For those unfamiliar with the name Robin Corn, he is the gent (scenery designer) who started the successful kickstarter to create a NZ photo scenery. This is a peek at some of his progress in Aerofly, which I thought some here might be interested in taking a look at. ( Yes I contributed to the kickstarter and am eagerly following Mr Corns progress)

 

 

 

Very nice scenery capabilities.

In my opinion, among the priorities of IPACS should be adding terrain self-shadowing and atmospheric scattering to the rendering engine.

I've seen some pics and videos of AFS2 that look like real photos more than the other flight sims, but the lack of those two features becomes evident as soon as the distant terrain becomes visible, or when the sun is not at high noon. It's also evident in the above posted videos.

As far as I know, adding those features should not be too difficult from a coding point of view (for example, I think X-Plane implements atmo scattering in a single pixel shader) and AFS2 has plenty of performance to spare.

Otherwise, while keeping at the distant forefront in performance, it risks being left behind in the other areas (both XP and FSW have those features).

 

2 minutes ago, Murmur said:

In my opinion, among the priorities of IPACS should be adding terrain self-shadowing and atmospheric scattering to the rendering engine.

I've seen some pics and videos of AFS2 that look like real photos more than the other flight sims, but the lack of those two features becomes evident as soon as the distant terrain becomes visible, or when the sun is not at high noon. It's also evident in the above posted videos.

LOL You took the words out of my mouth. While watching the video's I was thinking that it's nice to see all those houses etc. but that they stick out too much. I really miss those (cloud)shadows that P3D has. BTW I also miss the roads: specially when flying low the photoreal looks rather low res and the houses seem to stand in the middle of nowhere. But anyway, it's nice to see progress here.

Hmmmmmm........

I find that as time goes on, I understand more and more how the developers think on this, and while sometimes I disagree, (missed opportunities) I see overall they have pretty large ambitions they are approaching with a lot of internal discipline.

From the outside, (so I am told) it's kind of hard to see how one project leads and flows into others, but there is an overall method to the madness of how things are developing.

I myself am sitting back a bit more as I watch the pieces assemble, and have put myself into wait mode.

Hopefully good things come to those who wait. 

 

When I uploaded the Wellington video, it was originally linked through my own site, where I was able to explain what the video showed, and that it is a simple experiment rather than any work-in-progress or in any way represents a finished product. That's why I prefer a single link to my original post, rather than bypassing it and going directly to the embedded video. Still, I know that AVSIM's rules make this difficult, so I appreciate the plug.

Yes, the houses stick out, but this isn't really an issue with the rendering engine -- Wellington city is very green, with a lot of native vegetation, and normally I'd place vegetation around the houses, which makes them a better visual fit to the ground. Here only the larger areas of vegetation are 'cultivated'. Plus the building textures need a lot of work...  Also, I had dropped my display settings a lot for this, simply because I wanted to avoid any discussion of performance issues -- the cultivation process is in the early stages, and optimisation is needed. (This is the first time I've seen blurry ground textures in FS2, but this is solely the result of my settings.) I am interested in the way in which cultivation compares to MSFS autogen, but it's too early to judge at the moment. For example, the huge display distance may be tweaked in the future, I would accept something better than Prepar3d's limited display radius for autogen, but less than 'as far as the eye can see.'

I do think that FS2 has some ways to go, but in the meantime it does offer some real promise, especially as the baby-boomer killer app for VR. If anything was going to convince me to invest in VR, it would be this.

Being able to control shaders similar to Prepar3d/PTA would be a huge leap forward, and that applies to X-plane as well. My goal is to give each sim the benefit of the doubt while they are still in development, and make sure that the limiting factor is not the lack of developer support.

As a MSFS-based developer, the main thing for me is the support of Arno at FSDeveloper.com, with his FS2 support in his great development tools. So what excites me is not necessarily what excited the community:)