GSX v2 Released--Animated Pax and SODE jetways everywhere

[Wise87 1,281]

22 minutes ago, Mitch24 said:

You obviously didn't read my post. I've already seen that video.

I want to add the GSX jetways to KMSP (which already has SODE) in order to add the Gate numbers on the Jetways.

With GSX Level 2 you can't modify an existing jetway with SODE. In the Flightbeam manager you can disable sode jetways but then it makes static jetways which are part of the building model in which you can't edit either. 

😡😡😡😡😡

You made no mention of seeing that video and they recently posted it.. Good luck with that attitude. 

[out 769]

I've been testing GSX Level2 in LSGG (the only FSDT European airport I use), P3Dv4.
My pax in the bus look like below. Is this a bug or a feature? Has anyone else seen it too?

Edited September 7, 2018 by Rafal

[Drumcode 1,893]

22 minutes ago, Rafal said:

I've been testing GSX Level2 in LSGG (the only FSDT European airport I use), P3Dv4.
My pax in the bus look like below. Is this a bug or a feature? Has anyone else seen it too?

Bus full of alien Oscars! Cool!

[regis9 4,014]

1 hour ago, Rafal said:

I've been testing GSX Level2 in LSGG (the only FSDT European airport I use), P3Dv4.
My pax in the bus look like below. Is this a bug or a feature? Has anyone else seen it too?

Based on the show I saw last night about shadow people in a haunted house I'd say your bus is haunted.  

[Mitch24 194]

1 hour ago, Rafal said:

I've been testing GSX Level2 in LSGG (the only FSDT European airport I use), P3Dv4.
My pax in the bus look like below. Is this a bug or a feature? Has anyone else seen it too?

I had that too.. those people have been in the bus since the beginning of GSX... looks like they forgot to change them 

[grandfred29 180]

hello

Nice evolution of realism

 

Edited September 8, 2018 by grandfred29
found my problem

[fluffyflops 1,858]

14 hours ago, Mitch24 said:

Yeah I wouldn't image in today's time there being an A380 in which they are transporting 500+ passengers to it... I would imaging the extreme heavies get the most priority.

1.All depends on the airport, the agreement with the handling agent/bus supplier,

2.the distance from the stand to the terminal, (at virgin in St Lucia, Antigua and Barbados for example we can u load a 330 and 747 with out busses as the stand is by the arrivals door) at Heathrow If we get put on remote(very rare) we get busses

3.the location of the CP,

4.The location of the stand regarding if its a domestic or international stand and the flight is a domestic or international flight, (at easyJet if you'd come into lgw from pmi and are going to edi afterwards    ie:International to domestic you sometimes get a remote stand and buses as the pax are coming and going to different CPs, international and domestic 

5.if you've been given the correct terminal by Stand planning (those who know the Gatwick debacle will understand) when easyjet used to be at North and South terminal, dodgy dave in stand planning ground ops would constantly put you on the wrong terminal and youd have to bus to pax to the other terminal. 

6.If you where due to be met by port health. Very very rarely you might be put on a remote stand for this.  An occasional I remember was a few years ago was an easyjet flight from marrakech to Gatwick. Outside the terminal in marrakech there's lots of stray cats. A little old lady once grabbed a kitten, stuffed it into her jumper and somehow managed to get it through the security CP and onto the aircraft, fast forward 3 hours we got an acars in OCC advising us the kitten had escaped and was running around the aircraft (just south of Paris)  We told port health at Gatwick. They put it on a remote stand and came on board with the police (a few tree huggers didn't want it to be put down, which it was going to be) I remember telling my cat loving girlfriend when I got home. She didn't talk to me for days as she thought somehow I made the decision to put it down.... Women.... 

7. Lastly, and controversially.. Does the coach suppliers have enough busses and drivers. Anyone crew or pilots on here will relate to having to wait forever for a bus or an ambilift due to short staffing of bus drivers from Swissport, national express, menzies or whoever is providing them. I can assure you guys it doesn't matter which airline you work for, crew busses are always late no matter what. We have the problem at virgin, we had the same problem at easyJet, and they have the same problem at ba.  The coach companies pay rubbish money so historically you got alot of Eastern Europeans with hgv licenses doing it, since the brexit outcome there is now a shortage of Eastern Europeans so the bus companies are struggling to get staff.  National express at stansted are having this issue. 

 

On a final ramble from me, crew in February at LGW when it was snowing / bad weather.  747 gets given a remote stand with steps and busses. Pax disembark no problem.  Crew bus then arrives and crew run down the wet steps to get it before it goes.  The captain (who's one of my favourites, lovely bloke) runs out the aircraft slips on the second step, comes a cropper and falls and breaks his leg.  The poor bugger had 6 months left till retirement. 

[virtuali 4,421]

8 hours ago, Mitch24 said:

I had that too.. those people have been in the bus since the beginning of GSX... looks like they forgot to change them 

Far from it...

The Passenger bus has always been empty in GSX. We purposely added these "shadow" figures in this version, in order to give the impression the bus is filling/emptying while deboarding/boarding.

This, for the obvious performance reasons to keep the number of animated humans visible on screen at any given time as low as possible. Even on the highest passenger density, you don't see more 10-15 people at the same time, and it's already starting to affect fps a bit. But if we allowed the passengers to stay in the Bus, which can take up to 90 people, the fps would collapse.

