143 replies to this topic

[pyruvate]

hgtkifhieoplwoji, on Oct 26 2010, 11:53 AM, said:

The difference is, Railworks 2 is linear routes, on the ground, in a few places in the world. Flight simulators try to do the whole earth and every thing on it, from the air, on non-linear paths. That is MUCH more difficult, if not impossible to make look really, really good.

I agree with the former statements, but not the last

[MikeMann]

pwn247, on Oct 26 2010, 07:14 AM, said:

If a piddly 3rd person shooter can do this, why can't FS come close?

I think you answered your own question! FS is not a piddly 3rd person shooter.

[-Dexter]

MikeMann, on Oct 26 2010, 10:22 AM, said:

I think you answered your own question! FS is not a piddly 3rd person shooter.

Skip to 1:58:
GKT8COy3Oks

Apart from the realism aspect (highly unrealistic, designed more to be fun), from a performance standpoint I will ask this question: Why can't FS be like that?

Edited by pwn247, 26 October 2010 - 10:10 AM.

[Prancer]

pwn247, on Oct 26 2010, 09:14 AM, said:

That is highly debatable.

Ever played Just Cause 2? It renders a massive playable area on first load. To give you an idea, just the demo for the game limits you to 35 square miles.  You can fly through the environment: trees, vehicles, AI, weather, all beautifully rendered. It doesn't break a sweat with 16x AA. If a piddly 3rd person shooter can do this, why can't FS come close?

That is still not an entire earth that people expect to be crawling with life and detailed airports all over the place. That is ONE region and ONE geographic setting.

[pyruvate]

pwn247, on Oct 26 2010, 08:38 PM, said:

Skip to 1:58:
GKT8COy3Oks

Apart from the realism aspect (highly unrealistic, designed more to be fun), from a performance standpoint I will ask this question: Why can't FS be like that?

The perspective in that game is quite messed up, and the trees look very cartoony.

FSX is miles better IMO

[-Dexter]

hgtkifhieoplwoji, on Oct 26 2010, 11:59 AM, said:

That is still not an entire earth that people expect to be crawling with life and detailed airports all over the place. That is ONE region and ONE geographic setting.

FS has rendered the same way.

It only renders a chunk of the world at a time; only the area that the player can visibly see.

[Spam]

Someone asked how we can make a judgement on a game thats not released yet?

Well guys, im not sure how broken my eyes are but that looks exactly like the fsx engine, and that my friends IS somthing i can compare and comment on. although i won't bother becasue we all know what i would say. I just cant see how theyre going to get this engine running good, plus they're adding new shaders to it, It is early days yet...and i really hope my gut feeling is wrong.

[niteye]

They always stuck with their fosile engine that stems back from a time where it was acceptable to have flat ground, with a square lone building here and there that looked entirely out of place. And only made minor improvements like higher resolution, more out-of-place houses and trees and some more mountains but it's still fosile.

They need to rethink the way a 3D world is supposed to be modeled and leave their current FSX engine in the museum of dinosaur remnants where it belongs.

[usnchris]

I have no clue what ya'll are talking about. Improved shadows? Take a close look, they don't even have defined edges! Sharper textures? Are you nuts?! It looks just as blurry as default FSX!

The only improvement I see in this release is a sweet high quality bi-plane, but I can get one of those off avsim and fly it in essentially the exact same environment for $0.

And did I see someone raving over the increased autogen? I can crank my fsx autogen up to max and get way more than that......friggen' MS fanboys.

[Peter797]

hgtkifhieoplwoji, on Oct 26 2010, 02:23 AM, said:

The difference is, Railworks 2 is linear routes, on the ground, in a few places in the world. Flight simulators try to do the whole earth and every thing on it, from the air, on non-linear paths. That is MUCH more difficult, if not impossible to make look really, really good.

Make up an excuse for Just Cause 2

pyruvate, on Oct 26 2010, 11:59 AM, said:

The perspective in that game is quite messed up, and the trees look very cartoony.

FSX is miles better IMO

FSX is definitely not miles better than that.

Environment is so well represented in Just Cause 2

[Atomic_Sheep]

pwn247, on Oct 27 2010, 02:08 AM, said:

Skip to 1:58:
GKT8COy3Oks

Apart from the realism aspect (highly unrealistic, designed more to be fun), from a performance standpoint I will ask this question: Why can't FS be like that?

I'm willing to bet as some have already said that it's just due to the engine... I don't know why they don't redo it. The thing I'm also sort of confused about is I don't know what flight gear is like but I can't help but feel that although Flight Gear is meant to be no compromise, imho I think it's very similar to the FSX engine... I could be wrong but it looks awfully similar!

[MikeMann]

Look at X-Plane and you will see that it doesn't look any better either.

Do you see the pattern here; flight simulators put a lot of processing power into simulating flight, non-simulator games put a lot of processing power into better looking graphics.

I would say you are going to have to make a choice. On the other hand you can hope that the hardware improves enough in the next few years to provide both great simulation and great looking graphics.

