...looking at these two pics I got off the screenshots section of the Squad Zen referred to I see some new objects visible in these two screenshots of a dock area. Check 'em out and tell me what is new!







TX-Cuda
Minister of Information

Yeah, we also have lights and smoke of various types. . . if you try out my Guadalcanal Sea plane map you will see the new smokes, lights, buildings, cranes, etc. . . not that it's a big showcase of anything. . but anyway. . .the thing thats lame about the lights and smoke is that they can't be destroyed as the objects tehy are fixed to are.S!TX-EcoDragonBlack 1TX-Squadron XO

I know this sounds like I can't be happy with what I have but... I'm not impressed. The water is really good and so are the reflections. Yet we have the same boring ground objects. The buildings are flat and the clouds still only come in 1 flavor. We trade a lot of computing power for dynamic lighting and it costs us in performance and aesthetics. Here are some examples of what the sim could look like if texture baking was used, better clouds, and the dynamic lighting turned to static ambient light only. Texture baking is used in games to run complex lighting rendering directly to a surface saving the rendered texture map to a file. The complex lighting is then removed so you don't have to calculate all the rendering on the fly. Of course you need a limited amount of dynamic lighting for the planes, but the entire environment needn't rely on dynamic lighting. TX-Kingsnake

....Herr Kingsnake. I have to agree. If there was a game that had graphics like the ones shown in the pics in your post I would surely like to try it out...if the gameplay and flight dynamics were on par with FB.......good to see ya Dude!TX-CudaMinister of Information

Maybe the game is the way it is because that is the best performance we can get. I'm just thinking that these renderings look really good and I wish the game could look this good. They already know this and may be in the process of making the next game look good. I know that a scene takes a long time to render and when it is texture baked it can take a huge render time and make it interactive in real time. The point is that you needn't rely as much on computing dynamic lighting conditions and you can get better graphics. This is how the CoD engine works. We can't have static time in the game, AI moves to waypoints on a time basis and there would be a huge tradeoff in other aspects of game play. I would be willing to give up the changes in daylight.TX-Kingsnake