Friday 2010-06-04 Dev. update and Discussion Thread

[Chivas]

The SOW game engine will be DX 9, 10, and 11. I'm sure if Oleg still plans to make SOW into a complete series over the next 10+ years it will also be able to migrate to DX12, and beyond.

Luthier is still working with Oleg. I know Luthier stopped working on the Korean sim for the time being to help Oleg complete BOB.

[engarde]

wonderful.

eagerly looking forward to get my hands on this little gem.

and money is already put aside for beefier video / memory / cpu, not to mention control sticks and throttles.

[engarde]

not to mention the compass glass in the 109 is curved.

not just a flat bitmap over animated needles.

excellent.

[Xilon_x]

yes http://www.a2asimulations.com/wingso...eenshots/4.jpg

good model good cockpit clikable but FSX not is WAR SIMULATOR BUT CIVIL SIMULATOR non exist combat flight simulator X

[Dano]

Originally Posted by Tbag

All the little bumps and the air filter, they don't blend in with the rest of the model but have a very sharp "edge" where you can count the polys. Also, the parts of the aircraft that you can see from within the cockpit look rather crude compared to the A2A models.

They're all down to a lack of AA or the shadows, nothing to do with the poly count.

[AdMan]

Originally Posted by Zorin

I only increased the polygon count to a pount where there was no gain for overall quality beyond it, just like the SoW models. It is easy to throw around with polys, but there is no real gain in the longrun to do it just because you can.

Besides, where are those ugly edges on the Bf109 cowling? I can't see any. All I can make out are rough contours due to the lack of AA.

The poly count is quite good and barely noticeable but there are some instances that I've seen where I can count the polys, for instance on the Wellington cowling it looks pretty clear that it seems to be a 16 sided cylindrical shape.

...BUT, this may all be irrelevant as poly count is less of a concern for modelers with the new tessellation features of DX11 and the latest graphics cards. GPUs are now doing things like refinement algorithms which acts sort of like a smooth modifier does in 3dsmax. Of course there's no way to tell if this is being/has been implemented by looking at these screenies (pretty sure their all dx9 anyway) but if it is or if it can be applied in the future, advanced tessellation could probably make that 16 sided cowling look like a melted lump of butter. AND this can be applied to pre-existing models since it is a real time rendering process, the only question would be if you could apply the smoothing to specific polys without it adversely affecting the entire model.


read more here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html

[phoenix1963]

I really hope Oleg is not using Speedtree... it's more than a flight sim requires and will kill the CPU and graphics card.
Also, frankly, the trees look wrong. The trunks are too thick, even their "European Beech" doesn't look like the beeches I see in SE England. Something wrong with their fractal dimension it seems to me.
One of the characteristics of the vegitation here is that the trees & bushes all merge together in both hedgerows and woods because the rainfall is pretty high (one day I'll try and post some pictures if I can rope in a friend's Cessna). Single trees needing this level of detail are a small proportion of the total number of trees. An improvement of something less flat than the current "flat trees" would be absolutely fine.
As an aside, artists for thousands of years have been struggling with exactly this problem, how to represent trees without painting every leaf? There's nothing really new! Also streaming particles through stochastic mixtures in science.

56RAF_phoenix

Originally Posted by Zorin

While talking about trees and hitting stuff hidden underneath I was wondering if you will make use of the break up physics of the Speedtree module?

http://www.speedtree.com/showcase/?video=physx-breaking

Now that would finally give trees some reason to exists, except for the sole purpose of being scenery.

[Dano]

Oleg has already stated it is speedtree with customised trees if I recall correctly.

[kendo65]

To my eyes the SOW models look better than the B17. I am pretty sure that it is the comparative lack of AA in the SOW shots that is creating the apparent difference.

[KOM.Nausicaa]

Originally Posted by Dano

They're all down to a lack of AA or the shadows, nothing to do with the poly count.

I think Tbag has a misunderstanding about what a polygon in 3D modeling actually is ..