Water bodies

1st Official Post

    Since I recently bought Aerofly RC, I discovered that there it is a scenery (a boat) over an animated sea with waves, they look very good! Just like other sims. So, I guess there it is some hopes to have someday moving water in Aerofly FS.

    Best regards, Juan

    • Official Post
    Quote from Jugac64

    Since I recently bought Aerofly RC, I discovered that there it is a scenery (a boat) over an animated sea with waves, they look very good! Just like other sims. So, I guess there it is some hopes to have someday moving water in Aerofly FS.

    Animating the water isn't the issue, we've already done that. It's defining where water is on a global map that is more tricky. Defining all rivers, lakes and shorelines manually is not an option and unfortunately the available data is either low resolution or some weird data format that first needs to be converted. Getting this to work everywhere is the actual challenge here.

    Thanks Jan, now I understand. Maybe a realistic approach would be to start with a limited scope instead of trying to solve all water bodies at once. For example, the first step could be only oceans, coastlines and large lakes, using simplified and well-filtered global data. That alone would already make a noticeable visual improvement, while avoiding many of the problems caused by smaller rivers, seasonal water, wetlands or inconsistent local data. I wonder if, only the sea had animated effects, how this would affect the performance.

    Best regards, Juan

    Quote from Jugac64

    Thanks Jan, now I understand. Maybe a realistic approach would be to start with a limited scope instead of trying to solve all water bodies at once. For example, the first step could be only oceans, coastlines and large lakes, using simplified and well-filtered global data. That alone would already make a noticeable visual improvement, while avoiding many of the problems caused by smaller rivers, seasonal water, wetlands or inconsistent local data. I wonder if, only the sea had animated effects, how this would affect the performance.

    Good idea. The main thing is that the quality is good, in that case, I am definitely willing to wait longer.

    Quote from Jet-Pack (IPACS)

    Animating the water isn't the issue, we've already done that. It's defining where water is on a global map that is more tricky. Defining all rivers, lakes and shorelines manually is not an option and unfortunately the available data is either low resolution or some weird data format that first needs to be converted. Getting this to work everywhere is the actual challenge here.

    Will this feature consume too much device performance resources, just like urban buildings do?🤔

    This would be wonderful if it gets released in FS4 but we know that enough big-enough changes must drive on the eventual successor.

    Animation isn't really needed, MSFS waves always looked grossly terrible so it might not add much to realism. The reflective obviously flat water surface standing out from surrounding terrain if and only if the lighting is just right would really be impressive especially with major water features large enough to show obvious light vatiations as the angle from the passing water to the light source changes with the progress of the viewer's aircraft.

    We have some of this already in selected local ponds here and there, these small bodies of water would not be all that visible from altitude but for larger bodies of water seen from some altitude, quite slow 'micro-shimmer' of the reflected light would be a great simulation of the changing light return from moving wave surfaces too small to properly resolve individually but contributing towards the 'living' water surface texture or micro-iridescence (sort of thing!).

    Light and shadow changes on hills and mountains would be fantastic!