Shadowcat on 16/8/2020 at 11:20
I can't disagree with any of that -- and I
do think it all looks absolutely amazing.
Quote:
This could be a semantic issue of what you want to mean by "serious fidelity"
I essentially mean that, within the evident data resolution limitations, that it looks accurate to locals. Those "jumps out at you" kinds of inaccuracies you referred to would be an example of a lack of fidelity which might not occur in the regions which they are trying harder to reproduce in detail.
It's all relative of course -- I reckon the whole thing looks grand -- but I also think the world is too vast (by several orders of magnitude) to realistically "fix" a very substantial proportion of inaccuracies (notwithstanding that procedural generation might well be 'fixed' so that structures are never improperly underwater, and so forth). You're probably right in that, for most people, most places will look Good Enough for this to be a bit of a sightseer's paradise.
I'm sure the internet will tell us all about the hits and misses in due course :)
Shadowcat on 16/8/2020 at 11:43
Quote Posted by demagogue
You should watch that whole video & its Part 2 even. He goes practically building by building and points out the few places where something is off. (It's better to start from (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oHHfyBlZoQ&t=28m15s) 28m15s, where he really starts to talk about it.)
Having watched that first video from that point onwards, I'm seriously impressed. If that's truly the kind of detail we can expect globally, I'll simply eat my earlier words.
Thirith on 17/8/2020 at 08:38
I think I played some Flight Simulator 2 on Amiga as a kid, though never for very long. It was one of those games that I had a copy of but no manual, and that fascinated me because it was so cryptic. Just getting to a point where I could take off was already an achievement. Sometimes I wish that there were more games that offered this kind of experimentation and discovery (what happens if I press this?), but as the core gameplay rather than as an effect of me not having the right set of instructions. Though I suspect that I simply wouldn't have the patience for that kind of obliqueness any more, unless the feedback is much clearer and more immediate.
Other than that, I played some action sims on C64 (can't remember its name, but there was one set during the Blitz where you could eliminate V1 and V2 flying bombs by flying right next to them and nudging them with your wing). I was intrigued by the Lucasfilm Games action sims, but by the time we got a PC they'd moved on to the Star Wars space sims.
heywood on 17/8/2020 at 16:26
In addition to the manual, there was a "cheat sheet" reference card for the controls and a bunch of charts. I can't imagine playing FS2 without at least having the reference card and knowing the basics of flying, which the manual covered in surprising depth. Also, if you wanted to actually go anywhere, you needed the charts and you needed to know how to use the nav radios. The developers probably put more time into writing the manual and creating the charts as they did into writing the software.
Switching to the new game, I expect the level of world detail is going to vary because it depends on the quality of the available aerial imagery. For example, if you browse Microsoft's Bing maps, everything looks consistent at zoom levels where they use the satellite imagery. But once you zoom in close enough to switch to the aerial imagery, the boundaries where two different sets of aerial imagery have been joined become obvious. Sometimes they don't line up just right, but more often it's because the imagery was taken at different times of the year and in different weather/sunlight conditions. The aerial imagery around where I live looks like a patchwork of imagery taken in winter. spring, and summer. It's a similar story with Google Earth. My house is rendered in 2D with imagery taken in the spring, but in the woods just behind my house everything pops into 3D using winter imagery. If I move two kilometers to the South, it's 2D summer imagery taken in the evening. If I move 3 km to the North, it's 3D summer imagery taken around mid-day.
henke on 18/8/2020 at 08:22
PSA: 1 month of XBox Game Pass for PC is 1€ for new sign-ups! In case you wanna try this thing on the cheap. I'm downloading it right now.
Also, I did get a few months of the Game Pass over the past few years but it still considers me a new sign-up. Weird, cool.
demagogue on 18/8/2020 at 09:16
I think we should start a new thread with the right title and OP. I'm downloading the thing now. If it ends before I have to sleep (it's ~100 gigs), I'll make a video and can make a new thread for it. But anyone else is free to do that before me.
