Excellent Analysis of trailer by former ACES member

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

1 minute ago, LHookins said:

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

Larry, you’re up late!! I just looked at the clock and saw that is 2:45am and my wife’s already been in bed for 3 hours while I’m sitting on the couch watching tv still and browsing the forums. You’re probably the only one awake in Bonham right now, beside the sherrif and donut maker.

I agree with the comment however. Anyone who’s worked on so many sims as a career, probably has a good idea of what’s going on.

[Montie 124]

1 hour ago, guenseli said:

 

Define what you you understand as "modern"?

Modern games that I know do use procedural texturing

Procedural textures make sense on the environment or scenery what have you, where you tell the program: "I want a rock it should contain this and that texture/map" and it will generate it (of course there are more to it) - procedural texturing is about workflow more than the texture itself. On an aircraft not so much, at least I don't think so.

[LHookins 3,103]

1 minute ago, cmpbellsjc said:

Larry, you’re up late!!

My body clock works on a 25 hour day. 🙂  

 

4 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

Anyone who’s worked on so many sims as a career, probably has a good idea of what’s going on.

I agree.  While we're all guessing, his are the guesses of an industry insider with lots of experience.  While "he knows as much as we do" it's also correct to say "we don't know as much as he does."

I'll take his guesses over anyone else's.

Hook

[Longranger 148]

8 minutes ago, Montie said:

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

Not really. There are hugh differences between educated guesses, pure speculation and wishful thinking.and in these threads many people simply follow the last case.

[Montie 124]

1 minute ago, Longranger said:

Not really. There are hugh differences between educated guesses, pure speculation and wishful thinking.and in these threads many people simply follow the last case.

Exactly.

[Gibbage 199]

12 hours ago, Montie said:

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

As I said many times in the video, its an "educated guess".  

[Gibbage 199]

9 hours ago, Montie said:

Procedural textures make sense on the environment or scenery what have you, where you tell the program: "I want a rock it should contain this and that texture/map" and it will generate it (of course there are more to it) - procedural texturing is about workflow more than the texture itself. On an aircraft not so much, at least I don't think so.

I spent 18 months working on the car art team at Turn 10 on both Forza 7 and Forza Horizon 4.  They use a procedural texture system for all the cars, and after using it, I can see how flight sims can benefit from it.  

For example, the seats in my Zenith 701 need a 4K texture just so I can have a good fabric looking material.  With a procedural system, I can have a tiled 512/512 tiled with an AO map controlling things like dirt and shadows.  That way I can just apply a fabric material to the seats, and stitching be a tiled alpha.  That way im using a fraction of the texture space for an higher level of detail.  If you look at the cockpit of the average aircraft, its comprised of about 5-10 materials.  Plastic, fabric, chrome and so on.  Instead of painting chrome on toggle switches, you just apply a chrome material to them.  Once you have a stock of good shaders, its a very fast system to work in, and efficient.  It will be a bit of a learning curve for developers, and I will be sure to make video's explaining it.  

That is assuming we are getting procedural texture's.  It just makes sense with the limitations of Xbox to use it though.  

[BaronKen 144]

I have to say that I love Forza 4 though I'm not really "into" racing games per se. What's great about it is on my 6 year old system it runs fantastic and looks even better due to the auto customization feature. It's amazing to me that it does look and run so well on my system ( I have a 3.6 ghz processor, 12 GB ram and a 4GB Nvidia 1050ti) and what it must look like on a brand new PC I can't even fathom. I am hoping that FS2020 will do the same thing. I'm not averse to upgrading next year (and probably will) but it's possible that I may not have to for awhile. 

I hope the FS2020 team will build an auto customization feature into the new sim similar to Forza that the user can choose to implement while still "tweaking" some things if they choose to do so, but hopefully the days of fooling with cfg files are over.

While I'm at it I would like to thank Kevin for his analysis of the trailer, it was very interesting and knowledgeable. As for the info on photogrammetry I would like to point out that though it's one thing to analyze and dissect still frames and look at "flaws", I will take a guess that while flying (even low and slow at 1500' for example) the user will not notice these things because of the motion of flight and so taken in context the new technology will appear to look as good as it does when just watching the trailer without pausing it to look at individual frames or screenshots.

I was stunned to see the announcement last week, it brought back a lot of memories of new versions of Flight Simulator (I am old enough to have used all of them). I will very much be looking forward to this new version as well and wish the team all the best in bringing it to the flight sim community. I can hardly wait... 

[NZ255 309]

6 hours ago, Gibbage said:

That way I can just apply a fabric material to the seats

How does that differ to making a tileable material with a pixel based material now?

[Mengy 814]

Finally got around to watching all of this video, it's very interesting and enlightening.  I think it's the best analysis I've seen on the trailer yet and he picked out a lot of things I'd not heard mentioned before.

Great video.  I might have to watch it again if MS doesn't give us any more info soon!

[strider1 575]

20 hours ago, LHookins said:

I'll take his guesses over anyone else's.

 

Me too, vs the thousands of conjecture posts by the armchair sim/pilot experts.... Somebody, please wake me up in a year!

Edited June 30, 2019 by strider1

[Gibbage 199]

5 hours ago, NZ255 said:

How does that differ to making a tileable material with a pixel based material now?

The key difference is having a separate UV channel for the AO map.  UV1 would control how many times the material tiles, and UV2 would control the AO map.  UV1 would not need to be all fit into the texture sheet or even organized very well.  Again, its only controlling how many times the material is tiled.  Stuff can be stacked on top of each other.  The problem with using a tiled texture is lack of shadow information, so an area in the foot well would be just as bright as the dash.  Thats when you apply a low resolution AO map on another channel.  This map will need to be organized and not overlapping.  This way things in shadow are darker and have less reflection.  This is all stuff thats very possible in P3D if we just had a separate AO map on another mapping channel.  This is how you can have a tiled texture (like a leather) but also have unique shadow/AO baked in.

 

Kevin

[Dominique_K 10,149]

12 hours ago, Gibbage said:

 

Hi Kevin

Thanks for all these professional insights. Really appreciated. A conclusion I draw and I  might be too pessimistic here, is that repaints of the interior of an aircraft would not be possible anymore for us simmers without programmingg knowledge ? What about the exterior ? Procedural textures too ?

[Skywatcher 133]

I watched a few minutes of the video and from what I have seen he is guessing at things he knows nothing about as much as anyone else here. No point watching any more.

He pulls that snippet of the video into Photoshop and tries to explain how photogrammetry works and why the ships are messed up and the Ferris Wheel is messed up. I guess they must of also used pictures before the building was built because it has water on it or maybe the building went for a walk at some stage and moved. It also shows land on the side. That must of been a photo taken in prehistoric times by a dinosaur with disposable camera when that area was actually raised land prior to it eroding away over a great period of time. OMG! lol

Everything about MSFS so far is bad news if you actually understand some of the tech stuff and markets and marketing.

[anden145 2,285]

@Skywatcher - While I (kinda) agree with you, I'm not that ready to be so cynical... 

You can clearly see in the video (thanks a lot, @Gibbage for the detailed walkthrough), MSFS apparently supports both custom scenery and 'the-other-type-I-can't-remember-right-now ( 🙂 )... That could indicate, that MSFS's ecosystem would support 3rd party sceneries, if custom sceneries are supported along with the 'default' scenery type...

Very interesting, I must say... And I'm actually more optimistic after seeing this video.

Thanks alot @ryanbatcund and @Gibbage

Edited June 30, 2019 by Anders Bermann