I spend most of my day looking at X-Plane looking bad. If X-Plane looked good, there’d be no reason for me to look at what it was doing. (Poor Tom – I seem to alway
s have one of his planes loaded when I take a goofy screenshot. The Baron looks a lot better when it hasn’t been melted.
Besides pictures looking goofy due to bugs (that intersection was not supposed to have the sidewalks rotated) I often do my testing on old or random art assets I find lying around my hard drive. Those cross-walks aren’t even what we’re supposed to be using; they’re just something Alex sent me months ago to tinker with. Typically most of the scenery isn’t even in the picture to save time loading the sim.
A lot of the time the art assets that I use have been painted over to make debugging easier. The red, cyan, green and yellow intersections have been painted bright primary colors so I can see exactly where the 13 pieces of an intersection end up positioned. The real art assets are carefully drawn to blend together perfectly to create the illusion of a continuous world. Such a world is nearly impossible to debug!
A lot of what I see includes debug markings that don’t even show up in the final sim. The yellow and pink dots show various road grid mesh vertices; the color coding shows the level of mesh vertex duplication. (In this shot, there’s a lot of duplication – yellow – this was taken while I was measuring an inefficiency in the rendering engine.)
So I heed your calls for more screen-shots, but most of the screenshots on my hard drive are like the ones above, not the ones I am about to post; rather the ones that look like you might want to fly the sim are few and far between.
There are still a bunch of bugs in these pictures, but after staring at yellow dots, Dada-esque airplanes, and rainbow intersections all day, I was surprise to see something that looked vaguely like my home planet.
My Mac Pro (2.4 ghz Core 2, 8 cores, Radeon 4870) gets just about 20 fps exactly with those shots; that’s with global illumination and a shadow setting that will be medium; forests and autogen are maxed out. I’m hoping to get a bit more performance out of the sim when I have time to tune shaders, but that’s also an aggressive set of rendering settings on a no-longer-new computer.
The last set of screen shots (the planet Earth ones) look absolutely awesome! The ground texture in the crosswalk nightmare also looks just great. I just can’t help but chuckle at the freeze-frame polygon explosion of the plane–ya gotta break some eggs to make an omelet though. I’m quite excited to see all the bits and pieces you’ve shown us all together. Keep up the great work!
Are you sure your Mac Pro is an 8 core 2.4 GHz? Only the latest generation Mac Pro has an option for dual 4-core 2.4 GHz Xeon CPUs.
OMG those last screenshots are looking great Ben! Maybe the trees are a little ginormous.. Love the attack of the paper planes pic. We don’t mind all the colour coding, it shows the complexity of the make-up of the scenery that we don’t get to see.
Well it had to happen one day. After all the complaints, the mayor couldn’t neglect the complaints from the eighbourhood anymore, and he had to give in to the wishes of this particular neighbourhood. And now they have it.. and it’s their pride and glory. And it’s so convenient for all sorts of things too.
There it is, shining it’s light like a beacon of hope, a sign of things to come maybe, in the bend of the street: the first streetlight of the neighbourhood. A first safe haven for those who dare to endure the dark shadows of the night.
I really like the screenshots 🙂 Am i to conclude that the engine will be generating flyovers for freeways as well? And signs along the road too, it seems! will these be generic, or will they actually have the right indications on them?
It seems X-plane 10 is shaping up to be one helluva sim.. Keep the screenies coming!
2.4 GHz Core 2? You confusing the Mac Pro with another machine?
Oops – my bad, 2.8 ghz. But it’s _not_ the current crop of Mac Pro’s, it’s a generation back, pre i7.
Is it the early 2008 model? I have one of those and I hope it has what it takes for the entire XP 10 run. I have a HD 3870 but plan to buy a hacked HD 5870 PC card when they get a little cheaper.
The 2.8 GHz machines were the early 2008 machines: Mac Pro 3,1. So, two generations removed.
