Following a forum discussion, I finally became curious and tested the FSX demo version yesterday. I've spent about two hours flight with it, testing 3 different planes (the ultralight, the Baron and the Learjet) and had a look at different weather conditions and daytimes around TNCM.
The installation process takes forever, opens one useless wizard after the next one and never gives any indication what it's actually doing - the Windows way.... Also startup isn't exactly fast. A few immediate nice impressions: * The launcher GUI is very pretty - including some pics in the GUI adds a nice touch and gives you more immediate impressions what things are about. In comparison, the FG GU (both launcher and in-sim) is very rough around the edges. -> I guess it's a matter of taste, but including a pic of the weather situation to expect in pre-defined scenarios would not be a bad touch for our GUI for instance. * I got the IR-sycnhronized LCD shutter glasses 3D effect working out of the box, so I was able to test FSX in real-color 3D which looked very cool - I've never been able to make FG do that, I can activate the whole set of 3d options, but they never trigger my shutter glasses. I wish FG would support that function... -> Win for FSX. One in the cockpit, I had serious trouble finding my way around. Maybe it's just whay one is used to, but looking around in the virtual cockpit the FG way came much more natural to me than looking around in FSX. I didn't find any way to adjust my field of view at all. In the following, I maxed out all graphics and realism options I could find. 1) Terrain: * A big plus about the FSX terrain is that it doesn't have landclass seams. That makes it quite a bit nicer to look at from above. It's not so impressive from close-up, and all in all, I would conclude that regions where we did apply a regional texturing scheme and use the best shader effects available are in fact quite competitive. In particular, I think the recent 2nd generation Hawaii in FG or middle-east looks much better from close-up and is still about on par when seen from a few thousand feet. Of course, FG terrain can look much worse in areas where we didn't customize it. -> Pretty much a draw. Hiding the landclass seams better would still be the thing for FG.. it's just not so easy. * I know several people who were especially impressed by the water in FSX. Personally I wasn't at all. What it does get is that it knows where shallow water is and thus it gets lighter and the ground can be seen through. But for instance it doesn't have as nice waves and foam as our water, the scenery reflections it generates look completely unrealistic, ocean just doesn't do that, and it didn't really change color when underneath a 8/8 cloud cover where it should have gone to grey - as the FG water shader does. -> So that's a win by a narrow margin for FG - still, being able to include depth information into the rendering would be cool. * Models of trees and of the aircraft carrier in the vicinity where largely on par. Probably FSX has more graphical artists and the quality of for instance tree textures seems to be a bit better, but the technique is otherwise pretty similar. I liked seeing a few other aircraft lined up on a carrier - the FG carriers are usually rather empty. -> Ever so slight edge for FSX 2) Weather (I looked at 'Fair Weather' and 'Rain' scenarios.): * I wasn't at all impressed by the quality of 3d clouds. The Cu clouds are sort of very impressive at first glance from the ground , right until the point where you realize that they just don't look like real clouds. The form seems to be designed by an artist to impress, but the combination of shapes doesn't occur in real Cu clouds which are turbulent raising air motion. The distribution of cloud sizes is all wrong - a real sky generates Cumuli at all size scales, FSX just does two or three. The distribution of locations is all wrong - they should cluster over islands where convection is stronger than over water, but they don't. They don't respect time - I've gotten the same amount and size in the morning as during the day. They're far too white - real Cu have rather strong self-shading. This leaves the impression the clouds where made to resemble the pretty picture in the launcher GUI of fair skies, but they miss out pretty much every subtlety I've been struggling with when designing the Cu system of Advanced Weather. -> Clear win for FG. * The Cirrus clouds do actually look quite nice and better than what we have - here having people who can do good texture extraction is an advantage... -> We could need a helping hand from some photoshop/gimp master to get better Cirrus textures. * Rain and overcast skies didn't impress me either. The rain generated in FG looks more plausible to me, and the light underneath the overcast sky was just wrong. From above the cloud layer didn't look very good. -> Well, the overcast has also issues, so FG has an edge, but just slightly. 3) Light * I wanted to see a Caribbean sunrise and... well, it was quite a letdown. Cloud shading and lighting is plain wrong, light reflections on the water look acceptable, the sky color looks plain wrong, there's nothing like Mie scattering on clouds,... -> Atmospheric Light Scattering is really light-years ahead in this department. The FSX sunrise is barely on par with what the default rendering scheme in FG creates. 4) FDMs * I've tried the ultralight, the twin-prop Baron and the Learjet. As far as I could tell, they handled just the same, the only difference i noticed was the airspeed I could get out of them. It's just no comparison at all to our JSBSim beauties like the SenecaII or the P-51D where the FDM feels even the torque from spinning up the engine. The FSX experience reminded me of badly tuned YaSIm models - it sort of gets the rough characteristics right, but that's about all. -> Clear win for FG. 5) Cockpits * The cockpits in FSX demo were rather nice - about on the level of the 4-star and 5-star FG cockpits. One striking difference is that often in FG the instrument panel is done in hires, but then looking to the side I get to see coarse, monochromatic surfaces whereas FSX textures every interior surface of the cockpit in reasonable quality. Question for modellers - often interior surfaces are just textured by a color - like grey for metallic surfaces. I think the appearance would much improve if we'd replace that by a material texture - if we had a library of leather, metal, plastic in various colors,... it doesn't seem like a hell of a job to improve the visuals drastically. The eye keys so quickly on monochromatic surfaces... Having said that - for instance PAF team work (the DR-400 comes to mind) is actually even a bit better than FSX quality. -> on average an edge for FSX * Instruments were animated in rather jerky motion, I've never seen FG do that. -> Win for FG here. 6) Performance * I was struggling to get 20 fps delivered with full details - and that's in a mostly-water Caribbean area in fair weather. To be fair, that's 20 fps per eye, so in reality the system was clocking between 30 and 40 fps - on a GeForce 670M which is one of the best GPUs I could buy! FG with full eye candy in Hawaii scenery under similar cloud cover delivers me a constant 60 fps. -> Win for FG. In summary, I had expected that FSX would be much more impressive graphically. But it just isn't - maybe it gets better when you install all addons, maybe not, but out of the box, if we make a fair comparison between FSX and FG scenery where we've put an effort in, FG is in many areas better in the visuals, in some at least on par, and there's not so much where FSX actually has an edge. Given that the demo is probably designed with the aim of impressing me (rather than making me turn away), that's not a bad result for us. As for FDMs, I found FSX not really measuring up in this department. If I compare the Baron with the FG SenecaII, then it's just a no-brainer. So - it might give us some hints where to improve, but that's actually not a bad outcome. * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. 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