Microsoft Flight Simulator Offshore Landmarks-: North Sea (released)

[George Curious 12]

vor 7 Minuten schrieb Mathijs Kok:

This is the next ship being worked on... by tonnage it is the biggest ship in the world. Pick up a complete oil rig (30.000 tons). Did cost 2.600.000.000 euro to construct. 

 

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We are now also sure this will be the biggest DLC for flight simulator (counted in polygons) ever. We are now over 450 million polygons. In comparison, a very high end airport like our Brussels has under 5 million. I still get 60 fps btw.

Incredible. What's the name of this ship?

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Pioneering Spirit. https://allseas.com/equipment/pioneering-spirit/

Fascinating vessel. It is rebuild between jobs so it can go from laying massive pipes to picking up complete oil rigs.  382 meters long in the smallest configuration. It has two support vessels, Iron Lady and Bumblebee. Both of these are also massive.

[TomAce 78]

1 hour ago, Mathijs Kok said:

This is the next ship being worked on... by tonnage it is the biggest ship in the world. Pick up a complete oil rig (30.000 tons). Did cost 2.600.000.000 euro to construct. 

 

Please login to display this image.

 

We are now also sure this will be the biggest DLC for flight simulator (counted in polygons) ever. We are now over 450 million polygons. In comparison, a very high end airport like our Brussels has under 5 million. I still get 60 fps btw.

60 fps with what GPU? (I think I need to upgrade soon)...

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Radeon RX5700 XT at 5120x1440

 

Keep in mind these objects are at sea, without mesh, without terrain textures, vegetation etc. They are also fully MSFS spec, so with LODs etc. Not rehashed old P3D models.

[Pietert 15]

14 hours ago, Mathijs Kok said:

This is the next ship being worked on

Can you buy the model or do you need reference material?

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

8 hours ago, Pietert said:

Can you buy the model or do you need reference material?

 

We have a lot of assistance from people working on these ships, but this is one of the models we will acquire. Doing such a model internally would take 3 months now it is just a fraction of the cost. 

[Katana1K 10]

On 5/29/2022 at 6:22 PM, Mathijs Kok said:

This is the next ship being worked on... by tonnage it is the biggest ship in the world. Pick up a complete oil rig (30.000 tons). Did cost 2.600.000.000 euro to construct. 

 

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We are now also sure this will be the biggest DLC for flight simulator (counted in polygons) ever. We are now over 450 million polygons. In comparison, a very high end airport like our Brussels has under 5 million. I still get 60 fps btw.

 

I was hoping this vessel would make it into this DLC, mentioned it earlier in the thread when it made our local news, I think its going to be busy in the North Sea and elsewhere in the coming years.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Here is the absolutely massive Pioneering Spirit in the sim.

 

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There are also some new textures on one of the oilrigs:

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[Katana1K 10]

Hi Mathijs

Thought you might like to see this Pioneering Spirit vid, was speaking with my cousin other day and we were both involved in rig construction in Scotland and with the down turn of oil industry, he chose to travel and fair play, he tells me he was witness to seeing Pioneering Spirit being built at some far flung yard years ago and I believe him, its a small world really.
 

 

 

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Yeah, I know that video.  For people that speak Dutch there is also this one:

Shows a lot of the insights and how incredibly massive all the bits are.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Today I will explain to you our ideas about ships. 

 

We will cover all ships that are in the covered area, from massive tankers to small fishing vessels. As as with the rest of this project we want to be as accurate as possible. So we bought a lot of models and they are being converted (lights added etc) right now. The placement was something we had a lot of discussions on. There are basically two ways:

Moving along paths or as static objects. Both have advantages and problems.

 

Creating detailed paths for the 5000 ships we want to include is an impossible task. The paths need to be detailed because otherwise they will run into other ships, come into areas where they can't be (like the wind parks or oil fields). The ships would also not be landable. 

 

So in the end we decided to go with static ships. We think this is acceptable because you simply do not see from an aircraft if a fishing vessel doing 5 knots is moving without any reference point. You also can't really feel it because the effects are basically the same as wind.  It is impossible to notice if the ship is moving at 10 knots or is there is a 10 knots wind on the nose.  It also means we can add more detail and if there is a helipad (and about 35% of our ships have one) it can be used.

