It's called Level of Detail management and has been around for many many years (and yes MSFS is using it and has so far many years). What you do is simply swap highly detailed models with less complex ones, depending on how far you are away. The reason the user doesn't notice is because a tree that is far away gets rendered to a whole lot less pixels, ie you can't see any difference because the tree is very small on your screen.Christian

>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. Everything eventually will be possible, even having mushrooms under the trees. But at the moment and in the next say 2 years CPU and GPU power will still be grossly inadequate to achieve even the simplest of effects. For example at the momet we can't even increase density of autogen trees to depict a good looking forest or to have truely volumetric clouds.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/pmdg_744F.jpghttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

Michal, based on the FSX shots, the amount of autogen objects has increased significantly in the new version (Jase, any comment on this?)And to say "GPU power will still be grossly inadequate to achieve even the simplest of effects" is a puzzling statement really, and not true IMHO ;)

"...FSX shots, the amount of autogen objects>has increased significantly in the new version"All I can say is that the density seen in the shots released so far for vegetation are around an order of magnitude greater than FS9. That number is not final yet. :) It could go up, or down.Cheers,JasonAs to the other speculation with regards to SpeedTree and/or shadows, I won't go into much greater length here (simply because I don't have the time to write about all the reasons :)), other than to say that many of the proposed solutions (including LODs) add a much higher overhead to the cost of displaying vegetation than our current system.Cheers,j

>And to say "GPU power will still be grossly inadequate to>achieve even the simplest of effects" is a puzzling statement>really, and not true IMHO ;)It all depends what your definition of "simplest" effects is. Mine includes things like very dense forests (with crude trees), true 3D volumetric clouds, smooth transition in atmospheric effects, sky loaded with 100% AI. etc. Any GPU of today would simply not be able to deliver on that score. All this definitely not even coming close to having "Far Cry" effects in the scale of the MSFS world.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/pmdg_744F.jpghttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

> All I can say is that the density seen in the shots released so far for vegetation are around an order of magnitude greater than FS9. That number is not final yet. Is the performance an 'order of magnitude' higher too? :(

Koorbs,Any ideas on the overhead a forest 3D polygon (ie with depth) would place on the current engine. I mean in a very dense forest, all that would have to be modelled would be the forest canopy, would it not?I have no idea on what it takes to do this, hence the question.Cheers,Chris Porter:-outtaPerthWestern Australia

Hi,I assume the overhead for the polygon alone would be quite small. However, there would have to be some way of hiding the edges (I assume 3D trees ringing the polygon) and this would cause some increased overhead. If this was rendered at run time the overhead could be substantial - as opposed to autogen forests that were pre-determined on the given ground texture. Forests would then probably have to be smaller than one texture square, though.Hope this helps,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___

>Koorbs,>>Any ideas on the overhead a forest 3D polygon (ie with depth)>would place on the current engine. I mean in a very dense>forest, all that would have to be modelled would be the forest>canopy, would it not?>>I have no idea on what it takes to do this, hence the>question.>>Cheers,>>Chris Porter>:-outta>>Perth>Western Australia>Hi Chris. I'm not a 3D coder, so I'll defer an expert opinion to the devs here; but for what it's worth I do have lots of experience with 3D engines of various sorts. To have any sort of 3D polygon based "forest" (i.e. more than 100 or so trees in the immediate vicinity) is going to take a huge amount of processing power, purely from the aspect of the amount of polygons being thrown around. The FSX engine presumably cannot afford those CPU/GPU cycles and understandably so. From my perpsective I'd much rather have 4-5x the amount of 2D sprites in my scenery versus the same number of 3D polygon trees - the visual effect will be much better.

Chris, I've seen this done (and we've been thinking about implementing this too), but so far I haven't seen any implemtation of this that looks satisfactory. It just looks like that: a polygon surface that tries to simulate a forest canopy.There is no point trying to implement such crude models anymore anyway. Despite some other comments that high-res vegetation on large scales isn't possible on modern CPUs, it actually is - I've seen this done in specialist software, and running very nicely on todays systems. The problem is that it takes significant man power and resources to develop this, something of the order that the FS team surely can't afford. But the good news is that this technology will slowly creep into the entertainment sector over the next years - such is the nature of progress...Cheers,Christian

Cheers guys, thanks for the info...Chris Porter:-outtaPerthWestern Australia