Great explanation Ed! Hopefully a lot of people will read it and understand.

 

Vic

Let's be honest... comparing a sim that uses a 'fog' boundary on the outer edge of range to increase frame rates against a sim that does not obscure the distance with a haze... is apples and oranges.It's time to stop saying 'sim z does this'.

I answer this on the basis you are referring to my post.. Apologies if not.

 

Sorry we are not talking about distance. Look at the video. The aircraft is right alongside the mountain as various parts come into focus. Nothing to do with fog or haze. I fly real GA aircraft in the UK and I know which sim gives the most realistic impression of what I see out if the window in terms of definition and detail up close or in a 10 mile radius. For $200 dollars and hundreds of pounds of add ons I feel I have the right express disappointment and also use a comparator.

 

Cheers

Peter.

Yeah... you need to re-read what I stated. It is really not possible for you to see things on your computer screen just like you do in the real world with the naked eye. I know you think you can... but, you can't.

 

No sim will be capable of that, for a very, very long time. If ever.

Yeah...you need to re-read what I said.....I never said I could see the real world..........I said the most realistic impression.....anyway think we have done that one to death now.

 

 

cheers

Peter

One word...

 

P.S. Don't let Ed's negative attitude get to you. He seems to get pissy easily.

 

Your question is perfectly valid. The "soft" texture only a short distance from my aircraft is a big disappointment with P3D as well.

Please relax everyone

 

Small update from my side...

Tested several tweaks from participants here and what i found elsewere.

Current Conclusion: I hope someday the LM Devs allow higher settings and remove some of the limitations.

I read somewhere that it was possible to set higher LOD than 6.5 in older versions some time ago.

 

This annoying short range texture loading have nothing to do with a hardware limit, i mean...p3d runs very smooth here with ultra settings (in my testareas)

 

If it is no (lets say 32bit) limitation i want to be able to drag down the Frames per Second until the highest possible visual experience is reached.

I can still not believe that this texture loading issue is intended to save us all from unreasonable bad performance.

It's more VAS than Frames at that point. Crank P3D up to a LOD of 8.5 (if it was allowed) or higher and try to fly anything more than a default aircraft and you will quickly get the lovely OOM error.

It's more VAS than Frames at that point. Crank P3D up to a LOD of 8.5 (if it was allowed) or higher and try to fly anything more than a default aircraft and you will quickly get the lovely OOM error.

Ok, to be fair OOM is something i know only from (mostly) old prepar3d Forum Threads.

This seems to be in control because of the LM Development.

Yes, Out of Memory errors with our 3/4 GB limit with 32-bit apps.

Let's be honest... comparing a sim that uses a 'fog' boundary on the outer edge of range to increase frame rates against a sim that does not obscure the distance with a haze... is apples and oranges.

 

It's time to stop saying 'sim z does this'.

Pleas let me shortly "object" here (before we leave this "information" as it is and some people might get it wrong)  ... I would dare to say, that this "fog" story is outdated in the age of X-Plane 10 (yes, it was indeed there in XP8/XP9), where fog is really only used if you want fog (from a pure weather perspective).

 

To show you a interesting comparison (which also might underline the "no fog anymore" thesis!), there was a big post at the German simflight.de site some months ago (last year), where they compared a lot of FSX landclass products ... and with a little help (I did help them), we also added to almost each comparison set a X-Plane 10 shot showing more or less the exact same viewpoint (using the free HD Mesh Scenery as the only add-on - which is the best available "landclass" product in X-Plane to date). Of course I do not ask you (neither do you need!) to read it ... but if you scroll down, you will see the comparison set ... and usually the last picture is X-Plane 10:

• http://www.simflight.de/2014/09/14/der-grosse-vergleich-mit-welchen-landklassen-und-texturen-sieht-deutschland-besten-aus/

And by looking at these pictures, I would not say, that X-Plane is using "substantially" more fog to trick something.

 

Or you might check out some videos ... like this one (which underlines the argument, that X-plane has no "texture popping"):

 

DISCLAIMER: of course I know (I am a scenery developer), that the price - and reason - of this difference is, that MSFS (and equally P3D) does more of an on-the-fly scenery generation (from data closer to its original, raw form) which can be more dependent on your hardware ... while X-Plane is more like "pre-gen", where a lot of stuff is pre-generated and it only needs to load it in big (1x1 degree) chunks. And of course, I am quite aware of the upsides and downsides of both approaches (like file size, load time, modability, visual quality and so on) ... so, no need to discuss it here (as it would even more derail this thread).

Big thanks Alpilotx for some insight from your point of view and of course all the work you have done for X-Plane!

I thought HD Mesh was just that - - mesh, not landclass? Me confused... ;-)

Beautiful looking work there Andras!

here's some more example of Andras work here : https://www.flickr.com/photos/fogboundturtle/sets/72157650133113646/

 

Amazing amount of details and no texture pop-up.

here's some more example of Andras work here : https://www.flickr.com/photos/fogboundturtle/sets/72157650133113646/

 

Amazing amount of details and no texture pop-up.

Well ... yes, Mesh is maybe a gross understatement :rolleyes: ... A lengthy description of the contents is here:

• http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-mesh-scenery-v3/#General-charcteristics

In short: with X-Plane, elevation and landclass is NOT separated (as in MSFS), because there the scenery stores the "final" triangle mesh   (which is more like a complex patchwork a myriads of tiny triangle patches) where each triangle patch already contains the information, which terrain type (and thus indirectly texture) it should be shown in the end ... so, this way, the landclass information is already bound to the triangle structure.

 

Additionally, this base scenery also contains (very simplified):

• all water features like rivers, lakes, oceans (which in X-Plane is part of the mesh anyways ... just kind of a special "terrain type" --> water)
• complete road, railroad, power line network information
• autogen zoning (polygonal areas and line / point structures which tell the sim where, what type of autogen should be filled in)
• forest polygons (the exact form of forest areas and the forest type which should be used)
• some obstacle information

You can find some "interesting" screenshots in a year old interview with flightsim.com where you see some internal / structural images of the scenery (there you see the mesh etc.):

• www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?13946-Interview-With-Andras-Fabian