FSDT Chicago O'hare V2 Released.

[Flic1 976]

Can anyone say whether runway/taxiway textures cause the fuzzy moire effect at night with taxi/landing lights on?  This has been one of the biggest drawbacks for me lately with FSDT airports.  I don't see any reason this should happen as many other airport developers are using textures that look fantastic at night.

[virtuali 4,419]

10 minutes ago, Iceman2 said:

I’m finding performance very good in 4.5 with heaps of AI traffic. No texture flashing and the night lighting is perfect although I’m not a big fan of dynamic lighting because of the way it lights up the whole flight deck. (Like to be able to turn DL off)

You might have been accustomed to the ability to turn off DL in other sceneries, but this simply because other sceneries just added DL as an addition, but since they were initially made for FSX or older versions of P3D, they had also specific night textures, so DL could be turned off without the scenery not looking entirely dark.

However, it's a very well known fact night textures in HDR can look very bad, especially when using shader mods, which alter the overall lightness of stuff at night. This is a limitation of how the graphic engine deals with the limited dynamic range of a compressed texture, so you usually see lots of compression artifacts or weird pixelated colors, and of course users blame the scenery, when in fact most of the damage is caused by Shader mods. But even without mods, night textures don't look in the sim as clean as they look when we made them.

With true DL, this is fixed entirely, because we don't have many night textures. More precisely, we don't have any pre-baked illumination, since we don't need it, considering the scenery won't have to run in FSX, so we can be sure DL is always available. This way, we achieve the following results:

- We save texture memory, since only objects that really *emits* lights have night textures. Objects that reflect light (most of them are like this) don't, because they will be lit by DL. That's why you don't see the usual fps hit at night or the even higher fps hit at dusk, when BOTH day + night textures are loaded and blended together.

- We don't have the ugly pixelated artifacts due to texture compression

- DL makes the PBR materials looks as good at night as they are at day. Without DL, PBR won't really work, because the whole point of it is how it reacts differently to a TRUE light.

The downside of it, there's no way to turn off DL, unless you want to simulate a total blackout...

[G-YMML1 582]

Could someone with 4.4 please confirm that there are no PBR artifacts like ghost objects when approaching the airport? Almost all recent PBR sceneries (Imaginesim WSSS, Aerosoft Tenefire) have this issue related to the LM SDK. 

[Iceman2 110]

Ok Thanks Virtuali.

I have noticed the DL is a lot more subtle and not as bright making the effect more realistic.

Thank you for all your hardwork.

[virtuali 4,419]

4 minutes ago, G-YMML1 said:

Could someone with 4.4 please confirm that there are no PBR artifacts like ghost objects when approaching the airport? Almost all recent PBR sceneries (Imaginesim WSSS, Aerosoft Tenefire) have this issue related to the LM SDK. 

The problem of ghost objects in P3D 4.5 ( which I'm sure will be fixed shortly by LM, which is fully aware of it), doesn't affect our scenery, because the few objects we *did* had ghost objects raised in the air, have been made as Simobjects, which prevents the issue since the problem happens only if the object is in .BGL format. As soon as fix will be released, we'll convert them back to .BGL, to enjoy faster loading, but for the time being, they don't show.

A couple of users reported ghost objects in our forum, but they didn't belong to our scenery, and in one case they were fixed by reinstalling some OrbX libraries.

[virtuali 4,419]

6 minutes ago, Iceman2 said:

Ok Thanks Virtuali.

I have noticed the DL is a lot more subtle and not as bright making the effect more realistic

Of course. I'd say this is the first scenery that at night we are not ashamed of how it looks like.

[G-YMML1 582]

6 minutes ago, virtuali said:

The problem of ghost objects in P3D 4.5 ( which I'm sure will be fixed shortly by LM, which is fully aware of it), doesn't affect our scenery, because the few objects we *did* had ghost objects raised in the air, have been made as Simobjects, which prevents the issue since the problem happens only if the object is in .BGL format. As soon as fix will be released, we'll convert them back to .BGL, to enjoy faster loading, but for the time being, they don't show.

A couple of users reported ghost objects in our forum, but they didn't belong to our scenery, and in one case they were fixed by reinstalling some OrbX libraries.

Good to know - thanks!

[AnkH 2,233]

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

I don't know what you are talking about. The terminals are *way* more detailed on the outside as well, is external modeling "useless" too ? Don't you even realize that, THANKS to proper LOD optimization, you won't see this kind of detail from *that* distance, and this is a *good* thing, because detail come up when you need it, and it's not slowing down your approach. We know what matters, thank you.

