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[HiFlyer]

This sim just arrived, and its freaking beautiful! Its like watching aviation Pron.   

Aerofly FS 2 - KLAX to KLAS - Airbus 320 - 4K 60Hz



Smooothhhhhhh!

[2eyed]

For me it looks like the same FS experience I had 10+ years ago: Stay away from the ground or the blurriness will hit you hard!

[HiFlyer]

For me it looks like the same FS experience I had 10+ years ago: Stay away from the ground or the blurriness will hit you hard!

Not necessarily......

[2eyed]

Ok, it's got scenery with detail runway textures, but static water texture, cotton ball flat clouds, aircraft shadows looking like stencils, probably 1m ground texture, a mesh more like 30m. It's an overall look I had with FS2004 and Megascenery SoCal more than 10 years ago. Where is the big progress here?
Granted it is early access.

[KW71]

Ok, it's got scenery with detail runway textures, but static water texture, cotton ball flat clouds, aircraft shadows looking like stencils, probably 1m ground texture, a mesh more like 30m. It's an overall look I had with FS2004 and Megascenery SoCal more than 10 years ago. Where is the big progress here?
Granted it is early access.

And, again, all the houses, trees, cars "baked" in the 2D texture, as from 2:25 and on... "Same for breakfast again!!"

[josem75]

In fact is a bit simple simulator compared with others. And also this texture concept, with all baked on with his pros and cons (Sometimes weird to see those cars or planes baked on the terrain, but from altitude looks almost real life).
But i dont remember this visual capacity in my fsx time ago (which was very blurry, Vague for show buildings and trees, etc). 
Here it seems all the city with houses, textures and trees can be charged with no glitches or big blurries, and long distances.

So in visuals i would say this is the more advanced i saw in a simulator. Dovetail did something similar but looks a bit weird compared.
The atmosphere is also very decent. The visivility is very well represented. Also the scenary is awesome, i dont know if this is the only city that you can fly in the game. With 1m textures, 30m terrain. And so many buildings and trees details.
How much terrain in the world is represented in the game like that? Its posible to fly anywhere?
I remember my aerofly only in Switzerland in the past.


So half of that visuals are the amazing scenery and 1m textures. And the other half is how smooth can represent it in long distance with a decent atmosphere.
In the future Outerra will be ready for import those kind of sceneries, cant wait for that moment.
Outerra concept with the future idea of a base texture 15m and represented detail to 1 cm, its a mix in the simulation concepts.  We will not see baked things but a very rich color mix of the world. Probably a great realism in altitude flight but also when go downn to the ground.

[2eyed]

josem75 wrote: In the future Outerra will be ready for import those kind of scenaries, cant wait for that moment.

I don't think this is the approach the OT devs want to take. It would collide with their technique of procedural generated scenery and the down-to grass-blades rendering.
But more resemblance to the real world means of course more world data input here as well.

[HiFlyer]

Ok, it's got scenery with detail runway textures, but static water texture, cotton ball flat clouds, aircraft shadows looking like stencils, probably 1m ground texture, a mesh more like 30m. It's an overall look I had with FS2004 and Megascenery SoCal more than 10 years ago. Where is the big progress here?
Granted it is early access.

The water can be changed at any time with a little work. As for the clouds, I think they look about standard for flightsims, and better than most. I have an extensive collection of Megascenery for FSX, and by and large, they don't match this resolution, much less the dreck I purchased for Fs2004. 

Can we really complain about mesh when Outerra uses about the same resolution, albeit enhanced?

The progress would be in speed, lighting, view distance, painstakingly detailed city areas, 64 bit and a living hopefully growing sim based on the same. (SDK is promised asap)

I dont know if this is the only city that you can fly in the game. With 1m textures, 30m terrain. And so many buildings and trees details. How much terrain in the world is represented in the game like that? Its posible to fly anywhere? I remember my aerofly only in Switzerland in the past.

The entire world is covered in lower resolution ready to be enhanced by developers. The higher resolution areas cover California, Nevada, and Arizona with over 150 high detailed airports.. There are plans to add Switzerland to the High-res mix. Honestly, if Outerra was at this moment offering something comparable, I think we would all be out singing, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't be happy about this, too......

