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Amazing Cloud Tech

Gerli said:
Oh come on!! We were joking about individual leafs and grass blades...
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The rest of the gaming world isn't kidding at all. I believe it's an example of how far we're being left behind, probably because we're so accustomed to not being able to really use the power of today's graphics cards. (our current sim engines just don't let us leverage much of these technologies)
 
HiFlyer said:
The rest of the gaming world isn't kidding at all. I believe it's an example of how far we're being left behind, probably because we're so accustomed to not being able to really use the power of today's graphics cards. (our current sim engines just don't let us leverage much of these technologies)
Click to expand...

100% agreed there. While Flight Sims are demanding on systems on their own (not leaving much spare computing power to devote to the visual parts) you can see that modern flight sims (Aerofly, DCS, Xplane 11 and even P3D) do infact invest on the visual aspect as well, even though, if their develoopers were to list those visual enchancements before they had a product people could use, their userbase would be against that, branding those visual enchancements as "eye candy" and "unnecessary". I think every piece of software, no matter its purpose, including flight simulators, should aim for the best possible result, be it visuals, audio or physics.

And in the end, if you can have individual blades of grass, if you can have procedurally generated 3D trees while still having acceptable performance then:
Why not?
 
Imagine an emergency landing on a tall grass field and see all the grass around the crashed plane, or fly an Airtractor spraying some chems over a wheat field and see the crops swinging when the airplanes fly, only a couple of feets over it... or maybe a field fire and see the dried grass get consumed by the fire while the tankers and helicopters drop foam from above to suffocate the flames...
Yeah... Eyecandy... but tottaly worth it.
 
There are so many cool things that might have been but weren't. Roads not taken. I remember all the Nvidia gameworks videos years ago showing interactive smoke, flames, etc.......

Immediately, I Imagined planes landing with realistic realtime wing vortices that could actually be affected by things like wind direction. I imagined volumetric smoke/fog that swirled around planes coming in for a landing, and clouds that were affected by the passage of your vehicle. Clouds that lit up from the lights of your plane, contrails.....

All sorts of things made possible by the new programmable graphics cards. Why didn't it happen? I asked on the various forums of some developers and the answer was always some variation of not wanting to be locked into proprietary Nvidia (or AMD) physics libraries that might not pan out. Which meant they would prefer to come up with something of their own, which meant that with the niche market for simulations, that there would probably never be the money to actually do any of this.

And there never was, though tessellation has sneaked into P3D, and some OpenGL equivalent engine effects have sidled into X-plane.

That being said, in practice I essentially have only my imagination, and dreams of might-have-beens.

Such is life. :wave:

 
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The detail on those ships are bonkers.
just imagine a 747 where you can walk inside and watch every part, every room... and interact with all the systems.

 
And imagine the time to build and test it all. Great news!! After only eighteen years the latest 767 "Queen of the Atlantic" from PTSD is in open beta!!.....
 
It's hard to imagine the developer, except perhaps PMDG, that could afford to work in that much detail, considering the prices the community seems willing to pay for 3rd party planes.

Pretty nice when you have a community willing to cough up $2000 cash money for a ship! Or that's willing to cough up over 100 million dollars without receiving the game that was originally showcased in the kickstarter yet after all these years.
 
Currently it takes something between 6 to 12 month per ship from design to fully working in game...Yeah... but let's not talk about that... a lot of people are too attached to the promise of Star Citizen.
How about this? To get something near this on a flightsimulator you need a lot of tech currently unavailable on the most recent sims.

17308786_911379105671941_4040976480986414473_n.jpg
 
Poof! Your picture takes me right back to Outerra! :yikes:

It took about ten minutes to create a vaguely similar effect (Hmmmm should have thickened the fog a bit more) so the tech is possible, most likely as part of a procedural engine.

Zrdb4S.jpg
 
Looks cool (not the cartoon look) I think Prepar3D has different layers of volumetric clouds too. Right?
 
So I've heard. I have P3D and have messed around with it along with FlyInside and VR, but honestly, I don't find the atmospherics to be very different than those of FSX. Perhaps I'm using the settings incorrectly.
 
It would be nice have an ambient occlusion effect under those trees, not only hard shadows.

ScreenShot0001.jpg
 
Actually there is. If you turn off shadows, it falls back to ambient occlusion as default.
 
Gerli said:
I don't know man... it doesn't look right....
Click to expand...

Maybe that's why they just hired an art lead. (after me posting for years about the colors, and them assuring me that it was all mathematically accurate)

Sometimes art has to trump science.
 
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