Dreaming of the future...

  • Sitting snug in the small cockpit of my glider, waiting for the winch launch to get on the way, I look to the right of me and see some tall yellow grass next to the runway waving in the soft breeze that is blowing from the west.
    It's 10:30 am in the morning and the first wisps of cumulus clouds are forming. That means thermal activity, cause every book on the topic of weather will tell you that a cumulus cloud is always being formed by a thermal underneath it. I'm getting excited. Seems like a good day for soaring!
    I again look to the left and notice some summer flowers in between the grasses. Then I feel the wing of my glider lift and I see that person X is holding my wing up. Time for some action! A gust of wind makes the grass wiggle a bit more frantic. Better be ready for some turbulence and sudden wind gusts while going up, I say to myself.
    Then the winch cable tightens up and off I go. The first few 100 feet I look to the side and watch how I slowly stop seeing details in the grassy patches next to the runway. When they turn into a more or less uniform blur I know I can do a 360 in case of a cable break emergency. Steadily I climb to 1200 ft and at that point I pull the yellow knob in front of me (my hand was on it all the time... just in case) and I release the winch cable. Nose down? Check! Speed? Check! Wind breakes locked? Check! gear up? No, wait for it.... check! Ok, now I'm off for some soaring adventures!

    Wouldn't this be great? At this moment the scenery looks beautiful from a distance, but up close it's flat and featureless. Trees make up for it a little, but I do hope that Ipacs will implement some kind of detailed ground textures or better jet, 3D grass, grain, bushes, etc. Don't forget sheep, cows and the odd horse. I imagine that these close up features will only be rendered when up close (say a few 100 ft max) so they wont take up computing power when they are to far away to be viewed in any kind of detail anyway. This would make flying close to the ground in gliders (ridge soarin) or helicopters so much more immersive. At this point when close to the ground I always loose the feeling of being in a close to real environment. This feeling I do have when higher up in the sky.

    Ipacs: is this idea at all on the to do list? If so, what to expect?


  • Wouldn't this be great? At this moment the scenery looks beautiful from a distance, but up close it's flat and featureless. Trees make up for it a little, but I do hope that Ipacs will implement some kind of detailed ground textures or better jet, 3D grass, grain, bushes, etc. Don't forget sheep, cows and the odd horse. I imagine that these close up features will only be rendered when up close (say a few 100 ft max) so they wont take up computing power when they are to far away to be viewed in any kind of detail anyway. This would make flying close to the ground in gliders (ridge soarin) or helicopters so much more immersive. At this point when close to the ground I always loose the feeling of being in a close to real environment. This feeling I do have when higher up in the sky.

    Ipacs: is this idea at all on the to do list? If so, what to expect?

    Sounds nice indeed. But I fear it will stay a dream for quite some time. And by that I mean years. Development isn't going very fast (which isn't odd btw) and features like you describe will hurt performance a lot. I do agree about things not looking good down low. Nowadays I even use the UP-button to teleport me high into the air because things don't look too good when flying low. (My main problem being the flat cities.)

  • Your right. It will take time. But one can dream, right? I do think that Ipacs has the best papers to make this all happen, compared with xplane 11 (awful frame rates, not to speak of the childishly simple thermal model). Go Ipacs!

  • Look at how Arma3 does that. With LODs. Down on the ground detail is stunning. The farther away an object is, the less detailed. Works like a charm. But requires a totally different approach, and massive engine changes.

    So chances are slim :)

  • I was always impressed with the graphics engine by GTA V. Huge amount of details on ground and as soon as you go higher everything disappear and you can see very var. The light by night (street light and cars) is awesome. Howsoever, the development of this game cost 200 million Euros. :eek:

  • Talking about gliders you have Condor which is unsurpassed.

    Cheers
    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • I think all our current simulation tech has its flaws.

    X-planes night views are unsurpassed but of course, then you have the strange-ish and generally unconvincing ground textures by day. FSX/P3d do better, but then you accept the fact that the repetitive landclass textures generally are only tangentially related to what's there in real life, though that can be mitigated by judicious use of orthophotos....

    Of course then you still have the Oooms and a host of other issues of a sim that is showing its age, but tens years is a great run!

    Finally you have Aerofly, which embraces the concept of Orthophotos with all the advantages, and yes all the disadvantages, including enormous size and lack of clarity at low levels, unless you accept even more enormous sizes. And of course there is the lack of autogen.

    Autogen, I think, can be addressed. The technology exists to do so, though whether AF is heading that way will only be answered by time. Low level will be addressed, I suspect, by very high resolution ORBX style airports/cities that extend a few miles into the surroundings, and then fade to the standard Aerofly resolution.

    The only available tech I know of that goes pretty much from orbit to individual blades of grass is Outerra, and that's moving slower than probably anything else you could name, so..........

    Hmmmmmmm.

    I have good feelings that AF can become something great, but yes, like all the others, it will have its challenges to address.

    Devons rig

    Intel Core i5-13600K - Core i5 13th Gen 14-Core (6P+8E) @ 5.5Ghz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 32GB RAM DDR5 6000 / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070Ti GAMING OC 12G / Sound Blaster Z / Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 6x Samsung SSD/NVME's various sizes / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX LGA 1700 ATX Motherboard DDR5

  • Unsurpassed only in dynamics. It's uglier than a pigs ass :) That for me makes it no fun to fly. And once you go VR you don't go back.

    CondorFly? :cool:

    Devons rig

    Intel Core i5-13600K - Core i5 13th Gen 14-Core (6P+8E) @ 5.5Ghz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 32GB RAM DDR5 6000 / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070Ti GAMING OC 12G / Sound Blaster Z / Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 6x Samsung SSD/NVME's various sizes / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX LGA 1700 ATX Motherboard DDR5

  • Talking of dreams:)
    Have you ever wondered how great would it be to take your friend for a ride in AF VR?
    I know, I know.. current desktops would be boiling running two VR headsets. However because I recently purchased Gear VR to accompany my rift setup, I was thinking if we could somehow get an observer / passenger mode into the Gear VR......?

    Over and Out

    Jay

  • Yes that would be cool.

    Would the MP mode have shared cockpit as this would be an awesome training tool in VR and also be lots of fun.

    4.6GHz OC, Windows 10 home, 16GB RAM, 780 Ti SC 3GB
    Thrust master HOTAS Warthog, Virtual-Fly TQ3, CH Pro Rudder Pedals, 40 inch 4K Philips screen, CV1, P3DV4, Aerofly FS 2 for pc and iPad.

  • Almost exact, FSX/P3D makes both techniques possible : orthophotos or landclass.
    I definitely turned away from ugly and unrealistic landclass as photorealistic technology became available early 2000.

    The flaws of FSX/P3D are bound to its long heritage. Some people keep compiling today sceneries with tools from the FS2k2 SDK and complain when suddenly it isn't anymore compatible with P3D.
    Even if a 64bit version becomes available the sim mostly relies on pure CPU performance and not so much on GPU.

    AeroflyFS comes with a new, fresh and promising graphical engine. Way too many things are lacking for simmers to quit their current FSX/P3D/Xplane, but Rom wasn't built in 1 day.

    Cheers
    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.