A convincing scenery is not only an aerial image

[WarpD 824]

56 minutes ago, NZ255 said:

Slightly off topic but just quickly... did LM get the ESP code base, or the FSX Acceleration code with the ESP licence?

ESP had all that was released in Acceleration... so I'm not certain if there's an actual distinction there or not.  

Edited January 7, 2020 by WarpD

[mSparks 2,094]

Just now, WarpD said:

Now you're talking something different... and contradicting yourself to boot.  Do you do this intentionally?

please quote what you think is contradictory and ill do my best to clarify.

[Paraffin 2,197]

4 hours ago, mSparks said:

I would expect no more than 2 blue ray disks for offline/default and everything else to be dlc of some description.

edit:googles it... ok blue rays now at 128gb per disk. so that is a fair bit more than i thought.

We don't know yet, but I would be very surprised if MSFS has any physical media option at all. That's not the way the industry is going. 

Heck, I'd be shocked if the next "other sim v12" (do we still have to keep doing this?) isn't download only, since they had trouble fitting Greenland on the initial install of 8 DVD's for v11.

We're moving in a direction where game and sim developers can no longer count on anyone having a physical DVD or Blu-Ray drive. Why hassle with the cost of physical media production and shipping, when all you need is bandwidth for a downloaded version? They need that for "phone home" DRM anyway. 

[mSparks 2,094]

6 hours ago, Paraffin said:

, but I would be very surprised if MSFS has any physical media option at all.

Im about as sure as I can be given its unofficial future nature that XBOX discs will be becoming XBOX or PC discs.

[Claviateur 789]

14 hours ago, WarpD said:

You are grossly misinformed regarding one point.  It is not "ESP terrain architecture".  It is older architecture than that.  ESP is not the base of the sim... it never was.  ESP was a product that was developed by MS from FSX.  FSX existed first and ESP was essentially FSX with all of the UI removed.  The terrain database the sim uses was around before FSX and ESP.

I know it is not ESP terrain architecture and I know where ESP comes from 🙂 But I was hoping the same architure for the terrain components won't be priviledged for XY technical or streaming reason. 

[Anthracite 131]

14 hours ago, mSparks said:

during the initial dev interview the Asobo guy said they (paraphrased) "merged their cessna flight model with one provided by microsoft".

given they will not be using the ui, "esp base" for most things seems a fair expectation.

Terrain engine is almost certainly going to be based on:

(speculation, obviously, but its a near perfect match of in house IP for asobo for what they need for msfs2020)

Both are more than enough for every video they have created so far with only a couple of years extra work.

To my knowledge, Crew 2 was developed by Ivory Tower while Asobo's involvement was in porting to the Xbox. Their experience with large open worlds is likely why they were chosen to port to xbox - since they developed fuel, which at its time was the largest open world game.

Regarding your comments on the size of installs - many games are now above 50GB and "AAA" titles, as they're called, exceed 100GB commonly. Final Fantasy 15 was 85GB base but installing the optional "high-res texture pack" made it 148GB. Call of Duty installs have been growing steadily, Black Ops 3 was 113GB, I believe their latest asked for 175GB. Red Dead Redemption 2 was 150GB.

Edited January 7, 2020 by Anthracite

[mSparks 2,094]

3 hours ago, Anthracite said:

Their experience with large open worlds is likely why they were chosen to port to xbox - since they developed fuel, which at its time was the largest open world game.

yes, of which crew 2 is the latest production release. hence my posit it will be a variant of the engine used in msfs2020.

3 hours ago, Anthracite said:

I believe their latest asked for 175GB. Red Dead Redemption 2 was 150GB.

bluebray bdxl discs have a 128gb capacity.

[azulkb 302]

Has anyone seen an official source from ASOBO or Microsoft on the engine used? Not me.

The partnership between ASOBO is not new, and is not just with this flight simulator. ASOBO and Microsoft have collaborated in the past, on the Hololens, etc... (source = interview)

and besides, it's on a demo linked to virtual reality, that an engine exploiting bing was used, and they started to see if this engine could be exploited in a flight simulator.  (source = interview)

Which engine they're using, we don't know, what matters is the result. That result, given what the testers say, is good.  (source = reddit about london, london event, september event)

A masking system allows you to customize certain areas that would not have been well treated by Azure. Which is what they're going to do for famous places, by the way. Monuments, and of course airports. It's also on the airports that the modders will operate. (source = interview)

Nothing has been said about LOD accuracy. Some journalists have mentioned very good resolution terrain, but they are not necessarily specialised journalists, and I have not found any official source on this subject.I don't make deductions based on videos that have nothing to do with it, only on official interviews and videos. And so I don't make deductions at this stage about the LOD. I don't think that would be an objective way to do differently. Anyway, as for the rest in a few months we might have a feature discovery on this subject if the community asks for it. 

The SDK will be available at the beginning of March  (source = official site), if they don't fall late, and the modders will certainly be able to predict the outlines of the engine used, by deductions. And the modders will certainly also be able to guess things about the LODs.

