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New Game Engine?

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My monitor works fine-to get the game to run well it needs to be run in lower res-like your chart above shows. It doesn't look so good in lower res-either does fsx but luckily the game engine of fsx allows good performance in higher resolutions.The detail of the trees do look nice as do the animated people-but the aircraft in the opening scenes, topography from the air look rather primitive.I'll be making like your virtual brick below and be throwing it in the closet.http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/1b5baf...b9f427f694g.jpgMy blog:http://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

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Hey Geofa,Check the monitors OnScreenDisplay menus and see if there's an option to not scale lower resolution modes to fill the entire LCD display (instead it will center the lower res mode in the middle of the screen) - this scaling can cause nastly artifacts on some monitors.

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I can do that but playing a little window in the center of a 24" screen surrounded by black isn't the most exciting use of the hardware I have (I'd never expect to have to play fsx that way). From the source quoted above:"Our main concern is with the resolution. As most of the users prefer LCD monitors, 1024

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Personally I wonder why anyone says you cannot compare a FS with a FPS in the current hardware environment. These are both first-person action-oriented game genres which are trying to throw millions of textured triangles onto the screen as fast and as accurately as possible to give the player the illusion that he is really present at a certain geographical place and time. There was an ancient time when a FS had to spend most of its processing ticks trying to figure out flight dynamics equations and the graphics were generally a joke. An early FPS, on the other hand, simply did not have the processing power to render a dynamic world and churned out a bunch of pre-rendered rooms and fake 2D backgrounds.These two lines of gaming have very much converged. FSs are now trying to create an authentic and believable world, while FPSs are now waging war in outside environments with dynamic lighting and weather and many 3D objects. They both have the same goal: to make the world look real on a computer screen in all the variations God created it with.The argument that a FS is "rendering the whole world" or that someone wants to see KBOS in Crysis is a bit of a smokescreen. If there are 10,000 computers currently running FSX, I doubt that even 25 of them are actually rendering KBOS at this very moment. I am sure there are many sim pilots who will never even fly into KBOS in a lifetime of using FSX. A FS only needs to render what a pilot can see from his current position--and the LOD can drop rapidly as the distance increases. This rule applies equally for a FPS. Both games are rendering only a fraction of their "world" at any given moment.The truth is that these two genres can learn from each other. Most planes and helicopters in FPSs are completely unrealistic--the "arcade" feel, as we flight simmers call it. They have a lot to learn from FSX about how a plane flies. On the other hand, FPS companies have been developing high fidelity, high frame rate graphics for a long time and already have created several generations of excellent graphics engines. MS would be wise to swallow their pride and use what the companies who are way ahead of them have already developed in cutting edge graphics.

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Guest

At least with the Crysis RTM I've never gotten below 17 FPS, not great but still playable, most of the time its 24 or so. Now think back to October '06, FSX RTM and getting single digit FPS and horrible graphics. And relief didn't come until 6 months later. On top of that, Crysis brings a new evolution in graphics, theres always growing pains expected with this type of move forward. FSX didn't bring anything new that hadn't been seen in games 2 years older than it, and yet RTM still ran like garbage.

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I have had a steady above 20 fps on fsx since the beginning by moving a few sliders-even on a 4 year old machine. I didn't have to reduce the resolution like I do with Crysis now on a brand new machine or turn off some of the video enhancements my card has. I assume the never below 17 fps you mention is running Crysis at 1024/768 resolution? I haven't run fs in that low res for several years.If this is the future graphics engine I think I'll be staying away.Glad some of you like it-it is going on the shelf for me.http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/1b5baf...b9f427f694g.jpgMy blog:http://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

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Well, I play it at 1680x1050 on all high except shadows, post processing and shaders are set to medium and it's not perfect but its very playable and looks magnificent and my video card isn't as good as yours. But this is all pointless anyway since you decided long ago that you didn't like that type of game (probably should have just downloaded the demo in that case).

