Core sim improvements in MSFS 2024 & Phil Spencer interview

[NZ255 312]

18 hours ago, tonywob said:

Looking at the screenshots of FS2024 overall, it looks like there is some more procedural scenery, rocks,

Unfortunately, and I’d love to be wrong, it looked to me like they were hero assets for the trailer. If you look a bit further you can see the ground with the detail we have today. You could be right and maybe the radius of items is quite small which would make sense. As I said I’d love to be wrong. Putting your plane/heli down in some random location and having that level of detail to step out onto is a dream.
 

One thing that has improved a lot is the apron textures. They’re so sharp! And the painted lines look real!

[cyril972 220]

4 hours ago, NZ255 said:

Unfortunately, and I’d love to be wrong, it looked to me like they were hero assets for the trailer. If you look a bit further you can see the ground with the detail we have today. You could be right and maybe the radius of items is quite small which would make sense. As I said I’d love to be wrong. Putting your plane/heli down in some random location and having that level of detail to step out onto is a dream.
 

One thing that has improved a lot is the apron textures. They’re so sharp! And the painted lines look real!

To me it’s all procedural, and it all looks consistent, the rocks and cliffs for exemple looks natural in int trailer, but in MSFS 2020 all handcrafted cliffs or rocks are cartoonish, have a look at St Barth, Gibraltar or BoraBora and you’ll see it.

I think, the game engine has evolve to procedurally generated great looking terrain asset (rocks, bush, trees, maybe better houses and more building types) based on satellite imagery and OSM map. In the distance you wont see all of that because it fade due to radius stuff as you said. Talking about distances, the trees are also smallers, and they dont seems to appear throug the mesh is the distance anymore.

Anyway, to me it’s procedural stuff and in fact MSFS team is not used to showcase handcrafted area in their trailers. In MSFS E3 and release trailer the only handcrafted area is LAX and what you end up seeing in the game is exactly what you see in the trailer. Moreover, except for a few area, that level of detail is consistent all around the world

 

 

so when I look at this trailer, I’m confident this will look like what I actually see in the game

 

Edited June 16, 2023 by cyril972

[abennett 177]

3 hours ago, cyril972 said:

Talking about distances, the trees are also smallers, and they dont seems to appear throug the mesh is the distance anymore

Are you saying you think the tree draw distance is smaller? 

 

I really hope not, the reduction of tree draw distance with the Sim Updates has been hugely disappointing and it would be really sad to see it continue to get worse in MSFS 2024 as it has done with the MSFS 2020 updates.

[AnkH 2,282]

3 hours ago, cyril972 said:

Anyway, to me it’s procedural stuff and in fact MSFS team is not used to showcase handcrafted area in their trailers. In MSFS E3 and release trailer the only handcrafted area is LAX and what you end up seeing in the game is exactly what you see in the trailer. Moreover, except for a few area, that level of detail is consistent all around the world

so when I look at this trailer, I’m confident this will look like what I actually see in the gam

Except almost each and every watermask shown in pre-release trailers of MSFS 2020 was then missing in the release candidate and only re-added a) by freeware mods and b) for some regions in WU and only when requested by the public via forums. So I still fear that the level of detail shown in the trailer regarding rocks etc. might be very much mission scenario specific and not worldwide. Or that in the release candidate, several "downgrades" will be present (probably due to performance reasons) or, what is the most possible one, that the LOD of those things is so aggressive that it looks silly when flying low and slow due to rocks popping up etc.

[cyril972 220]

20 minutes ago, abennett said:

Are you saying you think the tree draw distance is smaller? 

 

I really hope not, the reduction of tree draw distance with the Sim Updates has been hugely disappointing and it would be really sad to see it continue to get worse in MSFS 2024 as it has done with the MSFS 2020 updates.

No threes are smaller, they where to big in MSFS2020 and many complained about that issues. Also, in the distance, on hills or mountain you see threes popping up sometime even before the mesh appears, it sometime break the immersion. 
looking at that new MSFS2024 trailer, trees seems to be smaller, and real 3D trees they won’t be hudge trees popping through the mesh as I’m describing 

Edited June 16, 2023 by cyril972

[MrFuzzy 2,124]

11 hours ago, Noel said:

I think it's out of their control in large part--to get something like the image below you need much greater resolution/voxel density, and that is restrained by the current hardware.  I think we'll see some improvement but this agenda competes w/ those obsessed w/ high frame rates--no will be able to have both, yet.  

It rather competes with XBox Series S usability. Whatever runs at 30 fps there, will run at 60 fps on a mid-range PC and 100+ fps on high end PCs. 

