Comments on: The Future of Precomputation https:/2011/08/the-future-of-precomputation/ Developer resources for the X-Plane flight simulator Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:16:29 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Andras Fabian https:/2011/08/the-future-of-precomputation/#comment-2610 Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:16:29 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/blog/?p=3646#comment-2610 Ben, maybe I might answer this one (as I have a lot to do with GlobalScenery)

The problem with such a pre-test would be, that there is not very much you could contribute in the short time frame of a beta (some months before release?), that could be fixed for the final product. There are lots and lots of decisions, preparation already made in the quite long – years(!) – of preparations for a Global Scenery where you can’t just quickly overhaul many of them. There are gazillion of factors that go in that scenery. There is a lot of RAW data (many many GBytes are piling on our disks), lots of this data is refined (months of work). There are also a lot of special algorithms (developed over months), with a lot of specially tuned configs (rules), to transform raw data to scenery (many months of work). There are lots of new technologies on the sim side, which needed to be developed, before all things work (many months of work) …

So, if you would/could test, you could definitely point out a hundred of things, which you would have done differently, or which doesn’t seem perfect/good. And other users might point out completely different stuff … in the end, making scenery is kind of art (and art is often a question of different tastes 🙂 )

And even if some of those observations might be valid, I doubt we could change too much about them in the short time of a beta phase (because often such changes would mean big overhauls – some of which might not be obvious to the users/testers).

So … well … I understand that everybody is eagerly waiting for the new stuff 🙂 … But I only can ask, be patient. We try to do our best.

]]> By: Richard https:/2011/08/the-future-of-precomputation/#comment-2609 Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:05:08 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/blog/?p=3646#comment-2609 If baking (pre-computing) provides fast loading, fast running and excellent compression then these are all positives.

One problem (other than the limitations on custom editing) might be that if you only bake 1 cake every few years there is not much opportunity for getting feedback and improving the recipe!

Do you provide early test versions with a fraction of the global scenery?

Eg. The 2 tiles north and 2 tiles east of +22,+113 give a few airports, cities, mountains, seas, rivers, islands and lakes!

People might be happy to spend time exploring different versions of this area without you having to provide any custom scenery or the complete v10 engine.

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