SpeedTree

[Guest jwflowers]

Will FSX support Speedtree? In one of the demos I saw at E3 for Speedtree, they had Huey flowing low over some trees and watching the trees sway as it crossed was very convincing. Other MS Games have included this such as Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends and PGR3, but I don't know the memory impact it would have. Here is the link to the video I saw. I realize the impact and expansion of these would be much bigger for the entire world, but if they could incorporate it I would be in heaven.[ur]http://www.speedtree.com/html/downloads_movies.htm[/url]Click on trees of pangea!!!

[Guest pixelpoke_from_MSFT]

>Will FSX support Speedtree? In one of the demos I saw at E3>for Speedtree, they had Huey flowing low over some trees and>watching the trees sway as it crossed was very convincing. >Other MS Games have included this such as Rise of Nations:>Rise of Legends and PGR3, but I don't know the memory impact>it would have. Here is the link to the video I saw. I>realize the impact and expansion of these would be much bigger>for the entire world, but if they could incorporate it I would>be in heaven.>>[ur]http://www.speedtree.com/html/downloads_movies.htm[/url]>>Click on trees of pangea!!!We've evaluated Speedtree in FS. No we won't be using the tech in FSX.Speedtree does a lot of stuff really well, but in the ways the FS world needs/uses vegetation it doesn't map well. Cheers,Jason

[Guest pixelpoke_from_MSFT]

Oh, and we will be there someday. :)Cheers,J

[Guest wingnut2]

I look forward to that day :9 Speedtree just blew me away.............

[Manny 1,293]

WOW.... Yeah...I want one.:)

[Guest wingnut2]

> in the ways the FS world needs/uses vegetation it doesn't map well. Sorry I dont get this?

[Guest pixelpoke_from_MSFT]

>> in the ways the FS world needs/uses vegetation it doesn't>map well. >>Sorry I dont get this?It means that what SpeedTree does well: the way they code, the experience they build for, the densities at which they show best, so on and so forth, that stuff doesn't necessarily work with what and how Flight Sim needs to do or does things.Their solutions, which are good solutions for a lot of games, aren't really good solutions for Flight Sim.---- at least at this point.Cheers,Jason

[Guest koorby]

I think Jase is politely trying to say that Speedtree demos running 1 million trees with swaying branches and 10,000 polys per tree; or the eye candy found in Elder Scrolls Oblivion - is sorta going to chew a good 15% of CPU geometry calcs which FSX will , er .. want to use for more important stuff.For a first person shooter/RPG you can afford to use 10-20% on fancy trees; but for a seriously complex real-time engine like FSX has, uh uh - no can spare the horses.2D sprites rock anyway! ;)

[Guest]

Hi Koorby, there should be a SpeedTree feature to display 'simple trees' when the distance is far or the altitude too high. If not, a simple 'if' statement could fix it :)

[moggel 0]

While it would be awesome to have trees of that quality in the sim, especially for VFR/chopper or ultra lite riders, I can appreciate the performance problems at hand. One thing I would love to see, however, is trees casting shadows on the ground. This "detail" would bring the terrain the "depth" that is currently missing. If it would help ease the performance hit the shadow updating (as the sun moves) doesn't have to be real for all I care.

[Guest koorby]

>While it would be awesome to have trees of that quality in>the sim, especially for VFR/chopper or ultra lite riders, I>can appreciate the performance problems at hand. One thing I>would love to see, however, is trees casting shadows on the>ground. This "detail" would bring the terrain the "depth" that>is currently missing. If it would help ease the performance>hit the shadow updating (as the sun moves) doesn't have to be>real for all I care.Yeah good point Moggel. However, with good ground textures that depict the trees shadows and tight manual autogen annotation, you can have accurate static shadows underneath trees like we do now in the VOZ 1.1 beta. And there's zero framerate impact using that method.http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c114/mto...reenMate_80.jpg

[moggel 0]

I have to agree that screenie does alot of the trick. However, with more CPU/GPU power coming I think (I'm no 3D coder so "think" is the key word here) tree shadows would be possible. Unfortunately I slipped a word in my post: "...doesn't have to be real for all I care" should have been "...doesn't have to be real time for all I care." Simply put: Wouldn't it be possible to simply render tree (and other ground stuff) shadows into the scenery every "n" minute or so to reflect sun movement? It would be like mixing Koorby's texture technique with semi-real time shadow rendering. Seeing the shadows from the vegetation grow steadily longer below, as night approaches would make the landscape look marvelous.

[Guest BOPrey]

You sounded like know how to design a system like Flight Simulation. I would like to know how you handle the transition between 'complex trees' and 'simple trees' without the user actually noticing it.

[Guest koorby]

You could easily achieve complex ground shadows by using black 2D sprites which are outlines of the actual tree textures (down to leaves of branches if you will), give the sprites a 50% transparency value and lay them sideways on top of the ground textures against the base of the trees then apply a scaling routine which squashes/stretches the sprite based on the time of day. If you had the 12 sprites for each daylight hour contained within the bmp it would use virtually zero CPU cycles for geometry calcs, and produce vastly complex shadows. The cost to framerates would be like doubling the number of trees in each scene.

[Guest christian]

There are lots of ways to hack this. The every n-th minute thingy would be a derivation of so called imposters, something FS2004 is using for the cloud system. If you think about it, clouds and trees are very similar, in principal they are 3D volumes and can be handled with similar algorithms (to a point). I'm quite convinced one could integrate 3D trees making heavy use of LOD and imposters and get good framerates. However, this would take some very significant development time to get right. Probably too much for the FS team to tackle right now...As for SpeedTree, I actually was very close to trialling it for the work I'm was about 2 years or so ago. The real-time demo back then looked stunning. I could see though that it would be quite resource intensive to include into existing applications.Cheers,Christian