And it's not just that. If we had to send (at each frame) Simconnect commands to the sim to keep 90 people animated and locked to the bus position, even when it's going away full, we would had to spam the simulator with so many commands, that we'll likely disrupt all the other addons usign Simconnect, and other developers would have any right to be angry with us and our ***ody spamming passengers...

So no, it's not a "bug", is clearly a feature, which is done intentionally to keep performance in control and don't kill the simulation.

Whenever you see something that doesn't look "entirely" real in an FSDT product, ask yourself this question first:

"Could be they made it this way for performance reasons ?"

And you'll find that, almost invariably, the answer will be Yes, if you took a minute or so thinking about the problem.

 

[out 769]

1 minute ago, virtuali said:

if you took a minute or so thinking about the problem.

I took much more than minute to do so and since I'm not a developer I thought asking (instead of accusing or trolling which happens around) won't hurt.

[garydpoole 183]

28 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Even on the highest passenger density, you don't see more 10-15 people at the same time, and it's already starting to affect fps a bit. But if we allowed the passengers to stay in the Bus, which can take up to 90 people, the fps would collapse.

Just an observation, but as I'm not actually moving at the time that the passengers are boarding / deboarding, is it such an issue that there is a loss in fps ? At the end of the day, this addon is all about whats goes on before and after the actual flight, not during. So does a loss in performance matter that much if it increases the eye candy ?

[Gnak26 1]

44 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Whenever you see something that doesn't look "entirely" real in an FSDT product, ask yourself this question first:

"Could be they made it this way for performance reasons ?"

And you'll find that, almost invariably, the answer will be Yes, if you took a minute or so thinking about the problem.

 

I asked myself if this could have been done better (i mean without the T-1000 cyborgs from the movie Terminator 2 inside the bus) maintaining the good performance...i think that, almost invariably, the answer will be yes. Maybe just with static passengers as now but a little more "real" than this (look at the driver, he is not a Terminator). Who knows, maybe in a future update. 😉

Edited September 8, 2018 by Gnak26

[Drumcode 1,893]

Wow. Total game changer at default airports, this combined with REX's WAHD is an instant win. Well done Umberto, well done.

[virtuali 4,421]

3 hours ago, Gnak26 said:

I asked myself if this could have been done better (i mean without the T-1000 cyborgs from the movie Terminator 2 inside the bus) maintaining the good performance...i think that, almost invariably, the answer will be yes. Maybe just with static passengers as now but a little more "real" than this (look at the driver, he is not a Terminator). Who knows, maybe in a future update. 😉

Well, it's at least good enough you agree with me it was right to have them static, which was my main point.

Making them more "real" would mean texture them. But the issue is, in order not to defeat the purpose of making them static (=not individually modeled as they are now), we should probably have them *share* a single texture because, of course, a big performance hit is also the very fact you have many objects visible at the same time, each one with a different texture. Each different texture is a separate DrawCalls, and they are the worse possible enemy of good fps.

It's not as if we are running the simulation stand-alone. Your GPU is already quite busy handling thousands of drawcalls from the scenery, the airport, the airplane, the VC (each animated switch is a separate drawcall. Airplanes like PMDG have more than 1000 drawcalls *just* for the VC), which means we have the responsibility to keep our stuff as lightweight as possible, so nobody can say "I installed GSX L2 and the passengers killed my fps"

Since every character has usually 2-3 textures, and we have 42 different models so, in order make them static just as they are now (a single mesh with a single color = just 1 DrawCall = very fast ), in order to achieve the same result, but have them textured, we would have to squeeze data from 80-100 different textures into a single one. With the obvious quality loss so, they might look more "real", but they surely would look very badly pixelated, with washed out slpotches of colors, since there wouldn't be enough pixel resolution to map the colors correctly to their polygons.

So, instead of having badly textured people, we chose the most obvious solution, which was to represent them as shadows.

You DO have a point though, and is they were supposed to look as shadows, but they are "shiny", which is just a compilation BUG. We haven't set a material flag properly, so they don't really look as they were supposed to. This is of course a very easy fix which is so trivial that it's not even worth discussing.

Edited September 8, 2018 by virtuali

[virtualstuff 759]

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

So, instead of having badly textured people, we chose the most obvious solution, which was to represent them as shadows.

You DO have a point though, and is they were supposed to look as shadows, but they are "shiny", which is just a compilation BUG. We haven't set a material flag properly, so they don't really look as they were supposed to. This is of course a very easy fix which is so trivial that it's not even worth discussing.

First of all great job and certainly a change in immersion factor.

Well maybe one texture map with different textures (20 and repeating) or maybe one object with one texture map,
creating the illusion of more passengers or maybe an option for users with fast hardware to choose...

A bus with less transparent windows 😉 since the animated objects already spawn from defined positions.
So I understand the reason, but would have chosen a different solution to give the illusion of an bus with pax...

I personally don't prefer how the grey scale objects are now modelled, even for performance reason....

But I really love what you guys have done with GSX and now GSX2, first day user and not flying without it 🙂

Anyhow just sharing some feedback to make an already great product even with a greater immersion factor.

Thanks again for the hard work gentlemen and GSX is a must have GSX / GSX2 / GSX3? lol

Edited September 8, 2018 by awf

[CFIJose 5,485]

Is this a mandatory update or can I wait a week or two?