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A new simulator (September/ October issue)


Irving Grey

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Nice to have - personal Fleet Management options.

Users have a collection of default, payware and freeware aircraft - would be nice to be able to place your own collection of aircraft at an airfield or airfields of your choice. For example I could display all ( or a selection) of my aircraft on the apron at an airfield, then hop into the one I want to fly.

also concur with the previous post about being able to add simple land marks or scenery.

Example - Google sketch up is freeware easy to use software that allows you to design 3d buildings and objects and you can place these objects in google earth- maybe you can do the same with the flight sim? for example I can build a model of my house in Sketch UP, then place it in the Sim and fly over it ( or land a heli in the garden!). Would be also neat for placing circuit reference points around airfields. For example I have a good addon scenery of my local GA airfiled, but the downwind , base and final turning visual reference points are missing ( a church, a water tower and a small forest ) - using a Sketch Up program you could easily create and place these objects. It would also allow you to import ready made objects and buildings from a community library and place them wherever you like.

Good luck with the new sim..

Irving Grey

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Nice to have - personal Fleet Management options.

Users have a collection of default, payware and freeware aircraft - would be nice to be able to place your own collection of aircraft at an airfield or airfields of your choice. For example I could display all ( or a selection) of my aircraft on the apron at an airfield, then hop into the one I want to fly.

also concur with the previous post about being able to add simple land marks or scenery.

Example - Google sketch up is freeware easy to use software that allows you to design 3d buildings and objects and you can place these objects in google earth- maybe you can do the same with the flight sim? for example I can build a model of my house in Sketch UP, then place it in the Sim and fly over it ( or land a heli in the garden!). Would be also neat for placing circuit reference points around airfields. For example I have a good addon scenery of my local GA airfiled, but the downwind , base and final turning visual reference points are missing ( a church, a water tower and a small forest ) - using a Sketch Up program you could easily create and place these objects. It would also allow you to import ready made objects and buildings from a community library and place them wherever you like.

Good luck with the new sim..

Irving Grey

Thanks for moving this post to the correct issue.

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I belive the most important aspect of the visual system is to avoid absolute hard edges. Secondly, a unified lighting engine. Lights illuminating the tarmac, must also illuminate the aircrafts parking there. Clouds infront of the sun should make the ground darker, landinglights should light up dark clouds.

For some reason i belive that ID-tech 5, would be a superb visual engine for a future-gen simulation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnBPqrhY3hw

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For some reason i belive that ID-tech 5, would be a superb visual engine for a future-gen simulation.

:rolleyes:

Yeah, with its maximum size of virtual texture 128000x128000 taking a few giga it would make a nice, seamless .. flying insect simulator, albeit with quite limited range and detail ...

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:rolleyes:

Yeah, with its maximum size of virtual texture 128000x128000 taking a few giga it would make a nice, seamless .. flying insect simulator, albeit with quite limited range and detail ...

Hmm, with a resolution of 25 cm per pixel, this would make for an area of 32 000 meters x 32 000 meters in their current incarnation. If you check out the development tools, you would find that the engine use procedural textures made in a custom photoshop-like program, the texture is not a bitmap... Carmack is a geek who loves making elegant technology that push pixels and polygons in the most efficient way. ID has claimed that they are very interested in seeing other games than first person shooters made with their new technology. Carmack would not be a bad partner for Aerosoft, but it would require some kind of personal interest from him and his company.

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Hmm, with a resolution of 25 cm per pixel, this would make for an area of 32 000 meters x 32 000 meters in their current incarnation. If you check out the development tools, you would find that the engine use procedural textures made in a custom photoshop-like program, the texture is not a bitmap... Carmack is a geek who loves making elegant technology that push pixels and polygons in the most efficient way. ID has claimed that they are very interested in seeing other games than first person shooters made with their new technology. Carmack would not be a bad partner for Aerosoft, but it would require some kind of personal interest from him and his company.

Those are procedural textures within the editor, that allow painting to the mega texture. In game everything is one big virtual texture, 20GB for that 32km x 32km region.

And I don't think this approach is usable for a flight simulator at all.

But indeed, procedural approach is the way to go. Did you guys see the recent videos from Outerra engine?

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Here's some ideas for the new sim, sorry if they've already been mentioned..

