One or two more facade follow-up pictures. Here we have a curved facade airport terminal. There are still some bugs with how the roof and walls go together. A facade definition has two sets of wall definitions: one meant to be curved (with more vertices for smoother curving) and one with fewer vertices for frame-rates when a wall is not curved.
Here is the same picture in wire-frame mode. You can see the second layer of cars. The new facades can have multiple roofs – this feature was specifically put in to allow us to build parking garages.
By request: a series of shadow pictures.
From left to right: no shadows, 1 texture along 500 meters, 2 texture along 500 meters, 2 textures along 5 km, 4 textures along 5 km. The distance is how far into the distance X-Plane tries to apply shadows (longer distances mean more CPU work to shadow more of the world, with less resolution on the shadows) and the number of textures is the number of separate texture shadow maps we apply. The more separate shadow maps we apply, the more resolution we have to work with.
If there’s a take-away point for shadows, it’s this: they’re really freaking tweaky. They can look really good or really bad. The shadows you see here are not at all done; we still have a lot of tuning and optimization to do. But these pictures will give you an idea of why we didn’t ship shadows in version 9 (the way I had hoped to): when they look bad, they look really bad.
I suspect we’ll have rendering settings to let you use more shadow maps to get nicer shadows at lower fps, or tune them down for more speed; we already have this with the reflection detail rendering setting.
This is going to be stunning! I love the wireframe shot. Cant wait to get my hands on the XP10. May switching to XP from MSFS then.. Such High renderable Shadow with a nice performance? Gime GIVEME !! Thanks for the news.. Keep it up *thumps up*
in the final version , will the lines of the terminals, jet way etc.. be ridged like in the above shots? or will this be fixed so the sim is smooth
anti aliasing correct?
i can see the depth the shadows add. fantastic! are those people looking out of the windows? its a cute idea, but they look out of scale, and stretched in some screen shots… just a thought. ( :
ive been flying m$ f$ since I was in the 3rd grade… looking forward to the switch ( :
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Looks fantastic as always. Thanks for teasing us!
Silly idea probably but would it not make sense to scale the area of ground covered by a shadow map with altitude? The lower you are, the less you care about far away shadows and the higher you are the less you care about resolution, is what I’m thinking… 🙂
First of all I have to say you people at LR are doing a great job. The pictures I have seen so far promise X-Plane 10 to become the new standard in flying simulations.
But there is one thing I haven’t seen until now. We have seen scenery, runways, weather, new aircraft models, but no screenshot shows it all together.
Is there any chance to get a glimpse on how the sim will look like from the standard view of most users, sitting in the cockpit in front of an instrument panel, looking outside through the clouds down to earth?
Maybe it’s a bit to early to ask for pictures of that kind, but I think many users are looking forward to get an eye on the “complete thing”.
All the best and keep on rollin’
Marc
I suppose we will get smooth shadows when the weather is overcast ?
Hi Ben, just wondering about 2 things:
1- Are the clouds affected in all this Global Illumination Environment?
2- Will be the visibility still like “tunnel vision”? (I use 120 degrees FOV, and always at 0 degrees azymuth (right at front) is the actual visibility distance)
Well, thanks and hopefully we could get that “Light Pollution glow” above cities.
Regards
Jerry C.
Was wondering, since you are showing us these really need shadows, will we have self shadows on aircraft now and if so can you give us an image of it?
And then of course with self shadows, goes my yearn to see reflections on the aircraft. hehe.
Thanks
If you run with global shadowing, the airplane self shadows, like all 3-d “stuff”. If you run without global shadows, you get the 2-d “ground shadow” from v9.