FS a classic over 25 years

[FTD1949 0]

I've been using FS since 1983 and have watched that vid at least 6 times to remind me of how good we have it now. I think that a majority of the people that constantly whine about FSX probably weren't born when FS1 was released. Craig

[Geofa 108]

Well you know what they say-those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. It isn't taught much in school anymore is it...http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Guest Stoopy]

Alex, I don't have much experience with them but could you recommend to me any of these FPS shooter-game-thingies that include real-time modeling of flight physics, including turbulence and thermals? Because it sounds like it'd be neato.

[ahuimanu 50]

Wingnut,Those pictures are impressive.I am not sure that we can have all that and cover the world in the manner that flight simulator does: autogen, mesh elevations, tens of thousands of airports, dynamic weather, etc.While those "oranges" you are showing are beautiful, I'm not certain if we can compare them to the "apples" we have in FS. And the gist of this thread is, MSFS is FAAAAAAR from a rotten apple. There might be a scratch and dent here and there, but it's a sweet apple. Take a bite and see.In any case, your tone paints ACES as incompetent, that is far from the case, nobody else gives us what we get with MSFS at the price-points it is offered. No other (civilian) flight simulation title has the same extensive 3rd party development activity and variety.These HDR effects no doubt require calculations on a world scene-graph which is somewhat bounded. Far more so bounded than the 316,940,070 square miles of round earth that is modeled for us in FSX. Look at this article/presentation by the extremely talented Adam Szofran: http://www.fsinsider.com/developers/Pages/GlobalTerrain.aspx. From looking at that article, I don't know if we have the computers/graphics cards ready to do "god rays" and other HDR stuff when you have to calculate for that much scenery (everything is a polygon). Look at Figure 1 in the article and see how high up that 747-400 is. Can we do HDR lighting for everything in that scene? In a FPS title, like Crysis, the "scene" will be restricted in extent such that, no matter how high your HALO jump is, the "world" to be rendered is certainly less than 316,940,070 square miles. Okay, to be fair, you're never rendering the entire 316,940,070 square miles as you'd never see more than 1/2 of the earth at altitude, but 158,470,035 square miles is still HUGE.Remember, in FSX you can go from 354,200 feet (and presumably beyond) down to the ground and get continuous detail rendering as you transition.So, while HDR stuff in newer generation FPS style games is cool, I think we're stuggling to get good performance as it is with FSX (doesn't bloom 1/2 performance?), these HDR techniques on the whole planet would be a challenge. The WindLight stuff is awesome and I have no idea on what the feasibility of adding such techniques to flight simulator would be. I know that SecondLife is going to be using the technology, but again, second life is NOT the size of the big blue marble.J-

[Guest]

The problem with some of these arguments is because most of you guys don't play FPS games you don't know what kind of features they have. It's ok to not want to play these games, but I've been playing them for a long time and they represent the state of the industry as much as it pains you to hear. I hate to break it to you but games like Half-Life 2 have had more graphics features and physics engines that actually do model flight physics since 2004 than FSX does now, even after SP2. An explosion will throw a barrel into the air, grenades bounce off walls etc etc. It's really not that different from FS. Both games can simulate objects moving through the air. I'll give you an even better example. There is a mod for HL2 called Garry's Mod that is basically a sandbox where you can construct things using the prefab object library. There are balloons you can attach to objects to make them lift into the air and rockets that will send objects spiralling through the air before smacking into the ground. The only difference is that FS specifically models air foils. And in that case, you would think it would be really efficient at it, right? And do you really think modeling the flight physics takes a lot of CPU power, so much so that the simulator can't even find the time to load a tile a quarter of a mile in front of the plane? ACES wants FSX to be a game. Fine, I get it, they need a profit in a difficult market. But if they want to achieve this goal they're going to need to figure out a way to provide a top-notch out of the box experience. Doing this will benefit their market, this dedicated community and even people like me. It's win-win-win, so why you guys want to continue on with this "lets-lock-the-FPS-at-20" approach is beyond me.

[Geofa 108]

"And do you really think modeling the flight physics takes a lot of CPU power, so much so that the simulator can't even find the time to load a tile a quarter of a mile in front of the plane? "The answer from me would be yes-but I bet a bigger drain is realistic intruments. Can you imagine how many calculations required just to model all the quirks of a vor-let alone gps?http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Mace 1,902]

>> I think that a majority of the people that constantly whine>about FSX> probably weren't born when FS1 was released.>Also, when you are younger, you may not know how to act properly in the forums, so you can't maturely converse about the issues.So it's a double whammy: 1) they are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history because they haven't lived through them as Geof says, and 2) they lack the maturity required for civilized debate.I was a terror on the BBS's when I was 18,19, 20 years old. I'll admit to that. :)Now approaching 35 I find myself frequently resisting the temptation to retort to some naysaying whiner (who really belongs in the FS9 forum), and the old adage "If you don't have anything good to say, then don't say anything at all" works well.Overall I feel lucky to have been "with it" enough at age 12 to buy Flight Simulator 2 for my Apple //e with coins I found in my dad's sofa. It's been quite a ride so far.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

