Comments on: Cutting Back on Shadows

By: flo

flo — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:27:53 +0000

One word on shadows:
I have much less flickering with beta9, first time I enjoy 3D shadows on aircrafts – just some minor issues. In general shadows look to crisp to me in brocken/overcast conditions. In XP I have a crisp shadow of a wing or even a propblade that are about 5-7 feet above ground.
I observed RW shadows today (broken/overcast) and found that you hardly see any shadows at all. Only langer objekts very close to the ground (<=1 feet) cast shadows and even they are washed out.
Of course it's impossible to simulate all aspects of shadows but to soften the shadows for overcast conditions would be a good improvement IMHO.

Cheers
Flo

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:36:03 +0000

In reply to Filippo.

Hi Filippo,

You are right: HDR is a big emphasis here – in particular, one of the primary goals for 10.10 is to make the airplane authoring SDK work in HDR and non-HDR mode, so that authors can target 10.10 and not have to update their airplane later (and not have to worry about weird HDR artifacts, as happens when some v9 airplanes are opened).

re: HDR taking over, I think in the long term that _is_ the future, but I think we’re going to have both modes for a while. The first-person-shooter world has followed a similar trajectory (with the first deferred rendering games providing two rendering modes, and newer titles that target only console+modern PCs going deferred-only). I think we’ll be dual mode for the entire v10 run; unknown at which future major version we’ll make deferred rendering mandatory.

By: Filippo

Filippo — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:30:26 +0000

Hi Ben,

considering the later blog articles and the 10.10 beta history, I deduce HDR mode is receiving fairly high attention from a development point of view. Do you think HDR is going to become the standard rendering path in some future version of X_Plane, or the traditional renderer will continue to exist togther with HDR?

By: Nick Wood

Nick Wood — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 09:50:19 +0000

In reply to Flightime56. haha, yes, taking off from an obscure scottish island airport I had a 747 suddenly appear and cut across the runway .... funny!

By: Tymon

Tymon — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 19:32:39 +0000

In reply to Andrzej. You are not alone, i am hoping for a OSM recut or at least a way to import the roads myself. I like to fly vfr but my town looked like a desert when they made the scenery cut.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:57:40 +0000

In reply to chris.

Perhaps because you’re in your cockpit and watching where you’re going? 😉

Accurate supersonic performance is one thing, visual effects are another. The original eye-candy intentions are still a work in progress.

Also, the ring you speak of only occurs in certain conditions of temperature and humidity. It would vary in size according to the aircraft size. It could be added by plugin, using the appropriate datarefs to show or hide an object with an appropriate texture.

By: chris

chris — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:29:57 +0000

In reply to snagar. cant wait for 64bit, will make xplane fully enjoyable

By: chris

chris — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:07:25 +0000

how come in the new beta 9 with all the postings for supersonic, I see no speed of sound cloud ring around an aircraft at high speed?

By: Heiko

Heiko — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:34:10 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. with beta 9, the flickering within 3d cockpit has mostly gone (GTX570) :-). fps hit is quite heavy...

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:09:28 +0000

In reply to Evan. The amount of flicker should now be the same with HDR on or off.