So please do not blame users for bad graphics because if Asobo wanted / were able to, they could do clouds like that image, add an Ultra+ option on the slider and everybody would be happy. 

[Noel 4,563]

10 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

So please do not blame users for bad graphics because if Asobo wanted / were able to, they could do clouds like that image, add an Ultra+ option on the slider and everybody would be happy. 

I've lobbied for that slider, of course, but you're underappreciating the load involved to get anywhere near that resolution.  This is why you see the same or worse density in XP12 and P3D.  Tell me, if you could get that level of resolution, in the photo provided, how would it go over for you if went from 100fps down to 30fps.  Would that work for you?  It would for me because fps is only one element of animation quality and I will trade in sterling FTV for ultra high FPS any day of the week.  High FPS does not obviate stuttering which is the bigger animation killer. Here's everyone's weather hero comment regarding this very topic: 

On 3/9/2023 at 11:22 PM, Damian Clark said:

Sure.  The problem is performance.  To get the resolution we want at those closer ranges, it will bring the sim to a slide show.  Thus resolution must be kept at a reasonable level (fairly low).

Please do not pretend this is Asobo's decision based on Xbox Series S capabilities.  I have been very vocal about the slider you're talking about and while I think it will get us closer to the goal of photoreal, complex diverse cloud morphologies, it will be a while before we get what that photo posted offers.

[MrFuzzy 2,124]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Tell me, if you could get that level of resolution, in the photo provided, how would it go over for you if went from 100fps down to 30fps.  Would that work for you? 

Yes of course, as long as I have the option to reduce the quality. 

I may also choose to play at 30 x 2 fps with frame generation (once I get a 4090) for example, without compromising on the quality.

More choice = always better.

[lwt1971 7,456]

13 hours ago, cyril972 said:

To me it’s all procedural, and it all looks consistent, the rocks and cliffs for exemple looks natural in int trailer, but in MSFS 2020 all handcrafted cliffs or rocks are cartoonish, have a look at St Barth, Gibraltar or BoraBora and you’ll see it.

I think, the game engine has evolve to procedurally generated great looking terrain asset (rocks, bush, trees, maybe better houses and more building types) based on satellite imagery and OSM map. In the distance you wont see all of that because it fade due to radius stuff as you said. Talking about distances, the trees are also smallers, and they dont seems to appear throug the mesh is the distance anymore.

Interesting, hadn't thought about procedural terrain, perhaps a mix of procedural tech (akin to what's in Starfield) combined with the existing or evolved blackshark AI for non-handcrafted areas.

I'm also thinking the 3D trees will go hand in hand with the seasons feature (for foliage removal etc).
 

[Rune-ENHD 83]

A long while ago a new emerging sim...

tried to get a user-made/built alternative.. this sim used a techdemo made by UNIGINE..

The UNIGINE Engine was absolutly crazy .. I remember messing around in the tech-demo area, and I saw perhaps procedurally generated stuff on the ground? I had a Nvidia GTX Titan(6GB) back then. The Techdemo area where in Port Angeles(Olympic national park?) area in Pacific Northwest,  Beatiful area..

 

 It was spectatular, it morphed the scene almost without too much of a transition, there were drift-wood/logs/tree-roots brought to beach /shore by tides/and weather or seaweeds and all kinds of ocean related stuff on the shore.. The terran also went into the sea!! Of course there where some kind of life under sea also with sea-diving sounds..

And in the forrest there where bird sounds chirping and winds and flowers/plants growing.. high grass also!!

THAT was about 10-15 years ago, WHY wouldnt Asobo do something similar now, so long afterwards, it should be possible??

So I also absolutlutly beliive it IS some sort of procedural terrain/photgramertry ground.. mix

It would be absolutely AMAZING if we could get closer to the first Trailer launch with weather and Atmosphere/Lighting and clouds and THEN have a updated Scenery engine like in the recent trailer.. I would certainly BUY That!!! Again..

I REALLY REALLY hope that the Main Developer from IL-2 (Rise of Flight? also)  Andrey Petrovich ?*Could sprinkle his magic* on the Flight-dynamics and Inertia and ground hadling/transistion to/from air on takeoff/landing + other highly needed Core-sim changes.. 😃😃😃 what scoop that THIS guy chose MSFS...

- - - - - -

*I just Hope/pray that they DON'T REGRESS the Sim AGAIN..

 I where never able to use the sim when it Launched/came out in 2019/2020 (Though I did purchase it on DAY 1 the Premium Deluxe version on Steam) BUT I saw all the videos and pictures posted up til until SU4/SU5......

