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
