Comments on: Next-Gen Cities

By: simmo

simmo — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 05:40:59 +0000

Great update Ben. Do you know if OSM Data for all the world will be used, or on release it will only be the larger population countries? I'm in Australia...
Ability to customize plausible local scenery will be good, I assume new tools or processes will be used? Goodie, more toys?
Finally, could features like fences between properties be randomized within an area? I love the look of those fences, but the same for hundreds of houses will look repetitive. Picky picky!

Simon

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:15:14 +0000

Users will be able to replace these art assets via the library for regionalization — in fact I hope people do so!

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:14:41 +0000

The article isn't accurate to X-Plane because there are multiple instancing extensions. We require GL_ARB_instanced_arrays or an OpenGL 4.0 driver (which bakes that extension in).

Now it gets trickier because the quality of instanced arrays varies quite a bit. I don't have good data on the latest DX11 cards, but amongst the DX10 cards the ATI cards do this better than the NV ones. (This style of instancing is core to DX11, so my guess is that the DX11 NV cards catch up, but I don't know for sure.)

By: Tonka

Tonka — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:18:01 +0000

Ben – to your knowledge, is this Wiki article correct in saying that GPU's which support OpenGL 3 will support hardware instancing? http://bit.ly/j1dm3

Thanks.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:54:36 +0000

Looks incredible!

I hope the road traffic can be customized too so that on smaller suburban roads you don't get large trucks.

How do you assign the land area for each building? I hope its customizable so that inner city areas can have higher density housing.

Think of some Asian cities like Manila, in some areas you could fit 3 houses in the area occupied by a single house in those photos. In 'Slum' areas maybe 8 'houses'.

Have a look at Google Earth around RPLL (Manila) you will see what I mean about high density housing.

I understand that out of the box you're only going to have support for US cities but at least make the scenery system customizable enough so that 3rd party devs can produce great looking/plausible scenery for other parts of the world.

Regards MatthewS

By: MajorFibbs

MajorFibbs — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:34:03 +0000

Looks promising, but why are these pictures so dark, apart from the ones in twilight?
Let's hope the level of details can be achieved with 2010 computer hardware? And I hope Laminar will not make the same error like MS a few years ago: promising more than what will be implemented or worse what the user can achieve.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:12:15 +0000

We need a video of a plane flying over the new scenery, that way we can get a feel of how it all looks during actual flight.

By: John

John — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:56:50 +0000

Thanks for all the info. I don't know how Austin feels about presenting more info on X-plane 10 (if he is worried about promising stuff that can't be shipped, or something?) - but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say every tidbit released gets me more excited for x-plane 10.

If I see some really crazy feature and it turns out it can't be implemented, seeing the technical background for why makes things a lot better and helps me image what the future might hold and appreciate the ingenuity that go into the work arounds.