I noticed that Just Cause 2 has scenery that is not near as nice as what Planetside Software's Terragen 2 is capable of. That would be because Terragen only has to render one screen at a time. It's called compromise.

[Peter797]

MikeMann, on Oct 27 2010, 08:54 AM, said:

Look at X-Plane and you will see that it doesn't look any better either.

Do you see the pattern here; flight simulators put a lot of processing power into simulating flight, non-simulator games put a lot of processing power into better looking graphics.

I would say you are going to have to make a choice. On the other hand you can hope that the hardware improves enough in the next few years to provide both great simulation and great looking graphics.

I noticed that Just Cause 2 has scenery that is not near as nice as what Planetside Software's Terragen 2 is capable of. That would be because Terragen only has to render one screen at a time. It's called compromise.

It's the year 2010. I don't care what their excuse is, they can easily make a new engine and still simulate.

[MikeMann]

Peter797, on Oct 27 2010, 06:10 AM, said:

It's the year 2010. I don't care what their excuse is, they can easily make a new engine and still simulate.

Which because it is so easily done explains why there are so many better flight simulators available that provide all the simulation that FSX does with the superior graphics of Terragen 2. Now if you can just name these superior flight simulators for me, I would be very thankful!!

[pyruvate]

MikeMann, on Oct 27 2010, 06:24 PM, said:

Look at X-Plane and you will see that it doesn't look any better either.

Do you see the pattern here; flight simulators put a lot of processing power into simulating flight, non-simulator games put a lot of processing power into better looking graphics.

I would say you are going to have to make a choice. On the other hand you can hope that the hardware improves enough in the next few years to provide both great simulation and great looking graphics.

X-Plane's performance is much better compared to FS9 at similar eye-candy, as far as I've experienced.

I've wondered about that as well, a lot of power gone into simulating the actual flight itself.  But I don't design the games at Microsoft so I have no idea.

HOWEVER, regardless of all of this, they need to make the sim more efficient, make use of new shaders and whatever graphics technologies, and have it split the load over all CPUS/cores FFS!  That alone would make the sim much much better.  Look at the enormous performance gain we get with DX10!  I can go from 20 fps to 80 fps by checking the DX10 Preview box.

Edited by pyruvate, 27 October 2010 - 08:58 AM.

[MikeMann]

pyruvate, on Oct 27 2010, 06:57 AM, said:

X-Plane's performance is much better compared to FS9 at similar eye-candy, as far as I've experienced.

So is FSX compared to FS9 at similar eye-candy. My computer runs FSX much smoother than FS9.

I was just looking at the latest photos for X-Plane 10 in their news section. The scenery looks much worse than Microsoft Flight (from what little we've seen), which is already being regarded as not good enough for many posters on this forum.

[pyruvate]

MikeMann, on Oct 27 2010, 08:14 PM, said:

So is FSX compared to FS9 at similar eye-candy. My computer runs FSX much smoother than FS9.

No actually, with an ancient Pentium 4 computer I had, FS9 would look better with the same frames but quite lower eye-candy with FSX.

[Daube]

pwn247, on Oct 26 2010, 09:14 AM, said:

That is highly debatable.

Ever played Just Cause 2? It renders a massive playable area on first load. To give you an idea, just the demo for the game limits you to 35 square miles.  You can fly through the environment: trees, vehicles, AI, weather, all beautifully rendered. It doesn't break a sweat with 16x AA. If a piddly 3rd person shooter can do this, why can't FS come close?

The problem lies in the type of terrain.
In Just  Cause 2, you terrain will never change. It will not be updated by any addon. From a programming point of view, it is much easier to optimise the display of such an "expectable" terrain, than programming the display of a completely generic terrain that can take any shape, and color, any type, with an autogen and not only fixed scenery, etc...
And that's just for the terrain.

[-Dexter]

Daube, on Oct 27 2010, 12:10 PM, said:

The problem lies in the type of terrain.
In Just  Cause 2, you terrain will never change. It will not be updated by any addon. From a programming point of view, it is much easier to optimise the display of such an "expectable" terrain, than programming the display of a completely generic terrain that can take any shape, and color, any type, with an autogen and not only fixed scenery, etc...
And that's just for the terrain.

Just Cause 2 does not use fixed scenery (have you played Just Cause 2?). In fact, you can mow down trees and clear a path for a tank, etc... It's like autogen in the way that it's placed depending on the environment (more trees generated in the jungle than in the snowy mountains, and different types of trees in the desert, etc...).

Just Cause 2 uses the Avalanche engine. According to Wikipedia...

Quote

The Avalanche Engine is a unique games technology powering landscapes in explicit detail.

And that's why JC2 looks so good while maintaining wonderful performance. Also, it utilizes DirectX 10 technology and takes advantage of all four of my cores. There's no sense in making a game these days on top of an engine that will use two cores at the most. That's foolish.

If Microsoft wants my money on this, they'd better have something for us that's not just a re-textured FSX with a little bit of DX10.

[MikeMann]

I have a couple of problems with Just Cause 2. One it is not a flight simulator. Two my computer does not even meet their minimum system requirements, let alone their recommended requirements! Yet I have no problems running FSX.