I, too, would say that response 2 was more hostile than response 1, but I agree with the second poster that the first response had nothing to do with the question, and sounded to me like a condescending opinion better kept to himself.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

>i agree with Tom that was uncalled for wasnt it, and i meant>payware VC and aircraft textures not default....>>i see that the PMDG MD11 VC textures are more crisp than the>PMDG 747 VC, anyone agree?>THats because those MD11 shots are from the graphics program theyre being modeled in not in SIM. While Im sure theyll be awesome theyll not look as real or crisp as those screen shots.

Post us a pic, L. so we can see for ourselves.Peter Sydney Australia

AHA, smart move Bill. Just didn't notice it until now.Carmine http://forums.avsim.net/images/wave.gifhttp://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7118/phoenixtp8mg.jpg

I original poster has asked a question, if there is going to be an improvement of VC or aircraft textures. My answer was that I find it secondary (and therefore don't care too much about it), if there were any improvements to the SDK, because only a few developers have made 100% use of the current texture sizes of the VC and aircraft. The quality of a VC or aircraft has less to do with technical enhancements, but more with creativity, artistic design and programming skills.I originally assumed that his question was about the quality of the VCs and airplane textures of the "default" planes.Sorry, if it came over as "hostile", I guess I was the target of the misinterpretation - it was not intended and maybe the wording was a tad confusing.Besides: The original question intends to ask someone to break the NDA, because it is not publically known yet what/if improvements are being done to FSX. But then again, someone could critize me for my earlier posting asking if there were any improvments to ATC. ;)Pat

>Post us a pic, L. so we can see for ourselves.>Peter Sydney AustraliaSaw this on a Fly forumhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/152260.jpg

Excellent L. Many thanks.Peter Sydney Australia

That is a beautiful pic, but as one who's spent the last 4 months trying to take that into the VC I can tell you that the pic has got to be a rendering of the model in the authoring environment and not an in - sim shot. Why?Because that kind of detail requires enormous power... that shot would take about 30-45 seconds to render a single frame on my machine which is a Sempron rig, 1.5 Gig RAM, 800 FSB and an ATI X700 Pro with 256 Ram.Don't get me wrong, it's magnificent work and hat's off to the dev who worked hard to model it. But I do that kind of thing too... I have an R22 panel in about the same detail and getting it into FS9 without loosing too much of that quality has been hard, at best.Bump mapping will go a very long way to making that sort of thing a reality because the better modeling environments can create a bump map (aka Normal map) right there within the 3d authoring environment. Then we need to get it into FSX.It will allow far more detail to be rendered because it's done on the Vid card rather than in the processor... a huge plus.Bill, you mentioned shading. Are we going to have to wait for shader 4 capable hardware that can interface with DX10? Or, possibly, we may be able to utilize the shading via shader 2 and DX9 when FSX first hits the shelves. Dunno, but it's an interesting thing to ponder...Between shading and bump mapping, what I see happening is that we're hitting the limits of GMax. It's a good program for what it was intended to do but it's no longer supported, it no longer resembles 3dS Max as it once did because that program has evolved and we're getting into capabilities that GMax was never intended to deal with.That leaves, as far as I know, only one program left that is free, has no licensing restrictions on what you create, can handle everything from keyframe and IKA to Catmul-Clark Subsurf and Nurbs plus handles multi-textures and bump map creation, all in one package.Blender. Thank goodness that the learning curve isn't nearly as hard as it was 5 years ago. A lot of tutes, vids and materials have been released in that 5 years... and it looks as if it's time to get ready to write some python scripts.Scott / Vorlin

>Bill, you mentioned shading. Are we going to have to wait for>shader 4 capable hardware that can interface with DX10? Or,>possibly, we may be able to utilize the shading via shader 2>and DX9 when FSX first hits the shelves. Dunno, but it's an>interesting thing to ponder...From everything I've been reading, we should be able to use 'Bump' as well as 'Fresnel Ramp' at RTM of FSX, using plugins supplied for both GMax and Max.