What's Your Deal-breaker?

[FPStewy]

On 8/16/2019 at 2:37 PM, Rob_Ainscough said:

 ... preferably 3-5 minutes of "normal" flight at 200-250 KTS in a single aircraft going from A to B (so I can see how the terrain is loading) with a few 360 degree orbits around the aircraft.

I agree but also it has to be raw not something rendered and filtered.

[nickhod]

9 hours ago, Noooch said:

Again, that is at the moment, and for 60fps at 4k and sound 5.1. You can have half this speed and still have a very pleasant experience. I know lot of people don t have stable or limitless internet, but you see my point 🙂 another chance might be 5g wireless networks for those who dont have or wont have fiber anytime soon.

Full game streaming is a service that sits on top of existing games. A streaming platform like Stadia is a massive engineering challenge in itself, probably more complex that a flight sim.

You might see an XBox branded competitor to Stadia and FS2020 might be a game available on that, but it's not going to be part of the game itself.

[nickhod]

1 hour ago, n4gix said:

That can be done in P3Dv4.x without 'ray tracing' at all, although not many developers bother with it because of the fps penalty. "Mirrors" in military aircraft for example can reflect what's actually behind the plane in real time.

Reflections are often seen in games, and are generally done with an static environment map or a reflection probe. It's a trick to make a "good enough" reflection by just taking a snapshot of the surroundings and overlaying it on a surface.

Ray tracing models the way light would actually bounce around from surface to surface.

In a P3D reflection on an aircraft propeller cone you'd see the environment reflected back.
In the TBM reflection you'll notice that the propeller itself is reflecting back, plus the sunlight that's bouncing off the exhaust metal.

I work in 3D graphics engineering and my first though was "cool, that's ray traced, nice job MS".

[Greazer]

On 8/16/2019 at 11:03 AM, dilore said:

Gamey flight dynamics, no helicopters, no 3rd party aircraft, subscription.

The road map has feature preview 3 on Aerodynamics. That's a big one.

[Greazer]

28 minutes ago, nickhod said:

I work in 3D graphics engineering and my first though was "cool, that's ray traced, nice job MS".

There is high quality reflections. In the vid with the moving flaps, it's being reflected in it's own plane windows. As well as the refections from the environment. Possible Ray tracing definitely.

[Wink207]

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

Well Rick, you won't be buying it then. It was make clear a month ago that it will require Win10, as it will require DX12 compatibility.

Thank you Fr. Bill. I didn't know that. You just saved me a large expense. I'll just stick with what I have, which is more than adequate.

Rick

[n4gix]

2 hours ago, nickhod said:

In a P3D reflection on an aircraft propeller cone you'd see the environment reflected back.
In the TBM reflection you'll notice that the propeller itself is reflecting back, plus the sunlight that's bouncing off the exhaust metal.

I work in 3D graphics engineering and my first though was "cool, that's ray traced, nice job MS".

So, you are completely unaware of P3D's "Dynamic Reflections" then? DR in P3D reflects the actual environment, not just a pre-baked sky-box.

I help moderate here at AVSIM for free. What do you suppose I do to earn a living?

[HughesMDflyer4]

13 hours ago, Wink207 said:

I run FSX off line except for maybe 30 sec to download weather for each flight.

Are you saying you disconnect your internet to run FSX? Can I ask why?

[Paraffin]

18 minutes ago, n4gix said:

So, you are completely unaware of P3D's "Dynamic Reflections" then? DR in P3D reflects the actual environment, not just a pre-baked sky-box.

I help moderate here at AVSIM for free. What do you suppose I do to earn a living?

There has been a hack in XP available for a while now that does something like that. I think it involves placing a hidden camera object in or behind a chrome prop spinner, and sending the camera output to a "screen" that's wrapped around the spinner cone. It will show the prop reflections and any ambient lighting. 

The shot in the announcement trailer with hangar doors opening looks like it could be ray-tracing, with those reflections on the wet ground surface. But I've seen reflections like that in AAA games too, and I sure don't have a GPU with hardware ray-tracing support, so who knows? 

[Mengy]

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

So, you are completely unaware of P3D's "Dynamic Reflections" then? DR in P3D reflects the actual environment, not just a pre-baked sky-box.

I believe P3D's dynamic reflections only reflect specific parts of the environment, not all of it.  FS2020 seems to be dynamically reflecting the entire environment, and this can only realistically be done by ray tracing a game world.  Normally this is hugely expensive to achieve from a performance point of view, but with the new RTX cards it will become much cheaper to do in game.

[Greazer]

Just now, Mengy said:

I believe P3D's dynamic reflections only reflect specific parts of the environment, not all of it.  FS2020 seems to be dynamically reflecting the entire environment, and this can only realistically be done by ray tracing a game world.  Normally this is hugely expensive to achieve from a performance point of view, but with the new RTX cards it will become much cheaper to do in game.

Not only dynamically reflecting the entire environment but wings, flaps etc are reflected in it's own windows.  

[nickhod]

5 hours ago, n4gix said:

So, you are completely unaware of P3D's "Dynamic Reflections" then? DR in P3D reflects the actual environment, not just a pre-baked sky-box.

I help moderate here at AVSIM for free. What do you suppose I do to earn a living?

A "dynamic reflection" is what I mentioned in my prior post, a reflection probe to anyone in dev. It samples the environment frequently at a point in space to make a "best guess" reflection map, that can be applied to a material.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-ReflectionProbe.html

As I said before, this is not the same as real-time ray tracing which calculates the actual paths that photons would travel between materials.

https://unity.com/ray-tracing

I have no idea what you do for a living. Should I?🤔

[Dominique_K]

A contrarian view, if I may 😉.  I am all for eye candy but within reason.

I follow with great interest this discussion between technicians about modeling external reflections. Really ! But as a simmer, do I care ? Not much. I am most of the time in the cockpit anyway. And when I am outside to take a shot, I am most of the time a litlle too far off the fuselage to make a difference. Does that warrant a drop in the FPS ? No.

I may add that when I see sometimes a caricatural use of PBR (aircraft or asphalt), I fear that we'll see the same excesses for RT. 
 

[nickhod]

58 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

don't get me wrong, I'd love to see hardware accelerated Ray Tracing support in any FS platform, but I'm willing to bet those on a budget don't want to have to pay $1200 to get a GPU that can handle the task at acceptable FPS.  But if MS are indeed using Ray Tracing extensions, then that is DX12 which is great for me and a few others, but my guess is RTX will be an in-sim graphics option users with the capable hardware can select.

Yep, to be clear, you can create some really nice dynamic reflections with an frequently updating reflection probe, as P3D is doing there. I'm not suggesting otherwise.

The reflections in the FS2020 media stood out to me as taking things to the "next level". I believe that the effects in the shot below in particular would be very hard to achieve without ray tracing. It simply wouldn't look as good as that.

That's subjective of course and none of us know for sure. I'm just guessing, but it's an educated guess.

I agree that if real-time ray tracing is in FS 2020 it'll be an option and the fall back will still be some very nice reflection effects, like those in P3D.

 

[nickhod]

11 minutes ago, domkle said:

A contrarian view, if I may 😉.  I am all for eye candy but within reason.

I follow with great interest this discussion between technicians about modeling external reflections. Really ! But as a simmer, do I care ? Not much. I am most of the time in the cockpit anyway.

Oh, a real-time ray traced cockpit will look absolutely gorgeous too. 😀

There have been very few in-cockpit shots, which leads me to think that the aircraft aren't as developed as the rest of the sim yet.

As for frame rate drop, yep, get your wallet out for that 2080ti.