2 hours ago, RobJC said:

It would take a miracle for me to open my wallet to either P3D or XP at this point. They would have to make huge gains.  

Same here I would never spend that much money on those platforms unless they greatly improved on visuals out of the box. I would rather just stick to FSX for now.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by jbdbow1970

8 hours ago, Janov said:

X-Plane 12 will not surpass MSFS in realism of terrain and weather depiction. It will close the gap, but not surpass it.

If XP 12 (Beta it's always Beta) is a repeat of XP 11 Beta with just a couple of extra sliders and a few tweaks here and there, nobody is going to buy into that this time.  Because this time there is competition and people are not going to waste their time or money on Developers who works at snails pace, always releasing buggy Beta's, and achieve next to nothing in results.

6 minutes ago, Greazer said:

releasing buggy Beta's

Umm. sounds like MSFS. Oh, it's not BETA it's still alpha. 😉

11 hours ago, BigDee said:

Compared to FSX, XP does have fascinating visual qualities,  paid add-ons come in some cases close to reality. Further, it doesn`t have exaggerated lighting and it is beautiful to watch. FS2020 is of course way better in graphics, but still the lighting tends to create a cartoonish look, not much, but a litte, this can be seen when compared with real world images.

From the pic you have showed, the one thing that is evident is that XP does also have very good auto-generated buildings, or even better, there is no building visible that is sitting on top of a photographed building, at least in the pic.

 

My main point is, whatever Microsoft does in FS2020, it has to be anounced in the loudest manner, yet they are not the only ones.

It may sound as a surprise, but their scenery engine options is already more capable than msfs's.

I can choose what type of streets can have lights (also, what type of lights?), in a specific region. I can choose to change the driving side in the UK.

Create my own animated scenes in blender and make it as detailed as I want, and then x-plane can use those little scenes as a really detailed regional auto-gen, with really neat details like kids playing, people, gardens around houses etc... and BETTER! those scenes can be consisted from different objects which can be used in multiple ways to create more scenes out of them in a "seamless" way. (all the trash cans look almost the same anyway lol)

As for MSFS, I don't care about the hype, but it's still the better looking out of the box but bare in mind it is MSFS*2020* and xp11 is getting really old. I can mention legacy features in MSFS though, like the sliced trees which looks horrible, or the flat shading photogrammetry trees (get close to them and you'll see triangles), mostly animated meshes are used these days in modern engines.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by akita

Plus it was Microsoft that told we will adapt a feature where people can build their own airports and upload them to the game.

It`s more like, we liked the feature in XP a lot, want to steal it, but use different words. XP has a great tool with good tutorials (Jan) for creating custom airports, plus the freeware software for integrating satellite image is great.

 

If Aerosoft says MSFS is the only future, or even PMDG (next-generation), flight simming looks bad for the future.

1 hour ago, akita said:

I can mention legacy features in MSFS though, like the sliced trees which looks horrible, or the flat shading photogrammetry trees (get close to them and you'll see triangles), mostly animated meshes are used these days in modern engines.

No offense, but it's night and day between the MSFS trees and other flight sims.  If I were to grade the trees on a scale of 1 to 10, MSFS trees get a 10 while XPlane trees get a 1.5 or maybe a 2 at best. XPlane trees are super ugly, and detract so much from the immersion.  Ditto for P3D trees, which are also really, really bad.

It's obvious that the trees in XPlane and P3D are from 10 years ago.  It really shows, and it's really, really, ugly.  The trees in MSFS are what you would expect of a modern simulator.

We can even compare the trees in DCS World to MSFS.  And even MSFS has better trees than DCS World.  It's not even a competition.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by abrams_tank

31 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

No offense, but it's night and day between the MSFS trees and other flight sims.  If I were to grade the trees on a scale of 1 to 10, MSFS trees get a 10 while XPlane trees get a 1.5 or maybe a 2 at best. XPlane trees are super ugly, and detract so much from the immersion.  Ditto for P3D trees, which are also really, really bad.

It's obvious that the trees in XPlane and P3D are from 10 years ago.  It really shows, and it's really, really, ugly.  The trees in MSFS are what you would expect of a modern simulator.

I am not really sure why you all go defensive, read my previous posts and see what I think about x-plane trees.

MSFS trees are sliced billboards which frankly is old and looks bad too IMO. Most modern games i'm aware off use *animated* meshes, then use compute to change foliage with seasons. For 2020 this tech is old.

Can't be compared to this:

 

So MSFS still leave stuff to be desired regarding a next-gen engine.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by akita

10 minutes ago, akita said:

I am not really sure why you all go defensive, read my previous posts and see what I think about x-plane trees.