1. A model viewer so that I can see my repaints on a model without having to launch the sim.

2. Drag'n'Drop Mission Editor - I am sure there is a lot of undiscovered talent out there that would love a relatively easy to use Mission editor

3. Atmosphere in the air. ASA goes a long way to helping but I want to feel the moisture in the air around me.

4. The possibility to automatically load preset controller settings and realism settings when I select an aircraft.

5. Standard guidelines for add-on developers ie DXT5 DDS Mipmapped textures ONLY.

6. Full 3d cockpits and 3d gauges with 6DOF Trackir support as standard.

7. Open architecture for developers so they can easily add content for the new sim and budding developers can see how it all works.

Bonne Chance,

Toby

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"And I don't think this approach is usable for a flight simulator at all."

First, I'm not sure we know how the texture data are organized in runtime, as I find it hard to belive that the virtual texture fills up 20 GB of texture memory, but anyways why would the methods used in IDtech5 be unusable for a flight sim?

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First, I'm not sure we know how the texture data are organized in runtime, as I find it hard to belive that the virtual texture fills up 20 GB of texture memory, but anyways why would the methods used in IDtech5 be unusable for a flight sim?

The demo you refer to takes 20 GB of (heavily) compressed textures. Virtual texturing is basically advanced paging system that handles level of detail and occlusion very efficiently. And it must be efficient because of the sheer amounts of data involved. What it does very well (and it has been pinpointed in the presentation several times) is that it frees the artists to do whatever they want to do, to avoid instancing and mapping the same textures from a limited set etc.

I should not have said that the approach is unusable - it could be usable, if you accept its limitations.

For example, from Understanding Virtual Texture:

For instance, a typical database design for a high to medium altitude range flight simulator covers an eight by eight geo-cell area, which translates into a typical geographical coverage of 900 by 700 kilometers. A typical requirement for geo-specific satellite imagery resolution is approximately 0.8 meters per texel, which translates to the corresponding texture dimensions on the order of 1125000 x 875000 texels.

That's quite a lot of data. Additionally, what advantages the virtual texturing brings you over standard multilevel texture tiling? A better compression, but you also have to process the data because of it. Occlusion optimizations don't account for so much in this scenario.

I don't think it solves the real problems here. You will still end up with visually unattractive ground detail. Rest of the world looks ugly in comparison to few selected and modeled areas. Also, with this approach every modeled area will add another heavy chunk of data - you wouldn't constraint the artists again by a requirement to reuse parts of the world to save the space, would you? What for is the engine then?

Virtual texturing or an advanced tiling system - the problems are still there. Some argue that using Google imagery is the future. Citing from x-plane thread aptly named Tired of lack of ground scenery in X-Plane:

Practically speaking, it will never happen [Gmaps in all flight sims]. This is why: orthophotos aren't consistent enough in quality and resolution throughout the world, as depicted by Scooter's screens. The total area covered by orthos are just a tiny percentage of the entire world, and it makes no sense economically covering the entire globe in high res orthos. In addition, each location would need to be photographed for all seasons or weather conditions, but you will still need data on where buildings goes and where to draw forrests, roads etc. Bandwidth will be another limiting factor, even in ten years. And finally, the world is changing all the time and it will be impossible to keep all regions up to date, some orthos are only updated every once in a while, some spanning several years between updates.

The answer is simply to use better data and better textures to create a plausible world with generic objects and textures based on sophisticated algorithms. Take a look at game engine called outerra, it showcases where the gaming industry in general is headed, and it is a much better solution in a longer perspective.

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"You will still end up with visually unattractive ground detail. Rest of the world looks ugly in comparison to few selected and modeled areas."

The world will be built up by algorithms that draws the correct textures based on landclass data and custom visual algorithms that draws the correct rock texture based on elevationdata (how steep is the curve?), areal preferences (diffrent rock textures in diffrent areas of the world) and erosion based on the curves in the landscapes, for instance.

If you were to build a custom area around an airport. You would simply load up an area (maybe 128 000 x 128 000 pixels) and start drawing, maybe copy paste in ortophotos, adjust them and paint them into the landscape, for a seemless integration, you save the project, and the current area are rebuilt with your custom area modelling integrated.

The bulings and lights are done in a diffrent program, saved in a standard scenery format. The objects are loaded into the "game"-editor and the lightmaps are generated with radiousity for all seasons and lighting conditions (day, dawn, dusk and night). Save, and update the database, beta test, publish!

