Interesting read on terrain rendering in FlightSim 10

[dodger42]

This is a pretty interesting read. Those terrain mesh overlays look like tron on steroids. Wouldn't mind flying around in game with that enabled! =)

 

http://www.fsinsider.com/articles/Global_Terrain_Technology.htm

[chris2802]

Somthing odd about that first picture. If you look at the valleys, the plane looks fairly close to the ground but look at the sky and it looks like the plane has left Earths atmosphere!

 

Chris

[Force_Feedback]

Somthing odd about that first picture. If you look at the valleys, the plane looks fairly close to the ground but look at the sky and it looks like the plane has left Earths atmosphere!

 

Chris

 

Guess you never look up while flying in an airliner...

[Mobius1]

Somthing odd about that first picture. If you look at the valleys, the plane looks fairly close to the ground but look at the sky and it looks like the plane has left Earths atmosphere!

 

Looks like the airplane is up around 30,000 feet to me, and that's what it looks like up there....

[Colt40Five]

Great article! I found this bit particularly interesting:

 

"Someday, Flight Simulator may stream all of its terrain imagery from a central server such as Microsoft’s Virtual Earth (http://ve.msn.com). However, that day hasn’t arrived yet for a variety of reasons [20]. For one, Flight Simulator does not require a broadband Internet connection, so we can’t rely on a network streaming solution. Second, raw aerial photographs, even high resolution ones, look surprisingly poor when draped over terrain."

 

Microsoft says "all Ur Earth belong to us."

[anivanov]

Looks like the airplane is up around 30,000 feet to me, and that's what it looks like up there....

 

more at 30,000 meters and this is weird

[Force_Feedback]

At least we'll have good fps from the start, and not after 3 years, with an occasional stutter (once every 30 minutes, then a restart is needed). :|

[dodger42]

Microsoft are clearly throwing a chunk of cash into the development of FSX, and it looks like a good result (though only the release will tell). Taking FSX and expanding it to a combat sim would be a huge time saver for a company looking to make a combat sim. Sure you have to create the weapons, supersonic flight models and mission planning, but surely the terrain and weather represents a huge chunk of the work. There are already a large number of flyable combat aircraft in FS2004, though the majority have poor flight models. Again, the bulk of the work creating the aircraft model is done. Just requires some hacks to create a realistic flight model for it, and there are more aircraft.

 

The point is closed source is suffocating combat sims. Surely the terrain data, weather etc are $$$ and cant be free. But making something like FSX expandable to combat would mean more license sales for FSX and quite possibly an great combatsim.

 

Thoughts?

[Pilotasso]

I think Microsoft has stated (and let down enthusiats) several times that they had shelved any plans for combat SIM's for the forseable future. And they suck for this.

 

I will never buy more stuff from them. Its expensive and after a few cute flights it goes to collect dust on a shelve. Never again.

[dodger42]

oops duplicate post... deleted.