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Excellent Analysis of trailer by former ACES member

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36 minutes ago, MikeT707 said:

Kevin,

What are your thoughts on the street lights? Do you think they are similar to X-Plane where the lamps cast their light on surrounding objects and possibly use ray tracing?

The X-Plane street lamps, car headlights, and other light sources do not use ray tracing as far as I know. Ben has talked about maybe supporting it in the future, but enough users will need to get their hands on GPUs like the Nvidia 20-series with hardware support to make it worthwhile. The lights seen at night are all individual sources though, and the engine can support a huge number at once. 

It can be hard to tell in a video whether night time lights are individual sources or baked into the scenery, until you get down to street or airport level and see what's happening. The big clue in XP11 is the moving car headlights. Not just points of white light, but lighting the road ahead of each individual car.

Edited by Paraffin
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X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator on Windows 10 
i7 6700 4.0 GHz, 32 GB RAM, GTX 1660 ti, 1920x1200 monitor

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My understanding of the state of play with RTX at the moment is that the performance is really only really at proof of concept stage with ray tracing, at least when you’re looking at triple a level games. Hopefully the 3xxx series will raise it significantly. I haven’t actually seen any ray tracing in the flesh so I have no idea how excit8ng it is. 

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Kevin/Gibbage, I'm at work and haven't been able to watch the video yet.

All the same, the input from someone who has the knowledge of all these things is greatly appreciated!


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Thank you Kevin,

Your professional comments and observations have helped me sort through the information on MSFS XX squirting through various sources. It does indeed look extremely promising by all accounts of those who know a lot more than I do. The active weather is astonishing, and when combined with a much more realistic portrayed and scaled world, it will be a significant game changer for me, and I expect many of my colleagues.

With nearly 700G of P3D and addons that look about as new and fresh as I do when I look in the mirror, it's time for a fresh start! :wacko:

I have a follow up question that I have not been able to answer: "Is there any indication or rumour as to seasonal variations of landscapes?" 

Thank you Sir for your briefing. I think I can speak for many who greatly appreciate your overview.

Kindest regards,

Spirit Flyer :smile:

Stephen

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Good question. I wonder how horizon 4 manages those seasonal changes - complete reloading of different textures or some sort of shading magic (I have seen other people write this, I don’t know what it means)

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57 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

Good question. I wonder how horizon 4 manages those seasonal changes - complete reloading of different textures or some sort of shading magic (I have seen other people write this, I don’t know what it means)

Shaders magic. Just look for seasonal shaders on youtube. It has a lot of videos showing/explaining.

Shaders are like masks rendered over the texture (E.G white/black/grey shaders over the green textures to simulate the snow). Of course the implementation will make it look good or bad.

Edited by ca_metal

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20 hours ago, LHookins said:

Obviously you don't apply this philosophy to a sports competition or in a war.  But in various forms of business, there are benefits to helping your "competitors" to be more successful.  The biggest benefit comes from helping others in your company.  You aren't competing with them, you're working toward a common goal.

You try to reduce it to a question of character. But in fact it is the opposite. They want to protect the members of their teams. The problem are simply the metrics of your controlling. A very simple solution would be every team has to earn money but R&D and Support always cost money. They are not so stupid but their metrics are in many cases speculation. But the management of the company simply needs their numbers but you are seeing every year how imperfect these metrics are. But if you get less budget due to these metrics you have to terminate team members that you need. They don't want to cheat the company but they try to protect their teams.

Edited by Longranger

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6 hours ago, SpiritFlyer said:

Thank you Kevin,

Your professional comments and observations have helped me sort through the information on MSFS XX squirting through various sources. It does indeed look extremely promising by all accounts of those who know a lot more than I do. The active weather is astonishing, and when combined with a much more realistic portrayed and scaled world, it will be a significant game changer for me, and I expect many of my colleagues.

With nearly 700G of P3D and addons that look about as new and fresh as I do when I look in the mirror, it's time for a fresh start! :wacko:

I have a follow up question that I have not been able to answer: "Is there any indication or rumour as to seasonal variations of landscapes?" 

Thank you Sir for your briefing. I think I can speak for many who greatly appreciate your overview.

