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Guest christian

FS2004..... Implications for scenery design

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Hi Christian.From what I hear, almost all MS games are contracted out! FS is the holdout in that area... perhaps Bill Gates has a fondness for Flight Simulator.CFS3 was built from scratch, and quite a deviaton from the FS series. There are none of the navigational, radio, ATC... that we have come to expect from a flight sim. Runways are quite crude.. no lighting. No improvement over VTP-type lines for roads or streams... raillines are a joke. The 4.8 meter/pixel restraint we have seems worse ( larger ) in CFS3. Runways are crude, with no lighting, or detail... look like VTP lines. The mesh looks highly oversampled, and doesn't seem nearly as accurate as FS2002... and if I understand the process, you must replace all mesh and landclass rather than addon as we do now. Lines and water polys are as misplaced as ever... no data source improvement. Effects files are XML... and are HUGE... and all exist in a single file that must be replaced... NO ADDONS ALLOWED. Ground terrain files are also XML ( shorelines, roads, polys ) and similarly cannot be added on... but must be replaced. But you can add planes and vehicles individually.Some would even claim CFS3 isn't a sim at all, but just a shoot 'em up game. The latest craze for CFS3 users, while they wait for months for the patch to arrive, is to turn the sim into a tank combat game by assigning aircraft attributes to the vehicles. That whole idea is a little sad. It doesn't even work well, as you can't cross a bridge or go near trees.. or you'll crash quite some distance from those objects.FS2004, on the other hand, would be much easier to code based on improvements to FS2002.It would be interesting to know if the design is going to an 'in-house' project, using the core of the FS2002 design crew. I'd feel a lot better if I knew that was the case.CFS3 won't even run on many home computers. It ran on my machine, but the ground terrain was the WORST. Stuttering in the game is very pronounced.I bought a newer Radeon 9500Pro, after realizing my older Radeon64DDR was a Directx7 card, and all newer sims will be either Dirextx8 or 9! The visual difference between the cards in CFS3 is astounding. But, stuttering remains, and that's really unacceptable in a flight sim.FS2002 is improved slightly with the 9500Pro card. The best treat, antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are now properly rendered by ATI with this card... and are much quicker than Nvidia's cards in that respect. Anyways... this may be an upsetting factor in FS2004. Will we all need to upgrade videocards to view the sim as intended? That is the case with CFS3... and may relate to the use of Directx8.2 used in that sim. i would think as time progresses, MS game designers would get better at video rendering... not worse. Didn't MS invent DirectX?Dick

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>>> Didn't MS invent DirectX?I think the only think Microsoft invented was MS-DOS. Everything else they have made seems to be bought or aquired in some fashion.Windows.NT..NETOh wait, we're not MS bashing are we?I have a hard time believing that MS would give up the newer VTP and mesh code for something new. It came out with FS2000 with little effect on the sim (because it couldn't handle it). But they seemed to clean up FS quite a bit and make FS2002 work with it with great improvements in performance. My point here is that they have probably spent some serious money developing (or did they aquire it) the technology.I too predict that the old BGL language is doomed. I have to agree that soon we'll be using GMAX or some equivalent and the MDL tool to create 3D stuff. However, I feel that the newer BGL commands that came with the FS2000 and FS2002 SDK's will probably stay for a while. If only to be able to provide non-3D stuff like runways, nav aids, AI Aircraft and ATC. MS likes their money and I can't see them coughing up the bucks to do a total rewrite in these areas. The development costs alone would be huge.CFS3 has hopefully taught MS that the technology they have is not easily reproducable. Many other sim companies have tried to create sims to go against MSFS. To quote a movie, "Many have tried, and died". The costs to develop consumer based flight sims is still enormous. MSFS has lasted this long only because of the bgl technology that they aquired back in the eighties. MS would be smart to keep the effecient (or the least non-effecient) parts of it and improve what doesn't work well. Let the thing evolve. Reinventing the technology could be MSFS's demise.Now having said all of that. X-Plane seems to be holding out. When you look at the development team size (less then 10, maybe only one?) and what features are provided and compare that to Microsoft, the X-Plane results are pretty spectacular.I myself have been using SCASM for many years on personnal stuff. But I'm now learning how to use GMAX. The learning curve is high to say the least. But that looks to be the direction MS is going.Lee.

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>I have a hard time believing that MS would give up the newer >VTP and mesh code for something new. It came out with >FS2000 with little effect on the sim (because it couldn't >handle it). But they seemed to clean up FS quite a bit and >make FS2002 work with it with great improvements in >performance. My point here is that they have probably spent >some serious money developing (or did they aquire it) the >technology.To get the rumours flowing :) It looks indeed that the TMF stuff was originally developped by an outside company called Terra something or so, can't remember the name, it's in the BGLC macros somewhere. A while ago I have even found their website (it's possible it's still floating around). This site is just AMAZING. They claim to be producing all these really cool mesh scenery addons for FS2000 (yes that's 2000 not 2002!). The screenshots are just stunning given that it really is FS2000. I don't know what happened though. These guys must have gone broke or so. None of their announcements where ever realised. >I too predict that the old BGL language is doomed. I have >to agree that soon we'll be using GMAX or some equivalent >and the MDL tool to create 3D stuff. However, I feel that >the newer BGL commands that came with the FS2000 and FS2002 >SDK's will probably stay for a while. If only to be able to >provide non-3D stuff like runways, nav aids, AI Aircraft and >ATC. MS likes their money and I can't see them coughing up >the bucks to do a total rewrite in these areas. The >development costs alone would be huge. What I think is that eventually this just will be packaged differently. I thought instead of using BGL opcodes, objects will be done directly in X files (with the possibility of loosing some bgl functionality though). TMF and ADF will remain, just not in the BGL wrapper. They are individual files with a BGL header anyway... That's my guess, but who knows, FS9 will still be based on the old BGL code. It seems M$ really has learned from the CFS3 mistake. Now all of this is really far fetched speculation for FS2006 or whatever...>Now having said all of that. X-Plane seems to be holding >out. When you look at the development team size (less then >10, maybe only one?) and what features are provided and >compare that to Microsoft, the X-Plane results are pretty >spectacular. I'm amazed by the x-plane phenomenon myself...>>I myself have been using SCASM for many years on personnal >stuff. But I'm now learning how to use GMAX. The learning >curve is high to say the least. But that looks to be the >direction MS is going. I think this is a good decision. I know 3dsmax, and this really is the way games are going (DOOM3 will read 3ds files natively). Gmax may be complex, but once you master it, it really is a great piece of software...Cheers, christian

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