Is a topic like this hyperbole, much? yep.
Posts by spiffy
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Done, email sent !
Almdudler: You can adjust the sensitivity of the Ir camera in the TrackIR options panel. I have had a little bit of success here.. however, I have had many rooms in various apartments I have lived where direct or reflected sunlight will always cause a reflector to be lost. There was nothing to do other than find an orientation of the camera which didn't have sunlight in its path. But for all other light sources, I have been able to filter them out via the sensitivity options. Hope that helps!
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Spiffy,
The TobieyeX system is an eye pupil tracking system than can be used to move the eyepoint orientation somewhat similar to TrackIR. I don't have either but imagine that you should be able to delete the TobieyeX assignments and reconnect to TrackIR. Maybe someone else with TrackIR will pipe in soon.What's puzzling is that the only hardware detected is TobiEyeX, and no longer TrackIR. And while I can disable the Tobi, I can't 'tell' the program I have TrackiR... it's like AeroFly thinks my TrackIR is a TObi. And like I said, this is a revent development, it was all literally working great two-three days ago, and I've changed nothing on my system. There were some game software/Steam updates though..
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For months my TrackIR has worked.. but for the last few days, the TrackIR is no longer working, and the axis is assigned to TobieyeX .. I have no idea what that is. Any ideas what happened? My TrackIR is working in all my other flight games.
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Free DLC! My favorite kind. Awesome, thanks to everyone who is putting work into the sim!
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I imagine they kept cloud radius to something that will perform well on most machines, and to something that looks good to low to mid height flight.. I almost never notice the outside range of the clouds since I'm always either flying just below, in, or just above them. You could try adjusting them to be higher up in the sliders, that would conceal the edge better for high altitude, unless you're perpetually in the stratosphere. Anyway, I do feel they made an effort to make sure they were accessible to most computers, and that means not allowing people to cripple their fps. Maybe they will allow you to extend the radius in the future, or maybe are working on an inexpensive way to represent clouds far away but that don' t use the same rendering system that would kill fps.
That said, just once I'd love a sim to have large, isolated, towering clouds that are more structurally interesting than wispy, evenly distributed clouds that everyone always has. Even REX isn't great, but they come the closest.. other than maybe RoF, where they have nice size, but not the best structure. I mean these:
[Blocked Image: http://malaysiagazette.com/sites/default/files/field/image/cumulus.jpg]
or else, have interesting grouping and patterns in them, like here, where there could be areas uncovered by clouds, and then a pattern where the clouds get dense.
[Blocked Image: http://www.sgsweather.com/Images/Glossary1/Cloud%20Streets.jpg]
I'm sure they're working on weather models, just not ready yet. Unless they plan on just staying in sim-lite game mode as a product design.. valid as a company mission, too. I guess not every flight sim has to try to do it all, as much as we want them to.
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Switzerland trees are actually clustered in appropriate areas, unlike SW USA... but as Overloaded writes, it looks better without them, since the underlying mesh is extruded for forests in Switzerland, giving the impression of depth without the need for autogen (see my pictures above).
Without bump mapping or mesh extrusion, it'd be great to get better tree placement in SW USA (especially the pacific northwest), but I imagine it would mean manual placement and too many man-hours of work, without some kind of auto-magical 'smart' texture tagging system that could identify where it was appropriate for trees or not.
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I think you guys have done the best job I've seen so far to depict accurate and integrated downtown centers, for most of the urban areas depicted in the scenery regions. Beautifully modelled and expertly textured to fit in.
Therefore, it's a little weird to not have downtown Oakland facing off with SF across the bay!!
San Jose as well!
