Julhelm

Those textures still take 61.5mb of actual video memory... Besides that looks incredibly blurry for 5 x 2048^2 textures looking at the panellines since I can easily have individual rivets and small stencils using just a single 2048 dds texture:

It's a pity I'm developing an indie game?

I got bored with planes so I went and started developing my own game.

Short answer: No. Keep in mind that in addition to the above, JPEG has to be decompressed into VRAM at runtime, unlike DDS: This also applies to .png format, which is also small filesize yet as expensive as bmp or tga at runtime: Compressed DDS can be run streamed directly into GPU VRAM, so a 1024x1024 DXT1 texture comes out at roughly 1.25mb, and that's what it takes up in video memory. However, if we load the same 1024 texture as a JPG or PNG file, it gets decompressed into 8-bit RGB, or 1024kb per channel, which ends up at the same 3mb size as were it a BMP. So JPG and PNG are actually more expensive despite having a smaller filesize on your harddrive. So don't do it.

Jpeg has s**tty compression. DDS is industry-standard. Can you post the texture flats?

:(

Cyclops

Most of the book is actually Larry Bond.

I'm not sure how many of you have seen these before but there's a ton of hard-to-find info in these and well worth the low prices. I personally bought the last issue that has among other things articles on the F/B-23 and F-23 NATF. http://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/index.htm

Hey I watched that movie just now.

Hey doesn't Iceland like have no trees at all anyway?

When I was a kid my favorite airplane bar none was the RA-5C. I've lost count of the number of digital RA-5's I've created since doing an A-5 shootemup using SEUCK on the C-64. I know I did a bunch in FST which was an awesome program. It had really good terrain tools, too.

Hey Stary, you forgot "weapon unlocked" and killstreak bonus level up popups covering 80% of the screen.

50km is still ludicrous draw distance.

You only need like 5 hours to complete a modern FPS anyway so that shouldn't be hard. Just send the missus to take the kids to grandma or something.

But then he would need to purchase additional kilobytes from his webhost. Can't afford that.

Can't afford marketing. Everybody knows you need to be big like Activision to do that.

But that violates the first law of Third Wire sims.

And you don't get it. Hardcore sims are designed to be excellent simulators. Not games. Therein lies the crux. When "sims" start moving into training-tool fidelity land, they cease being games and no manner of "lol arcade avionics options" can change that. Sure DCS has "game mode" but turning such on reveals it as a very shallow game compared to something like F-19 or Jetfighter 3 which were still optimized for fun over realism.

Of course. The market used to listen to the hardcore sim crowd before and that almost killed off the genre as far as being mainstream entertainment. I also like my games somewhere in between arcade and sim, like they were back in the 90's. However I also expect my games to at least try and match current visual standards. Now the standard retort to that around here is always the tired old "but TW isn't a AAA company with millions of dollars in budget". The reality is that what makes AAA games ridiculously expensive is the amazing amount of content needed to produce Hollywood-grade blockbuster entertainment. A game like BF3 or MW3 has literally thousands of different animations, sound samples and environment props. Needing to have a small army to create all that content is what is expensive, even with outsourcing everything but the key content it costs tens of millions of dollars, and then you add tens of millions of dollars of marketing on top of that. The actual tech is comparatively cheap in comparison. And it's not like a flight sim needs as much environment content as a AAA FPS anyway.

I agree with Dave. In fact the sim community as a whole seems to suffer from diminished expectations. We just rush out and buy any product because we're starved and get a bone thrown at us. Thats what makes us end up with SH5 and Cliffs of Dover.

I'm sure that's what customers said when IL-2:Cliffs of Dover was released.

It's kind of the same thing as a skybox. Basically you have an environment texture laid out in the shape of a cube and you then sample from it to reflect the sky and ground on your game objects. If you have dynamic day/night cycle you can also write-to-texture to the cubemap so that it updates on the fly. It's what FSX does with its reflections. It's more expensive but then SF2 was never intended to run on a PS3 with 256mb ram.

Hey all I asked was why the canopy glass looked really bad in the F-14 pics. I suppose that makes it my fault for wanting simple cubemap reflections when TK inevitably pulls the plug on his business rather than the guys who seem to be expecting Fleet Defender 2-type features. Maybe if I complain about the stock SF2E terrain in the background of one of the pics TK will come and personally remove any and all copies of SF from your harddrives. Then we can really have a "bash Julhelm" party here.