as a lover of eye candy I cannot disagree with a single point you've made.sigh - we want it all i guessre the video though - the fact that a still-evolving $50 sim comes anywhere close to that visual level is a credit to the fs team imho.regards,Mark

Ha! No landing tyre smoke! Piece of junk, won't be buying it - whatever it is.;-)Gavin

>>Ha! No landing tyre smoke! Piece of junk, won't be buying it - whatever it is. Yeah I agreed with you at first -then I remembered the part with the ice and then I thought some more:-roll

Hello All, Have to admit, watched it several times and it's pretty impressive . . . eye candy galore! Love the icy runways, looked pretty real to me.As or the computing power, yes, I too have been a bit dissappointed lately -- it seems we must have run into some kind of hump which is difficult to cross as the gains in the PC CPU dept, (not even close to being an expert on this subject, but just going by past experience and snubbing my nose at the Intel 'Extreme' nonesense), just have not been forthcoming.All just when we are all geared up for another large increase . . . sort of dissappointing at least. If the CPU power remains stagnant at the 3.4 -- 3.6 level, we won't have to worry about FS10 for awhile, knowing that a new release is always geared for the next two generations CPU development.Best,Clayhttp://www.dreamfleet2000.com/gfx/images/F...ers/Dopke01.jpgClayton T. Dopke (Clay)Major, USAF (retired)"Drac"

But you guys why are you forgetting AMD? They are way ahead again in the Gaming CPU segment ;)The mhz race is dead really. Both AMD and Intel is trying to find other ways to increase performance. AMD abandoned it sooner so they have an advantage currently. Intel is doing the same. What we will end up with is probably MP setups in every home sooner or later ;). As well as 64-bit of course and other stuff.

Hit the nail right on the head, GeofA. I couldn't agree with you more.

Yep, I'm totally with Geofa on this as well. This seems indicative of the way things go with FS outside of a few payware and freeware developers. Evidence: check out the file library...every day scads and scads of repaints very few panels, original aircraft, scenery. Look at the screen shots forum,...repaints,repaints,repaints many of which are produced by very talented repainters but... we need more people working towards the immersion factor inside the cockpit IMHO.Adam

Guess what they're using to render the graphics...http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2002/4488.htmlThat makes laugh...Regards,Pedro

Guys - that type of look is 100% possible right now and probably was even 2 years ago from the Radeon 9700 Pro on up. The problem isn't hardware, it's FS's graphics engine - MS needs to write a new renderer portion of FS that takes advantage of all the amazing things that DirectX9 capable graphics cards can do like pixel and vertex shaders, geometry instancing etc. If we don't see this type of stuff in FS2006 I will be very surprised because the renderer code update is long overdue IMO. Part of the reason we don't see 60FPS in FS9 is because the CPU is doing a lot of this that could be offloaded to the video card using DX9 stuff. Look at how amazing Half-Life 2's physics and AI are coupled with the staggering increase in texture resolution over something like FS and yet it still runs super smooth at high resolutions with high levels of AA and AF. I've got my fingers crossed that we're going to be doing the same with the next version of FS.

>I agree, it's already been done with 'Games Consoles'. The speed is there so why can't greater technology hack the same performance?All the best,Dave.'Three greens and soft landings'

Yeah but HL 2 is not very technically advanced. It hardly have any shadows whatsoever and there is a bit of low polygon going on but the textures is very well done. Also the AI in HL 2 isn

Ok, but you're talking about this as opposed to FS, which has no lighting at all whatsoever - it is still faking shadows and shading by using separate textures for every time of day where the lighting changes. If FS had a real lighting engine in the renderer, the game would need one texture for the ground, planes, etc probably cutting the install size for the sim down by a factor of 3 or 4 as well as making things like airport environments, landing lights, lightning, etc look a whole load more realistic.I have to disagree on Doom 3 vs. Half-Life 2 as well, I found HL2 to be the far more realistic looking game. Half of the time in Doom3 it's so dark that you can't even see the "realism" lol! Some of those areas in Half-Life 2, like the flyby through the citadel had my jaw on the floor because of how much it resembled movie CGI to me. Half-Life 2 was by far the better game I thought as well - got bored with Doom 3 very quickly.

>Ok, but you're talking about this as opposed to FS, which has>no lighting at all whatsoever - it is still faking shadows and>shading by using separate textures for every time of day where>the lighting changes. If FS had a real lighting engine in the>renderer, the game would need one texture for the ground,>planes, etc probably cutting the install size for the sim down>by a factor of 3 or 4 as well as making things like airport>environments, landing lights, lightning, etc look a whole load>more realistic.Well, it's using day and night textures really - I don't see another way of adding lights, instead of maybe layered textures. Still you're right about the lighting engine...it's, like, from the 90ies or something ;)-Daniel

>Ok, but you're talking about this as opposed to FS, which has>no lighting at all whatsoever - it is still faking shadows and>shading by using separate textures for every time of day where>the lighting changes. If FS had a real lighting engine in the>renderer, the game would need one texture for the ground,>planes, etc probably cutting the install size for the sim down>by a factor of 3 or 4 as well as making things like airport>environments, landing lights, lightning, etc look a whole load>more realistic.>>I have to disagree on Doom 3 vs. Half-Life 2 as well, I found>HL2 to be the far more realistic looking game. Half of the>time in Doom3 it's so dark that you can't even see the>"realism" lol! Some of those areas in Half-Life 2, like the>flyby through the citadel had my jaw on the floor because of>how much it resembled movie CGI to me. Half-Life 2 was by far>the better game I thought as well - got bored with Doom 3 very>quickly.Well I am talking technically here. I agree that HL 2 both is a better game and looks better. But it looks better mostly because of Valve is having better art designers and the environment. If you look closely Half Life 2 shadows is really junk. Which is one of the reason Half Life 2 is mostly

The only problem is that Half-Life 2 runs in smaller world broken down map worlds with limited distances. So they can afford the detail, FS unfortunately would have to limit it's visibility to a mile or less like Half-Life 2 to keep it from being a major frame rate hit.I haven't tried LOMAC yet, however. The screenshots of the aircraft look great, but how is it on terrain, weather, airports, ATC, and navigation systems? Not just the graphics of it, but the complexity of it.It's these background calculations being run for how fast the clouts are moving, how fast fog is developing, what the pressure and wind direction and speed are as you're changing altitude, ATC trying to calculate all the traffic and the functions it need to do. Unfortuantely when things start getting this complex, some things need to be sacrifced to keep it from eating too much processor, memory, and hard drive space. I'm quite confident we could presently design a flight simulator that looked and acted like reality. Unfortunately, this would require a supercomputer to run. Commercial simulators can afford it because they have a dedicated machine that runs the sim and only the sim and may be using multiple processors and harddrives to run it.I feel general aviation flight simulators for PCs will always lag behind the grand majority of other games for the fact that they are trying to simulate a complex, many-facetted environment within a massive area compared to most other types of games. In that respect, I feel it's only fair to judge flight simulators only to other flight simulators.Just my two cents.----------------------------------------------------------------John S. MorganReal World: KGEG, UND Aerospace Spokane Satillite, Private 130+ hrs.Virtual: MSFS 2004"There is a feeling about an airport that no other piece of ground can have. No matter what the name of the country on whose land it lies, an airport is a place you can see and touch that leads to a reality that can only be thought and felt." - The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story by Richard Bach