September 12th, 2019 Update - Alpha sign-up

[jlund 380]

I really don't think it's ridicuolos to say that if people already now, before even seeing the final product, starts nitpicking about things that might or might not be in the final product, then maybe they're better off not investing in a new sim.

I also have some concerns about how they will license it, will it be a  monthly subcribsion, or can we buy it once'n for all, and then stream it or.....? If it's a subscribsion plan, then I stick to what I have now, BUT I' wont complain about it before we know a lot more.

So let's wait till after Sep 29 where I think we will know some more of MS' plan, before we nitpick.

[Gulfstream 416]

If anyone hasn't seen what the trueSKY engine is capable in regards to clouds, see as a reference how it is used in NAMCO's Ace Combat 7.

And before anyone jumps in to say "that is a shooter game!" or anything along those lines, I know but it shows how far we've come these days.  The clouds in the new MSFS look very similar to these and I am guessing they are also using the trueSKY engine for atmosphere.

This is an example of what modern volumetric clouds are like, and this runs at 120 FPS on my GTX1060, a budget video card.

This should also put to rest concerns about "2D rotating billboard" clouds ... we are way beyond that in 2019.

 

Edited September 16, 2019 by Gulfstream

[eslader 1,783]

Yeah, but that's a shooter.

 

😉

 

I hope 2020 has rain effects like that too. That's spectacular.

[Gulfstream 416]

Just now, eslader said:

Yeah, but that's a shooter.

Yes and to get the others out of the way ... it also doesn't have very accurate flight dynamics, it doesn't have global coverage, it doesn't have real-world earth, it doesn't have an FMS ... it also doesn't have those "DO NOT TOUCH SCREENS" stickers come to think of it.  😅

But hopefully you get the idea!

[Paraffin 2,197]

Just now, eslader said:

I hope 2020 has rain effects like that too. That's spectacular.

I hope MSFS doesn't have rain effects like that, because you don't get rain drops sticking to the forward canopy at jet fighter airspeed. 😉

[eslader 1,783]

4 hours ago, Paraffin said:

I hope MSFS doesn't have rain effects like that, because you don't get rain drops sticking to the forward canopy at jet fighter airspeed. 😉

Yeah, I was a bit imprecise. I hope MSFS has rain effects that look like that when realistic. 😉

 

 

[HughesMDflyer4 470]

10 hours ago, Gulfstream said:

If anyone hasn't seen what the trueSKY engine is capable in regards to clouds, see as a reference how it is used in NAMCO's Ace Combat 7.

And before anyone jumps in to say "that is a shooter game!" or anything along those lines, I know but it shows how far we've come these days.  

100% this.

I posted this elsewhere but will say it here too. I've always been super frustrated by the "it's a flight simulator so it has bad performance" argument. As if sims are made from some magical different code/rendering API that intentionally runs poorly. "Global scenery" and "complex aircraft" don't inherently mean bad performance - the entire world in full detail isn't rendered at once, and the aircraft are for the most part doing basic math calculations/number crunching. Flight simmers have to be some of the only gamers who have convinced themselves that mediocre FPS and visuals are acceptable. If you're reading this and are happy, hats off to you, but our industry as a whole has been behind for quite some time and there are many of us that want to see it catch up. Any proper AAA studio releasing a game today with the visuals and performance of current flight sims would be burned at the stake.

[FDEdev 955]

Aerofly is a flying game which is even much less complex than Ace combat. With almost zero features it's no wonder that the FPS is so high.

[G-RFRY 1,711]

One big difference in top end games and flight sim is that the best games graphics titles tend to be level base, you complete a level then the cache is dumped and the next level the cache bar loads the next level, unlike flight sim when dumping and loading the cache must be done in real time, having played some of the highest details games the background is often rendered in 2D backboards but your attention is focused on near detail.  

Edited September 17, 2019 by rjfry

[ca_metal 2,019]

26 minutes ago, rjfry said:

One big difference in top end games and flight sim is that the best games graphics titles tend to be level base, you complete a level then the cache is dumped and the next level the cache bar loads the next level, unlike flight sim when dumping and loading the cache must be done in real time, having played some of the highest details games the background is often rendered in 2D backboards but your attention is focused on near detail.  

Not true, the new trend on the gaming industry is doing open world games, and their worlds have been growing a lot lately. Just look at Assassin's Creed, GTA, Red Dead Redemption and so on. No loading are needed and you can go to whatever you want, there's no physical limitations on the sceneries or 2D background as you say.

But well, if you still think FSims are a total different beast that can't be optimized for modern systems, I respect your opinions. But I will say MS might change that point of view on 2020.

[DrumsArt 270]

Hi,

All videos from the links are blank!??

Firefox...

Thanks,

Richard

[eslader 1,783]

1 hour ago, ca_metal said:

Just look at Assassin's Creed, GTA, Red Dead Redemption and so on.

Yeah, but even if you get the fastest horse in Odyssey, you're still *at best* doing around 50mph (probably a good deal slower), and you're on the ground and can only see about 200 feet around you in detail, and maybe a mile or two in lower detail.

In a flight sim you might have a ground speed as high as 600mph, and you can see for 80 miles in every direction. That's a boatload of visuals to be continually loading and unloading, and it gets even worse when you're low down because you can still see decently far even at 1,000AGL, only now a lot of it's gotta be high-detail stuff that you're flying past at 290mph.

 

[ifly777 4]

18 hours ago, Minos said:

The surrounding looks great in the Diamond video, but the runway pops out of the greenery like a giant billboard. Being a Commercial pilot, I can say that runways are usually much harder to find that depicted here and blend usually quite nicely with the surrounding.

We had a similar problem in fsx, when you get close enough to a default airport, the runway seems to stand out from the scenery. Hope they change this for 2020

[FlyerNYC 82]

They will definitely have found methods to get around those issues. Optimization is in a different place now than where it was back in 2006. There are many new techniques and even whole new jobs that were created because of the increased importance of optimization.

[ca_metal 2,019]

1 hour ago, eslader said:

Yeah, but even if you get the fastest horse in Odyssey, you're still *at best* doing around 50mph (probably a good deal slower), and you're on the ground and can only see about 200 feet around you in detail, and maybe a mile or two in lower detail.

 In a flight sim you might have a ground speed as high as 600mph, and you can see for 80 miles in every direction. That's a boatload of visuals to be continually loading and unloading, and it gets even worse when you're low down because you can still see decently far even at 1,000AGL, only now a lot of it's gotta be high-detail stuff that you're flying past at 290mph.

  

Hence why you will need much more RAM and VRAM using a FSim. It shouldn't get limited by your CPU, as Odyssey is really CPU hungry (as you might know, there's a lot of NPCs and things going on the scenery) and still can run fine in a high-end system. It's just a cache thing, I wouldn't mind to buy 32GB of ram and having a high-end GPU, with a lot o VRAM, so I can run MSFS2020 with max settings and good performance.

To be clear, a high-end system should run a flight simulator with max settings and a good performance. That's what I think MS is willing to do.