[Guest]

It's not an actual GPS communicating with satellites in outerspace. It displays a 2D graphic on a 2D representation of the world. It doesn't have the "quirks" of a real GPS. And do you see a noticle drop in performance when you open the GPS window? Why would that possibly cause bad performance and blurries? Keep in mind I'm talking about the default GPS, maybe you're talking about something else. Even if you step up to the RXP stuff, unless you have the NTDVM.exe or whatever bug there's no drop in performance, and that is simulating an actual GPS. Same thing with the VOR. The plane is to the right of course, the needle goes to the left. It's not rocket surgery and it's been simulated for God knows how long. Relatively and logically speaking, simulating a VOR should be child's play for FS and that includes the quirks of sensitivy, altitude, range, terrain blockage (not sure if FS does that one) etc. Again, I'm just not buying this idea that in the modern incarnation of FS we're still struggling with simulating the basics. And if this is true, I would be highly dissapointed because I would assume after all these years this would be the last thing to be causing blurries and bad performance.

[Cedhed 0]

As someone who plays FPS's and Racing simulators quite a lot (love my 360). I will side with the Apples and Oranges comparo. You're trying to compare two entirely separate types of programs as if they were the sameFPS's like HL2 are able to pull much better graphics and a lot more features because of their design. Typically they render a small pre defined world. Far Cry did an entire island with amazing detail. But they were very aware of your range of view at any given instant and only rendered the mesh that would be visible to you or could be visible to you. They knew this before hand and wrote their engine around it. So if you were in deep jungle in the middle of the island they didn't bother with the beach. And if you could see the beach why render the middle of the island? Going to be at least a few minutes before you can get from one to the other along pre-defined paths. Half Life 2 worked in the same manner.In FS you have to be able to have a few hundred miles of data available to be viewed at any minute. Even if I am behind a mountain right now I can pop open a tower view and have to render everything in front of it immediately. Or I can pull up suddenly and have the entire world (say to 300 miles or so) viewable around me.The texturing is also very different. In FPS's the world is pre textured by the artists. Every object has a texture assigned and the cpu is just deciding wich texture to use (based off damage, time of day, etc etc) and fetching the textures from memory or HD storage and pushing them to the GPU for it to handle the rest. The GPU then decides lighting and what special effects and features to add to the texture. If you will read the article linked earlier you'll note that FS has to do a lot of calculations before it can hand the textures off to the video subsystem. The landclass has to be analyzed and the textures applied, smoothed together, height map information, water.. Etc etc all have to be calculated even before it reaches the video card. There is no easy way to do this because of the sheer amount of terrain and terrain data involved. If FS's models and texture data were designed like in a FPS the installs would be unmanagably huge.And as far as physics goes calculating impact and trajectory physics is easier than fluid dynamics. Especially when calculating weather and air currents and applying those to the calculations. Most of Flight Sims work goes on behind the scenes. Now while FSX's physics aren't necessarily as intensive as say Xplane's they still require a goodly bit of CPU time. A better comparison to FS would be looking to IL2 instead of a FPS. They're more in the same vein. And IL2 can look better than FS. The terrain is a bit flattened looking, but the shader effects are much better. But like FS for the graphical quality it can show it takes much much better hardware than a similar looking FPS would. And again, Il2 only has to deal with smaller "arenas" than the entire world FS has to contend with. These "arenas" are several hundred miles across but again are predefined and pre-textured. FS does it all on the fly.

[Geofa 108]

If you beleive that then I suggest you get the G1000 simulator from Garmin (I think is only about 5 bucks). That simulator brings many computers to their knees-and it is only simulating the G1000-not loading scenery or all the other things fs does.By the way-yes I notice a drop in performance bringing the gps up. Try a third party aircraft with lots of custom avionics and see how it drops. See how using a g1000 aircraft in fs is slower than the non.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Guest]

I guess I'm in a bind. So far I've managed to stay within Avsim's policies without getting banned, going so far as to apologize to Tom and Geoff for events in which I feel I crossed the line. I am grateful for the elasticity I have been given and have toned down my rhetoric to suit the feelings of other users. However, clearly it is not enough, as I am apparently still whining and being immature. My posts seem to elicit backhanded comments while one could easily send me a PM and address their concerns directly to me which would show a greater, more serious concern that I would take to heart. So, to any of you who believe I am being immature, whining too much, or that I "belong in the FS9 forum", send me a PM and I will take it seriously. Until then I will regard personal attacks like this born not out of concern for the well-being of this forum, but a disagreement of opinion run amok.

[Mace 1,902]

> Until then I will regard personal>attacks like this born not out of concern for the well-being>of this forum, but a disagreement of opinion run amok.Er, are you talking to me? Or someone else??:(RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian