oktorn777

@mghI think I haven't made it really clear what I wanted to convey with my original post.First of all I wanted to show that Flight is not using a new rendering engine which becomes apparent when comparing the available screenshots to FSX or FS2004 or even FS2002 (which all basically use the same rendering engine for the terrain, apart from the added support for higher resolution textures and DEM data).I strongly believe that the visuals of "realistic" games can only become truly "photorealistic" for the lack of a better word if developers actually start to simulate the physics behind the visuals of the real world.The huge benefit of this approach is that you do not need artists anymore to generate all the visuals, but the physics and data driven system generates them automatically and in a realistic manner. Products like REX only exist because of the shortcomings of the artist generated visuals of flight simulator. Once you have the physics in the engine artists can move on to generate other items of the world rather than spending time on atmospheric effects, clouds and water.It would benefit all users because everyone, no matter of the actually understanding of the underlying processes, is very good at judging what looks realistic and behaves realistically, because everyone is seeing and interacting in the physical world every day.To summarize, visuals driven by physics make things look realistic without the need of artists spending countless hours trying to recreate effects and visuals artificially.Ultimately, it is the only way forward for the entire game industry, at least for the industry which tries to make real looking games. I am confident that 5 to 10 years from now all major rendering engines for games will have moved to a much more physics dependent approach to generate the visuals.I understand that companies like to make money. But I also do firmly believe that you can only be truly excellent at what you do when got a genuine passion for it. If you got passion you will be innovative and ultimately come up with a superior product which in the end will sell better too. Where I am coming from we have a very simple tenet, either you give something everything you have or you don't do it at all.If you are interested, watch this video of Outerra to see that such a system is actually feasible to run at decent framerates (20+) on todays hardware: http://vimeo.com/31560308PS: Here is the paper I actually wanted to linked about real-time cloud rendering by A. Bouthors et al. (2008): http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2008/BNMBC08/clouds.pdf

To put my reflections into perspective it might be useful to introduce myself. I have been out of the loop for many years now when it comes to flight simulation, but I still occasionally follow the news on simulation related stuff. I did a lot of flight simming years ago during my youth and I always was fascinated by the idea of recreating a realistic virtual world. For a long time, flight simulators where the only consumer programs out there which attempted to recreate such a believable virtual world. Professionally I am working as an atmospheric scientist and therefore got quite a weak spot when it comes to depicting that particular part of the simulated world. :-) Further, I used to have a PPL licence when I was a university student and I am still actively involved in paragliding.When I was a kid we had this apple computer and my dad one day brought a flight simulator home for it. I cannot remember the name, but it had black and white, wire frame graphics. The world was one big, black, flat square with an occasional white line representing a landing strip. The world was surrounded by four black walls with outlines of mountains drawn across them. Still, I was completely fascinated by that thing having never seen anything like it before. From a very young age I was fond of airplanes so that definitely helped keeping me interested in flight simulation. I spent too many hours in that sim trying to escape that box world by trying to escape by flying over the cardboard mountain tops, convinced there must be something behind them!Looking back from where we are today flight simulation has come quite a long way. Flight simulators are now multi gigabytes in size, have real world data driven graphics and and the airplanes have much more realistic flight characteristics.So the question arises if there can be still significant improvements be made to existing home use simulators like FSX.Which areas have still the biggest shortcomings?I will only focus on the world as a physical and visual entity for the purpose of this post. The visual aspect of a virtual world is much more connected to physics than most people probably realize. The light from the sun for example has a certain spectrum and this light hits the atmosphere in which different scattering (mainly layleigh and mie scattering), absorption and reflection processes are taking place . The scattering of sun light in the atmosphere depends on many factors such as the composition of the atmosphere, suspended particles, water vapor content, inclination of the sun to name a few. This physical processes have a direct effect on the sky coloration, the light spectrum and intensity actually reaching the earths surface illumination the surface and objects. So physics are not only critical to accurately calculate the flight path and movements of an aircraft, but are equally important when it comes to rendering a believable world.So for example, how does a flight simulator like FSX simulate the physical processes which determine how the sky looks? Well it turns out it actually doesn't simulate anything at all. FSX simply uses a couple of coloured bitmaps to draw the sky around you depending on the day of time.Looking at the MS Flight screenshots I have a hard time to hide my disappointment.And here is why:- The overal rendering (lighting, terrain, clouds, autogen, airplanes, instruments) looks nearly identical to FSX apart from the reworked shadows and new textures.- The cloud rendering looks identical to the system introduced with FS2004 in 2003 (see this paper by Niniane Wang for more details: http://ofb.net/~niniane/clouds-jgt.pdf). Basically clouds are a pile of 2d sprites arranged in 3d boxes which then are color shaded based on vertical color levels made up by artists. (see this paper by A. Bouthors et al. for a different approach on real-time cloud rendering: http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2006/BNL06/)- Looking at the terrain rendering the same issues as in FSX can be see: "soft rounded" look to mountains and blurries in the distance. (see this video showing the Outerra engine using fractal algorithms to refine and render real world elevation data (they got some a physics based atmospheric rendering in there aswell).There are many more things that are worth noting, but I think this will do for now. Clearly the MS Flight team is not putting in much effort to move the rendering away from an artist created to a physics driven system. For me this missed opportunity is a major disappointment. It feels like the team has either not enough resources, they have moved their focus to different topics or they just lost the "bite" to truely innovate and push the genre forward.