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Yeah, I realize now the forest elevations have been hand-painted into the mesh. Still, it's a very effective technique, but I guess it would require quite a bit of manual labor to achieve it with the other regions. And it probably also means there isn't the mesh density to do it to smaller objects like buildings. Which means a traditional bump or displacement map would still need to be used for more granular details, like I did in my previous posts, which is fine viewed at medium height. I'm still convinced you could make an automatic process to flag roads, water, and trees and maybe even house roofs in the texture files via isolating colors, then create more effective bump maps for them, but that would probably mean giving every texture file an alpha, which means increasing required hard drive storage space, which is already clearly a limiting factor.
Still, I will always prefer an extrusion of existing photofeatures than generic (even well done) autogen, as it is a better reflection of reality, rather than covering it up with abstracted 3d objects. Hand placed and created autogen (like NYC) is king, but we know how much effort that entails, and covering for example the entirety of the southwest US with it would be too costly.
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Well! It seems like Aerofly actually is using a kind of 'bump map', but only in the Switzerland DLC, where they have extruded upwards patches of forest, to great effect! The houses feel more bumpy too, but it might be my imagination, or the textures have better shading than the NYC.. or something.
Here is a pic of NYC without autogen trees. Note the perfectly flat forests.
Next , here is Switzerland. Note the raised and bumpy forests (especially obvious in the distance along the ridge, top center of screen)! It actually is very convincing from the air in movement. It looks great. I wonder if this had to be done manually, or if it was automated / detected by color / etc?
Ironically, showing the autogen trees covers up the effect, since it's layering trees on top of trees! Not great. Looks more convincing without them!
I wonder if all the houses could be procedurally bumped in the same manner? And if all forests in a ll regions could get the same treatment? My guess is that it takes effort, since it isn't the case in the other regions.. but I wish it was. It really gives texture to the landscape, give density without affecting performance, and removes the problem of "samey" trees since it's the actual trees in the real world.
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Wonder how many gigs it would take to do that worldwide........
If they can reuse the same textures for the bump channel, it wouldn't require any extra storage.
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Hey, so I had some spare time, and mocked up some bump maps and specular maps for water in my software (note, this is Maya, not a game dev kit, so YMMV). I simply threw the RGB into the bump channel. In some cases it need to be inverted, depending on if there are more trees than roads, which is bad news for consistency.. but it's neat to see the effect. The water is simple specular map with a mask, no change to the underlying photo. The images are screen grabs from google.
For the most part, it looks neat! it's really nice how the bump map catches the light and breaks up the flat tile.
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Hey guys,
Love the sim. The aerial photography is addicting, and I'm having a very hard time going back to FSX / Orbx patchwork texture-autogen when they are just abstractions of the real thing.
However, flying low is not a good experience right now, and it's obvious trying to populate the world with 3D objects would take forever. However, I was wondering, would it not be possible to create bump or displacement maps to give the ground more texture when flying low? IE, areas that are green: any darker smaller object is likely to be a tree, bump/displace that darker value upwards. Or in urban environments, isolate road color and bump everything else (all the houses/buildings) up. That should allow them to catch light highlights and help depth. Some of this might need texture tagging or whatnot, but for relatively low maintenance maybe it would help. (or maybe it would be a mess, I don't know).
For water: Clearly we are missing specular reflections of the sun and detail maps/animation of waves.. sorely needed. But at the same time, it is wonderful to have all the lakes/ponds/streams be the proper color of real life, rather than one solid hue like in FSX, which isn't great either. Would it possible to maintain the color and texture of your current water, and overlay a different specular material, with wave detail (bump map possibly?) overlaid to give it texture and catch highlights? I'd hate to super real ground texture run into cartoony water, but at the same time it's bizarre to fly over glasslike featureless deep water.
Anyway, good stuff. I'd love to see boats leaving trails, road traffic on major arteries, street lights on urban centers at night, and air traffic in the sky (even if they are just flying loops or are magically appearing, I just want to swoop down on them!), or have mulitplayer where I can see other people's planes. That's my wishlist! Things that help immersion. I'm not so interested in ATC and proper procedures etc, I just love flying around. Many thanks!!!