Cool review Renk! Regarding FDMs: I was at a friend's this christmas and since he had just bought X-Plane 10, I had the chance to test it with C172 to see how it handles...
FG clearly wins here since on X-plane there was not even a slight 'adverse yaw' (aileron-breaking) attitude when turning the plane, with realism on full. (Unless that particular c172 model had differential ailerons, although nothing of the sort was visible when I was looking at the model from the outside). All best, /Klearchos On 27 feb 2013, at 08:44, "Renk Thorsten"ng <thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi> wrote: > > 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. > Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics > Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: > http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb > _______________________________________________ > Flightgear-devel mailing list > Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. 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