Don't look! - you'll go blind ...

[MaXMhZ]

But you'll never forgive yourself if you don't look:
http://forums.netwings.org/forums/showthread.php?t=5445


OMG I warned ya!

[CrazySchmidt]

The pic from Max's link:


OMFG I am happily blinded . It will be interesting to see the same shot from a much lower altitude though.

My poor old PC is going to haemorrhage I just know it.

Cheers, CS.

[MaXMhZ]

hehe - I'm gonne get lost chasing those red buses down below there

[KenleyKid]

Blimey, I'm sure that's my mum's house down there - I can drop in for tea via my parachute (of which I'm becoming an expert just lately).

[Lionman]

I must say the addition of even minimal AI moving traffic would hugely enhance the realism of such ground detail.

I have also been a virtual flier in the last 5 iterations of MS Flight Simulator and have always been deeply dissapointed by the "blurry flat photograph with children's building bricks" style of so called "ground-detail". FSX looks as if it will totally address this and I full unddrstand that Oleg's team must make constant trade-offs of CPU useage to attin better ground detail. It looks as if they will be attaining far higher standards in Storm of War BoB however.

[IV/JG1_Oesau]

What has surprised me is that at this stage the development team have not taken on dual CPUs. I understand that most people don’t have them, but if you are to implement dual CPU coding you can nearly double your power (it’s not quite as simple as doubling your processing power). I’ve said it more than once, releasing a flight sim title for long life is unfortunate. DirectX 10, Vista, 64 bit, PPU’s, dual CPUs are all things coming up in the next year or two. The potential increases in home PC power is going to be large and this title may not be able to take advantage of it, which is going to be a shame.

[MaXMhZ]

What has surprised me is that at this stage the development team have not taken on dual CPUs. I understand that most people don’t have them, but if you are to implement dual CPU coding you can nearly double your power (it’s not quite as simple as doubling your processing power). I’ve said it more than once, releasing a flight sim title for long life is unfortunate. DirectX 10, Vista, 64 bit, PPU’s, dual CPUs are all things coming up in the next year or two. The potential increases in home PC power is going to be large and this title may not be able to take advantage of it, which is going to be a shame.

It's true there are some exciting new technologies just around the corner these days. While that's a good thing, I don't think even Vista will be using multiple processors to it's full potential. M$ would need a re-thinking and re-design of Windows OS from the ground-up It is simply impossible to run a real multi-processor system with Windows OS like you could with e.g. Linux (which is Unix based, and can take advantage of multi-processors That said, there are signs that make me think FB is already being prepared to go that way (the "ProcessAffinity" setting in conf.ini e.g although that still doesn't do much probably because of Windows just using multithreading and not multi-processor capabilities. I also think Vista has some real bad design decisions in it. It will not support the newest OpenGL e.g. - this means no more programmable shaders for nVidea either which already gave us some inpresseive eye candy in FB like the water / reflections, smoke, new clouds and atmospheric effects The programmable shaders in OpenGL even make real-time raytracing possible
Releasing a flightsim title for a number of years to come is probably a necessary company decision, otherwise you can't plan a head and can't do any real long term planning. It worked very well for the originsl IL2 Sturmovik, and I don't see any problems arising if it's done for BoB. We will probably still have the great support Oleg has allways given us in updates and add-on's. Last I heard BoB is just the first title in the SOW series and the way hardware and programming systems are progressing, it would be a very hard thing to say what's on our desktops in a couple of years. We've already seen a couple of "technology jumps" in the lifetime of the IL-2 series and I suspect this will happen over the lifetime of the SOW series too - by that time we'll need a new computer anyway.

[hein-kill]

Sigh, unfortunately all is not what it seems: This from Oleg's latest interview on BOB SOW.

Oleg: ...it is not the final looking texture. It is currently a great smart mix of manual drawings and satellite photos. The final will be almost all manually done, because all the places with buildings must correspond to actual 3D buildings of the sim and not “switch” visually at different altitudes. We can’t directly use photos to get that photo realistic looking landscape from different altitudes simply because we can’t model so many different types of buildings, bridges and types of trees and forests. Everything should correspond to the set of the 3D database for our sim. In this case it will look similar and will not switch to the other landscape at low altitude.

Meaning that this screenshot is the ambition, which is admirable, but not the reality...it is a photoshopped satellite pic.

I know pre-sell hype is necessary to make a commercial success out of a game project, but need honesty go out the window?

[MaXMhZ]

How do you suggest they show us what BoB will look like if even the best systems out there now are not able to cope? Oleg did say in so many words we would need a new system once BoB was released. It definitely has nothing to do with dishonesty.
I'm very glad they give us an impression of what BoB will look like once it's released instead of keeping quiet
Oleg's interview at SimHQ Part 2
Besides, what's shown above is not even the original picture (see Oleg's interview for that.)

[EURO_Snoopy]

To be fair Oleg nor anybody from Maddox games said that those texture tiles were representative of what we will see in BOB. Those pictures were taken from a collection of images released on a E3 show CD with no info included.

The community has created the pre- release hype by raising their hopes based on rumour and guess work. It is remarkable how someones comment about a possible inclusion in the game becomes hard fact within a few threads.

Maddox games continue to be tight lipped about any real progress, neither of the SimHQ interviews really tell us any more than we knew from Oleg's forum posts earlier this year.

It's good to see Oleg set the record straight and if anyone remembers CFS 1 we should be grateful he isn't going the tile route.