Lighting is really difficult, it's the hardest part about rendering, well animation is the hardest, lighting is second 🙂

 

1 minute ago, Slides said:

advancing to DX12

Did they quote a timeline for the move? I missed that part.

5 minutes ago, airlinejets said:

Did they quote a timeline for the move? I missed that part.

No timeline. But I bet MS wants to get on board the DX12 marketing machine. 

6 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

Lighting is really difficult, it's the hardest part about rendering, well animation is the hardest, lighting is second 🙂

 

Yeah that's not true at all, but ok.

21 minutes ago, GSalden said:

I
And imho the main target for MS is the XBox platform. That we have a pc version is good for us, but there are more people playing games on XBox/PS than there are people playing on pc’s.

Devious people, the guys in Redmont.

Their main target is the Xbox customer base, if I understand what you say. You could have thought that developing the sim for the console would come first then.  This what you and me would have done. 

But no,  they develop and release for the PC first and refuse to say with stubborness what could be the date of a release  for the console. Listen to Neuman’s last interview one can even wonder whether there will a port to the Box or not.

Very, very clever. 

11 minutes ago, Slides said:

Yeah that's not true at all, but ok.

Do you use Blender, yah there are a lot of filters regarding reflection that you have to apply to make objects look more realistic, or to try to get that PBR look, something which Orbx never could get quite right in many cases.

Have you ever even rendered anything before at all?

The lighting was the hardest part generally speaking, there are all these filters you have to apply to make it look more realistic. Even if you didn't have a perfect texture, you could often fix it with lighting tricks. Having a perfect photoreal texture by itself does not give it that realistic shimmer unless you get the reflections balanced exactly a certain way, this is even more complicated by the fact that the game engine itself changes the lighting on you in ways not always known.

Edited August 23, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

33 minutes ago, Slides said:

1. You just described what a bug is. Or call it feature incomplete. But what that does that have to do with scenery? Why did you bring this up? It's a particle effect.

2. Huh? i honestly don't know what your rant is about. That screenshot looks perfectly fine. Why would I know or care what P3D looks like? It's a small niche sim that I didn't even know existed until a few months ago. It means nothing to me.

3. Ok? You do know that DCS maps are far smaller and all handcrafted right? Why are you comparing the entire world to DCS maps? The Syria map just came out. If I saw trees in wrong places, I would ask ED for my money back because I paid $40 for just the Syria map. Meanwhile, I paid $60 for the entire world in MSFS. Do you understand the difference? You're all over the place here.

Slides, here's some free advice - when you try and get snarky about a subject you don't know much about, you just end up sounding like a goose.

We're only having this conversation because you made (yet another) overblown claim about the new sim - that is was "indisputably" more "believable" than P3D and X-Plane.

I've pointed out to you multiple areas where this over-the-top statement can be disputed. I wouldn't go so far as to say that one sim is more "believable" than the others overall, as there's multiple points where this can be debated.

Here's what I can tell you from my own experience. Having flown nothing but MSFS since the hour it was released on the beautiful islands of Kiribati - and I've spent a lot of sleepless nights this week flying the new sim - I just went back and flew P3D v5 for the first time. And that's the first time this week I've actually felt like I was flying a real aircraft. Why? I had a plane where everything worked (Maddog), I was flying with an HMD, I had a great frame rate for smoothness, I had clouds that looked real rather than Hollywood (Truesky) and I had ortho scenery that was not blurry at FL380. In short, for me this was my most "believable" flight of the week by a fair margin.

Now, thousands of others may disagree with me, but the point is that there is nuance here. You've made it clear that you have no idea what P3D is - referring to the sim the was (probably) the world's most popular platform a week ago as "a small niche sim that I didn't even know existed..." 🙄

So why on earth do you continue to compared MSFS to sims you've never flown in absolute terms?!?

I'll say the word again, because it's something that's lacking from every one of your posts that I've read in this forum - "nuance".

MSFS is brilliant at some things. It's not so good at others. You're allowed to praise the new sim, but you're also allowed to take an honest look at it and criticize as appropriate. 

 

 

   

 

 

15 hours ago, VFXSimmer said:

Yeah, I dont disagree that I'd prefer higher res in both ortho and mesh.  I'd love to see them set up an option to stream a more detailed version if your internet and machine can handle it.  As with anything server based though, you have to let it stabilize to see what the real numbers are before opening the pipe more.

I hope any upgrades in that respect include higher-res terrain mesh equivalent at least to the HD mesh in XP. I do a lot of flying at low altitude in bush planes or helicopters in mountain areas, so maybe I notice it more than others who are flying airport to airport with high altitude cruise.

I wonder if the relatively low terrain mesh resolution in MSFS is not so much a question of bandwidth as a consideration for user RAM?

