I would image that it is nigh on impossible to properly simulate trees, woods and forests. There are around 60000 species of tree in the world. No two trees, even of the same species, are exactly the same. There is an infinite variety in their way of growth, height, spacing, death, shape, colour and volume etc etc. Even in a plantation monoculture and even if every tree is a clone no two trees will be exactly the same.

4 hours ago, jarmstro said:

I would image that it is nigh on impossible to properly simulate trees, woods and forests. There are around 60000 species of tree in the world. No two trees, even of the same species, are exactly the same. There is an infinite variety in their way of growth, height, spacing, death, shape, colour and volume etc etc. Even in a plantation monoculture and even if every tree is a clone no two trees will be exactly the same.

Yep, and it's incredibly hard to get anything looking realistic in today's sims. In XP as an example, I was limited by a set number of tree textures and had to make do to fill entire regions such as Washington State or GB.. Whilst I could vary the heights of the trees and species somewhat (broad, pine, mixed etc), it's all essentially scaled versions of the same few models. In XP, I couldn't even alter the colour of the trees without creating new texture sheets (XP lets you darken/lighten trees at random, but this is all)

I'd love a truly dynamic approach to this, e.g. I could say to the sim "Place me a tree here, it's 25m tall, the crown is x size, it has these types of leaves, etc". None of our sims come anywhere close to this, and I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. But once we do, and with all the high quality data we now have available, we could create some incredibly realistic looking landscapes.

 

30 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Yep, and it's incredibly hard to get anything looking realistic in today's sims. In XP as an example, I was limited by a set number of tree textures and had to make do to fill entire regions such as Washington State or GB.. Whilst I could vary the heights of the trees and species somewhat (broad, pine, mixed etc), it's all essentially scaled versions of the same few models. In XP, I couldn't even alter the colour of the trees without creating new texture sheets (XP lets you darken/lighten trees at random, but this is all)

I'd love a truly dynamic approach to this, e.g. I could say to the sim "Place me a tree here, it's 25m tall, the crown is x size, it has these types of leaves, etc". None of our sims come anywhere close to this, and I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. But once we do, and with all the high quality data we now have available, we could create some incredibly realistic looking landscapes.

 

It would be great to see something a bit more realistic. As a forester it's a subject dear to my heart. 

Yeah, look, without getting into all this - XP's showing of the new lighting and trees has invigorated my interest in this platform - enough so that for the past week all I have been flying is XP. P3D and MSFS are sitting there waiting, but I have been digging deep into XP with some amazing stuff I bought and downloaded and even now, XP looks wonderful to me in version 11 with DEFAULT scenery and only Orbx trees, Vivid Sky, and a new water texture. And Beautiful XP Nights. That's all for scenery, folks... everything else is default and out of the box it already looks miles beyond what P3D does in the same way. I honestly don't mind flying with just default scenery in XP and I am an MSFS user! So... whatever the new tech Austin is gonna stuff into the next major release??? That's gonna be a game-changer already. Cause even right now, I am enjoying the heck out of it. 

The new trees and lighting look PHENOMENAL. 

17 minutes ago, BostonJeremy77 said:

And Beautiful XP Nights.

This is one of the X-Plane strength to me: night lighting.

You can feel the ground is a living world with thousands of cars moving on the roads, which density varies by road type. Light bulbs are giving a convincing rendition of power and glint, and they are not fuzzy in the distance either. This is even more enjoyable in VR compared to FS2020 which makes you want wearing reading glasses. But more importantly, I find airport lighting spot-on with its specific technical characteristics, like narrow cone of light for runways and taxiways and more.

I know this is a XP forum, but here is a link to some of my posts about FS2020 where I'm comparing from time to time P3D, FS2020 and XP11 lighting for reference:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/external-lights-only-render-on-right-eye-random-ghosting-image-on-right-eye-only/427755/6?u=cptlucky8

4 hours ago, RXP said:

This is one of the X-Plane strength to me: night lighting.

You can feel the ground is a living world with thousands of cars moving on the roads, which density varies by road type. Light bulbs are giving a convincing rendition of power and glint, and they are not fuzzy in the distance either. This is even more enjoyable in VR compared to FS2020 which makes you want wearing reading glasses. But more importantly, I find airport lighting spot-on with its specific technical characteristics, like narrow cone of light for runways and taxiways and more.

I know this is a XP forum, but here is a link to some of my posts about FS2020 where I'm comparing from time to time P3D, FS2020 and XP11 lighting for reference:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/external-lights-only-render-on-right-eye-random-ghosting-image-on-right-eye-only/427755/6?u=cptlucky8

It's so funny you mention that! In MSFS I usually avoid flying at night like the plague. If it's not a custom airport, it's usually wicked dark everywhere and it feels dead around there. In P3D, all the airports are dead day or night in my installation - they are just devoid of anything except 2-3 planes parked somewhere. Night lighting is a little better than MSFS, but not great. In X-Plane though, I have been flying at night A LOT! It's just such a pleasure! The lighting in the airports, the general amount of parked aircraft and default AI plane traffic and vehicles combined with the lighting just makes them feel so immersive and cozy! I really enjoy that in X-Plane... in general, I am sure it's due to the Scenery Gateway or whatever that is called, a lot of the included default airports are just good. I don't even feel the need to buy any airports for XP. I am perfectly content with the ones included in the sim. 

The other thing is... it's just a breath of fresh air that things just... work. I am enjoying it a lot. Now that I have some aircraft besides default with some good avionics built by some guys called RXP 😉 it's just everything I want in terms of a satisfying simulation. 

So yeah, XP at night is much better than what the other two sims offer. MSFS has potential for improvement in that area, but... to be honest there are so many other more crucial things that need to be fixed first, night lighting is the least of my concern (it's slightly above World Updates though which I could not care any less about at this point - hear me, Asobo? Your world is ALREADY GREAT. Can we please have some simulation features to fly in it?)... 🙂

On 8/6/2021 at 5:36 AM, jarmstro said:

I would image that it is nigh on impossible to properly simulate trees, woods and forests. There are around 60000 species of tree in the world. No two trees, even of the same species, are exactly the same. There is an infinite variety in their way of growth, height, spacing, death, shape, colour and volume etc etc. Even in a plantation monoculture and even if every tree is a clone no two trees will be exactly the same.

computers are very good at whats called "pseudorandom" numbers (not so good at real random numbers)

The difference between a pseudorandom number and a real random number is a sequence of pseudorandom numbers can easily be recreated. While this sucks for cryptography, its great for simulations where you want to persist randomness, but generate everything with formulas - this is called "procedurally generated"

In the case of trees you "randomly" grow each tree, but because the sequence of a pseudorandom number is always the same when starting from the same point, you can always grow exactly the same tree when you want to. This makes it easy to create enormous variation just by changing the starting point (known as a seed - lol).

So its achievable - and from https://developer.x-plane.com/2021/08/next-generation-trees-and-opengl/ it sounds like this is the approach its taken (input function values to generate the trees into the .for file -> get highly variant trees out)

But anything that works is better than now.

10 hours ago, BostonJeremy77 said:

So yeah, XP at night is much better than what the other two sims offer.

I'm really looking forward to finally seeing properly moonlit scenery, none of the sims are good in that regard, the new photometric lighting coming in the next gen XP should hopefully nail it.

Edited August 7, 20214 yr by mSparks

The latest patch for MSFS has fixed volumetric lighting and flying at night looks real. The next XP should have moonlit scenery but they need to improve the graphics engine to load as much autogen as possible not simply have a fixed radius for everyone. We should not have to try 3rd party hacks to extend lighting.

4 hours ago, Greazer said:

The latest patch for MSFS has fixed volumetric lighting and flying at night looks real.

Something seems to have gone wrong..... was watching this review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNfIORkZdTo   and the clouds, draw-distance lighting and trees all look really messed up compared to what it used to look like.. Clouds look very low quality and the trees have some sort of weird white shine on them (not snow).. N.B. My version doesn't look like this... but I know Jeff's videos, and it seems to have downgraded

Yes the graphics became horrible recently, but now it's better after the second fix patch on Friday (his video was before second patch).

1 hour ago, tonywob said:

the clouds

Good Lord, they look as bad as XP clouds! 😆

4 hours ago, tonywob said:

Something seems to have gone wrong..... was watching this review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNfIORkZdTo   and the clouds, draw-distance lighting and trees all look really messed up compared to what it used to look like.. Clouds look very low quality and the trees have some sort of weird white shine on them (not snow).. N.B. My version doesn't look like this... but I know Jeff's videos, and it seems to have downgraded

Indeed. Something went very very wrong! But the Friday patch seems to have got the graphics back to the way they were. At least for me.