REVIEW: Roman Design Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier

[FilbertFlies 980]

Evening all! My review of Roman Design's CYOW is now up. I use the word 'fantastic' quite a lot in it. Too much, probably...

 

 

[johnbow72 2,722]

Solid review mate , it is always nice to hear fantastic instead of being disappointed in any review for MSFS .

Cheers

John

[FilbertFlies 980]

20 hours ago, johnbow72 said:

it is always nice to hear fantastic

It is, though I think I overused the word a little in this review! 😄 Need to invest in a thesaurus...

[regis9 3,999]

Valid though, this really is a great scenery.  Congrats to @Roman Design !

[Roman Design 344]

Thanks for a great review! Due to video limited time, there are many parts that didn't make it to the review, so for those interested, I would recommend taking a look at the photos on the CYOW page (link in the sig) or on this forum's CYOW topic as they show all interesting parts. There's a bridge you can taxi on, wind tunnel complex, cargo hangar and 2 hotels with parallax windows, firehall, and other interesting locations, buildings, billboards, sculptures etc. 

If you set airport traffic and planes in the sim, you will have a number of airliners and GA aircraft randomly parked at gates and parking starts, and moving around the airport. So I felt there is no need for static plane models, as dynamic AI planes are more realistic. 

Here's a few notes, similar to what I posted as a comment on the video, for those interested in details: the double concrete seams are visible because the underlying aerial photo textures are blending and bleeding through the MSFS Apron textures. There is no control over that. All apron textures are blending with the ground below. Usually it's good, because it gives some variation to the texture, but when there are slabs like that it becomes weird. Some kinds of ground textures can be opaque, but they are not aprons, and can't be rotated and aligned, for example. There are 3 other open hangars, and other areas that weren't in the review, just in case someone is interested. There are some weird bug in MSFS: the glass is tinted from inside in every building with interior, but one, where I've done it in the same way, but for some reason it doesn't work. Snow is a huge problem: I as a developer have absolutely no control over the snow. It depends on the underlying aerial photo texture color and intensity, and when using different ground textures it's a complete lottery about how the snow will appear. Runways are using one of the Asobo runway textures that is closest to the real airport, and possibly because it's not too dark it's covered in snow. Custom paint textures are on top of that. And custom paint lines on Aprons seem to be painted over the snow for some reason, and again, I have no control over that whatsoever. So there are many quirks like that. Some are possible to work around, some are not. My guess is that I could use different much darker runway textures that may be snow-free if I'm lucky, but they would look very different from a real-life textures. It's a lottery.

Edited May 26, 2021 by Roman Design

[109Sqn 1,551]

On 5/23/2021 at 9:49 PM, mrfilbert said:

I use the word 'fantastic' quite a lot in it. Too much, probably...

A fantastic review, thank you.😉 You used 'fantastic' fewer than 10 times by my count (and I did count!😊 ). Only one less than 10, but less than 10 all the same.😁

Another lovely effort form @Roman Design which sets a good standard for reasonably pricedadd-ons.👍

On 5/26/2021 at 4:49 PM, Roman Design said:

Snow is a huge problem: I as a developer have absolutely no control over the snow. It depends on the underlying aerial photo texture color and intensity...

Interesting to hear a reason for that problem. Hopefully Asobo can fix it in the future.

[Roman Design 344]

9 minutes ago, 109Sqn said:

Interesting to hear a reason for that problem. Hopefully Asobo can fix it in the future.

It will probably take a while. Generally, their approach is quite genius, and generates very convincing snow almost everywhere, without any extra data needed to the sim. They did a great job. But they should have thought more about the aprons, taxiways and runways. Either give us, developers, more control over the snow via a texture channel or something, but even better - just tweak the procedural snow algorithm to account for runways, taxiways and aprons and have them gently covered with snow at the edges with just some traces in the center, and disable the texture color-based coverage for those. Same would work well for large roads. And that should work well everywhere and look fairly convincing. But there are so many things wrong with it yet, so that will take a long while I think...

[regis9 3,999]

56 minutes ago, Roman Design said:

just tweak the procedural snow algorithm to account for runways, taxiways and aprons and have them gently covered with snow at the edges with just some traces in the center, and disable the texture color-based coverage for those. Same would work well for large roads. And that should work well everywhere and look fairly convincing. But there are so many things wrong with it yet, so that will take a long while I think...

This is what I’m hoping to see, something that is applied across the globe rather than airport devs needing to mess around with it.

By my book I don’t need to worry about flying in snow (Northern Hemisphere anyway) for another six months give or take, so there’s their timeline to get it fixed 🙂