The Future of EDs Flight Sims Graphics

[Blacknemisis]

Looking at games like Crysis, Bioshock, Flight Sim X, SH4, Fighter Ops, and many others games are starting to look amazing. Just wandering what you guys think about the future graphics of ED sims. Should they look amazing are is it more about game play with sims?

[SuperKungFu]

ED has always pushed the edge of graphics. When Lock On first came out, it maintained the highest quality for a long time. (sure it came at a price of fps but ah well). Personally, i say lock on graphics is good enough, probably the next wise step is to focus on the game play. Especially for flight sims since the cpu is constantly doing all these calculations, like AFM models.

[Weta43]

We're visual animals - good graphics add to the sense of immersion & help with (but are not enough in themselves for) the suspension of disbelief that generates excitement (or relaxation :-).

Better graphics are (of course) going to be needed in next gen sims, but not at the expense of gameplay & depth of simulation.

[3Sqn_Fudd]

Yeh LockOns Graphics were pretty sweet when they came out... I hope it has set a tradition.

 

Hopefully Tank Killers or whatever is coming out down the road will be Crysis-esque in its engine nature.

 

Question... Can one buy any engine you choose and apply the models and physics one wants? More importantly, the physics.

 

I hope that the economics of "the little guy" developer has born fruit here and the sequels (essentially Flaming Cliffs and Black Shark, plus the added bonus of a USAF contract) have/will infuse ED with enough cash to get going on the next step.

 

Tough business game making is... Gone are the days (Think Microprose and early 1990's) where 300,000 games sold at 50$ a piece made a success. The costs are exponentially higher, and in relative terms Russia isn't getting any cheaper to live in.

 

I wouldn't think it aweful at all for a sim maker to charge early adopters 100$+ for a title. I would pay it for something well done, or potentially well done.

 

At any rate... there's probably a bunch of holes in the above examples, but it's just some thoughts rolling in my head.

[Rikus]

When Lock On first came out, it maintained the highest quality for a long time.

 

And for what? there were no cpu who can move softly lomac with full settings since some months ago, an offline for sure.

 

Online, actually i think it´s also imposible to move lomac softly with full details.

 

Greetings.

[3Sqn_Fudd]

And for what? there were no cpu who can move softly lomac with full settings since some months ago, an offline for sure.

 

Online, actually i think it´s also imposible to move lomac softly with full details.

 

Greetings.

 

Well Full yes... but that depends on what you mean by "details." Meaning... Full client settings plus, weather, AI, Ships, Radars sweeps, number of server clients, over cities, burning targets, with 40 missiles in the air etc etc... 2 years from now yes... possibly sooner

[H4rM]

I don't understand how you can have Fighter Ops in your mention above when nobody has seen an in-game screenshot yet. The only thing I have seen are rendered images of 3D models which pretty much always look fantastic. I guess we are all hoping it will look good, have great network code and be released before we all exit the flight sim world onto another hobby.

[britgliderpilot]

. . . and be released before we all exit the flight sim world onto another hobby.

 

Playing the harp? ;)

 

 

Graphics are important, and so is gameplay. But you can't just stop improving the graphics in favour of better gameplay . . . the Falcon 4 guys took that line some time ago, and the graphics on that sim now look dated to the extent that I just don't enjoy flying it anymore.

 

Lock On is starting to show it's age in some areas as well.

Some of it can be updated easily - new terrain mapping and textures have already been mentioned as areas of improvement for Black Shark.

 

Some of it, IMO, doesn't need much tweaking yet - the atmospheric shaders, for example, are still pretty good.

 

The water reflections are great, but could do with a better wave shape.

 

The clouds could do with improving, adding cirrus clouds, changing shapes, so forth.

 

Shadows. Ahh, shadows . . . .

The Full Shadows Bug and the jagged edges on self-shadowing could both do with some improvement, of course.

 

 

As ED's future turns towards mudmoving, though, the ground details in particular will require upgrading to stay up to date. Here I'm talking about better trees, more detailed ground textures . . . . and sooner or later, probably updating the models used for buildings as well.

