FSDT Chicago O'hare V2 Released.

[virtuali 4,419]

1 hour ago, micstatic said:

Do you intend on giving options for higher quality ground textures like we discussed earlier in thread for grass and taxi areas?  The Atlanta scenery that just came out does all this perfectly 

If I didn't had to spend so much time repeating things that have been logically explained over and over ( and most of them already had an explanation in the manual ), I might have already got a chance to post what should be way more interesting to everybody.

We already have an update of ALL ground textures on Live Update now, which covers what I finally understood what seemed to be the thing you hated most: the transition between grass and taxiways. We haven't changed the overall resolution, but we made the transition way smoother and less jagged.

Now they look like this:

It's already on FSDT Live Update, together with the fix we already posted yesterday which solved the issue of missing runway entry markers on hold short zones, and another fix that reduce moire effect on all metal garage doors across all the scenery, for example in front of the Fedex hangar.

See, doing a proper report about that, like YOU did, is what I called "constructive criticism", and resulted in an actual update.

 

Edited August 23, 2019 by virtuali

[micstatic 4,314]

nice man.  Thanks.  Very impressive. 

[cavaricooper 2,613]

I LIKE THIS UPDATE- WELL DONE!

Thanks for a splendid Chicago... now if only I could run downtown for a pie 😉

C

PS- Umberto, any chance the FD by NE Cargo will make it into one of your updates?

Edited August 23, 2019 by cavaricooper

[klamal 282]

4 hours ago, Farlis said:

And another one who neither reads the posts Umberto makes nor the manual...

If you had you would not beating this dead horse. It's a non-issue. 

The internals are not loaded outside of avatar mode. And even then only when you cross a certain threshold in the scenery. 

How often does that need to be repeated?

I really admire Umberto's patience with people who keep on complaining about things, that only exist in their false perception.

My apologies then in regards to this being a non-issue on the performance end, let's say.  Though, is it safe to assume that we pay for this in one way or another?  This focus on the internals of the buildings that most of us will never see?

Do we pay in a higher price for the product?  Do we pay in something else that could have garnered more focus and been made better?  The issue that this started out about was textures not being as good as they could have been, right?  (I do totally apologize here - yes, I have not read every single comment in this thread.  So if I'm again wrong, I am sorry.  I don't have the time to read the entire thing)  Anyway, so we see textures that didn't get the focus they should have.  Is that a fair statement to make?  I tend to think that somehow, there is a "cost" to those of us that don't care about this stuff.  Is it not fair for us to voice that opinion?  I'm not trying to start a war.  Just having conversation here.  That's all.

[virtuali 4,419]

23 minutes ago, klamal said:

My apologies then in regards to this being a non-issue on the performance end, let's say.  Though, is it safe to assume that we pay for this in one way or another?  This focus on the internals of the buildings that most of us will never see?

Doing both Brenda and Josh, which seemed to have been the most discussed "useless" feature, took me about 2 days of work for both of them. We gained quite a bit of experience of doing human characters in GSX and, when they are P3D4 native, they are quicker to make. So no, you haven't "paid" for them. WE spent a couple of days of work, to make a feature that is giving us lots of free advertising, since it's very social-youtube-friendly.

And, you haven't paid for walking passengers inside terminals as well, because we needed to spend that time to create the core support for people that can go anywhere in airports using paths which have some properties like density of people, kind of people that can use them ( passengers, crew, pilots), the path width, etc. This kind of support software will be required by GSX, because lots of users wanted to see passengers walking out of stairs and then enter in a terminal WITHOUT taking a bus. This will of course evolve in GSX in the form of editable paths that users can add to every scenery out there, adding value to the GSX customization. So, in a way, you can say its cost will be supported by GSX L2 users but, since we needed a test case for them, we added to KORD "for free"...

But this is hardly the first scenery that had terminal interiors. We had interiors with seats and walls even in KLAS, back in 2009, because you are supposed to see something of the interior when your are outside, if the scenery has large glass surfaces.

Edited August 23, 2019 by virtuali

[micstatic 4,314]

one very cool thing I noticed with this scenery is that when I landed and got to the gate it showed ATL-ORD.  Which was what I flew.  Where does it pull that from?  VATSIM or is it my flightplan from the computer?  

[okupton 308]

7 hours ago, B777ER said:

I was hoping this would not have it. This is only with FSDT scenery and looks very unsightly and immersion killing.