I am not talking about the external details (should be clear as I wrote "you put inside the terminals", INSIDE the terminals), but about McDonalds, moving passengers and live departure screens inside the terminals.

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

The terminals obviously look way better from up close, way more detailed, and way more realistic under different light conditions. Please look the scenery live, on your system, and try different time of the day, different weather, and see how the scenery changes.

I do not know why you keep insisting on the external parts of the terminals and blaming me for not knowing that the screenshot from this distance does not show all the details (I am aware about how LOD works...). I was not talking a second about the terminals external structure and details...

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

There's no such thing as s "low quality" ground to be seen here.

As said, I did not yet have time to test how it looks on my rig, but the screenshots so far show all the same low quality ground (not the textures, they are nice and crisp). I collected a few samples to show what I mean, just give me some seconds to upload it...

There we go:

 

Edited August 23, 2019 by AnkH

[okupton 308]

1 hour ago, Flic1 said:

Can anyone say whether runway/taxiway textures cause the fuzzy moire effect at night with taxi/landing lights on?  This has been one of the biggest drawbacks for me lately with FSDT airports.  I don't see any reason this should happen as many other airport developers are using textures that look fantastic at night.

I’m still seeing this in my sim, but believe it is a setting I have in my sim and not the fault of the scenery. Will be working with tomatoshade/hdr to see if that is the culprit.

Edited August 23, 2019 by okupton

[fakeflyer737 991]

I purchased last night. 

It looks amazing and performs great!

It was also cheap. 

[virtuali 4,419]

34 minutes ago, AnkH said:

I am not talking about the external details (should be clear as I wrote "you put inside the terminals", INSIDE the terminals), but about McDonalds, moving passengers and live departure screens inside the terminals.

And of course I replied to look at the externals, just to disprove your point, which seemed to say that we didn't pay much attentions to things that *matters*, to do things that don't. My reply was of course, to tell you that no, we did model with way more detail the things that DO matter, that is the external.

 

34 minutes ago, AnkH said:

As said, I did not yet have time to test how it looks on my rig, but the screenshots so far show all the same low quality ground (not the textures, they are nice and crisp). I collected a few samples to show what I mean, just give me some seconds to upload it...

Ok, so I guessed right, and you didn't like the transition between grass and aprons. You tried to say we didn't "care", because we were "busy" modeling Brenda and the interiors, which of course is wrong.

It's not that we save time/money by choosing a certain resolution over another one. It's just that, this being O'Hare, and it's a fairly dense area, with several other airports nearby, with so many parkings able to attract an insane number of AI, with a background city skyline that can be very heavy on fps, regardless what we did, there would be some people blaming us for "bad fps", when their fps would probably similarly slow even with a default scenery.

This means making choice and, exactly opposite of what you said, we decided to focus on the things that *matters* in the cockpit, rather than how the scenery would look like in a static screenshot which (again), was made just to show the whole airport in sight, and compare it to the old version, to disprove the "bad fps" theory.

And a choice was obviously made to SAVE texture memory of the things you are not supposed to taxi over or pass very close, in favor of the things you are always supposed to be on top of. That is, saving texture memory for the background, which is basically just grass, and be sure the aprons would look sharp and realistic.

And no, before you start, the internals don't take any texture memory, until you enter on them in Avatar mode...

With texture memory, I mean the one that matters, including the buildings *externals*, hence my reference to then, Would you rather compromise the modeling/sharpness/quality of buildings, to have a better grass ?

We tried to be conservative, so the whole background is made of a single 8K texture, which once in the sim becomes 2x2 4K textures. This is a bit lower than other sceneries we made, considering the huge size of the aiport (KLAX has a bit better meter/pixel ratio), and it was made this on purpose, because we wanted to be sure we had enough VRAM available to represent the *actual* airport, which is mainly buildings, as best as we could. As RAM before in the 32 bit era, VRAM is not an "infinite" resources and, while there's usually no such thing as a "VRAM OOM crash", when VRAM is close to exhaustion, fps will *collapse* dramatically. Some users here have probably this problem, because of all the stuff they added, they are likely very close to VRAM exhaustion, so an 4x higher resolution ground would destroy their fps.