I agree that the fs graphics engine development needs a new and fresh approach. But fs2000, as far as I can remember, was quite slow and suffered from microstutters even on high end machines. So that's hardly the ideal performance we are looking for in the next iteration of fs.best regards,C.G.

First let me tell you that I'm very impressed by your program! It works great on my system, except of things getting blurred when flying a fast plane.That filesize is fine with me. As long as the download speed offered by the host is fast enough.I have a question though regarding the water mask data. I like the shallow reef structures around islands very much, will they be excluded?many thanks for your efforts!:-beerchugbest regards,C.G.

Thanks for your inputs guys!To get a realistic depiction of a specific lake, river or ocean there are three things that have to come together: correct water classification for a given area, good water textures that represent a certain class as good as possible (foremost the colour) and an appropriate wave effect.One of the biggest realism killer for me is that ms only provided one wave effect with the sim. The effect looks quite good for oceans, but is much too big for lakes and rivers.It would be very nice if there was a way to have at least 3 different kind of water surface effects for oceans, lakes and rivers. I don't know if it is possible in fsx.The other major problem for me is that the wave effect changes the colour of the water surface quite dramatically. The colour gets much, much more blue and light. So there is no way to produce a texture set which works for all effect settings (off, 1x, 2x).So I thought to stick with the 2x setting which probably most fsx users are using. But after some experimentation with different colours I must say that there seams to be no way to get the muddy colour of tropical rivers for example right, when the current 2x water effect is applied.I don't know how to alter the water effect. I have to look into that.And yes, I would like to make a free package available.best regards,C.G.

Well I'm here with my first results for inland water (waterclass: 7,8,9,12).The location is somewhere in the middle of florida.fsx original 1xlow:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/175412.jpgnew textures 1xlow:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/175413.jpgfsx original 1xhigh:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/175415.jpgnew textures 1xhigh:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/175416.jpgfsx original 2xlow:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/175418.jpgnew textures 2xlow:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/175419.jpgAs Luis pointed out the different water effect settings, really make a big difference. I ran fsx without water effects for some time because of performance and was very annoyed how bad muddy inland water looked (much too green). But if you throw the water effects into the equation things look very different! With the 2x water effect (low, med or high doesn't matter here) muddy water looks even quite good. I didn't realise this before I started with this textures. So the question is, for which effect do I want to make a texture set? I think I'll stick with the 2x water effect setting, because on the 2xlow setting the performance drop ain't that big. What do you guys think?cheers,C.G.

Thanks Luis!I will look into it.cheers,C.G.

I agree that the start page of fsinsider is very strange indeed. Half the space is filled with a screenshot.. Anyways, what would be nice if they could place a big "get SP1 know" yellow and red button on the front page, like many other game developers do if they have an update on offer. That shouldn't be a too big hassle for the webmaster. Well, we will see..:-bigangelcheers, :-beerchugC.G.

Thanks, I didn't think about that. If its compiled into a bgl-file is there a way to open it and than recompile? I wouldn't understand why they don't want us to change those textures. The tropical water looks very cartoonish and the inland water has very strange colours at times, than are the to main things I'd like to improve.cheers,C.G.

Hi all!This is my first post in this forum and I'm really looking forward to start with scenery design myself. The first thing I'd like to do is to make a new set of water textures for FSX. To start off I need to know the location and file names of the current water texture set, which I couldn't dig up. They don't seem to have the same name as in FS9. Any help is much appreciated.best regards,C.G.

If your eyesight is still good the distant terrain shouldn't look blurry in real life. Of course it's different with a photo which is focused on a certain distance. The eye focuses aswell, depending where you're looking at, so when looking into the distance it should look sharp. Naturally you can't see the same amount of detail from something far away like as from a object nearby. But that's already given by the fixed resolution of the monitor that you're looking at. The Problematic thing is that the screen is 2d and doesn't know what you are looking at the moment, so just to blur the distance isn't really a solution, although it adds a cinematic (not the same as reality) effect of depth.regards,C.G.Off Topic: The second screenshot nicely demonstrates how bad the default textures can look in certain places. The FS9 textures are blurry and do resemble the real scenery very badly aswell, but somehow the scene notheless looks more realistic than fsx!

I get image tearing effects otherwise.cheers,C.G.