MSFS trees are sliced billboards which frankly is old and looks bad too IMO. Most modern games i'm aware off use *animated* meshes, then use compute to change foliage with seasons. For 2020 this tech is old.

Can't be compared to this:

 

So MSFS still leave stuff to be desired regarding a next-gen engine.

Why don't you show trees from XPlane and P3D?  Showing trees for your video is pointless.  Let' compare flight simulator to flight simulator.

Quote

Most modern games

This right there is why your comparison is pointless.  MSFS, like other flight simulators. has a huge rendering distance.  Of course flight sim programmers can inject more complex trees, at the cost of really bad FPS.  Stop comparing MSFS to "modern games" that are played with confined or very low viewing distances.  For example, confined, small area shooter games can have very nice trees, because the rendering distance is very, very, small.  Compare MSFS to the other flight simulators, which have the same problems as MSFS, which is the very long rendering distance, and they cannot torpedo the FPS.

Like I said, MSFS trees are 10 out of 10 for a flight sim.  XPlane trees are 1.5 or 2 out of 10. P3D trees are also very bad.  There is a huge, huge, gap between MSFS trees and the other flight sim trees.  I even brought up DCS World trees, which are still worse than MSFS trees.

4 hours ago, akita said:

I am not really sure why you all go defensive, read my previous posts and see what I think about x-plane trees.

MSFS trees are sliced billboards which frankly is old and looks bad too IMO. Most modern games i'm aware off use *animated* meshes, then use compute to change foliage with seasons. For 2020 this tech is old.

Can't be compared to this:

 

So MSFS still leave stuff to be desired regarding a next-gen engine.

MSFS trees aren’t billboard trees like the other sims, they are volumetric. They might look bad when you look really closer because they had to lower the details for performance reasons, but in FSim, you shouldn’t be so closer to the trees anyways (😂). Also you can use shaders to change their colors like on any modern gaming engines. When seasons are implemented we will probably see, for now just the snow effects are partially present.

The engine is capable, I can’t say much because of the Alpha NDA, but if you look around, you might find some comparisons with the trees in older alpha versions vs newer ones.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by ca_metal

5 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

It's obvious that the trees in XPlane and P3D are from 10 years ago.  It really shows, and it's really, really, ugly.  The trees in MSFS are what you would expect of a modern simulator.

The trees are ancient technology sprite graphics from the 90's, another terrible "feature" like 2d clouds that they never fix. And mark my words I am fully expecting this to continue with XP12. 

14 minutes ago, Greazer said:

The trees are ancient technology sprite graphics from the 90's, another terrible "feature" like 2d clouds that they never fix. And mark my words I am fully expecting this to continue with XP12. 

  Indeed, they are horrible.

However no reason to mark your words because this is one of the things they claim to be improved already in their internal demo/pre-alpha versions.

1 hour ago, ca_metal said:

MSFS trees aren’t billboard trees like the other sims, they are volumetric. They might look bad when you look really closer because they had to lower the details for performance reasons, but in FSim, you shouldn’t be so closer to the trees anyways (😂). Also you can use shaders to change their colors like on any modern gaming engines. When seasons are implemented we will probably see, for now just the snow effects are partially present.

The engine is capable, I can’t say much because of the Alpha NDA, but if you look around, you might find some comparisons with the trees in older alpha versions vs newer ones.

Whatever they are, they look bad, like a "sliced" 2d image in an attempt to create a tree. MSFS still leaves a lot to be desired in that department, regardless of other platforms who also look bad.

And the photogrammetry trees are also the worst, you can literally see flat shading and triangles, they look like a low poly model of a rock, but in green.

Respect the trees more 🙂 they are everywhere, it's not true that we don't need them to look good in a flight simulator, they can be very close to the user not just but especially when bush flying.

There are ways to make the performance penalty small while keeping additive rendering seamless.

5 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

Why don't you show trees from XPlane and P3D?  Showing trees for your video is pointless.  Let' compare flight simulator to flight simulator.

Because i'm not into being a little child who cares what you or others use? 

I showed x-plane trees (Yikes!), a few pages ago, if you only care to read instead of making excuses on behalf of MSFS while all modern engines these days have 10x better looking trees and ground detail.

  

5 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

This right there is why your comparison is pointless.  MSFS, like other flight simulators. has a huge rendering distance.  Of course flight sim programmers can inject more complex trees, at the cost of really bad FPS. 

modern GPUs can render gazillions of geometry and have dedicated compute units for those kind of shaders, it's mostly AA, resolution and VRAM that drive them down. it is sane in the fact that it is an industry standart and what MSFS uses for trees is not, it was a maybe decade ago, but not in 2020.

