Friday 2010-10-29 Dev. update and Discussion

[Redwan]

Thanks for your interesting comments about the clouds. I have made some researches on the web and indeed it seems that the FSX clouds, although quite realistic, are not very 3D. They are reported to vanish when one flies through them without occulting the view, which is, I agree, not compatible with the requirements of a combat flight sim.

However I’m still not happy with the graphic quality of the BoB clouds seen until now.

They look too much like an ensemble of cotton wool balls and I hope that Oleg’s team will find a solution to make them look more homogeneous in the future.

And I even don’t talk about heaving a complex multilayer cloud system (even if Oleg promised that … but he promised so many things …) like this:



… but at least I would like to have some realistic looking cumulus’s.

When thermals are active in the middle of a sunny day, the bottoms of these clouds should be more flat, more compact and much darker ! Is it so difficult for an advanced graphic engine like the one used in BoB to produce something more realistic ?

Where are the dynamic wind effects that are claimed by Oleg to be affecting the shapes of the clouds ? Until now, all the clouds I have seen look all similar, like so many clones of one single cotton wool ball floating in a static and boring atmosphere.

Let’s compare BoB and the reality.



With some little photoshop changes BoB clouds could look much more realistic and I can’t believe that BoB’s graphic engine cannot do that. I think that the poor quality of clouds is due to a lack of attention to the completions (lack of time, budget, need to focus on more important bugs …)



PS. Even if I seem to focus on the quality of the clouds (which is quite normal as far as we talk about a flight simulator), please keep in mind that I really appreciate the other great qualities of BoB and the improvements done since Il2.