Edited January 7, 2020 by azulkb

[mSparks 2,094]

when talking about the sdk, scenery design and modification, what matters is the tools available.

2 hours ago, azulkb said:

The SDK will be available at the beginning of March

if the sdk doesnt include those tools you really can forget about scenery design or modification any time soon (and the ms guy does hint at this several times in the dev interview).

In house tools are almost never suitable for public release (user facing bugs and usability issues are not important for in house tools), building such tools for public release requires more effort than building the engine itself (and is only even potentially profitable if the engine is to be resold ala unreal engine, id tech, cryengine or hl source or "simulator that shall not be named")

This is the number 1 reason the last version of microsoft flight died so quickly.

BTW, this is not in anyway a criticism - if they deliver it will rock the entire gaming industry. (at least those still interested in targetting dx11)

Edited January 7, 2020 by mSparks

[Anthracite 131]

7 hours ago, mSparks said:

yes, of which crew 2 is the latest production release. hence my posit it will be a variant of the engine used in msfs2020.

bluebray bdxl discs have a 128gb capacity.

To my knowledge, Crew 2 uses the Dunia engine that is a fork of the original CryEngine from the original Farcry. Fuel uses the ACE engine, by Asobo.

Yeah - they send multiple disks. Typically an install disk and a game disk if it's a console. 

[mSparks 2,094]

1 hour ago, Anthracite said:

To my knowledge, Crew 2 uses the Dunia engine that is a fork of the original CryEngine from the original Farcry. Fuel uses the ACE engine, by Asobo.

link?

Edited January 8, 2020 by mSparks

[Anthracite 131]

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

link?

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/325889/QA_Inside_the_tools_and_techniques_used_to_build_The_Crew_2s_open_world.php

[mSparks 2,094]

44 minutes ago, Anthracite said:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/325889/QA_Inside_the_tools_and_techniques_used_to_build_The_Crew_2s_open_world.php

i couldnt (and cant) get that link to open - what does it say about asobos role?

as far as I know "Ivory Tower" didnt have a large open world engine to use which is why Asobo actually got involved. (guessed from a wikipedia page)

Even fuel alone isnt enough to support high detail "whole world" scenery.

crew 2 had to compress the usa down from 10 million km2 into 2000km2, and it still weighed in at 30GB.

That doesnt cut the mustard for msfs2020 where real distances matter.

I was about to say I hadnt seen any tech alpha claims that the detail in the tech alpha ended up sparse - but then there was that one post that claimed only cities had real detail....

Even I struggle to believe they could have made that big a mistake...  they surely must have solved it (I know only one company that has so far) and I am trying to work out how they did it.

Edited January 8, 2020 by mSparks

[Sasyska 12]

Avoid orbx like plague. All they're doing is combining ortho which is free with their low quality assets. MSFS doesn't look flat. It looks real.

[Anthracite 131]

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

i couldnt (and cant) get that link to open - what does it say about asobos role?

as far as I know "Ivory Tower" didnt have a large open world engine to use which is why Asobo actually got involved. (guessed from a wikipedia page)

Even fuel alone isnt enough to support high detail "whole world" scenery.

crew 2 had to compress the usa down from 10 million km2 into 2000km2, and it still weighed in at 30GB.

That doesnt cut the mustard for msfs2020 where real distances matter.

I was about to say I hadnt seen any tech alpha claims that the detail in the tech alpha ended up sparse - but then there was that one post that claimed only cities had real detail....

Even I struggle to believe they could have made that big a mistake...  they surely must have solved it (I know only one company that has so far) and I am trying to work out how they did it.

This:

Quote

Pedimina: In the very beginning of the project, we tried to look at middleware like the Unreal Engine. It quickly appeared that this kind of game engine would not do. Our world is huge (approximately 120 km by 75 km) with a lot of different places and moods. Furthermore, the player can drive vehicles that can go over 600 km/h!

However, we did not want to reinvent the wheel. So we decided to take the basis of the Dunia Engine (used at Ubisoft for the Far Cry series) and revamp it to our needs. Eventually, we rewrote a lot of things like the world editor, the game editor, the world management, the streaming strategy, the graphics engine… and we used only 10-15 percent of the original engine but it allowed us to quickly prototype and build our own engine by providing solid foundations.

I remember from some interviews Asobo said that they had worked on a Hololens project where you could visit places in the world based on bing maps data. I imagine they took their ACE engine and fed it that data and that was the starting point for the rendering of that hololens project. They probably added the footprints and textures and toiled with Azure to make all the areas which they didn't have photogrammetry data 3D. Since from what I've seen and read, Bing has very limited photogrammetry compared to the likes of Google . 

Then they probably stuck a plane in and thought "we could make a new Flight Sim with this", so they fed in the FSX data to get the basis for the sim and expanded on that with their weather, improved flight model etc.

That's my understanding of how it began anyway.