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The world will be built up by algorithms that draws the correct textures based on landclass data and custom visual algorithms that draws the correct rock texture based on elevationdata (how steep is the curve?), areal preferences (diffrent rock textures in diffrent areas of the world) and erosion based on the curves in the landscapes, for instance.

Yep - and that's the point. It wants a different engine.

If you were to build a custom area around an airport. You would simply load up an area (maybe 128 000 x 128 000 pixels) and start drawing, maybe copy paste in ortophotos, adjust them and paint them into the landscape, for a seemless integration, you save the project, and the current area are rebuilt with your custom area modelling integrated.

And it will eat 20 GB for each one. A nice level in FPS. How many of them in a flight simulator?

The bulings and lights are done in a diffrent program, saved in a standard scenery format. The objects are loaded into the "game"-editor and the lightmaps are generated with radiousity for all seasons and lighting conditions (day, dawn, dusk and night). Save, and update the database, beta test, publish!

Again, you are combining stuff that is done this way in other engines. What was the point of using the Id Tech 5 engine?

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"Yep - and that's the point. It wants a different engine."

? You are here replying to a suggestion on how the landscapes could be built. It's an example of elements needed in the landcape generator.

"And it will eat 20 GB for each one. A nice level in FPS. How many of them in a flight simulator?"

No, it will not. It will only eat the bitmap for ortophotoes (if they are used), and the custom defenitions of were you placed your brushstrokes.

"Again, you are combining stuff that is done this way in other engines. What was the point of using the Id Tech 5 engine?"

? You are here replying to my suggestion on how custom scenery could be built using ID Tech 5.

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Ah but the whole point of ID Tech 5 engine is to let developers use a single virtual texture per level, with engine automatically streaming textures into memory as needed. This simplifies the creation of content. Once again - single virtual texture. Combining it with different technologies and breaking the whole simplicity point and introducing the very constraints back ..

Never mind, this leads nowhere :(

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One problem with FSX is that it seems to base its AI traffic on the length of the airport's runway. For example, the airport in my hometown has a 5000 ft. long runway, soon to be extended to 6400 ft., but we don't have airline flights in real life. But, in FSX our airport has Dash 8's using it just because the runway is long enough for them. This happens at a lot of other airports, too. AI traffic should be based on whether the airport has airline flights in real life, not on the length of the runway.

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Ah but the whole point of ID Tech 5 engine is to let developers use a single virtual texture per level, with engine automatically streaming textures into memory as needed. This simplifies the creation of content. Once again - single virtual texture. Combining it with different technologies and breaking the whole simplicity point and introducing the very constraints back ..

None of my suggestions on how to use an engine like ID tech 5 to power a flight sim would break with the idea of using a singel virtual texture, an orthophoto for instance would just be threated as a big brush.

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Mathijs Kok wrote: It has NOT been asked and it is a very good question.

If it works with FSUIPC I would say we can nearly guarantee it will work, if it connects via simconnect I can't be 100% sure as MS made this a propriety coms platform. A mistake we will NOT make. I got good hope though this will not be a major issue.

Mathijs, this is really good news if you decide to build this Aerosoft Next generation simohmy.gifbiggrin.gifbiggrin.gif

I have quite some investment in spesiallised software called Project Magenta, and It makes me excited to see my PM will work in your new sim, using FSUIPC/wideFS smile.gif You will be very popular with the cockpit builder-community now!! wink.gifwub.gif

Btw that Outerra engine looked quite niceohmy.gif espesially those mountains and trees wow! and the lighting/atmosphere was also quite good it seemed...

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Hi!

I'am new here but not new to Aerosoft. ^^

Well I'am happy that someone takes the risk to develop a new Flight Simulator. Its time for it ...

My ideas:

.) Go for lighting!!! I can't repeat it more often, lighting is one of the essential things in real world.

I like Ultimate Terrain at night, its great and should be standard. Also parking aircrafts should be illuminated and I miss very much the flash which appears by the strobes when flying through clouds or fog. Also night lighting should be improved.

Also nice are the sun rays when you, for example, go under trees. (Look at Halo (1) for this).

.) Clouds! But real volumetric clouds not those static images. Rise of flight looks like it uses a combination or something like that.

