folks here make it out to be. FWIW,

[Egbert Drenth 258]

Quote:>> There we go again. Thread #99999999999 about what will be in the next version. <