 

More important, we can place the ships 100% realistically. I bought a database with all the ship locations and headings at  a certain day/time (this may). So if there was a ship at a location at that time, our project will have it. It is a 100% accurate snapshot of shipping. Something not possible in any other way. And the type of ship will also be correct. Fishing vessels will be on the fishing banks, tankers will be heading for Antwerp or Rotterdam, container ships will be in the correct south or north bound lanes and tugs will be dragging barges to production sites.  You will see where the shipping lanes cross etc.

 

The database is massive, more then 14.000 ships. But of course some are in ports, others on rivers so we are filtering these out (perhaps a later project).  

 

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[krazyj 3]

nice, is there a preliminary release date you can share on this @Mathijs Kok ? are we talking months or weeks

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Months.

[jstnj 110]

On 4/1/2022 at 2:37 PM, Mathijs Kok said:

 

Yes, but the sim has a hard limit on what you can see, it needs to cover 1.5% of the screen to be shown. So while you would see ships and oil platforms (certainly at night) from FL380, the sim most likely will not show them.  See why we add a lot of very large tankers?

 

But that said, if you fly into Amsterdam, London etc you are often at FL100 when you get to the coast.

Wouldn't a workaround for this be to add (large) invisible elements to the 3d assets?

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

9 minutes ago, jstnj said:

Wouldn't a workaround for this be to add (large) invisible elements to the 3d assets?

Nice idea... but no.  But we found some cool ways to see the objects from far away

 

[cbc 12]

The way you tell if a ship is moving or not in the sim is the presence of a wake behind it, not its speed. The Seafront Simulations vessels have wakes and so do the Global AI Ship Traffic models. Static is OK but its going to look odd if these are static out at sea. Static are best limited to either support roles around rigs (they sit around statically anyway) or at or outside ports in my opinion. 

 

Turbine blades should be out of sync otherwise they look unrealistic and it is possible by having a random starting point for each turbine. This is what Mamu82 did with his default turbine replacement mod which some of us have used to replace the Asobo versions around the UK. If your project overrides those default farms and has synchronised blades its going to be a step backwards, not an improvement. So if you cannot give us farms with turbines that are out of sync, I think an option not to override the default sim version that Mamus mod replaces will be important.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

Of course they will have wakes! But the choice to keep all ship static has been made. Providing paths for 2300 ships would take months and would still end up with ships where they should not be. Now we have every single ship in a location it actually was. Seafront and Global (both are in our dev Discord group) do not have to deal with ten thousand+ objects on the water.  We do. 

 

And don't worry about the animations. Christian is perhaps the most experienced developer in that aspect.  But all the parts of the project can be installed or not installed. So if you prefer to only see the standard turbines (about 3% of what we include) with that mod that is most certainly possible. 

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

More oil rigs added and the helipads and windsocks have been worked on. 

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[cbc 12]

Thanks Mathijs, sounds great. Looking forward to this one, all those rigs are going to make the North Sea a lot more interesting.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

The Kittywake. actually made by one of the many people who assist in this project. 

 

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And if you do not follow safety guidelines this supervisor will have a talk with you.

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[Goofey007 24]

Wauw, all this looks great. I think it is time to learn flying helicopters

[George Curious 12]

Am 7.6.2022 um 12:40 schrieb Goofey007:

Wauw, all this looks great. I think it is time to learn flying helicopters

And if we are lucky it comes at or around the same time as the helicopter update from Asobo.

[Goofey007 24]

19 hours ago, George Curious said:

And if we are lucky it comes at or around the same time as the helicopter update from Asobo.

Yeh, I was thinking the same.

And with Aerosoft being a big partner with Asobo, who knows ...

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51561]

6 hours ago, Goofey007 said:

Yeh, I was thinking the same.

And with Aerosoft being a big partner with Asobo, who knows ...

 

I am saying nothing. That said, both in freeware and payware there are some choppers that I think are pretty good.

 

Status updates.  As I explained we have the database that places all vessels where they were on May 29th 2022, at 14:30. We now also have bought all the vessel models to place there.  We got all kinds of tankers, from the ultra large, via Panamax to the smaller vessels that bring chemicals to the rigs. We got several bulk carriers, container ships small to large, life stock carriers, car carriers (those look seriously weird). We got ferries, we got 5 types of fishing vessels. All in all over 4.000.000 unique polygons.  Counting the close to 750 vessels we place this way are talking over a quarter of a billion polygons placed accurately. This really is a project of superlatives in many ways.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Goofey007 24]

43 minutes ago, Mathijs Kok said:

I am saying nothing.

Dju, .... Well I tried .

This sim keeps me amazing on the level of detail it can display. All eyecandy