*I was completely Heartbroken* when I found out the SIM *had Regressed SOO MUCH* when I FINALLY could build a NEW computer for a year later or so...

Pleeeease ASOBO/Microsoft Don't ever REGRESS The sim AGAIN!!! After Launch... I would rather pay a small subsrciption(2-3$ pr. month) rather than Loose to regressions AGAIN...

Edited June 17, 2023 by Rune-ENHD
Grammax fixes... and additional info..

[Funky D 275]

On 6/16/2023 at 2:09 PM, lwt1971 said:

Interesting, hadn't thought about procedural terrain, perhaps a mix of procedural tech (akin to what's in Starfield) combined with the existing or evolved blackshark AI for non-handcrafted areas.

I'm also thinking the 3D trees will go hand in hand with the seasons feature (for foliage removal etc).
 

I also wonder if they're still using Blackshark AI... it would make sense to bring this in-house to cut down on licensing costs, and between Bing Maps and elevation data, MS probably has all the data they need readily available. The air racing section in Dubrovnik, Croatia looks like photogrammetry, but there currently isn't any 3D Bing maps available for Dubrovnik (or Google maps, for what it's worth). If this is actually auto generated based on the satellite data and not actually photogrammetry, it's a huge visual upgrade.

Also, it's hard to tell by comparing the photogrammetry shot of LA due to the lighting, but the trees appear to be more detailed. I wonder if they were able to replace the ugly photogrammetry trees with autogen trees?

We won't know much until we get more info, but I'd put money on some new procedural tech with much higher detail that makes large portions of the world look great up-close.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

10 hours ago, Rune-ENHD said:

So I also absolutlutly beliive it IS some sort of procedural terrain/photgramertry ground.. mix

It would be absolutely AMAZING if we could get closer to the first Trailer launch with weather and Atmosphere/Lighting and clouds and THEN have a updated Scenery engine like in the recent trailer.. I would certainly BUY That!!! Again..

I remember the Unigine demo with Port Angeles. Those were hand designed areas and they got away with a lot of the terrain mapping because it was covered in trees, so they didn't have to worry about how the ground texture looked from up high that much. FS could be better, but it's a performance issue. How much of the performance is an inherent design problem with the graphics engine, or how much is simply just what the real limitations are is hard to say. However, I don't think the FS-2020 engine is nearly as optimized partly because of all the custom textures used. Most games use more repeat textures, whereas when you load FS 2020, a lot of the textures are custom which strains the GPU more. So it would be hard not to make the world very repetitive looking using the Unigine technique and it would take too long for placement.

 

Edited June 18, 2023 by Alpine Scenery

[bobcat999 8,504]

While I am generally optimistic and looking forward to the release of 2024, you really cannot fully trust the videos.

As we saw with the 2020 videos, and as someone has already mentioned, the water masks aren't always like shown in the trailer, but also the Golden Gate Bridge in the trailer has never been like that in the sim without the horrible shadow underneath.
These are just some examples. 

Nice to see the smoothness and lack of popping in the new video though - do you think this will be representative of the actual gameplay?    We will have to wait and see I suppose.
Ultimately though, we will get what we are given, and hopefully it is all a step in the right direction even if it is not going to be perfect (what is?).

Ultimately, I feel most of us will end up upgrading anyway if the backwards compatibility is like they say.  I can't find a reason not to 'upgrade' currently.  Current 2020 owners may also get a token upgrade discount as well I think.

Edited June 18, 2023 by bobcat999

[Dominique_K 10,152]

44 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

While I am generally optimistic and looking forward to the release of 2024, you really cannot fully trust the videos.

 You really cannot fully trust the videos even a little.

The trailer is not targeting the main issues I care about anyway. I am  confident that the engineers (Asobo, WT) can pull off something better than FS20 if  (big if) Neumann makes the right calls, features-wise, in allocating resources.  

 Conclusion ? I  am agnostic. Wait and see.

[BilboBaggins 82]

I will be circumspect in my reply on this, but I'm confident MS/Asobo have plenty of good reasons (not just fiscal) for a new release.

Tech and audience are both evolving, very rapidly, now, even more than in the past, if you can even imagine that.

No doubt there are updated versions of Xbox on the way; main areas would be storage capability and perhaps a ramp-up in RAM and GPU capabilities (incremental, not dramatic, but on both fronts, hardware prices are coming down rapidly, and will continue to do so).

