Terrain Detail

[Liquidpinky]

Looks like they need to work on the sat map a bit, looks like an addon makers early beta map like that at the moment.

[BiggerBoat]

YoYo - Your pictures show a bunch of rural areas, which don't look too bad because of the relative lack of detail. Fields and rivers tend to look nice at low resolution and reveal some of the advantages of satellite terrain.

However, the urban areas just don't hold up. THere's too much of a contrast between the detail of the buildings and the muddiness of the terrain. It was actually a couple of your videos which made me first go "uh, oh."

Here's a couple of screenshots. Notice the general gray blob that represents the I-5 corridor through downtown Seattle. If you go a bit south, have a look at the Sea-Tac airport as well.





Also note the sort of sandy green underlying color of the terrain. This seems really off to me. This area is defined by deep browns, deep greens, blues, and (through the I-5 corridor) the gray of concrete. None of the colors in the sim seem right.

Trying not to be a downer. I love Bohemia games. But this is just a deal breaker for me. Other people will probably think it's fine.

I'm hoping what I am seeing is system-specific and/or indicative of the beta.

[kludger]

I installed to a SSD and the textures seem not too bad from ~2000 feet in the light helicopter (maybe it gets more blurry in the faster ones) but what I noticed once I got out of Seattle into far North Seattle (Richmond Highlands) and went low altitude is that there is no autogen 3D objects down low besides cars that far out of town.

It kind of reminds me of FS9 back when I used to run Megascenery 2005 PNW photo scenery with no autogen.

So I am assuming the autogen was only mapped so far for the beta, I am hoping the final version will have autogen buildings mapped farther outside the downtown or that they can be added later as a mod.

Still the helicopter handling is pretty fun and the mission possibilities should be great, enjoying this especially as someone who lives in Seattle and was not a fan of the FSX helicopter modeling.

[.kju [PvPscene]]

Here is a developer statement on the subject:
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthrea...15#post2026915

Some things to keep in mind:

• PC performance directly affects the detail of any texture and also the ground texture. While playing, the game simply needs to handle the massive amount of data being streamed in and out, and it will not show the most detailed level all the time. We are doing our best to optimize the engine to handle this the best it can, but not all imagery you see published on the Internet will be showing the game at the best available detail of course
• There are data size limits we run into and had to make decisions about. The amount of pixel data necessary for a 60 by 60 km (let alone 120 by 120 km) texture quickly becomes unmanageable for: development (editing tools), distribution (amount of DVDs) and the streaming engine (internal memory).

Maybe the pre-release beta does not have the highest level texture to cut down the download size?

[OMAC]

Obviously trade-offs must be made to balance looks and feel (performance). I have to say that the beta is VERY DEMANDING on my system already - almost ridiculously so. AVG fps is way down, low 20's max if vis distance is set to ~12,000 and obj dist. to about 5000. Even with all settings set to normal (which is utterly unacceptable in terms of visual quality), fps never exceeds 35. In the training sessions I almost never get above 20 fps, flying over water. Gonna have to tweak my settings big time.

If they increase ground detail without tweaking something else, performance will decrease further, which will be disastrous. I'd hate to be playing this game on an average system. The guy above is running at 4.7 GHz with two GTX 570's in SLI and gets only 20-30 fps with settings maxed? THAT SUCKS! Something must be done to increase performance, and that cannot include reducing detail, which is already quite bad on the ground as it is. A conundrum indeed.

[.kju [PvPscene]]

Did you try to disable picture in picture?

[YasT]

Obviously trade-offs must be made to balance looks and feel (performance). I have to say that the beta is VERY DEMANDING on my system already - almost ridiculously so. AVG fps is way down, low 20's max if vis distance is set to ~12,000 and obj dist. to about 5000. Even with all settings set to normal (which is utterly unacceptable in terms of visual quality), fps never exceeds 35. In the training sessions I almost never get above 20 fps, flying over water. Gonna have to tweak my settings big time.

If they increase ground detail without tweaking something else, performance will decrease further, which will be disastrous. I'd hate to be playing this game on an average system. The guy above is running at 4.7 GHz with two GTX 570's in SLI and gets only 20-30 fps with settings maxed? THAT SUCKS! Something must be done to increase performance, and that cannot include reducing detail, which is already quite bad on the ground as it is. A conundrum indeed.

I'm getting the same fps using a 2500k @ 4.8Ghz and two GTX470. The problem is that the graphic cards are not being used by the game. It's usage, according to MSI Afterburner is always around 50% each, and it doesn't seem like the cpu is being stressed a lot (less than 60% if I remember well).

[BiggerBoat]

Did you try to disable picture in picture?

PIP makes a big difference in performance (I assume this is the mirrors)? Turning it off adds about 10 fps for me. This keeps me at 30+ fps when setting all of the dials pretty high. Making some other adjustments easily gets me to 50-60 fps.

The textures do get a bit sharper as you make sure your system has some headroom. You can start to see a bit of the detail in roads and railways.



However, the quality of the textures still tops out pretty low for me, no matter what I do with settings. Seattle-Tacoma airport looks like it's been ravaged in some sort of war.



And since all of us are going to be buzzing between buildings in downtown seattle, I'm not sure why we're not seeing a bit of 3d detail to the freeway interchanges (maybe coming in the final release?)



More worrisome is that, even at 60+ fps on a pretty robust system, I am getting constant shifting of textures from kinda' blurry to very blurry and back again. If any of you are familiar with FSX and the constant battles to avoid "the blurries", this is that situation compounded 100x. It's pretty distracting.

I'd love for this to be unique to my system. If anyone is seeing something dramatically different, please post screenshots.

[DnA]

... and went low altitude is that there is no autogen 3D objects down low besides cars that far out of town.

The Pre-Order Beta only has Seattle (Lite). That mostly means that about 25% of the environment has objects and the rest was removed. Of course in the full version the entire environment is covered by objects.

[Toroges]

this sounds good DnA

so i like the Beta and im looking hopfully to the final