The requirement to use HD mesh in X-Plane is 16GB, and 32GB is recommended for the UHD mesh. Assuming the data set is roughly equivalent, maybe MSFS is using a relatively low terrain mesh resolution to keep the system requirements lower? They're using a lot of RAM as it is for the 3D object rendering, so maybe it would require something like 32 GB to get higher terrain mesh. I don't know if the streaming system could identify higher user RAM and serve a separate stream.

59 minutes ago, boshar said:

I believe photo scenery has its place but it also has obvious drawbacks.

You will never get cloudless high res satellite imagery from the whole world let alone useful seasons. Shadows are also baked in, the wind turbines models are alway accompanied with their flat twin ghosts baked into the scenery. Military installations and sites like nuclear plants are blurred and the list goes on. I take it for granted that these things ‘pop up’ with this method but it’s far from ideal.

I don’t care if it is X-Plane Next or whatever other company that comes up with a solution. With photo scenery I always had a first ‘wow, this is great’ period shortly followed by disappointment after a look at how the sausage is made. If someone comes up with a better alternative I will certainly give it a chance.

It appears that we all have different tolerances for ortho artifacts. I fly bush planes and helicopters in the sim, usually away from large urban areas. I can handle a certain amount of low-res blurriness, but really breaks immersion for me are artifacts like squashed cars, squashed boats, squashed buildings and baked-in shadows.

It's especially annoying flying over my home town in either Orbx TE WA in X-Plane or MSFS, because there are two marinas at the shoreline that only show as blurred pixelated rectangles stuck out in the water. That's never going to change for areas that aren't prominent enough for hand-editing (the Orbx approach), and I never believed the hype that Azure would somehow magically "know" that there was supposed to be docks and boats there.

That said, MSFS does a terrific job in areas where there is photogrammetry data for buildings, and in open wilderness areas where there are no man-made objects to break immersion. 

Took a trip to Flagstaff since someone recommended it, immediate surrounding area was "ok", but the airport itself was pretty bad. Third party companies are going to make a killing off adding airports if they don't fix some of these issues. This is as bad as an FSX default airport, in some ways worse.

Mud huts with doors perhaps?


 

Fidelity of default airport buildings (!?!?!)

2 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

Took a trip to Flagstaff since someone recommended it, immediate surrounding area was "ok", but the airport itself was pretty bad. Third party companies are going to make a killing off adding airports if they don't fix some of these issues. This is as bad as an FSX default airport, in some ways worse.

Mud huts with doors perhaps?

This is a side effect from one of the techniques they use to generate the scenery. When you look at it from a normal VFR flying height it looks amazing. I flew the via drone view in the greater New York area and came across a train yard with trains, containers, parked cars. All these items get a rough mesh underneath them to make them ‘pop’. Off course when you go really low and slow (or when we get helicopters) you will see part off how the sausage is made. 

The New-York scenery has bridges that rise up out of the water, solid walls on either side. Some of them have solid pylons that make ramps out of the road and the traffic jumps over the Dukes of Hazard style. The Manhattan Island area in New York is either hand corrected or uses a different technique so there it looks a lot better.

As I said from a normal sightseeing flying height it looks great. I hope they can fine tune  their algorithm or maybe do a better cross check with other data sources.

Here is the default airport in Xplane 11

Here is a typical default airport overlayed with photoscenery in Xplane 11


Here are some higher res Photoscenery images from Xplane 11

 

On 8/22/2020 at 10:05 AM, Kendig said:

Short version: X-Plane will be fine. For many of us, flight dynamics rules the day.

MFS will succeed due to the gameplay; activities, challenges, badges and the like. (Plus, of course, the scenery.)  XP won’t go away due to the flight dynamics. Don’t forget, the pro version of XP is certified by the FAA for flight instruction.
 

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers

p.s. I’ve been flight simming since the SubLogic days.

Can you please share the results for your flight model analysis between MSFS20 and X plane?   

3 minutes ago, boshar said:

All these items get a rough mesh underneath them to make them ‘pop’. 

I agree in some cases it looks good from flying height, but no, not in this one case. The airport looked awful from all perspectives.

 

22 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

I agree in some cases it looks good from flying height, but no, not in this one case. The airport looked awful from all perspectives.

 

Nice job cherry-picking one airport building and some photogrammetry anomalies.

Here is a fairer comparison:

 

Vanilla XP11:

 

Vanilla MSFS:

It wasn't cherry picked, someone told me to try it yesterday from this very thread (err cannot win in here)...

Per your screens, they are showing off Ortho vs. No Ortho more than the differences of the airport, and the trees of course. If you show ortho on the XP screenshots, the difference will not be that much.

No-one is arguing that the buildings and trees aren't better in MSFS (sometimes), they are. We all are aware, but having better buildings (sometimes) and always better trees with varying ortho quality does not always make for a better scenery.

It totally depends where you are flying and what addons you are running in XP 11.

Without addons, of course the terrain of FSX/P3D/XP11 is going to look horrible, no-one is saying otherwise.

Edited August 23, 20205 yr by SceneryFX