And then there are the new things, like my current toy, the ASUS ROG Ally. Amazing bit of tech; I've been experimenting with MSFS2020 (my full, 400GB install) on it.

I see two things inevitable in a next step.

First, yes of course lots of detailed improvements in areas everyone knows about on the tech side: flight model, rendering/procedural, helicopter and glider flight modeling and control options, study-level sim support, and so on (the stuff most important here).

But there are also some interface and use changes I think would be significant. Take, for example, the controller options and presets manager for that -- a good start but, compared with, say, DCS, still quite primitive. I can easily see a substantial improvement there, with the ability to manage presets more fluidly, so as you're switching to different types of aircraft to fly, access to and refinement of your control interface is more ergonomic.

Along with this, the logic of presets in the options settings should invariably be extended to the render engine. Right now, we have "PC" and "VR". What we need is the ability to create various kinds of Graphics configuration presets for flying in different areas. I want one preset that will make flying in heavy traffic at KJFK during rush hour running a PMDG-737 render smoothly and happily; another that will give me all the graphics detail where it matters, or flight sim modeling detail where it matters, in less demanding situations. You want consistency of look across the board, certainly, but you have the same issue here evolving we had with FSX, which is that a configuration that was good for heavy urban/atc/study sim environments wasn't good or necessary elsewhere.

I think of this as a kind of "level of detail" problem. You want focus of all compute resources, for an increasing variety of platforms, from high-end Intel/AMD PC to hand-held "game" console (ASUS Ally is just the first; this is very much a growing field, Steam Deck and Ally are very much 1.0 versions of what's to come here), for the situation at hand, no matter what kind of flying you're doing. So along the lines of this logic, streamlining what is being done given the player's/pilot's focus at the moment is very much an ongoing optimization process. I suspect '2024 will do a lot here to make things work better for a wider variety of situations.

And then, the part most dismiss here but I think is a fascinating, evolving possibility: the "living world" aspect of flight simulation.

In Electronic Arts/Codemasters' F1 sim (PC or console, doesn't really matter), F1 has been evolving year to year to incorporate more of the world around the core F1 simulation, which has been fundamentally excellent for years now. There's I'm sure as always a small contingent who see anything but the vehicle and track modeling as extraneous (as someone mentioning the evolution of Train Simulator 3 here confirms).

But, given the resources and the overall marketplace (Battlefield 2042, Starfield, Call of Duty, Streetfighter 6 as prime examples), there's an entirely new approach growing in the what I would no longer call "games" business but "virtual worlds" business: concentration on providing the entirety of the context for the core experience, in ways which aren't just fluffy add-on but inherent to the experience of the simulation.

MSFS for 2024 is clearly moving in that direction, which I think is a correct one. There's more of a "role-playing" aspect implied in the mission advances, with much more, I can easily imagine, to come.

Think about fleshing out all the real-life situations for flight simulation, beyond the stuff we already focus on: air traffic control, large airport runway air traffic environments, weather, flight planning, seasonal stuff, day/night environments, winds aloft, and so on. These are already "virtual world" enhancements to the core sim, and have been there since the very start, with subLogic's development of Air Transport Pilot out of BAO's original Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The next stage of virtual world building, then, is implied in all the new mission ideas hinted at. I think there's very much to be done there, without it becoming burdensome or distracting from the core simulation. We'll see a start of that in 2024. Along with the VR/TrackIR type cockpit environment evolution.

That won't be controversial if it contextualizes ongoing work within the core sim, and makes it more approachable for, yes, a wider audience, without dumbing it down at all. You can start F1 23 in hardcore mode and it's as difficult an F1 driving simulation as any out there, and then some (with things like MotoGP23, Ride5 and of course Forza/Gran Turismo right alongside it).

It's time to bring MSFS into the current market, and I'm not speaking just in marketing terms here; this is what simulation is now, across the board. Something as already excellent as MSFS2020 _needs_ to contextualize its virtual world this way, to not be left behind. It's a huge, missed opportunity otherwise, with so many excellent examples in other areas of simulation out there (Dirt 5!).

Keep in mind my perspective, though; not only have I been using MSFS since it started, but I now "play" it on PC, Xbox and most recently, ASUS ROG Ally (the last is the most exciting challenge at the moment, in terms of figuring out the best way to optimize it in that environment). Many here would consider that ludicrous ("ludic" being the operative term here, latin for "play"). But it's what MSFS has always been about: maximizing ALL the possibilities on rapidly evolving technology, not just sitting comfortably in the past.

There's a good chance for MSFS to really thrive here; don't kill it with suspicion, please. 🙂

/rant off