 

If you take a flight through the world of Armed Assault, you begin to see the level of detail that is possible now . . . . and Lock On is starting to fall behind.

 

Of course a flight sim can never offer quite the level of ground detail that a game primarily designed as a first-person shooter can - especially not over such a huge game area - but there are still some improvements that can be made, and we should all hope WILL be made.

[tflash]

If I'm right, Lockon:FC is currently a Directx 8.0 game, and does not support Directx 9.0 functions. This essentially means that on the graphics card, there is little to gain from Geforce 5/Radeon 9800 onwards. If you want more performance in Lockon, you need a faster CPU.

 

It would help alot if the code could exploit more recent DirectX, e.g. shader 2.0 etc.

 

I recently swapped a GeForce FX5200 card for an ASUS N7600GS on an older machine, and whereas performance of modern FPS and RTS games made a quantum leap, as expected there was little to no change in Lockon performance.

[qrazi]

Newer cards did not only add support for DirectX 9/10, also in terms of raw performance they do significantly better.

 

If the step from FX5200 to 7600GS did not give you better FPS in LOMAC, then you simply did not have a bottlenecked videocard in LOMAC. Perhaps LOMAC is bottlenecked at the amount of RAM, of speed of your CPU. Or perhaps it is a driver issue.

 

Going back to your point: The Radeon 9700Pro, one of the first DirectX9 cards, was a lot faster then the Geforce Ti4600, which is probably the fastest pre-DirectX9 card. This I mean offcourse in DirectX 8 applications, since there where almost no DirectX9 applications available at the time.

 

Another example: The Athlon64 is a lot faster in 32-bit applications then its Athlon XP siblings, when compared even at the same clockspeed. That is because not only did AMD add x86-64 instructions, but also improved the general x86 performance by better FPU and integrated memory controller among other things.

[Rikus]

If you take a flight through the world of Armed Assault, you begin to see the level of detail that is possible now . . . . and Lock On is starting to fall behind.

 

It´s incredible that people with super cpu´s can´t move ArmA just with normal settings!!! i´m not talking about high settings, just normal, it´s unbelieble the cpu you can see and the poor fps...

 

Take a looke for some pages of this post:

 

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard311/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=64;t=57902;st=0

 

When a cpu can move softly with full details ArmA, doesn´t matter because then, the graphic standrad will change to a higuer setting and then we start with poor fps again, a bucle?

 

Greetings

[VMFA-Blaze]

If I'm right, Lockon:FC is currently a Directx 8.0 game, and does not support Directx 9.0 functions. This essentially means that on the graphics card, there is little to gain from Geforce 5/Radeon 9800 onwards. If you want more performance in Lockon, you need a faster CPU.

 

It would help alot if the code could exploit more recent DirectX, e.g. shader 2.0 etc.

 

I recently swapped a GeForce FX5200 card for an ASUS N7600GS on an older machine, and whereas performance of modern FPS and RTS games made a quantum leap, as expected there was little to no change in Lockon performance.

 

 

Well these issues that you've listed are true to some degree, but I've found that upgrading your video card setup will most certainly add detail to Lock On...your not going to see much of a change in FPS but you can eliminate most of the jaggys, increase the lighting effects and see colors more vividly .....

 

I guess that everyone is aware that I've completed a new system build a few months back.. I'm now running BFG 8800GTS OC 640 x 2, in SLI, I purchased one card initially and just added the second card recently in order to stay within my budget... So yes there was improvement with each consecutive upgrade, maybe not a quantum leap in performance, as you stated, but a nice improvement in the visual aspect...

 

I certainly would like to see Ed bring us a product that visually equals that of what Crysis seems to projecting.. But I'm afraid that this will effect the game play and might not be possible even with the current hardware that's available...

But then we don't know what Ed's plans for the future are do we...

I'm hoping the new engine that's on the horizon is optimised and will maybe be DX10 compliant...

 

~S~

 

Blaze

[Immermann]

I'd rather it used OGL 2 (or 3 that's just been announced). I don't like Vista.

[borchi_2b]

but what do the guys who cannot afford a expansive GRAKA ?

they are out of the game then or what?