Cool – thanks for posting that!

To those who were not there, the McPhat guys were not messing around…multi-camera, separate audio, etc. As an ex-audio/video guy I appreciate the production values. 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goY_QEkBow0

By principle I won’t touch MS, and by “heart” I love XP, but I’d reiterate the above comment – a lot needs to happen, quickly, for XP to really win the hearts of the majority of the sim community. It’s a better product, by far!

I have to say the grass and weeds detail I saw in some shots of Aerosoft XPX airfields was fantastic – I love that, particularly for landing helos! And missions … layering on missions and learning programs (Khamsin’s T-28 Trojan is on the path) would bring so much more involvement to XP.

Keep up the good work, fight the good fight, but don’t let down your guard – ever! The sim economy is attractive enough for the beancounters at MS to authorise the MSF investment, but I reckon XP should have their lunch.

once again —> 🙁 :-(. This is so sad actually. Flying in and around tropical islands, with the new HDR and the new clouds, would be simply extraordinary with tropical water textures… but that’s OK. We can’t have everything…. we already have a lot and find ways to complain!!!

I’m terrified! Such awesome capabilities are only keystrokes and mouse clicks away. So much to learn….and I want it all!

Im like a kid in a candy store! Good stuff 🙂

Nice use of specularity! All of our in-house guys really get a lot of leverage out of specular and normal maps – you can create a lot of depth with some careful texturing.

There are some more tricks in the sim that we need to doc. You can “de-amplify” the power of a normal map, allowing normal maps to be used for ultra-small deformations of a surface without precision problems. Once you do this you can get very subtle specularity, like the reflections of light on a building.

In HDR mode you can also fade out your normal maps and albedos separately, which means you can burn in ‘normal map’ bumpiness _outside_ the visible range of an overlay.

No third party SDK for water right now.

I have been playing around with the new scenery system in XPX for some time and right now many of the changes you have programmed aren’t apparent in the sim. I am sure as development in-house and third party warms up more the look of XPX will change drasitcally.

I’ll be glad when you do get this new documentation released. Right now I have been messing around with “Normals” on the ground terrain and have run into a few snags. But as luck would have it I performed an Alpha layer trick, on accident, and I really love how the specular highlights can make a big, minimally expensive change to the ground textures.

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYWAMkNT_Ys&feature=player_embedded

XPX has huge potential for development in the future and I look forward to being a part of it!

as for my real comment now: does XP10 allow third party developers to touch water ? (colors, textures, waves ?) originally you’ve answered no. But does any 3rd party developers at this meeting mentioned anything about it ?

thank you