WOW. This totally blew my mind up. This is incredible, just stunning. The detail? Made me stare at the screen shot for 10 min and yet I keep finding more details. This really made my day. Really looking forward to some more shots to demonstrate the overall looks. I am particularly interested in seeing night shots with lit lights, lighting up roads etc.
This is almost too good to be true. Great work, Ben and all of you others working @laminar! This is going to be a super product and I can’t wait to get my own copy of it! Keep the good work up!
Ditto Chris,
Keep up the GREAT work, V10 will be an incredible step up!
Well worth the wait!
Very impressive work guys!
Even the slightly complex junctions seems natural and realistic. Any more info on how you handle tunnels, junctions and layered roads?
Love the shadows too. Will tall mountains cast shadows too, or is it too demanding on the system yet?
Keep it up, this is a big step in the right direction!
Don’t mountains cast shadows already?
Looks great. Can’t wait!
@ Lozz
Mountains in XP9 are shaded by the sun, but don’t cast shadows on other objects or terrain.
That looks cool. I hope my not-so-awesome hardware will stand a chance, without having to disable it all.
What happened to the Baron? Added and subtracted three million from each vertex?
Each unique vertex has had its XYZ coordinates changed by an amount modulo the vertex id; this has the effect of making cracks in a mesh where the vertices are not shared (but keeps shared vertices manifold). I wrote the shader hack to debug vertex sharing and optimization in the terrain mesh; a ‘small nudge’ for a terrain triangle is a big nudge for a GA plane.
Ah. That makes sense. Indeed adding and subtracting 3 million wouldn’t shatter mesh topology like that, although it looks about the same otherwise.
Great work! The last couple of pics look great. What worries me is that all the posts seem to indicate that evidently there is no way X-Plane 10 was going to be ready for X-mas 2010, but it also won’t be ready any time soon – the messages point out to early stages of development in many things (such as the ATC and the rendering engine optimizations). All in all, I guess the real release date will end up being Q4 2011 if I’m not mistaken in my observations.
But hell, the thing is going to be awesome…
It does look amazing. Makes me wonder: how hard would it be to actually have a populated world with some people walking down the sidewalks here and there? I think this would make things way more immersive, while it shouldn’t be too hard to implement, as far as i can see. We’ve been flying in ‘dead’ worlds for as long as i can remember, where cars and planes seem to be the main lifeform inhabiting our planet (next to the flocks of birds and herds of deer infesting airports, that is).
I like the new ground textures in the 2nd pic (fubar_junction.png) … details such as rocks when you get up-close are nice to see.
I am surprised all you major contributors to X-P aren’t given new Mac/PCs by Austin so you can maximise your efforts in the time available. If Austin is big on charity it should be remembered that “charity starts at home”. Keep going Ben……. 🙂
BJ
Rest assured, the minute our development machines become a problem for us in terms of efficiency, we’ll get new ones for sure. The truth of the matter is however that it’s beneficial to keep around older machines so that we can have systems that more closely match what our users will have. If we all start developing on 8 core monsters, you guys lose because we don’t see potential candidates for optimization since we’d run in all situations at 100+ fps. 🙂
What Chris said. Plus what’s really handy is people in the company all having different machines (where possible within the limited set of Apple hw offerings).
… and some of us even use Windows PCs (though I do admit to having just bought a Mac Book Pro!).
– Robin
Looking good, Ben.
In line with the recent Org discussion, any chance we’ll be seeing more realistically sized (i.e., generally shorter) trees in Ver 10?
Look very nice – it will be great for VFR. But… :
1. Why sunday in X-Plane looks like a cloudy day in real world? Similary, no enough brightness and bloom effect.
2. So low fps on the screens – is a Videocard or CPU problem?
Stop whining. If you want to run a state of the art sim anno 2011 on an old PIII-450 Mhz then you probably should look into upgrading. Things happen in the electronics segment and one can not expect that one’s 12 year old PC should run todays sims just perfect without hiccups. Upgrade. And enjoy the new decade.
Not even a remark on the raised highways, which look fantastic by the way. I really am excited to see what the final product will be…..