1 hour ago, Colonel X said:

If MS really wants to break new grounds here, it would be server based rendering, think Google Stadia. Yes that would be subscription based, of course (even streaming only scenery into a client based flight sim would probably require that) - but it would mean that anybody with a decent internet connection could enjoy FULL FIDELITY, something only a top of the line pc (probably even exceeding that) could. If they're able to do that (they have the infrastructure) - I'd be throwing money at them. Imagine that - the detail we see in those videos at 60FPS for anyone - a new era.

A new era indeed, but only if you're physically close enough to the server that there is no perceptible lag on control input sent from the user's PC to the server, and aircraft behavior streamed down from the server. Latency is *the* critical consideration in completely streamed game content. It's not like YouTube or Netflex where there isn't a feedback loop between client input and server response.

There was an interview with a Google guy recently where he mentioned that they're only able to do Stadia now because they have enough Google server farms spread out across the USA and UK/Europe to handle the latency issues. Which suggests that maybe in other parts of the world like Asia, Africa, South America you might not be able to play at low latency.

I know MS has been building out its Azure server farms too, but I don't know if it's at the same scale. They might need Google-scale infrastructure to pull off this dream of completely streamed flight sim content. That seems to be what they're going for with the upcoming XBox Cloud service, so we'll get a preview of how that might work for flight sims.

1 hour ago, Colonel X said:

The Forza engine never had to render anything remotely close to the complexity of what's required for flight simulation. It's polished but focused on a very small window into the world. I doubt it can be scaled to earth scale while maintaining its polish. Look at polished flight sim engines on consoles such as Ace Combat - looks stunning but never comes close to handling the amount of objects required for real flight simulation.

There is nothing inherently crazy complex about rendering a flight simulator by today's standards. Yes, it may all look very impressive looking out the window but it's not like the engine is rendering all the buildings in super detail for a million miles, nor is a large mesh overlaid with a texture a difficult thing render. In this area, engines have come a long way from the abysmal performance we know of something like the ESP engine. Again, Aerofly 2 FS is an absolute prime example of that, where a post HiFlyver made on the OrbX forum is interesting in this regard; https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/179113-lack-of-aerofly-fs2-products/?tab=comments#comment-1563755

A scene with 1.6 million buildings and it's still running 137FPS. Rendering large amounts of (basic) geometry has improved leaps and bounds with modern engines. And it's the geometry rendering that is always the Achilles' heel of the older flight simulators when it comes to performance. Anyone who's flown FSX or P3D knows this, how insanely heavy the autogen is. That old, tired engine is running several hundred of FPS out of the box but once you intro things that increase the autogen and geometry density, that is the #1 biggest performance drain.

The Forzatech engine is more than capable of rendering this and once released, I think you'll find the performance to be very, very impressive compared to its visuals.

 

Good point @Sethos - I agree, rendering has come a long way and what I wrote was sort of an echo of how things used to be. We'll see how much more triangles their engine can push. X-Plane is not bad at it, seeing how fast Autogen has become. X-Plane's main issue is that developers need additional CPU time for things like traffic and aircraft systems. Plus, many add-ons, such as high res meshes seem unoptimized. And don't forget that apart from AA, the GPU is basically idling in X-Plane. Really hoping Vulkan improves this.

2 minutes ago, Colonel X said:

X-Plane is not bad at it, seeing how fast Autogen has become

Simple autogen renders quickly and efficiently, the problem comes with anything more complex (i.e. Non rectangular buildings, roads, trees). These all seem to be very much reliant on the CPU, so you could have a top of the range GPU, but if the CPU is a bottleneck, it won't help. Sims like AF2 are fast because the scenery is basic and simple, with autogen restricted to simple boxes and no vector data to deal with.

I'm suspecting in the new MS sim that all the complex scenery items are precalculated (i.e. Not built up by the CPU as you fly but streamed in), which would mean much more fluid performance with a decent internet connection. I suspect Vulkan alone won't improve the situation in X-Plane, but rather will allow the developers to make better use of the GPU

 

 

X-Plane 11 ROCKS, And getting better with every update.