[2eyed]

I see it this way: Aerofly does presumably the same thing  we have with the MS sim platform for years. There is nothing ground breaking. Unlit billboard trees, baked shadows, mediocre atmosphere model and so on. At low flight levels it shows way less detail than OT due to photo textures. Grand Canyon scenery shows low detail mesh and heavy LODing.
If you keep your flight level high (above 2000ft) and look down at the right time and angle it can look decent and sometimes convincing, but its probably not better than Google earth.
Nevertheless I would buy it if they had VR support.

[josem75]

Ok, it's got scenery with detail runway textures, but static water texture, cotton ball flat clouds, aircraft shadows looking like stencils, probably 1m ground texture, a mesh more like 30m. It's an overall look I had with FS2004 and Megascenery SoCal more than 10 years ago. Where is the big progress here?
Granted it is early access.

The water can be changed at any time with a little work. As for the clouds, I think they look about standard for flightsims, and better than most. I have an extensive collection of Megascenery for FSX, and by and large, they don't match this resolution, much less the dreck I purchased for Fs2004. 

Can we really complain about mesh when Outerra uses about the same resolution, albeit enhanced?

The progress would be in speed, lighting, view distance, painstakingly detailed city areas, 64 bit and a living hopefully growing sim based on the same. (SDK is promised asap)

I dont know if this is the only city that you can fly in the game. With 1m textures, 30m terrain. And so many buildings and trees details. How much terrain in the world is represented in the game like that? Its posible to fly anywhere? I remember my aerofly only in Switzerland in the past.

The entire world is covered in lower resolution ready to be enhanced by developers. The higher resolution areas cover California, Nevada, and Arizona with over 150 high detailed airports.. There are plans to add Switzerland to the High-res mix. Honestly, if Outerra was at this moment offering something comparable, I think we would all be out singing, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't be happy about this, too......

I agree with you. The first aerofly was already a nice new simple product from new kids on the block. Waiting for see how they would improve in future development. So now with the time we have the answer.
Just seeing they are still developing is good news.
We know its diferent simulation concept with outerra. This is pure flight simulator, nice for fly and not that good for ground.  This is what make Outerra so special and promising. And we are all here for that since long.

Personally i feell more attracted with Outerra concept and visuals (perfect ground approach not only fly).
But i like also fly over cities in pure modern simulators which are well made.

Do you know if its posible to fly with high speed planes like military jets? Or if its posible to have free models from comunity working there?
Also, if its posible make and find free content for scenaries, in Fsx style. Because i still have some terrain data prepared for fsx for my place in 5m resolution and 1m textures. Would be great adapt for aerofly.

[HiFlyer]

I see it this way: Aerofly does presumably the same thing  we have with the MS sim platform for years. There is nothing ground breaking. Unlit billboard trees, baked shadows, mediocre atmosphere model and so on. At low flight levels it shows way less detail than OT due to photo textures. Grand Canyon scenery shows low detail mesh and heavy LODing.
If you keep your flight level high (above 2000ft) and look down at the right time and angle it can look decent and sometimes convincing, but its probably not better than Google earth.
Nevertheless I would buy it if they had VR support.

I'm wondering if we are looking at the same videos......

[josem75]

I see it this way: Aerofly does presumably the same thing  we have with the MS sim platform for years. There is nothing ground breaking. Unlit billboard trees, baked shadows, mediocre atmosphere model and so on. At low flight levels it shows way less detail than OT due to photo textures. Grand Canyon scenery shows low detail mesh and heavy LODing.
If you keep your flight level high (above 2000ft) and look down at the right time and angle it can look decent and sometimes convincing, but its probably not better than Google earth.
Nevertheless I would buy it if they had VR support.

Also agree with you in some of your parts. But what i remember from Fsx, it was not that powerful like those new engines for show geometry and details (not blurry all the time).
In suppouse those new engines do the same we had but with more capacity, and much better optimization.
In this aerofly did a very good job and going probably in the right way i guess. (still lacking in other things like clouds, water, etc). 