I am still getting the grainy/fuzzy textures on runway and taxiways. Again, not saying this is a FSDT problem as I see it on other airports as well (ORBX ESSA, LATINVFR MIA V5 for example) Tomatoshade removed and HDR returned to default.  Any ideas what else I can do to minimize this?  AA set to 4XSSAA, Antisotropic 16X and 4096x4096.  This occurs on default and payware aircraft.  

[klamal 282]

2 hours ago, virtuali said:

This kind of support software will be required by GSX, because lots of users wanted to see passengers walking out of stairs and then enter in a terminal WITHOUT taking a bus. This will of course evolve in GSX in the form of editable paths that users can add to every scenery out there, adding value to the GSX customization.

Very interesting. That makes sense. Thank you for the insight into what goes into making some of these decisions. 

[B777ER 2,484]

9 hours ago, Nemo said:

I'm observing shimmering (antialiasing issues) with at least two PBR airports too. KMIA and now KORD. Together with the PBR/Floating issue this is reason enough to uninstall KORD ... and reinstall the DD version which works without any issues.

Just landed at KORD. I downloaded and installed it about 9 hours ago. Now mind you I have the very latest P3D full version installed. I saw ghosting over Terminal 5 with objects/buildings up in the air. The terminal buildings were very dark and then some lights came eventually. Dynamic Lighting was not seen. The ground textures at night look really bad. There was massive amounts of shimmering on buildings, etc... Overall, highly disappointed with this release. I have an i9 9900k and a 1080Ti with latest drivers and 64GB oh physical RAM. So my system is top of the line. No issues with any other airports. I will be uninstalling this. Wasted 27 dollars. 

[virtuali 4,419]

4 hours ago, B777ER said:

Just landed at KORD. I downloaded and installed it about 9 hours ago. Now mind you I have the very latest P3D full version installed. I saw ghosting over Terminal 5 with objects/buildings up in the air. The terminal buildings were very dark and then some lights came eventually. Dynamic Lighting was not seen. The ground textures at night look really bad. There was massive amounts of shimmering on buildings, etc... Overall, highly disappointed with this release. I have an i9 9900k and a 1080Ti with latest drivers and 64GB oh physical RAM. So my system is top of the line. No issues with any other airports. I will be uninstalling this. Wasted 27 dollars. 

As already discussed on our forum today, we posted an update that replaces the T5 from .BGL to Simobject format, and this should fix the floating issue.

We plan to go back to the BGL format as soon as LM will release the fix but, in the meantime, it would be interesting to know if going back to creating objects dynamically via our scripting engine, saved us again from a problem in the sim...we wanted to be as clean and simple as possible with this one, but apparently it came back at us.

 

About DL and the scenery supposedly being too dark, don't you find your comments a bit odd, in the light of what this user posted here?

Don't you think it's a bit odd that another USER saying "the night lighting is perfect", opposite to what you said ? Could you be open, at least, to consider it might be something related to different settings ? Do you use any shader tweakers ?  Do you have HDR enabled ? If yes, are you using the default settings or you changed them ?

This is what I see on my system, which of course doesn't have any shader tweaks and have default settings for HDR:

Do you find this kind of night lighting too dark  or unrealistic ? Is this what you see on your system ?

About the supposed lack of DL, if DL were really missing, the scenery would look pitch black, because we the scenery is entirely reliant on DL so, everything light you see reflected on terminals comes from DL, but we tried to go for a realistic and subtle look, not an "in your face" look ( as our own KLAX), which is usually the result of a scenery originally made for FSX with its pre-baked lightmaps and DL added on top of it.

So, if you saw some lighting and not an almost pitch black scenery, it means DL was working. As explained in the manual, we have two set of DL lights, global ones that are always active, which cover larger areas with less lights, to give a general base ambiance so the airport won't be entirely dark when approaching, and several "Local" set, one for each terminal, which are turned on/off dynamically only when you get close to them, this to save performances by not having all lights active at the same time, but only the global ones+the ones of the terminal you are located on.

In my screenshot above, the  local lights are the brightest ones which lit the top of the airplane, while the global ones are the lighting the apron further away from the plane, in the lower right part of the screenshot.

Again, do you find my screenshot to be an unrealistic representation of an airport at night ? I'd say it's extremely good but, of course, everything is subjective, otherwise user Iceman2 wouldn't said "NIGHT LIGHTING IS PERFECT". I can only say I agree with him.

About shimmering, which are caused by using normal maps that reacts to a very low angle incident light of your airplane landing/taxilight, have you at least noticed how much LESS visible is compare to, say, KCLT or KMEM ? We tried to tone it down a lot, but if we wanted to remove it entirely, we would have to get rid of normals on ground altogether, which is not really possible in PBR, since PBR without normal maps simply doesn't work and, of course, the ground scenery at day would look as flat as an FS9 scenery.

