FSX Light

[toprob]

With the release of Acceleration, we finally get the finished light which really makes FSX the best-looking sim by far. I'm not talking the flash DX10 lighting, just the normal old DX9 stuff which we can all take advantage of.
Here's a film-strip showing the passage of time from dawn till dusk. Acceleration adds the finishing touch -- nice deep shadows with self-shading. The important light features are all shown here:
With the sun behind the 'subject', the front is dark. That's the way the real world works, but in the past the sim has had trouble with this.
Note the shadow of the balcony on the building -- self-shading was available in FSX originally, but with a wussy pale shadow. It's now fixed.
See how the white paint gets a lot brighter.
The plaque is bump-mapped -- this gives a 3D effect to the lettering, and the rock.
All up, this is 1000% more realistic that FS9, and should make a lot of difference to addon scenery made from now on.

[creator2003]

Yeah bump mapping has been out along time and works all good with my deep creator/ at a download of 6mb-12mb / but at a engine at 8gig WOW now that progress ...

bump mapping and lighting is a frame killer ,this is no where new and just another lame side track to fsim ,do i know what im talking about ,sure ive been doing this along time now
lighting should be baked textures for better performance ,bump mapping only when needed ?not in a flight sim game ,like tell me how many times am i going to fly past that rock or anything that i have enough time to see like that ?"yeah good for advertising pics "
jar jar jar until our computer specs can keep up with it .
more lights more jars more bump mapping more jars ,,,how about the flying side of things ? are we going to be able to do that without all the jars
this new addon is just there way of saying give us more money for cr@p so my $120 plus 59$ + sp1 +sp2 at 200mb each, no dx10 ,how about fixing the platform that they have careleslly creatored ...abacus flight deck 4 has more detail than that carrier ever would ?"design a year ago " and that chopper you can get from hovercontrol for free "designed a year ago ,two/3 engines well jordan moore "hovercontrol "has done that in fs2004 with his bell 412 like 2 years ago
man oh man lighting ,bump maps and lame aircraft , what else are you guys going to fall for ,,lucky you robin ,get to test this cr@p out for free seeing you are beta testing it ...
one up on the guys that have to pay for it to find out that he mite aswell just brought addons for fs2004,,
this "game" now has turned into one big joke , i hope they are happy with what they have done to it .. good for kids with no idea ,but for true simmers well..
Yeah i pick at anything to do with fsx at the moment ,yes i owned a copy yes i tryed it out with sp1 and all the payware you could put into it and still it never came close to the performance of fs2004 even with my 4mR photoreal ,whats a couple of meters anyway if you cant enjoy the flying part of it ...

[FunkymonkeyNZ]

Well....... .......Here Here to that one MATE!!! couldnt speak it anymore truthfull i'd say!!! i as well dissapointed with FSX, no matter what they are doing to it we deserve a good product from the get-go, not..."oh here you need to download this" or "you could do with a better Vid card" well all i can say is @%&# THAT! im happy with FS9

[Charl]

Hey now that is purty...
What'll DX10 do, then?

[Timmo]

Looks good Robin!

At least from my perspective this makes a great sim even better- It allows me to generate even higher quality visualisations.

Yes, these new features are 'frame-hogs'...but what new feature isnt? We are at the stage now where these little things are being added to up the visual realism...Visually, they arent large changes- most people wont consciously notice them, but they do trick the brain.

There arent too many anvenues left to developers to make simulations more real- We, for the most part, are still stuck sitting on a static chair in front of a small screen so all of our 'Realism' is derived by the quality of the images on screen. FS developers cant change the other things (size of peoples screens, full movement etc) but they can tweak the very impressive 3D engine....I would imagine this will be further tweaked for the next couple of FS versions but not significantly changed.

So, creator, you might not like it....but i Love it! I fired up FS9 the other night....it looked like a cartoon show!

As for the website you provided a link- That is totally different- That type of development and visualisation is useful for small projects and scales (say under 1:1000) but the usefulness of this approach dimishes as the scale of the project increases. This is where a world sim, with wordwide spatial awareness comes into its own- more of a GIS such as FSX. The work that i do, people need to see how an object interacts with its environment...how it looks from 5kms away, the view of other objects 5km from it etc etc. What these new 3d engine tweaks do is allow better results at small scales (i.e. of the memorial rock in Robins images) and at wider scales....

Horses for courses.

[Alex]

Looks really nice, when I do get back into simming, I suspect it will be more in FSX.

I only had to make one hardware change to get FSX running nicely - that was a new graphics card. For $400 FSX runs well, and all my other games as well - for me it was well worth the purchase.

Alex

[ranm]

Robin

I really hope that the NZPP scenery you are developing will be compatible with FS9.... too much hassle to migrate just now.

Cheers - Ran

[toprob]

QUOTE(ranm @ Oct 11 2007, 07:09 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Robin

I really hope that the NZPP scenery you are developing will be compatible with FS9.... too much hassle to migrate just now.

Cheers - Ran

Yes, no worries.

[deaneb]

QUOTE (creator2003 @ Oct 11 2007, 05:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

this "game" now has turned into one big joke , i hope they are happy with what they have done to it .. good for kids with no idea ,but for true simmers well..
Yeah i pick at anything to do with fsx at the moment ,yes i owned a copy yes i tryed it out with sp1 and all the payware you could put into it and still it never came close to the performance of fs2004 even with my 4mR photoreal ,whats a couple of meters anyway if you cant enjoy the flying part of it ...

