2reds2whites

My comment re My comment re: the cockpit is simply because as that's where you do most of you flying, that's where you're going to notice it most - especially with any depth of reflection/illumination in instruments/glass etc. I am familiar with the hangar video, and having watched it again to review - in my opinion that video is actually a superb example of why ray tracing is absolutely not important. I really don't think it would benefit those shiny floors immensely, in fact I'd go as far to say I don't think you'd be able to tell them apart. Simple lighting, simple reflections, not a huge amount of opacity etc etc. In any case RTX, even on a modern title with superb textures and lighting simply doesn't make a noticeable amount of difference. It barely makes a difference in still shots, let alone in dynamic moving scenes. Combine this with the massively lower quality textures and lighting required to run a flight sim at anything other than a powerpoint slide show and you've lost any potential benefit - especially if you're not running on a superb quality screen (which 99% of users aren't).

Ray tracing absolutely obliterates performance. It's the first thing that anyone would turn off the pick up more frames - it's so resource intensive. It'll cut your FPS in half basically. It's also in my view fairly pointless in a flight simulation. The only place you'd possibly notice it is in the cockpit, but even then with good textures and standard lighting you'd do incredibly well to notice a worthwhile difference. Flight sims aren't really what ray tracing is designed for.

The weather in that Gibraltar video has been dialled up to 11 to illustrate the capabilities, I don't think any single element is unrealistic, but the combination of everything (long lasting lightning, low clouds, virga, lighting etc is (to me at least) more of a demonstration of the visual effects possible, rather than an accurate weather state. You can get long lasting lightning like that, but it's quite rare. The sea state in the Gibraltar video is magnificent, as is the way the lightning illuminates the rock!

Ha! Apologies JSilva, I meant more videos of the sim! Originally I'd replied to your message but decided to edit it and just make a general statement about wanting more videos. Perhaps it alerted you to my message even though I'd already edited it? I don't know. I'm familiar with Funchal, I've landed a jet there a few times. But it's still good to watch these videos.

Would love some more videos, the screenshots are great but videos would be lovely.

The runway undulation isn't extreme at all. That's what sloping runways look like from the cockpit. You're end on and the undulations are very obvious. As for the runway colour/markings/the occasional bush, feel free to correct these things when the sim is released! Large elements of the design of these airports is entirely procedural. They absolutely cannot adjust these small parameters for each airport and still bring us a sim within the next 5 years. It's just not how the process works. The aim of the sim should be to give a reasonable representation (which it absolutely is) which can be improved upon using the tools of the sim (which it looks like you absolutely can).

In game I'm confident you'll have unlimited depth of field. The DOF effect will likely be an adjustable element in some 'photo mode' or otherwise.

Yep. People get excited about the weirdest things on here, stuff that no pilot would ever notice or care about. It's greatly contradictory to complain that something isn't simulated accurately enough, when your view on what it should be is completely inaccurate. I had something similar the other day - someone complaining about a night scene not looking as 'good' as a competitor. I had to make the point that the one they said wasn't good was in fact the accurate one! I can count on one hand the airports I've landed at that have significant or noticeable undulation. Anyway, the thing that people should be most excited about is the SDK implementation. Even if your airport of choice isn't included in the 'detailed' ones then it looks as though you may have the resources to fix it simply.

That doesn't look fine at all. Having several thousand hours flying in and out of the world's biggest cities at night in big jets, including almost all major European airports and most major American airfields (as well as the Middle East, East Asia, Africa, the Carribean and elsewhere), I've never seen a night scene that looks anything like what you've posted. It's complete garbage. Out of all the 'night' photos in this thread (including the real photos which have been exposure compensated), by far the most accurate is that depicted by Asobo.

They don't have to do any work at all on the auto-generated trees. You're looking at an 8k image in 100% zoom. To replicate this view 1:1 on your computer screen, the maths tells us you'd need something like a 74 inch monitor on your computer desk.

Frankly, every minute they spend implementing things like wildfires/volcanic eruptions (both a lot of work) is time that they can't spend refining the base scenery, aircraft, engine or performance. Given the third party support of flight simulators, I'd rather the developers not focus at all on the 'extraneous,' and instead build a simulator with the 'basics' absolutely nailed. If after that they wanted to add extra's (or third party work) then that's fine, but I don't really want them wasting time on such features. Especially since in real life for example, you wouldn't get anywhere near close enough to a volcanic eruption to see much of it! They have finite time and finite resources to publish the sim. Get the basics right and the rest will follow!

I hope not, because that's nothing at all what it looks like in real life! The video has been massively brightened.

You can see the 'popping' at the very start of the San Fran clip. It's within the first second of that segment. That said, it doesn't look anything like popping to me. For one thing it appears universal across all cloud depiction and reflections only. Secondly it appears in the foreground where you wouldn't expect any popping, and the underlaying ground mesh/textures/autogen is perfectly constant, which wouldn't be the case if it were indeed 'popping.' If I were to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that the recording was started just after a pause state and the clouds/reflections took half a second to render in........

Are you joking? If they could show an airliner landing at JFK in 4K for 5 minutes then it'd be release ready.... Do either of you know what a pre-alpha is? What planet are you on lol? This appears to have an astonishing level of polish for such an early build.

I think you'll find we can assume all we like, whether it's right or wrong is what's up for debate.

I think some of you are being too simplistic in the likely approach towards streaming. I can only assume there'll be some mixed model of downloadable assets and streaming services, with some kind of 'slider' as to how much of each you wish to use. I imagine at the very least the basic landclass will be downloadable, with probably base textures, along with dedicated points of interest (in San Francisco, the bridge for example, or the CNN Tower in Toronto). From there I would think you can choose the amount/quality of what gets streamed, and I would think there will be an option to download whatever you want. Keep in mind you don't have to download the entire planet, if you like flying around North America on certain routes then you could just download that. Also note that if you're flying an airliner, the bits between point A and B will likely suffice with very basic landclass, whereas if you're a VFR flyer the areas you would have to download are reasonably small. And whilst I do appreciate that these areas could take up lots of storage, we live in an era where a quality 1tb SSD can be bought for $120 (and always getting cheaper) and a quality 1tb HDD can be bought for $50 - and mass storage is always getting bigger and cheaper.

At night a runway is pitch black. If the video depicts it as not 'as dark' then that's just the camera auto-adjusting to the low light and falsely raising the brightness. Runway lighting is directional, and does not illuminate the surface of the runway in any way. Even if it is lit 'ambiently,' then given your eyes are adjusted to the approach lighting, the runway surface still appears pitch black. In certain parts of the world (India seems to be a particular culprit) the runway lighting is often ineffective or not working - in which case we'd describe it as a black hole - and it can be difficult to judge the flare. Your first sight of the runway surface will be when the landing lights start to illuminate the surface as you start the roundout and flare. If it's a 'black hole' as described above you'll often see guys sticking on all lights (taxi/turnoff etc) to try and illuminate the ground in the absence of good runway lighting. Spoken having hundreds of landings at night in narrow and wide body aircraft. This is an accurate depiction of your view on short final at night;