In any case, since our background is not a satellite image, which is a fixed resolution, we *could* possibly offer an alternate set of ground texture as an option for those with AT LEAST 12GB of VRAM or even more, which means very few video card out there could afford it ( 2080 Ti, Radeon VII, RTX Quadro ), because that won't require redoing the background, since it can be rendered at any resolution. 

[micstatic 4,316]

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

You are making this sentence as if it was somewhat "obvious" there's a problem.

If you are referring to the missing red runway enter ground markers in the hold short zones, those have been of course ALREADY FIXED, and will be downloaded automatically (thanks to Live Update), to anybody that installs the scenery now.

If you mean something else, then please provide a precise description on what do you think it's wrong, and we'll look at it.

Same things said in the thread already.  Also pictures at top of this thread.  The taxiways edges look fuzzy/blurry.  The actual painted lines look faint.  AnKH's post shows what I'm talking about.  

[AnkH 2,233]

11 minutes ago, virtuali said:

And of course I replied to look at the externals [...]

Oh, a huge load of text just to tell that it was a design decision based on potential performance issues. Don't get me wrong, I understand this, but to me, it is as I said, putting the focus on the wrong things.

11 minutes ago, virtuali said:

With texture memory, I mean the one that matters, including the buildings *externals*, hence my reference to then, Would you rather compromise the modeling/sharpness/quality of buildings, to have a better grass ?

No, again no. I would rather compromise the whole internal modeling thing to have better grass, yes. If you now tell me that if all terminals on KORD would not have ANY internal modeling/animations, this would still not have saved enough VRAM and performance for the ground being better, well then, I would shut up. But as long as I see the internals of terminals modeled to such an extent and other things being reduced due to potential performance issues, I will stick to my opinion about wrong priorities...

[micstatic 4,316]

3 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Oh, a huge load of text just to tell that it was a design decision based on potential performance issues. Don't get me wrong, I understand this, but to me, it is as I said, putting the focus on the wrong things.

No, again no. I would rather compromise the whole internal modeling thing to have better grass, yes. If you now tell me that if all terminals on KORD would not have ANY internal modeling/animations, this would still not have saved enough VRAM and performance for the ground being better, well then, I would shut up. But as long as I see the internals of terminals modeled to such an extent and other things being reduced due to potential performance issues, I will stick to my opinion about wrong priorities...

I've gotta agree with this totally.  There are plenty of complex and dense airport scenery's out there that still manage to have grass and good ground textures.  Including some from same developer.  We already know this is possible.  

[virtuali 4,419]

25 minutes ago, micstatic said:

I've gotta agree with this totally.  There are plenty of complex and dense airport scenery's out there that still manage to have grass and good ground textures.  Including some from same developer.  We already know this is possible.  

We tried to explain this in great detail on the KORD V2 manual, but that's obviously a boring 7 pages explanation that most would probably label as useless fluff...

Anyway, every comparison with any other scenery out there, is very misleading. This is the FIRST commercial ever to be made 100% in PBR, and it's incidentally one of the biggest airports in the world.

Having every single object of the whole scenery being made in PBR, which is the only way to have the scenery *coherent* with itself ( non PBR and PBR stuff mixed together break the immersion, since they don't react the same way on the same light ), means that, for *every* object, there must be the full complement of Albedo + Metallic/Gloss/AO + Normal maps.

With non PBR, we could get away with lots of object having just the Diffuse color, or not having Normal maps, but with PBR you simply can't: in order to work all 3 textures must be there. In addition to that, KORD has a LOT of metallic stuff in the buildings, so we couldn't even use an alternate method of not using the Metallic/Gloss/AO map at all, and use the Alpha channel of the Albedo (making it bigger, of course, not usable with partially transparent objects, and would mean losing AO) which could save a bit of texture memory if the object doesn't have any metallic parts. KORD is full of metal, which is not that common in the US, but that's the way it is.

As usual, there's no such thing as a free lunch, if you want the next-gen look of PBR and they realism and immersion that comes with doing a 100% PBR scenery, you must have to deal with an higher VRAM requirement.

Which means, as I've said, compromising on some other things, to be sure we still have some spare VRAM left to fill with, you know, those useless things like the surrounding scenery, autogen, airplane textures (internal and external), airplane animations, AI textures, etc. They all compete for the same amount of VRAM.

The default Windows Performance monitor is your friend here. Go to the GPU page, and see how much VRAM you have left. If you are over 85-90%, you know you couldn't afford a better resolution scenery, with your combination of add-ons and settings, and hardware of course.

Edited August 23, 2019 by virtuali