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Guest fsxmissionguy

"These are both first-person action-oriented game genres which are trying to throw millions of textured triangles onto the screen as fast and as accurately as possible to give the player the illusion that he is really present at a certain geographical place and time."This statement really understates the physics differences between the two engines. The CryEngine is first and foremost a physics engine.What the CryEngine attempts (very well) is the accurate depiction of a mostly fictional place that has real-world-like physics. The goal is that if the player interacts with anything in that world ... that thing reacts in a way that mimics what would occur in real life. It is less important that the buildings in that world are placed correctly (or reflect what might actually be at that location in real life.)What Flight Simulator X attempts to do (very well) is the accurate depiction of the planet Earth's landmasses, water, buildings, airports and the like using actual data gathered by many different organizations. It's really more of an "Earth Depictor." (And just guessing, Microsoft has realized this, and FSX will be marketed in the future as a platform for many other different types of simulators.)There are some rudimentary physics-like tricks (water "moving," trees blowing in the wind, dust from chopper blades, etc.) but just enough to depict enough real-world physics to make the flight aspects realistic.According to the developers, the physics of making the flight seem realistic are really very, very basic(first-year programming.)If a player in Crysis shoots a tree with a large enough weapon, the tree limb will break off and move in a way that simulates what would occur in real life.On the other hand, if a player in FSX crashes into a tree, no attempt is made to depict the damage to the tree (or the plane for that matter thanks to restrictions probably demanded by licensees such as Boeing and Cessna).So, the long-term goal of FSX development appears to me to be to create a platform for vehicle simulators of all types: driving, boating, flying, motorcycling, train simulation, tanks, armed unmanned airial platforms, cruise missiles, enemy movements of all types, etc.The long-term goal for the CryEngine is most likely to make every particle larger than a grain of dust behave in a way that does not violate the laws of physics so you can blast stuff and watch it go boom. Its "world" will never be very large or need to be hyperaccurate because its audience doesn't care about that.The FSX audience does care about accuracy first and physics second. In fact, the franchise is utterly dependent upon it.

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Guest jshyluk

A tough question!At this point, I would be hesitant to pin myself down to any one option. Again, we have to "follow the money": what the budgetary demands are hat will shape the course of FS11 development. I can think of 4 possibilities for success, but I cannot decide right now which one would be the most likely, if any. There's just too much to speculate. And , of course, this is just my own personal conjecture, and may or may not reflect any official opinions AVSIM has on this topic, if any. But you ask, and I will answer, since this is an interesting topic to me:Possibility 1) FS11 will be developed directly from FSX technology, much as FSX grew from FS9 and so on. FS11 will more or less be FSX but completely DX10. The core engine will remain more or less the same, but advancements in DX10, and a deeper understanding of the legacy code by the newer members of the production team will allow FS11 to be an FSX that delivers on all of the promises made by the FSX marketing team, i.e., the "magic screenies". Possibility 2) FS11 will be developed directly from Train Simulator 2 technology. There's at least two areas that differ coniderably between TS and FS; the overall physics (trains vs. airplanes) and the handling of high-resolution textures, in that for trains you see the ground and ground objects more closely and more often than in airplanes. Still, concieveably, if you take TS, port over FS textures and some airplane physics, you'd have a sim that might be for all intents and purposes be the same as TS but with an FS front-loader. For folks who want to have TS and FS interact, this would be like Christmas, Valentine's Day, your birthday, and Canada Day all rolled into one. Possibility 3) FS11 will be developed in conjunction with some sort of new technology created within the ESP pipeline. This assumes that ESP has so much production going on that their team would come up with something that the TS team or the FS team hasn't seen since the Bruce Artwick years. Who knows?Possibility 4) FS11 will be developed from scratch, independant of any other MS departments. This would probably be the most expensive, time-consuming, and risk-intensive process, as it involves the most creativity. Maybe MS would be interested in leasing a pre-existing gaming engine and/or hiring an expert team that can run that engine. That's usually pretty costly, and it would mean inviting outside talent into the MS fortress. Maybe there's something here I've missed... well, probably. It will be interesting to see what will actually transpire. One thing that is new and different seems to be that Microsoft is more aware of what their public wants to see in a sim. That's a double-edged (or even triple-edged?) weapon: while MS strives to put in the features we want, their marketers might just use that information to show us what we want to see, as in Magic Screenies II. Then, the third edge would be that MS wants to put in feautures that would please the fans, but cannot, due to production constraints, like the raindrops on the cockpit windscreens. In the old days, MS just did what they did regardless of their audience. Nowadays, are things different? It's a lot easier for any of us to get their attention. ACES provided some interesting dialogs with sim fans at our AVSIM FanCon. Does that mean that we can create a direct influence on their production schedule? Typically, for most gaming studios, that answer would be a no... mostly.Jeff ShylukAssistant Managing EditorSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM

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Hey Jeff,Well, in one of the ESP threads, I already laid out how the ACES studio is configured now, with the Core team working on the "common" parts of the platform, the TS2 team working on the "Train" parts, the FS11 team working on the "Aircraft" parts, and the ESP team which will likely take bits and pieces from all of the above when we're ready to create ESP V2.We've also already stated (at least in blogs and whatnot), that TS2 is being built on top of the FSX platform, granted with lots of Train specific additions and better ground level detailed textures (at least in areas where trains are likely to go :-> ) and FS11 will ship at some point after TS2 (and no, I'm not saying when on either of them :-> ) so its a pretty safe bet that FS11 will gain from any additions made to the platform for TS2.So, I'd say your Possiblities 1 & 2 merged together would be the most likely with maybe a little of Possiblity 3 thrown in as well. Possibility 4 seems pretty unlikely :->.Not quite sure why everyone seems to think we need a new engine (of course, I've been hearing this since around the FS98 time frame :-> ). Various parts of the engine get rewritten (or at least greatly overhauled) with every version, for FSX that included the new Terrain engine, the new Multiplayer system, the new Mission system, the new SimConnect API, etc. I checked once a few months ago and determined there's almost no code left in the tree from FS95 anymore (I can tell that because there aren't any Assembler files in the tree anymore which made up about 80% of FS95 and 99% of all the "Flight" related code) and I know some of the C/C++ stuff I wrote for FS95 is gone now (the old module loader system for one), although occasionally I come across some code I wrote back then and go "Wow, this is still being used" (like the command line parsing code), but that's pretty much all OS interfacing code, and a lot of that is gone or going soon (it was mostly needed because the Windows APIs didn't always lend themselves to being called directly from Assembler so we put a small wedge layer in between).

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Can't really answer that one as I'm not sure how many we had working on it before (I work out of my house, so only see the rest of the team a few times a year :-> ). I can say we have a lot more devs than we did 3 years ago when I rejoined the team and it seems like I'm the only one who doesn't want to work on the graphics engine in some way (I guess I had my fill of doing that way back when working on BAO Tower :-> ). And the fact that we have multiple products being built off the same core platform means that some graphics features (or other subsystem features for that matter) that might have been considered further down the wish list for a FS may be higher on the list for a TS and once the feature gets into the engine, FS will likely go ahead and use it.

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Hi Tim,You may remember this: in FS5.x some modules were encrypted (I think they had the extension .FSO). If you are allowed to say, I wonder why this was done ? Was that to prevent anyone else than BAO to come up with extensions/addons or more to protect IP ? BGLs were not encrypted and I think that started the 3rd party addons.Cheers,Siggy


Siggy Schwarz

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Hey Siggy,I vaguely recall there being some encrypted modules, but I didn't do much work on FS5, other than porting it to the Japanese hardware available at the time (which was almost but not quite IBM PC compatible :-> ), so don't recall which modules they were. If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably the flight model data and/or equations, but that's just a guess :->. In general, I think the .FSO files were our version of what are .DLL files these days (DOS didn't really have that concept, so we created our own loadable relocatable module format). As to why they were encrypted, Bruce is probably the only one who knows for sure :->

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