Kraft Mayo doesn't look like those screenshots though. I want Whole Foods Mayo. :9

Here is a video of from windwardmark. ACES really needs to scrap the current engine and just redo the whole thing. To heck with backwards compatability. We being simmers and them being developers just need to start fresh from some point. We should make it FS11 even if it means and extra year or two to come out. Notice in the video how the sun actually gets blocked out from the clouds not allowing light through. This is at 187fps as well. So ACES surely cannot say it "cant be done". Its just a matter of doing it and not having this stuff we have now were we rejoice in seeing 25fps. This video takes a minute or two to load..be patient.http://windwardmark.net/videos/windlight/W...Weather_512.avi

>Here is a video of from windwardmark. ACES really needs to>scrap the current engine and just redo the whole thing. To>heck with backwards compatability. We being simmers and them>being developers just need to start fresh from some point. We>should make it FS11 even if it means and extra year or two to>come out. Notice in the video how the sun actually gets>blocked out from the clouds not allowing light through. This>is at 187fps as well. So ACES surely cannot say it "cant be>done". Its just a matter of doing it and not having this stuff>we have now were we rejoice in seeing 25fps. This video takes>a minute or two to load..be patient.>>http://windwardmark.net/videos/windlight/W...Weather_512.aviWhile I lean more towards the "rewrite the engine" side than "maintain backward compatiblity", you are comparing apples to oranges here.That is a weather simulator (I'll call it WSX). FSX is doing a lot more than weather. WSX is just a camera floating around in space. There is no aircraft flight model to contend with, no computing effects of weather on the aircraft. No Autogen. No gigabytes of textures to show for every nook and cranny of the earth. No ATC, AI aircraft, collision detection, panels, etc.Now, maybe there is some technology in WSX that could lend itself to FSX (or FSXI). If so, that would be great. I think DX10 will help somewhat in this regard. It will give ACES more headroom in the graphics pipeline to show more "clutter" on the screen, whether the clutter is buildings, trees, or maybe weather.

The snow it that video looks like the fsx snow?!http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

That snow in the video looks really good. Better than FSX snow.Maybe the ActiveSky devs could use some of this technology today. We won't see major changes in FS till FSXI (except for DX10).

It sure doesn't look like the snow I get in Michigan (either does fs9 or fsx)-and we sure get enough of it. I just thought for a dedicated weather sim it would look a little more real.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

The video shows some amazing effects - for a static viewpoint.What is does not show is any ability to handle the rapidly changing viewpoint / world which we deem essential to Flight Sim.And it's somewhere between 1.25 and 2 years old video and technology.

...FSX is still using 10 year old technology.The other videos on their site show rapid movement with volumetric clouds, cloud shadows on terrain, self shadowing on structures & its all tweekable in realtime running at nearly 200fps with lighting almost as good as pre-rendered radiosity engines.No waiting for FSX to reload everything whenever you make a tiny change either. Looks like a real quality engine rather than another half baked FS98 re-hash to make The Vole more bux.

>...FSX is still using 10 year old technology.Really? Is Shader Model 2.0 10 years old?>The other videos on their site show rapid movement with>volumetric clouds, cloud shadows on terrain, self shadowing on>structures & its all tweekable in realtime running at nearly>200fps with lighting almost as good as pre-rendered radiosity>engines.Great. Maybe they'll market it as Floating Camera Weather Simulator. Have fun with that.>No waiting for FSX to reload everything whenever you make a>tiny change either. Looks like a real quality engine rather>than another half baked FS98 re-hash to make The Vole more>bux.Yeah, Floating Camera Weather Simulator doesn't have to deal a pesky 57,268,900 square miles of terrain. But you can slew around to your heart's content (until you run out of the simulated area).

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The observation that FSX needs to calculate a lot more things other than weather FX is obviously a trivial one. The interesting thing is that this engine seems to take little overhead on top of the 3d engine it is applied to.There are others visually appealing graphic engines, but what struck me in this case (and the reason I posted the link), is how much it alone improves the realism of common 3D scenes: the "before" shots are at FSX levels (maybe also a little lower) and look at how they are transformed!Reading the features, the parameters it needs, and the fact that it seems to be based mainly on pixel shaders, in my opinion most of those effect could already be implemented in FSX at present time by a 3d party developer (substituting and integrating the pixel shaders FSX already uses).Marco

The lighting, haze and environmental effects are very impressive.However, I don't see any volumetric clouds in the demos and there seems to be only one cloud layer. As we have seen in FS, real-time 3D clouds come at a significant framerate cost. Further, the performance page shows large framerate losses as the polygon count rises and as multi-pass rendering is enabled for water reflections. The last of their 3 demo cases shows a framerate of 73fps, for instance. Add real-time, volumetric 3D clouds into the mix along with high-polygon aircraft models, multiple thousands of low-polygon ground objects, AI, physics and systems modeling eating up CPU cycles, on-the-fly texture and 3D object loading and all the other tasks which eat up the CPU/GPU budget in a flight simulator, and I suspect the framerate would fall below the magic fps threshold and there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in these forums.

What gets me about that is that I'm not sure how a third party developer would be able to add the dome that windlight would need. I haven't read the SDK's for fs, but I'd assume that it'd be in the core coding of the sim..I could be wrong though.

>However, I don't see any volumetric clouds in the demos and>there seems to be only one cloud layer. As we have seen in>FS, real-time 3D clouds come at a significant framerate cost. >Further, the performance page shows large framerate losses as>the polygon count rises and as multi-pass rendering is enabled>for water reflections. The last of their 3 demo cases shows a>framerate of 73fps, for instance. >Check out they're Nimble program, which can be implemented into Windlight.

I like procedural rendering. I always thought that the landclass bitmaps would be particularly suited to this: imagine a landclass that is rendered to wrap around the road network based on a set of rules about a particular region and how it it developed, instead of being static and under it.Simpit