Edited August 24, 2019 by virtuali

[Wolkenschreck 269]

I own every FSDT scenery and bought them right on the release day. But after trying out the demo (which is a very appreciated feature) I think that I will skip for the time being.

Modelling, texturing of the buildings, night lighting and performance are very good and state of the art. Shimmering of the PBR textures do not bother me too much, as I am optimistic that LM will fix this with a future update. Also, I do not mind Brenda at all as it does not impact performance. Only the LOD was a bit to aggressive for my taste with ground equipment loading very late.

And what deserves some praise is the generous discount for customers who bought the v1 nearly ten years ago. 

But prior to release I expressed my skepticism in on of the recent topics here at Avsim about the ground textures (taxiways, aprons) and the grass texture. Trying out the demo I can say that I stand corrected about the taxiways and markings. They are superb. However, the grass textures and the underlying background are worse than expected. Grass, road, taxiway edges an so on all look very artificial and call up strong FS2000 vibes in me. Frankly, I think that this scenery is trying a bit to "overachieve" in regards of performance and native techniques. But turning away from an ortho photo as ground is in my opinion a move in the wrong direction. Even with the benefits for future updates of the ground structures (like the future RW 9C/27C) it does still give the scenery a very unnatural look.

Edited August 24, 2019 by Wolkenschreck

[virtuali 4,419]

26 minutes ago, Wolkenschreck said:

But turning away from an ortho photo as ground is in my opinion a move in the wrong direction. Even with the benefits for future updates of the ground structures (like the future RW 9C/27C) it does still give the scenery a very unnatural look that.

We think we already explained that quite clearly. The real airport won't be completed well into 2021, and it will go through several major steps, for example RWY 27C that will open in November 2020, and the new Terminal that might come or not. During this period, the ground layout will keep changing, it changed so many times while we were working on it, almost every week or so, and is still changing right now. 

Using satellite/aerial photograph, which would require licensing them AND wait to be available, means we wouldn't be able to keep up with the progress of the airport and we won't be able to release an update in a timely fashion when the new runway will open next year. And before that happens, taxiways will change too so, if we used a real satellite image as it is, assuming it was available each time something changed, we would have to license it again. Would users be prepared to pay a subscription for this service, kind Navigraph, just for a single airport that is in the act of changing ? And, if we tried to hand edit the current images to adapt to all future changes, it will look...synthetic which, incidentally, is exactly how it looks like now.

We already did what I now understand was probably a mistake when we made KLAX: we tried to be smart and modeled the TBIT according to a plan which wasn't completed as it was initially announced. We though this could have prevented us from having to work again on it. Unfortunately, real events happened, and the current TBIT is not as large as the one which was planned, so our KLAX is representing a "what-if" situation. So no, this time we won't do the same mistake again, and we'll only add new stuff *after* it will appear on the real world, also because we want to be sure users can use the scenery with updated charts.

I'd say that, when the new runway will finally open and we'll get confirmation about the final status of the proposed new Terminal 7, we might consider finally licensing a real satellite or aerial image of the "completed" airport, sometime around 2021, which we hope would last for a while.

Also, I think you posted that screenshot to tell about the "unnatural " look from that position, because those very bright side lines are a strong contributors of that perception. Another user posted the same thing on our forum, and I'm inclined to agree with him so, we'll surely tone them down to have them stick out less, and this will likely improve a lot your perception.

Edited August 24, 2019 by virtuali

[virtuali 4,419]

There are possibly some good news on our forum about the "floating objects" issue:

http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,21740.msg147862.html#msg147862

It's only one user so far that confirmed the Live Update fixed it, but he was clearly affected before, so I'm fairly optimistic.

This should work as a temporary solution until LM will release a proper fix, and we'll switch both T5 objects back to .BGL then, to keep in line with our original commitment to make this scenery as standard as possible, and use our software modules only when absolutely necessary and where's no other alternative available.

Edited August 24, 2019 by virtuali

[B777ER 2,484]

3 hours ago, virtuali said:

As already discussed on our forum today, we posted an update that replaces the T5 from .BGL to Simobject format, and this should fix the floating issue.

We plan to go back to the BGL format as soon as LM will release the fix but, in the meantime, it would be interesting to know if going back to creating objects dynamically via our scripting engine, saved us again from a problem in the sim...we wanted to be as clean and simple as possible with this one, but apparently it came back at us.