7 hours ago, tonywob said:

I'm suspecting in the new MS sim that all the complex scenery items are precalculated (i.e. Not built up by the CPU as you fly but streamed in), which would mean much more fluid performance with a decent internet connection

That could be what they're doing. 

I noticed something interesting in that clip from the new MSFS of a Cessna spin. Near the end when the plane pulls up and you get a good view of the streets and houses below, the streets are completely empty. No moving cars, no static cars either. And I can tell 'ya from living nearby, that traffic is constant in that area.

There is another video clip from the new MSFS that does show a moving car, I think it's in the night time Tahoe clip? So I'm sure that will be in the new sim, I'm just wondering if they can match what XP11 does with moving ground traffic. I'm sometimes amazed at how many moving cars and trucks I see without any perceptible impact on the frame rate.

Edited September 15, 20196 yr by Paraffin

4 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

I noticed something interesting in that clip from the new MSFS of a Cessna spin. Near the end when the plane pulls up and you get a good view of the streets and houses below, the streets are completely empty. No moving cars, no static cars either. And I can tell 'ya from living nearby, that traffic is constant in that area.

Yep, also if you look as well, the bridges disappear/fade into water from the masking etc, which would indicate there aren't yet any 3D roads or road overlays, so I'd guess the scenery, whilst very nice looking and accurate is still graphically fairly simple at present which is going to help a lot with performance and smoothness

37 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Yep, also if you look as well, the bridges disappear/fade into water from the masking etc, which would indicate there aren't yet any 3D roads or road overlays, so I'd guess the scenery, whilst very nice looking and accurate is still graphically fairly simple at present which is going to help a lot with performance and smoothness

Hmmm... I'm thinking, with a very hi-def orthophoto, the sim wouldn't need to draw vector roads (and indeed it would actually look better and perform better). There's also an XP addon that makes roads invisible I think?

Although road vector data would still be needed for things like traffic, lighting posts, overpasses, etc.

Yeah, I don't know how you'd program moving traffic just using the ortho image without a vector/OSM type street overlay. Maybe "Azure AI" is smart enough to do that by identifying streets in the image, but I can imagine some hilarious traffic movement if it guessed wrong.

There is moving traffic, you can see it some shots/videos, but not others. It probably just uses their bing maps data to place cars/traffic on the roads.

Well, once thing is clear - if MS really moves away from layering vector data and just streams their world model from Bing Maps 3D - they will end up with a lot of other issues instead.

That's a very realistic spin entry and recovery - better than anything I've been able to get on any sim so far, even with aircraft purely designed for aerobatics.

1 hour ago, olderndirt said:

That's a very realistic spin entry and recovery - better than anything I've been able to get on any sim so far, even with aircraft purely designed for aerobatics.

Have you tried any of the recent combat sims that focus on the early prop fighter years, when you're flying right on the edge of a stall and spin because that's part of the dogfight tactics? It's been a while since I've flown it, but I remember the WW1 combat sim "Rise of Flight" had a pretty realistic stall and spin recovery. It was the first thing that MSFS spin clip reminded me of.

Yes,

that's why I somehow moved to those ww2 sims, or variants, starting with DCS World, then IL-2 Great Battles, and finishing where I am now - War Thunder.

War Thunder is supposedly the closest to MSFS we have in terms of FDM, while IL2 resembles a lot X-Plane's FDM, just fine tuned ...

They all get pretty decent stall & spin ( even in their flat and inverted forms ) behaviour. 

Will FS 2020 bring us that "new" FDM they were working on before MS FLIGHT was "created" and ruined ?

Anyway, I have tried the new FDM features in XP11.40, and I liked most of it, although I didn't find that wake effect particularly interesting, and I wasn't able to notice that new "stall" behaviour Austin talks about in he's videos ( ? ). Probably my preferred cange so far was the wash from heli rotors and the gradient wind near ground ( from 10m down ).

This all being said, each time I watch FS 2020 preview shots / traillers the more I believe it's going to be my Go-To civil flightsim when released... Maybe I can finally settle with a FS 2020 / War Thunder combo...

 

Edited September 17, 20196 yr by jcomm

So far - very enticing but the bottom line - how much and how many hoops to jump through has yet to be revealed.