I also want to bring up the youtube link which was already posted:

Would be nice and would improve very much the realism!

.) Landscape: What about this?

(FarCry 2 Dunia Engine, Realistic Weather System)

Keep in mind, 18 months are optimistic and in 2 years its highly possible that the above ideas can be rendered "easily" realtime. Take a look at cry engine 3, the light tests, not bad. Also "Moores law" is still valid!

nice greetings from Vienna!

EK

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  • Aerosoft

Practically speaking, it will never happen [Gmaps in all flight sims]. This is why: orthophotos aren't consistent enough in quality and resolution throughout the world, as depicted by Scooter's screens. The total area covered by orthos are just a tiny percentage of the entire world, and it makes no sense economically covering the entire globe in high res orthos. In addition, each location would need to be photographed for all seasons or weather conditions, but you will still need data on where buildings goes and where to draw forrests, roads etc. Bandwidth will be another limiting factor, even in ten years. And finally, the world is changing all the time and it will be impossible to keep all regions up to date, some orthos are only updated every once in a while, some spanning several years between updates.

The answer is simply to use better data and better textures to create a plausible world with generic objects and textures based on sophisticated algorithms. Take a look at game engine called outerra, it showcases where the gaming industry in general is headed, and it is a much better solution in a longer perspective.

Picking out a small part of a VERY interesting conversation...

We got years of experience with imagery from sat and aerial data sources and the moment you got below 5 meter pixels you run into a huge amount of problems. From cloud coverage to the fact we only have access to one season (a green Alaska in December) for many location. There's also the simple fact a lot of not georeferenced or color corrected. Believe me, it might work for Google Earth but never for a simulator. And I know, been looking for imagery for Iceland for weeks.

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Picking out a small part of a VERY interesting conversation...

We got years of experience with imagery from sat and aerial data sources and the moment you got below 5 meter pixels you run into a huge amount of problems. From cloud coverage to the fact we only have access to one season (a green Alaska in December) for many location. There's also the simple fact a lot of not georeferenced or color corrected. Believe me, it might work for Google Earth but never for a simulator. And I know, been looking for imagery for Iceland for weeks.

What will work? The same landclass system like the one in FSX, or are there a new technology? Today we can invest in Ground Environmen X which absolutly improve the scenerey, or we can go for the ORBX version of Australia wich is totally amazing (have only seen the demo). What is the difference between those two approaches?

I believe that a major part of the simmers are located in areas that is not very famous, and there is no way that any commercial company will recreate their nabourhood. In that case it would have been nice if it was easy and simple to modify the texture anywhere in the sim world.

Reco

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What I like about Orbx's approach is that they use a combination of lanclass tiles as well as photoreal, multiseasonal and hand annotated imagery to beautifully craft the most believable scenery that is available in the market today.

The combination of the two methodologies reall does give that sensation of reality where when low down during approach or take off (or for the whole flight for small GA'ers like me), you get to see an incredible amount of detail, but when at the mid or upper FL's you see enough detail to complete relegate stock FS stuff to the trash can.

Definitely the Orbx solution is hard to beat and would recommend that product as a benchmark from which to improve for any new product going to market.

Cheers,

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I think someone mentioned this before, but coming into the fall season I was reminded of it and wanted to reiterate it. It would be great if the seasons changed gradually in the new sim. In FSX, one day the leaves are green; the next day, they're fall colors. It's the same for all the other season transitions, too.

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I dont think this was mentioned before in this forum , but one thing i noticed in FS is that many nav aids do not have the cover range of their real world counterparts. As a result if navigating by VOR or ADF you find your self at points where are you are suppose to pick singnals and start preparing to navigate by the next appropriate navaid and the signal just isnt there ... .

Thats one thing to be addressed for the upcoming sim

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I just watch a few clips from the game Arma 2.

i haven't payed the game, and I do not think I am going to, but I liked the graphics when flying. The runaway is nice (have only seen one) with grass, bumps etc and the trees, roads, water and fields are very convincing. Most of all, the contrast level is right.

I am not sure if it's possible to create graphics like this on a larger scale, but it would have been nice.

Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kaZpJRoWrw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eflightsim%2Eno%2Fubbthreads%2Fubbthreads%2Ephp%3Fubb%3Dshowflat%26Number%3D500858%26nt%3D2%26page%3D1&feature=player_embedded

Reco

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