In which lifetime did you ever think the next generation sim would run as good as FS9 ?? Many of us are enjoying FSX immensly on medium spec machines because we have taken the time to optimize our settings and understand that we can't always run the latest FS version with sliders on max. As a designer, like Robin and others, we will move forward. In my case I'm not even going to design for FS9 as the new methods for FSX are not always easily backward compatible.

If you want to stick to FS9 - great - your choice, but calling FSX a big joke is missing the point - latest sim versions never have and never will run at full noise on the current available machines at release.


Deane

[VH-CC1]

QUOTE (Timmo @ Oct 11 2007, 03:12 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So, creator, you might not like it....but i Love it! I fired up FS9 the other night....it looked like a cartoon show!

I'd rather have a cartoon show then a slideshow

[FunkymonkeyNZ]

Amen to that brother!

[creator2003]

yeah yeah you guys know it all dont you ,and if anyone of us point out anything that makes FSX look bad we are just going to be put down for it ,,,sweet thats cool ...
I was looking forward to X just like the next guy and never thought for one second that it would run the same ,i thought it was suppose to be better not a four year step back through time to where NZ looked like desert and all the towns and citys/airports that many of designer designed go to the big rubbish bin of the skys unless they rebuild them all ,,thats ok for the guy that gets more money for it ,
so we are back now to the begining , with just robins addons ,topo and some new photo landscape and a platform that in most peoples minds have very big issues ...
can you see the joke in that ??

[Charl]

Interesting to see there are still FS98 downloads available from time to time, I guess those guys also had a major time investment in that sim and stuck with it.
I have a major time and money investment in FS2004, and will hang on to it until the last drop of life is squeezed out of it.
And there's very little in FSX that hasn't been matched in one way or another by an FS9 addon
Perhaps development will pick up in FSX now that the official "Retail Beta" period is almost over.
I'm just surprised X-Plane hasn't struck at the soft underbelly in the interim.

[toprob]

QUOTE (creator2003 @ Oct 12 2007, 08:53 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

yeah yeah you guys know it all dont you ,and if anyone of us point out anything that makes FSX look bad we are just going to be put down for it ,,,sweet thats cool ...

Ok, I'm gonna pick on you a bit here, which may be a bit unfair after me, um, picking on you yesterday, and being taken to task by Craig...
This attitude that those who get anything positive out of FSX 'know it all', and 'put you down' is kinda annoying to me. On my part it has nothing to do with you, I just love to express my opinion. You, too have the right to express your opinion, and I always enjoy it when you do, but not when your opinion is aimed at my (or anyone's) motives. Say what you like about FSX (please!) but don't even begin to judge the folk here who have a different opinion. Judge FSX! Don't judge me! End of rant.

I guess I look at it a little differently because I went through the release of FS2000, FS2002, FS2004, and now FSX. Actually, it may just be a generation thing -- I got my first introduction to computing when I went to high school. We were given a pile of punch cards, which we punched, and sent off to what was probably the only computer here in Christchurch, and a week later we'd get a massive printout which mainly just said 'error error error'; so we'd fix the errors and send the cards off again for another week -- only to get the same result. My first reaction was computing = no fun at all. So any disappointment I may have from some computer program not meeting my expectations is normally overshadowed by the 'wow' factor which kicks in whenever something new comes along. Like a new version of FS.
I can remember using FS on the Commodore 64. Back then you had to pour over the supplied charts before you began to fly, and flying was... well, pretty basic. The FPS was pretty much locked to 4, from memory. The ground was green and the sky was blue. Mountains were drawn on in wireframe. Yet at certain times I'd move into this zone where I'd really believe that I was up flying for real. Ok, that feeling didn't happen often, but when it did it was freaky, and defined my love of FS, and my desire to make it easier for me -- and others -- to get into that zone.
Getting back to the release of FS2000/2002/2004... pretty much EVERYTHING which has been said about FSX was said about ALL those versions, pretty much word for word. After the release of FS2004 I:
a) bought a new computer, because the old one couldn't handle it (hey, it could handle FS2002 ok!)
b) spend 18 months tweaking FS2004 until I could get it to run to my expectations. I actually enjoyed all that, but I was glad when it was over, and I could decide, hey, it works now, I'll leave it alone and just enjoy it.

At no time do I even think to grumble about MS, or developers, or people who had better computers, or people who thought differently. I do find plenty of time to grumble about ex-wives, however...

[creator2003]

Yeah my choise of words and the way i say something is well not the best at times ofcourse and that is a well known thing of mine around these parts ,,
i am truly sorry if i upset people when i talk out about stuff or if it seems that i point the finger ... this is just something sometimes i dont have control off ,,
and before you say i could , i can sometimes that is true but sometimes i wake up on the wrong side of bed and spit out cr@p ,and it is truly cr@p

sometimes i just wish there was a lock on my puter when i feel this way ,but there are points sometimes to what im saying big or small ,ill just alot harder to keep my opinions alot more confind to my head space and not you poor people that proberly have a good old laugh at half the cr@p i say ,,i know i do after i feel bad about it all


anyway sorry again if ive offended anyone ,and ill just sit back and see what happens now instead of starting little wars with myself