Has FTX Global been dumbed down in FSW?

[dtrjones 356]

Having a flight through FSW today and it struck me the quality of the textures were not great. They are clearly being worked on as for example the night textures and lighting is pretty much absent.

Having said this the textures are clearly better than stock FSX, some farm scenes look great but other town scenes don't always look like the screenshots promised, so I wonder if either we got a dumbed down version of FTX Global or may be something isn't working properly.

As a reminder the original trailer video which I'm guessing came from P3D is below. However the fact this video was probably taken from P3D shouldn't mean it's better than FSW unless you guys can tell me P3D can do this and FSW can't. Anyway from what I can see from the video, it doesn't appear to me that we are seeing the same quality in FSW which is a shame.

Just before you people point it out. I'm aware that FTX Global from Orbx costs over 50 dollars which is twice the price of FSW, however I didn't think that be an excuse for including a cutdown product,

 

[Longranger 148]

23 minutes ago, dtrjones said:

Having a flight through FSW today and it struck me the quality of the textures were not great. They are clearly being worked on as for example the night textures and lighting is pretty much absent.

DUmbed down? I think not. I think the problem is simply that the lighting engine.

The fundamental prtoblem is: PBR has to handle the complete bandwith that our eyes can handle. This can only be donein a clean manner in a HDR workflow. X-Plane switched everything to a HDR foundation in the beginning of X-Plane 10 and they still had a slight colorshift, when they switched to PBR in X-Plane 11 and people argued that the colors were no longer saturated, they were too dumped down by the haze.But that´s the thing how the air behaves. When LM went to HDR they simply added an additional tuning menu where you can shift the settings totally out of line.

What PBR does: It adds all lights into the scenery, calculates the environment, determines how the human eye will react to these conditions and has then the data to calculate, what the eye will see.

Everything has to be up to specs. The textures have to be defined right, the internal handling has to be right, the monitor has to be more or less calibrated to see a more or less realistic image.You can "improve" these images afterward (many digital cameras do this).

But this won´t be in highly saturated colors that you are used too.. At the moment many things are pushed into the black-out white-out areas in FSW, the night lighting is simply not there, so what would you expect?

[dtrjones 356]

1 hour ago, Longranger said:

DUmbed down? I think not. I think the problem is simply that the lighting engine.

The fundamental prtoblem is: PBR has to handle the complete bandwith that our eyes can handle. This can only be donein a clean manner in a HDR workflow. X-Plane switched everything to a HDR foundation in the beginning of X-Plane 10 and they still had a slight colorshift, when they switched to PBR in X-Plane 11 and people argued that the colors were no longer saturated, they were too dumped down by the haze.But that´s the thing how the air behaves. When LM went to HDR they simply added an additional tuning menu where you can shift the settings totally out of line.

What PBR does: It adds all lights into the scenery, calculates the environment, determines how the human eye will react to these conditions and has then the data to calculate, what the eye will see.

Everything has to be up to specs. The textures have to be defined right, the internal handling has to be right, the monitor has to be more or less calibrated to see a more or less realistic image.You can "improve" these images afterward (many digital cameras do this).

But this won´t be in highly saturated colors that you are used too.. At the moment many things are pushed into the black-out white-out areas in FSW, the night lighting is simply not there, so what would you expect?

Thanks Karsten, I see. So white runways are an example of this because th exposure is all wrong due to the inability to calcuate the light correctly? It seems odd that the runways should look wrong as if I was adding PBR into the engine the runway would be the first thing I would address. I don't know about MS Flight but damn they had nice looking runways especially at dawn / dusk.

So if I read you correctly because P3D doesn't have PBR then the textures from Orbx are being shown as designed. So what effort would it take for Dovetail to correct the look of all the textures in the game for PBR? Apart from the planes and cockpits it sounds as if all the textures need to be redone if you forgive the pun from the ground up for it to work, otherwise how does a light source know what physical element it's interacting with to calculate the bounced light?

This all seams a lot of work, so I'm not sure what claim Dovetail to have implemented PBR if all the assets in the environment don't make use of PBR values? 

[TechguyMaxC 516]

One thing I've noticed whilst watching videos on youtube and with my own limited time in the sim, is that rural areas tend to look more realistic to my eyes than urban areas.  Urban areas seem to have too many trees and the buildings are poorly aligned with roads (if at all).  Hopefully DTG hears and is able to address this concern because right now, my FSX:SE installation with all the NA Orbx regions looks miles better than this.  Of course, that's not shocking to discover but it is something which can be improved upon.

[188AHC 2,138]

Cryss is addressing this subject in another post. One of the things in the update will be some lighting corrections.

 

[TechguyMaxC 516]

18 minutes ago, 188AHC said:

Cryss is addressing this subject in another post. One of the things in the update will be some lighting corrections.

 

The lighting improvements are welcome, though it won't help with the landclass classifications.  Just one more item on a very long list, I'm sure.  It's great to see bug fixes/improvements so quickly after release into EA though, 10/10 for that!