Hi Mike,Yes I'm running xp and do regular defrags with perfectdisk 7. My main harddrive is a samsung HD501LJ 500Gb which unfortunately is quite a bit slower than I expected.Reducing the target frame rate even lower than 30 isn't an option for me because of smoothness. I also have "wait for vsync" on. Without that setting I get very distracting tearing effects on my monitor. With vsync on and another refresh rate than 30 (locked to 25 for example) I get quite heavy and irregular stutters (not bound to hd activity).So I ended up with vsync on and the frames locked to 30 for my setup which is nearly stutter free, the fluidity is quite good, but heck it's nowhere near reallife and I'm really asking myself if such fluidity even can be achieved in video games or not.As a sidenote, I just changed from a CRT to LCD and my first impression is that the CRT gives you a nicer fluid feeling than the LCD. Maybe there is setting I'm missing tjat I don't now of?regards,C.G.

HI Mike,I'm running a c2d [email protected], FSB1200, 2gigs Corsair DDR2-800, radeon x1900 Pro 512mb und am getting some stutters when panning the view or making sharp turns. I build this setup just a few weeks ago and also replaced my old trusty sony 19' CRT with a Asus LCD.I don't have a lot of experience with lcd's and gaming, but for now I get the least stutters when locking the framerate to 30 (half the refresh rate of the display).I also hoped for stutter free sim after sp1, because stutters kill the immersion for me, no matter how small and short they are.Looking forward to any solutions,cheers,:-beerchugC.G.

Imagine if we wouldn't use drives anymore in 5 years! Imagine terrabytes of space on a chip less than a square inch big. Now that would be progress!It still astonishes me how long this old technology has survived. In fact IBM build the first hard drive in 1956. A new storage technology seems long overdue and one wonders why it hasn't happend yet?cheers, :-beerchugC.G.

Well I have a 4 year old setup (AMD XP 1800+, 1GB Ram, Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb) and it runs fsx without tweaks fairly well. I have my fps locked at 40 fps and also reach them in rural areas. The sim is very smooth, in fact it is smoother than fs9 on the same setup (nearly no stutters).I must say if I max all the sliders and go to seattle for instance the performance is absolutely unplayable and I get barely 1 fps.You see there is a very wide performance margin in the sim. To get the performance I mentioned above I had to set my settings to this: turn of bloom and selfshadowing of a/c's, Scenery detail radius all the way to the left, weather settings middle low and no traffic. I only fly the ga planes and helicopters in good weather conditions and get very smooth performance and still decent graphics. See screenshot below.cheers,C.G.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/167671.jpg

This is a great Idea but one will get problems in areas with bad road data. You could have a city without any roads and only houses!I agree with the fact, that the higher resolution actually makes things worse particularly in this area.In FSX, when looking at the textures one by one they look great, but when they are mixed together they can look very strange and unrealistic. That's something that really bothers me.On the other hand there are regions that look quite nice like the southern part of france.cheers,C.G.

Well I run fsx without freezing or lockup problems on a much lower spec machine: Athlon XP 1800+, 1024mb ram, ati radeon 9800 Pro with 128mb vram, so that shouldn't be the problem really.I even get good framerates (around 30) and visuals nearly everywhere, except of big cities. (how I get good framerates on this machine: no weather, no air & car traffic, no autogen and only flying the ga aircraft and helos)cheers, :-beerchugC.G.

YES! Please!

Well, the problem is that fsx only features ONE water effect for ALL water surfaces. The water effect looks quite good on the ocean, but bad on lakes and even worse on rivers. The effect simulates quite big ocean waves rolling in one direction which look pretty aweful on any other surface than the ocean itself.To sum it up, the effect kills realism for inland water bodies such as lakes and rivers (the smaller the lakes the worse).I cannot understand why they didn't at least include 3 different kind of animations for the ocean, lakes and rivers.cheers, CGPS: One artistic shot showing fsx under directx 10 sports even much better looking water but it is totally unrealistic for a lake oder normal calm conditions! See for yourself:FSX:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/158956.jpgRealworld:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/158958.jpg

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Here is another example how much the detail has been increased compared to fs9:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/152822.jpgthe new caravan looks really nice!cheers,CG

It is the bloom effect which is a new feature in fsx. Another nice thing in this shot is the self shadowing on the aircraft. The sun seams to be somewhere low in front of the cub in this shot.cheers, :-beerchugC.G.

Than take a look at the blog post "flight simulator x and dx10?" by sebastien st-laurent(graphics engineer on mfst), where he states this: "Do we plan on supporting DX10? Definetly! The question I can't really answer is whether it will be out of the box or as an update to the product. As I have mentioned, there is currently no hardware in existence which supports DX10. And we are still at least a few months away from seeing any type of prototypical hardware (the kind with wires all over the place and tape holding the pieces together)."you can find the blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sebby1234/archive/20.../16/533879.aspxmake your own conclusions,cheers,C.G.