New interview with Jörg Neumann

[Raymond.Groenendijk 255]

7 hours ago, Shug said:

I find it very hard to believe there are over 2 million cities in the world. What defines a city? For example there are 21 cities in Togo with a population over 7,000 people. There are 30 in Papua New Guinea with a population of over 3,000. Many would consider such small populations as towns or villages. The USA has less than 500 cities with a population over 100,000. Would love to know where all the other hundreds of thousands of cities are....

Yeah well my post was actually trying to be a bit funny and I was over exaggerating things, guess it failed to be funny 😉 The 2 million was taken directly from the world video which was obviously wrong, like @F737NG pointed out they were probably meaning settlements. 

[Nedo68 533]

2 hours ago, steve310002 said:

If seasons are not in FS2020 on release (which hopefully they will be in some format), then I reckon it will be a Summer 2020 release date. It would make less sense without seasons to release a permanent summer flight sim in winter for example. 

This only works with a flat earth,

with a round earth we have winter & summer same time, talk about northern hemisphere
& southern hemisphere 😉

[steve310002 1,198]

1 hour ago, Nedo68 said:

This only works with a flat earth,

with a round earth we have winter & summer same time, talk about northern hemisphere
& southern hemisphere 😉

You got me 😂. In fairness, however, the biggest markets for gaming and simming are in the northern hemisphere and so are Microsoft's headquarters so my bet would still be on that. And in Australia, its basically warm all year for the most part.

[liams 8]

Somewhat baseless speculation

Jorg mentioned that their weather data provider was based in Switzerland, they could be using MeteoBlue, which if you have a look at the link has some very nice weather maps.

 

https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather-maps/london_united-kingdom_2643743?variable=precipitation3h_cloudcover_pressure&level=surface&lines=none&mapcenter=49.2248N1.1646&zoom=6

Edited November 26, 2019 by liams
spelling

[Noooch 1,084]

46 minutes ago, liams said:

Somewhat baseless speculation

Jorg mentioned that their weather data provider was based in Switzerland, they could be using MeteoBlue, which if you have a look at the link has some very nice weather maps.

 

https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather-maps/london_united-kingdom_2643743?variable=precipitation3h_cloudcover_pressure&level=surface&lines=none&mapcenter=49.2248N1.1646&zoom=6

That's exactly how it looked in the end of the weather episode so I think you are right !

[anden145 2,299]

3 hours ago, Nedo68 said:

This only works with a flat earth,

with a round earth we have winter & summer same time, talk about northern hemisphere
& southern hemisphere 😉

Wait?! What?! We do?

[anden145 2,299]

6 hours ago, Ikaro said:

In a shooting game, what happens when you fire the gun? A ray is traced along a vector in the direction your gun is pointing, if that ray intersects with the position of an enemy, then a hit is registered.

Ehh - I'm not exactly sure what you mean here - but RayTracing is a computational technique, in which rays of light are calculated to render and determine reflections, refractions etc of objects surfaces thereby giving surfaces of objects their color and appearance.
It can create immensely more realistic sceneries, than for instance rasterization, because each object gets color, light and shadow from actual rays of light - which are affected by other objects etc... However, it comes at quite a computational penalty, since calculation rays of light (and typically more than 1 ray is calculated), with ray bouncing etc is quite complex. 

I'm not sure why you referencing a gun... shooting a projectile (or objects) in a video game isn't raytracing (at least not to my knowledge). It is the calculation of a ballistic trajectory and it is a physical calculation - which is rather simple, actually. 

Sorry for going off-topic... 🙂

[ErnieAlston 33]

11 hours ago, F737NG said:

There are only approximately 4,000 cities worldwide with a population of 100,000+.
https://brilliantmaps.com/4037-100000-person-cities/

Makes me wonder what are the 400 high detailed cities they mentioned? Are they 400 of those 4000 cities ? or are they 400 of the overall 2 million cities ?

[Ikaro 31]

7 minutes ago, Anders Bermann said:

Ehh - I'm not exactly sure what you mean here - but RayTracing is a computational technique, in which rays of light are calculated to render and determine reflections, refractions etc of objects surfaces thereby giving surfaces of objects their color and appearance.
It can create immensely more realistic sceneries, than for instance rasterization, because each object gets color, light and shadow from actual rays of light - which are affected by other objects etc... However, it comes at quite a computational penalty, since calculation rays of light (and typically more than 1 ray is calculated), with ray bouncing etc is quite complex. 

I'm not sure why you referencing a gun... shooting a projectile (or objects) in a video game isn't raytracing (at least not to my knowledge). It is the calculation of a ballistic trajectory and it is a physical calculation - which is rather simple, actually. 

Sorry for going off-topic... 🙂

At it's most basic level, raytracing is a vector intersection test. In the example of the gun, a single ray is fired. This is how 98% of shooting games work under the hood; there is no ballistic trajectory, the bullet flies in a straight line, with hits registered instantly.

Ray tracing as used in calculating light-transport as you have described it just an expansion on this same concept.

[Shack95 2,665]

34 minutes ago, ErnieAlston said:

Makes me wonder what are the 400 high detailed cities they mentioned? Are they 400 of those 4000 cities ? or are they 400 of the overall 2 million cities ?

You might find the answer in this thread:Do we have a definitive list of the 3D cities?

[azulkb 302]

my town is under 100K (96k) and it's phtotogrammetry (Tourcoing, but 20km near Lille - FR)

Edited November 26, 2019 by azulkb

[ErnieAlston 33]

35 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

You might find the answer in this thread:Do we have a definitive list of the 3D cities?

Thanks, but that list seems to be speculatively contained within the 4000.

Would that mean there are no detailed small towns at all (ie within the 2 mil).  Considering the images we saw of Courchevel, I'm assuming some small towns (or small town airports) may be very detailed.  Would small highly detailed places like Courchevel be within that 400 ?

 

[Shack95 2,665]

24 minutes ago, azulkb said:

my town is under 100K (96k) and it's phtotogrammetry (Tourcoing, but 20km near Lille - FR)

I guess Bing treated Tourcoing as a part of Lille. That would explain why it‘s not listed under 3d cities in Bing Maps.

By the way, cases such as this could be the reason for the discrepancy between the number of 3d cities listed in Bing Maps and the 400+ cities the devs mentioned, i.e. Bing counting 3d areas while MS/Asobo count actual cities. A similar case can be found in the UK where Bing only lists Southampton while nearby Portsmouth is 3d as well, so in fact it‘s two 3d cities and not just one.

[Shack95 2,665]

27 minutes ago, ErnieAlston said:

 

Would that mean there are no detailed small towns at all (ie within the 2 mil).  Considering the images we saw of Courchevel, I'm assuming some small towns (or small town airports) may be very detailed.  Would small highly detailed places like Courchevel be within that 400 ?

I don‘t know. I thought those 400 cities were the ones that have photogrammetry, which Courchevel hasn‘t. I guess the airport and surrounding buildings were handcrafted. 

[RALF9636 1,998]

4 hours ago, liams said:

Somewhat baseless speculation

Jorg mentioned that their weather data provider was based in Switzerland, they could be using MeteoBlue, which if you have a look at the link has some very nice weather maps.

 

https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather-maps/london_united-kingdom_2643743?variable=precipitation3h_cloudcover_pressure&level=surface&lines=none&mapcenter=49.2248N1.1646&zoom=6

 

3 hours ago, Noooch said:

That's exactly how it looked in the end of the weather episode so I think you are right !

 

To continue this baseless speculation: Going through the meteoblue website I found that they have a weather archive going back 30 (!) years. So I am even more confident now that we will get historic weather in the sim.