homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Rise of Flight - The First Great Air War WWI sim, based on the IL-2 engine announced

Best WWI 'pit we've seen, of course!

- The BoB Spitfire still takes the prize...

For comparsion, here are some cockpit pics from Third Wire's world war one sim (also WIP):

Fokker D.VII pit

SPAD pit

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Try this:

Fokker

SPAD

For me it is more important to get a good (= realistic) flight and damage model than a more ore less used looking texture.

Thx!

The Spad looks very nice, the Fokker not so, IMHO. It has pretty rough-looking textures and a somewhat jarring colour choice. I personally think the Gennadich views of the Dr.I look a bit more polished, but of course with room for improvements.

(Fancy radar for the Fokker in the upper right-hand corner, btw! )

LOL!

I think its getting to the stage where people accept that gfx in sims are an important part of immersion.

Current games have large environments with textures and lighting that make a scene look close to photo real. The smoke and haze effects in COD2 added greatly to the experience, I want to see these sort of effects applied to my flight sims, i'm tired of the sterile environments that current flight sims have. I want to feel that I'm flying in a living world.

In this COD2 shot look at the textures on the glove, fingers and the gun. I want to see this sort of stuff in my flightsims. Modern gfx cards can process these sort of high res textures with hardly any additional CPU load.



TBH I'm happy wth the level of flight modelling in IL2, any more detail would be wasted on me and I suspect 99% of people who buy simulations. If the FM convinces me I'm flying and the aircraft perform reasonably close to how they should from old reports I'm happy. I'd rather dev time be spent on improving immersive elements, campaigns and yes gfx (especially terrain and cockpit gfx) than on small technical details.

Yup, the textures on that Ppsh are very nice. I hope to see something like that in flight sims soon (compare with the fairly poor metal and wood textures in the cockpit pics above).

Your looking at shaders and things like bump mapping on that gun. Flight Sims are way behind in this area. Another thing is that a WWI cockpit is much more organic than a metal WWII. Pit. It is tough to do leather and wood, with the way it is done in il2 (2d texture). You rely on the artist to make the material look real. With the proper use of shaders and bump mapping you get realistic textures with less load for the artist but someonehas to create the shaders. Ofcourse this makes it more of a resource hog but in my opinion flight sims generally skip on this part citing poor performance from rendering all that stuff. It needs to get better if you want to attrack players who at first only care about the way it looks and the explosions. Lure them in with great graphics then make them appreciate the FM.

Any chance we can have a higher seat position in those planes? I'm not talking towering above the pit, but high enough that we don't feel like we're in babies in a crib. Yes, I know visibility wasn't so good on these planes anyway. but then again, we can't lean for a better view in IL-2 yet. (or can we...?)

Actually you are looking at a nice texture, a specular map and a bump/normal map on that ppsh. That doesnt mean less workload on the artist at all, since usually both spec and bump maps are made from the layered template of the main texture. Naturally these arent used in Il-2 engine, so all these details (bumps, highlights) have to be done on the main texture. Its not any harder than making them separate, naturally the result wont be as nice. Not to mention the higher poly count (CoD2 guns are around 3500 poly - the same as the older Il-2 pits) But still..you can add a lot more detail to the cockpit textures above.

Ok, that makes sense and it also explains why the quality of the pits in Il-2 varies so much.

Yes, that's a perennial problem in flight sims. The standard explanation is that most simmers want a forward view that also shows the instruments, but with 3D pits I think we should get the option for a higher and (according to every real pilots I've seen comment on it) more realistic view.

It matters a lot for deflection shooting, and therefore influences how we play the game (like the difficulty of snapshooting in Full Real mode and how that affects planes like the FW-190 and P-47).

It is much easier to have someones graphics card do the lighting and create the depth in the textures as oppossed to having the 2d artist fake it. A very simple texture can be made to look good with good normals and bump maps. Much easier to create these than fake it in my opinion.

Pretty graphics put more load on the CPU. All graphics are passed by the CPU to the GPU. This takes up more cycles. These cycles that would be used for flight modelling, damage modelling, or ballistics modelling. All of these put high demand on the CPU.

That's why most of the games with great eye candy have limited physics modelling.

With flight sims there's a trade off, in the next few years that trade off may become very little, but right now it's still fairly significant.

Thing is, your craphic card does the lighning only if you do the proper textures for it. Its the 2D artists job in both cases. Needs the same thinking in most cases, I mean you have to know which parts should have bump, which parts need highlights. No card will calculate that for you, not to mention that would need zillion polygons to make it real. So you have to tell the card with a texture where to do it. Or you fake it onto the diffuse map. Same story, personally i find the first approach a lot more fun, naturally the latter gives nicer result.

Moggy Il-2 was amazing when other sims were less than amazing, he had Gouraud shading etc in there years ago when it was fairly cutting edge. That solution to the forests and hardware TnL. He's already given us SM3.0 I think but he's had to work it into the code. Brave lad

Oleg knows about shaders don't worry mate it'll all be in there and btw Oleg please show us a screenshot from an early build sometime soon we're gagging for it mate

Ming

I've seen your work mate and you are a true artist. It is a tough pill for the pure artist ,I know but honestly digital art for games is starting to morph. Now you have folks like me producing good work when I am not an artist. Graphics for games are differnt than true painting in my opinion (apples and oranges). Much of the overall product can be produced with the shader these days (diffuse and specular lighting, shades, reflection, surface texture etc). Take rendermonkey for example. I can take a generic shader and just add my normal, bump etc to the model and I'm off to the races. It is only more work in that you have more at your disposal as an artist. Downside is that you have to learn how to get the most from the shaders and that takes time. To create the same result with just 2d textures in some cases would be impossible. You can't simulate the reflection of surrounding light on a piece of metal or glass with a 2d texture. Well you could, but a shader makes the reflection dynamic.

In an aircraft like the Dr I one would think that the seat could be modeled a bit higher. There aren't *any* instruments, really, from the screenshots (I've never seen a real Dr I cockpit). That's pretty minimal, eh?

Personally, I'm a Nieuport 17 gal, myself. One Lewis .303 over the top wing-or didn't some have one single Vickers on the fuselage? With the Lewis, you better be careful changing drums lest you fall out! Reckon they'll model the actual 110 hp or so Gnome and LeRhone rotaries, that had like no throttle and you have to blip 'em on and off to slow down for landing ?? I've always read that the N11 and 17 could turn witjin their own length or something equallyamazing, as long as you didn't rip the top wing off.

For the AEF pilots of 1917, a Nieuport 22 (?) would be needed, wouldn't it? That and the Spad 13?

Miao, Cat

Oh well, I guess you are right Killdevil. But luckily there will always be a need for someone who paints the diffuse map. Hmm..unless you use procedural maps only