I always though 15 years back, the future of fligh simulators was improve the ground, adding stones, grass, etc (not always all so flat).  At the moment nobody did.
But Outerra concept did it and its more in that idea, for that attracted me instantly, even in a very early develop.

[Occams Razer]

If nothing else, though, it's almost certainly a good thing to have more competition in a market that's been pretty stagnant for most of its history. Particularly as their main concurrent competitor is Flight School, which has no modding support, light content, far-too-dark clouds, and color grading out the wazoo.

That, and a more segmented flight sim market will make it easier for Outerra to jump into the fray.

[HiFlyer]

On comparisons to other sims:

We have learnt over the years that publishing a new flight simulator in the PC market is a difficult thing, to say the least

We have those people that are happy with our approach and think its a fresh start in the flight simulator business, on the other hand there are existing FSX and X-Plane users that are rather skeptical. The main problem is that our potential customers are ranging from casual users that just want to make a quick flight up to demanding users that want to simulate every aspect of flying.

Comparison to other simulators is something we cannot stop, but FSX is in the market for many many years and has grown especially due to the huge amount of 3rd party AddOns. This is something a new simulator can never achieve right from the start. But it is our long term intention to offer an open Flight Simulator as well where other users can add content to it.

Developing a Flight Simulator takes time and the internals of Aerofly evolved over many years, but we now have a solid base that we can built on. That's why we think is the best time to enter the Early Access program. We will listen to your Feedback and we will try to implement as many wishes as possible, but it takes time, so please be patient with us.

Regarding an SDK:

An SDK is our top priority. Attracting external developers will help us getting more attention from the hard core flight simmer enthusiasts.

For all the rest, wait for our posting next week, where we will publish our roadmap.

Regarding ATC:

Thank you for your feedback. Next week we will publish our roadmap for the upcoming features.

We will have a high priority for add-on developers and we are also in contact with PilotEdge.

We will also add more functionality to our airplanes.

Where is the A380?

The A380 requires some more work before we can release it. We will not sell it as a DLC.

Regarding better ground textures: We plan to offer a special download option where users with lots of space can download additional data, but we have to check this first with Steam.

All your other requests are also on our todo list. Its too early yet to publish more details.

Is this program worth the Money?

It seems like people don't seem to understand Early Access. We want and need the feedback of users to add new features and to fix bugs. This first version was never ment to be our final version with respect to what it has.

Is this a simulator or a game?

What people do not understand today is, that there is not that much difference between a fast mobile devices compared to a desktop computer. The main difference is that desktop computer typically have better 3D graphics, but the actual computing power for performing the flight physics runs at its full precision on both platforms, so Aerofly FS 2 is running the same engine on mobile devices and on the PC version just with slightly adjusted parameters.

Our flight physics engine runs at the highest precision even on powerful mobile devices.

The big difference in the mobile and PC version is the fact that we use higher resolution textures as well as a lot more complex vertex and pixel shader. Lighting does look much better on the PC version.

Also the PC version features airplanes will a lot more functionality, e.g. some parts of the cockpit are operational.

Autopilot/FMC/MCDU modes

The current version of Aerofly FS 2 allows full IFR flights. You can tune in the navaids from the worldwide VOR/DME/ILS database and set the courses according to your enroute and approach charts. Also all autopilot functionality should be directly usable by operating them inside the cockpit.

At the moment, there is no ATC guidance whatsoever. This is one of the major topics we would like to get feedback on and see how much demand there is compared to other topics.

User generated content:

It is our explicit intention to allow user created content, like airports and airplanes.

The user requires a 3D modelling tool that we support ( e.g. 3D Studio Max ). We will then deliver tools to convert from those 3D tools to our internal format.

Setting up an airplane however requires manual editing of a text file which requires quite some work. Once Aerofly is available you can see that all airplanes and airports have text files that you can look into.

[Krutan]

For me it looks like the same FS experience I had 10+ years ago: Stay away from the ground or the blurriness will hit you hard!

Textures are quite low res for low level flight, but they are going to update the game with high res satellite images.

I think it's a terrific sim. Really great for some chilling VFR flying