New user - future development questions

1st Official Post

    Hi all, new user coming from p3d world. Few questions on this super promising simulator.

    1) trees - they are everywhere they shouldn't be in roads and buildings - is this being looked at?

    2) real water texture masks - are there any plans to change the current "just photo" water?

    3) high res areas - I like the addon hi res areas but even then I feel the resolution is a little on the low side. Will there be any opportunity to add higher res tiles sort of like ortho4xp does? I realize disk space is a cost of this but is not a huge problem these days. Perhaps the geo tool I have heard mentioned will do this?

    Glad to be on board and supporting this sim. The performance aspect alone is just incredible. Looking forward to the ride going forward.

    Glenn

    • Official Post

    Hi Glenn,

    welcome aboard :)

    The tree placements are troublesome due to the fact that they are based on a 1m accuracy model. They will be cleaned up over time where an OSM layer might be used to provide better accuracy. So, the team is aware of this but it may be some time (to be honest) before this item is addressed. There are much more important things to focus on at the moment.

    The water textures; I was able to recreate pretty nice looking water effect (though not animated) by using specular and bump mapping with the SDK but that won't make it to mainstream yet. If you are familiar with Aerofly FS1, you will notice that this was implemented already, just not in FS2 as of yet. There are some issues that need to be worked out, and performance measures need to be looked at before it's placed and used in FS2. This may be a feature in a future build but I'm not going to guarantee anything at this point in time.

    There will be a new tool released soon (GeoConvert) that will allow for you to add your own hi-res scenery areas yourself with ease. There will be step-by-step tutorials to follow available at release as well.

    Make sure that you visit the official Wiki to insure that you get the most of Aerofly FS2, and please remember that this is still deep in development and more features and functionality will come in time, including ATC.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

    Thanks for the responses. Looking forward to the development path.

    Couple more questions:

    1) Clouds - seem to have a perf / stutter penalty when vsync is enabled? I have resorted to using the 120FPS fixed option but it has noticeable tearing when panning views. Vsync 60 fps is great with no clouds but if you add cumulus it becomes very stuttery. Can anything be done about this or am I going to have to live with the tearing?

    2) AA options. I don't see any AA options in the graphics settings. What are the default / standard AA options built into AFS2? Can the nvidia CP be used to enhance or override or is this not recommended?

    I will check the wiki as well. Thanks for the tip.

    Glenn

    • Official Post

    I'm glad that you have these questions.

    The clouds quite frankly none of us are satisfied with in their current state. However, considering them as placeholders for now, due to the 3rd party scripting they can't really be changed or modified therefore we are stuck with them. They are 2D billboards and not volumetric so they kind of "follow" you around, so looking at them from different angles will appear to have a flashing/flickering effect. As development continues, these will be addressed and most definitely changed completely to where the programmers can have control over them.

    You can use AA options from your NVidia/ATI control panel in addition to the settings provided in Aerofly FS2 graphical settings. They work nicely together. If you have VR, there is an option to increase the RSF (render scale factor) to multiply the resolution and increase sharpness. A 1080 GPU can easily handle a 2.0 factor with no performance hits.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff