Gauge resolution

[Guest Pieter]

Did anyone lately play again with this? Meaning the stepped (jagged?) edges of needles, fonts and markings on gauges. As the years go by it seems to me my eyes are in demand for improved smoothness. It's as if I see only the low res effects more and more. :-(Pieter

[Guest R_Driscoll]

I've never noticed. Maybe its to do with 800x600 res being the design size, but running in 1280x760.

[Guest fu3]

Pieter/Rob,I've tried some tricks whilst working on the S340. One thing I can say is that a good video card 'rules'. Trying to get great performance out of a low-end card just doesn't work. After upgrading my MB recently, I decided to get a new video card and give the old one to my Daughter. All I can say is...R9600XT's are wonderful for FU3 ;)I tried a lot of cards (;)

[Guest fu3]

I forgot to mention this, although it's obvious in hindsight (isn't everything?) - FU3 resizes instruments on-the-fly. By that, I mean that, for example a needle is a fixed size but the actual size can be set in CPD and FU3 renders it in the correct size during play. In most cases, the needle artwork is about 3 or 4 times the size of the actual needle. What I have tried is reducing needle artworks to the exact size required in the first place. This makes them 'sharper' but more jagged (i.e. the only AA applied is by FU3 during play). When I tried the opposite (MUCH larger than standard and resized in CPD), the jaggies disappear but the image becomes blurry because AA has been applied twice (once in FU3 resizing it to fit and once by the video card during display on-screen).The real problem is the 800x600 resolution - many small needles are only 15-20 pixels long and, when you dither the pixels along each edge using AA, the points become rather blurred :-( One solution is to alter the needle so it is still 3 pixels wide at the tip, but this makes all of them appear rather 'stubby'. Daniel's Malibu is a good example of dials just too small to even fit readable scales to. If I get that far, I'd rather leave them out. I will send you a beta test version of the S340 to look at if you'd like to comment on it, when I have the night/day/lit/unlit sets all done (right now it's day lit and night unlit) :-waveMy next plane is going to be a small GA, but done to (my usual) extreme! I was looking at the small Saab trainer or the Pilatus. Either way, the inherently smaller panel will look better with larger gauges on it. I just have to finish my other 20 or so projects yet!

[Christopher Low 5,341]

Jon,Are you saying that all of the plane panels are in 800*600 resolution, and FU3 simply scales them up to 1024*768 ? If that is the case, then it is presumably a result of the panel resolution limitation in FU2 (panels were not displayed if the screen resolution was set to 1024*768).As far as graphical quality is concerned, my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro is actually inferior to the GeForce 3 Ti 200 that preceded it. The cockpit graphics seem to suffer from a limited colour palette (most noticeable when the sky is dull), and there is a slight shimmer effect on distant models. IMO, the GeForce 3 card that I used was probably one of the best graphics cards ever for FU3. I have no idea what the graphics looked like with the (supposedly legendary) Voodoo 5500, but I suspect that the GeForce 3 came pretty #### close.Chris Low.

[Guest Pieter]

No, please not that! I've just upgraded my card to the FX5700 with 256 megs of RAM. Come again? You want to tell me I really should've bought that R9600XT... :-( Sigh and after so much this-way en that-way considerations. I really wish we had shops that really allows one to test drive a few, it's all so total "system dependent" I can scream - and it was not cheap.Pieter

[Guest fu3]

Pieter,I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the '5700. The problem with all this is that video card manufacturers really only need to sell about 3 different cards but they seem to have 50 in their catalogue!What it means is that one cannot go by price or even manufacturer to get any idea of the performance to expect, and under what conditions! Anyone familiar with the Nvidia 'benchmark fiasco' will understand, as will anyone who tries to make sense of comparitive benchmarks published on gaming sites and hardware sites. I was looking for a mild upgrade and I noticed one serious problem - 'reference' sites always concentrate on the latest offerings and consistently 'forget' about everything else :-(So, I scanned a number of video card tests, where like ($-wise) cards were compared. The outcome of this was that in it's pricerange, the 9600XT was consistently just below cards 2 times the price. In some tests it did very badly - by comparison, In some tests, the crappiest card came out within 10% of the top - proving to me that the benchmarks weren't measuring what we all wanted - smooth performance under all conditions.What made me go for it was that I set a price limit and serached the 'net for what I could get for that. With the R9600XT consistently selling at ~AUD$300, one supplier came out at AUD$226, which was waaaaaay below what I was expecting. Then I had the opportunity to try it out against a '5700 (the office needed to upgrade a couple of PCs :-roll ) and there I noticed a staggering difference in performance.So I bought it and haven't looked back since ;)Except the driver, which consistently identified the Athlon64 as a P4 and installed the wrong driver :-( :-( Just do it manually, instead of running the stupid autorun ;)

[Christopher Low 5,341]

Jon,Have you received my recent e-mails ?Chris Low.

[Guest fu3]

Chris,Yep, Just got 'em! I've been off-air a few days. Something to do with trains, you know!I'm actually working on it right now...How, you ask? I'm at my Girlfriend's place (she's away...) so I thought I'd take the opportunity ;)Durn - there's no FU3 on this PC :-hmmmPieter,Given the limtied resolution of the panels, 2 things determine the readability:* The size - the larger, the better* Your video card's ability to preserve readability whilst providing enough AA to substantially reduce jaggies.Increasing contrast CAN help but to create any kind of reasonable dial at 1280 x 960, let alone 800 x 600, will involve some dithering.I'm experimenting with different types of AA used to resize images and have found startling differences between programs. I'll kepp you posted ;)Back to the model stuff for the evening :-wave