Kindest regards,

Spirit Flyer :smile:

Stephen

I dont know about the seasons.  Its NOT an easy thing to do.  Seasons are not the same all over the globe, and you need 4 sets of autogen.  If the sim is using FSX as its core, seasons are built into the sim.  The question is then if they plan on using the resources needed.  

Photogrametery will not work well with seasons by default.  A new highly advanced shader system would need to be created that would put snow on the roofs of the new scenery since lighting and textures are "baked" into them.  I have seen this shader work in other game engines and it calculates the surface angle of polygons.  The polygons that is more horizontal get white/snow.  Its possible, but will take extra work.  It all depends on how much they value that feature on the photogrametery maps.  The tree's are also an issue since they are all green blobs even in fall or winter.  Again, more resources would be needed to clean up those trees and replace them with autogen trees that already have seasonal packages.  

What the team is doing is restarting a product that had been developed over 25 years and stopped for 10.  Saying that task is monumental is the understatement of a lifetime!  What we may get is something with less features than FSX (like seasons) with the expectation of adding them through its lifetime.  Game's are seen more as a service.  We wont get version 1.0 then 2.0 then 3.0.  They will keep improving the core over and over, supported by 3rd party sales, subscription or add-ons.  If we dont get seasons on release, I hope its on the roadmap.

Kevin

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Kevin Miller

 

3D Artist and developer

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On 6/25/2019 at 6:51 PM, LHookins said:

The only thing I was wrong about was that Icon A5 isn't the same model used in Flight (he should know, he made the original) but he thought the Super Cub was the same one that was in flight.

Hook

I found it interesting he couldn't talk about Flight under an NDA. I also watched the whole thing. I found it very interesting coming from him and actually explaining different things from a tech's point of view.  

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ASUS Prime Z490-A / i7-10700K / RTX 4080 / G.SKILL Ripjaws 32GB / Lian-Li PC-O11 Dynamic case 

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On 6/26/2019 at 3:41 PM, skully said:

Regarding the procedural based texturing he describes in the video:

From Wikipdia-" In computer graphics, a procedural texture is a texture created using a mathematical description (i.e. an algorithm) rather than directly stored data. The advantage of this approach is low storage cost, unlimited texture resolution and easy texture mapping.[1] These kinds of textures are often used to model surface or volumetric representations of natural elements such as wood, marble, granite, metal, stone, and others.

Usually, the natural look of the rendered result is achieved by the usage of fractal noise and turbulence functions. These functions are used as a numerical representation of the "randomness" found in nature."

This also brings up the question of what implications this method will have on the aircraft we currently use if indeed they are able to be ported over?

Will all modeled objects use procedural based texturing or will the textures we now use be usable? So many questions.

Very exciting times ahead!

I do not believe that any aircraft in the new title uses procedural textures. I believe its going to be like any other modern titles, its uses a bumpmaps and PBR textures. There is no point in using procedural textures on a fixed 3D model.

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Its interesting yes, but when it comes down to it, he know as much as we do.

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1 hour ago, Montie said:

I believe its going to be like any other modern titles, its uses a bumpmaps and PBR textures.

 

Define what you you understand as "modern"?

Modern games that I know do use procedural texturing

Edited by guenseli
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Guenter Steiner
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1 hour ago, guenseli said:

Modern games that I know do use procedural texturing

This is only one tool in the toolbox. There are no single features that make a renderer modern and the other old it is simply a combination of tools that tell us something about the use case.What do they want to do, and how do they do this.In the case of a flight simulator we have many smooth surfaces and very few humans. So a realistic look of skin and hair is less important so PBR could be used as an indication of a modern renderer but by itself it is only an indication. But by itself procedural texturing is only one of many tools and it has advantages and disadvantages and the designers can choose what they really need.

What you can say in this case the use on consoles seems to be a highly wanted feature.

Edited by Longranger

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2 hours ago, Montie said:

Its interesting yes, but when it comes down to it, he know as much as we do.

I think it's a safe bet that he knows more about it than we do.  

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Larry Hookins

 

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

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Just now, LHookins said:

I think it's a safe bet that he knows more about it than we do.  

About the technology of course he does. 

But about the features of the game, we are all guessing at this point. Only the developers of the game really know.

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