LOD distance is mostly a cpu thing, then again MSFS is still DX11.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by akita

On 11/26/2020 at 10:07 PM, marsman2020 said:

Microsoft has given them a sweetheart deal that no other developer got and the chance to make sure the SDK meets their needs (while possibly not meetings the needs of other developers).

Of course they will have nothing but gushing praise for Microsobo.

I love how he complains that "Lockheed can't make up their mind" in the like yearly or every 6 months updates to P3D.....but Asobo is breaking MSFS every 2 weeks.  What a cognitive dissonance.

All this post does is make sure I will never buy any Aerosoft products.

You have not one shred of evidence that this is the case, in fact Asobo/MS would be absolutely stupid to do such a thing. The devs of the sim are always going on that they love the diversity of the flightsim community, so why would they just focus on one company who are not even the most talented devs in the industry?

One thing that slightly gets on my nerves regarding Aerosoft is that, it was not that long ago how they were singing LM's praise's about how LM were so easy to work with and that they were so flexible and easy to talk to. So as a company I think Aerosoft are very quick to get cosy with the new kids in town, and drop your old flame.

21 minutes ago, akita said:

Because i'm not into being a little child who cares what you or others use? 

I showed x-plane trees (Yikes!), a few pages ago, if you only care to read instead of making excuses on behalf of MSFS while all modern engines these days have 10x better looking trees and ground detail.

Sheesh, you don't have to get personal with your insults.  Calm down. 

Again with the "modern engines."  Those aren't flight simulators.  I don't know how you don't understand that.  The bottleneck of flight simulators is the drawing distance.  You can't use the most beautiful and most detailed trees in a flight simulator because that will tank the FPS.  Don't you get it?  That's why what MSFS is doing is all the more impressive because we have very good looking trees in a flight simulator, with good FPS on mediocre hardware, with very long rendering distances.

 

Quote

modern GPUs can render gazillions of geometry and have dedicated compute units for those kind of shaders, it's mostly AA, resolution and VRAM that drive them down. it is sane in the fact that it is an industry standart and what MSFS uses for trees is not, it was a maybe decade ago, but not in 2020.

LOD distance is mostly a cpu thing, then again MSFS is still DX11.

And yet only MSFS can produce this high level of graphics for a flight simulator, and only demand a very mediocre computer. That is the brilliance of MSFS. That's also a problem of XPlane and P3D - if they want to improve the graphics and not tank the FPS with the hardware that most of their users are using, it's not that easy for Lockheed Martin and Austin.   

43 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Sheesh, you don't have to get personal with your insults.  Calm down. 

Again with the "modern engines."  Those aren't flight simulators.  I don't know how you don't understand that.  The bottleneck of flight simulators is the drawing distance.  You can't use the most beautiful and most detailed trees in a flight simulator because that will tank the FPS.  Don't you get it?  That's why what MSFS is doing is all the more impressive because we have very good looking trees in a flight simulator, with good FPS on mediocre hardware, with very long rendering distances.

 

And yet only MSFS can produce this high level of graphics for a flight simulator, and only demand a very mediocre computer. That is the brilliance of MSFS. That's also a problem of XPlane and P3D - if they want to improve the graphics and not tank the FPS with the hardware that most of their users are using, it's not that easy for Lockheed Martin and Austin.   

It's not being personal, I find this type of behavior childish.

I am not comparing between platforms, this is an MSFS forum so I discuss stuff that might be good for MSFS.

When I want to discuss stuff for x-plane, I go there and I badger about how much I would love to see x-plane a ray tracing simulator under Vulkan.

You, for some reason, are under the impression that I care what you fly. Constantly trying to derail me to a MSFS VS P3D VS XP discussion.

Read Again: The main bottleneck for real time simulations including the need to render 100nm terrain, is the cpu. as long as MSFS is DX11 you might be true. DX11 is a very multi-core limited API (2-4 cores), this is why IMO dx12 will be no less than crucial for the future of MSFS. dx12 provides the foundations and safe for threading and can scale to as much cores as you need, but they will still need, after moving to dx12, work on multi-threading to actually use the benefits.

But this all not that related to trees, since obviously a tree that is 5nm away do not need to be rendered in full detail, there are many possible optimization that can be done, it is widespread in 2020.

So, as I said, MSFS regardless of the fact that it's a big + in the graphics department compared to xp11/p3d, still leaves to be desired.

 

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by akita