 

About DL and the scenery supposedly being too dark, don't you find your comments a bit odd, in the light of what this user posted here?

Don't you think it's a bit odd that another USER saying "the night lighting is perfect", opposite to what you said ? Could you be open, at least, to consider it might be something related to different settings ? Do you use any shader tweakers ?  Do you have HDR enabled ? If yes, are you using the default settings or you changed them ?

This is what I see on my system, which of course doesn't have any shader tweaks and have default settings for HDR:

Do you find this kind of night lighting too dark  or unrealistic ? Is this what you see on your system ?

About the supposed lack of DL, if DL were really missing, the scenery would look pitch black, because we the scenery is entirely reliant on DL so, everything light you see reflected on terminals comes from DL, but we tried to go for a realistic and subtle look, not an "in your face" look ( as our own KLAX), which is usually the result of a scenery originally made for FSX with its pre-baked lightmaps and DL added on top of it.

So, if you saw some lighting and not an almost pitch black scenery, it means DL was working. As explained in the manual, we have two set of DL lights, global ones that are always active, which cover larger areas with less lights, to give a general base ambiance so the airport won't be entirely dark when approaching, and several "Local" set, one for each terminal, which are turned on/off dynamically only when you get close to them, this to save performances by not having all lights active at the same time, but only the global ones+the ones of the terminal you are located on.

In my screenshot above, the  local lights are the brightest ones which lit the top of the airplane, while the global ones are the lighting the apron further away from the plane, in the lower right part of the screenshot.

Again, do you find my screenshot to be an unrealistic representation of an airport at night ? I'd say it's extremely good but, of course, everything is subjective, otherwise user Iceman2 wouldn't said "NIGHT LIGHTING IS PERFECT". I can only say I agree with him.

About shimmering, which are caused by using normal maps that reacts to a very low angle incident light of your airplane landing/taxilight, have you at least noticed how much LESS visible is compare to, say, KCLT or KMEM ? We tried to tone it down a lot, but if we wanted to remove it entirely, we would have to get rid of normals on ground altogether, which is not really possible in PBR, since PBR without normal maps simply doesn't work and, of course, the ground scenery at day would look as flat as an FS9 scenery.

The area around the gates had none of that light that is in that pic. That pic is perfect, however that is not what I am seeing. This was by Terminal 5. The top of my plane not lit at all, it was pitch black at the gate. Yes I have PTA and run shader tweaks and HDR settings are tweaked as well. But if you are going to say not to use shader tweaks or adjust HDR settings in order to use your scenery then you have the very last of my money. I run Flightbeam, Flytampa, LatinVFR, Aerosoft, DD stuff without any problems between the scenery and shader tweaks. You cannot honestly sit there and tell users, in order for the scenery to work, use P3D default shader's? If so then I'll just purchase the DD KORD and be done with it. And the shimmering with the taxi lights at night with the ground is just has bad as KCLT. 

[virtuali 4,419]

23 minutes ago, B777ER said:

But if you are going to say not to use shader tweaks or adjust HDR settings in order to use your scenery then you have the very last of my money. I run Flightbeam, Flytampa, LatinVFR, Aerosoft, DD stuff without any problems between the scenery and shader tweaks ?

You cannot honestly sit there and tell users, in order for the scenery to work, use P3D default shader's? If so then I'll just purchase the DD KORD and be done with it.

PMDG says the same thing, and they are entirely right. No more PMDG purchases from you as well ?

https://forum.pmdg.com/forum/main-forum/general-discussion-news-and-announcements/5957-11mar19-shader-mods-if-you-are-having-trouble-with-artifacts-after-our-747-pbr-update-you-need-to-read-this

Let's see what Aerosoft has to say about them:

https://forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?/topic/127957-as-professional-airports-crazy-night-textures/&do=findComment&comment=847713

"Also let us know if you use any shader tweak. Many PTA profiles for example screw up the night lighting totally, like those blue skies you have in your second picture."

 

Quote

And the shimmering with the taxi lights at night with the ground is just has bad as KCLT. 

I can't believe you don't see a marked difference, so that can only possibly be caused by your shader tweaks, which might have increased the effect of incident light in a unrealistic way, to make lesser sceneries with no PBR looking less flat.

Kyle Rodgers from PMDG explained the same concept very effectively:

"To be honest, we're getting to the point where shader hacks really aren't necessary. That's quite a lot of the point of PBR."

That's absolutely correct. PBR, by definition, means physically correct rendering, and shouldn't require much tweaking.

Edited August 24, 2019 by virtuali