• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

The First Catalina 'Pit Pictures!

warbird861 said:
The old Aerosoft Manhattan scenery for FS9 and the Seahawk & Jayhawk were supposed to be these 'limit pushers', but I don't know how demanding they were as I never had Manhattan and I got the Seahawk so late that I already had proper hardware to run it. I just realize that I haven't flown it for ages, I'm off to do some chopper flying :running:
Click to expand...

Manhattan for FS9 was unflyable till I upgraded, but even though I ran with max settings, even at KLAX with full AI/real weather, I still had problems using Manhattan with real weather.
The seahawk for FS9 was flyable when released, but the boxer included with it was a complete overkill of detail which is why I put off getting the FSX package

I really respect the fact Aerosoft makes no excuses for pushing forward with FSX design, it's just their views and products are hit or miss. I wonder how many purchased the F-16 are are no longer using it due to the detail.
 
MCDesigns said:
I wonder how many purchased the F-16 are are no longer using it due to the detail.
Click to expand...

Again, I don't find the F-16 much more detailed than any of the good performance planes I have. A ton of polys does NOT mean a ton of detail. Good texturing results in a ton of detail.

I don't fly it much due to the performance I get with it, not because its too detailed. Aerosoft and some of you seem to be equating polys (I heard the -16 is 350,000 polys somewhere... maybe its more) with detail. That's only a very SMALL part of it. If they wanted the F-16 to be more detailed, they should have used higher resolution textures, especially on the exterior. 1024 x 1024 is hardly detailed anymore.

I'd venture to guess you could chop HALF the polys from the F-16 and use smart texturing and you would NOT be able to tell the difference. When the model is around 35 megs between the interior and exterior, chopping half the polys could help performance quite a bit. There's no reason NOT to optimize when you can't tell the difference anyways (not saying Aerosoft didn't optmize their F-16 models, but much more could have been done).

To me, announcing the extremely high poly count sounds like bragging more than anything. There are MANY other products out there that look as good if not better than the F-16 does, and they have a third or maybe even less of the polys the F-16 has. That being said, the F-16 does look good and its a solid product. I enjoy flying it, but the performance hit for what I get doesn't seem worth it to me. Most other developers seem to be able to balance performance and detail and get an equally stunning product.
 
some1 said:
What's eye candy in this?
Click to expand...


The way it's done is to take one or more valid sim parameters, create some .xml or C++ code, put those parameters through the code as an .xml gage or .gau file, and use the result to animate a gage or part. Some very "realistic" results can be obtained through this kind of trickery. The method can also be used to activate controls, like slats or flaps, variable-sweep wings, landing gear lockout, and other stuff.
 
I'm very satisfied with the Aerosoft F-16, and fly it almost daily. I added almost all extra paints available on the net, and tweaked/modified the birds to personal satisfaction. The F-16 however, is not really limit-pushing (at least not for me). Hope the Catalina will be of at least equal quality (and they will find time to develope a two seater F-16, and the latest development variants after release of the Catalina, though a dual seat Flanker (SU-30 MK and variants) would also be on my top favourite list)). :wiggle:
 
Here's a new texturing example :wavey:

index.php


Remember, still early beta
 
MCDesigns said:
I wonder how many purchased the F-16 are are no longer using it due to the detail.
Click to expand...

If I am in the mood for a fast mover its the 1st one I go to! Doesnt drag on my rig at all.

Personally I like that Aerosoft is on the bleeding edge.
 
Code: 
There are MANY other products out there that look as good if not better than the F-16 does, and they have a third or maybe even less of the polys the F-16 has.

....... :icon_eek: ...please, tell me more about these products!!?? I`m flying the Aerosoft F-16 every day, and I think this is the best jetfighter-model there is, both inside and out.
 
I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into this discussion....

I find it quite amazing that A2A can achieve a HUGE level of interior/cockpit detail but yet doesn't take nearly the hit in FPS as some Aerosoft products.....

Just something to ponder...:kilroy:
 
ROB is a very talented modeller and he exactly knows which aircraft components shall be modelled at very high detail and which not. Besides that he maps and PAINTS the interiors. This allows him to plan everything very carefully from scratch. My 2 cents regarding the A2A :)
 
I should also add that A2A enjoys the same FPS advantage over AlphaSim interiors as well...

Panther_99FS said:
I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into this discussion....

I find it quite amazing that A2A can achieve a HUGE level of interior/cockpit detail but yet doesn't take nearly the hit in FPS as some Aerosoft products.....

Just something to ponder...:kilroy:
Click to expand...
 
djwaglik said:
ROB is a very talented modeller and he exactly knows which aircraft components shall be modelled at very high detail and which not. Besides that he maps and PAINTS the interiors. This allows him to plan everything very carefully from scratch. My 2 cents regarding the A2A :)
Click to expand...

I think the main reason is that ROB runs FSX on a reaaaly ancient computer, with everything set to low except aircraft details, and that made him very sensitive about performance.

Pray he won't upgrade his computer in the nearest future. :costumes:
 
Panther_99FS said:
I should also add that A2A enjoys the same FPS advantage over AlphaSim interiors as well...
Click to expand...
I have also noticed that A2A seems to be the masters of the realm of High-detail, High-performance aircraft...Hopefully Aerosoft's claims of the Cat's FPS-friendly design are accurate.
 
Unfortunately, Mathijs made this comment:

Mathijs Kok said:
QUOTE ( Maverick322 @ Dec 30 2008, 11:15 )
Dear Mathijs Kok,

I think this is a bad case from Aerosoft! Yes, hardware is becoming cheaper but there are still people who cant afford to buy new hardware every year. So I think it's important that developers should trive for low FPS. But good news that the Catalina would run smooth.
wink.gif
Click to expand...
<!--QuoteEEnd-->
Good point, but what you state makes any progress into a more in-depth and more immerse very hard. If we make software for middle of the road hardware bought 12 months ago we would be just repeating what we done before. The Catalina is intended to be sold for 18 months at least. So we always make it run fine on top of the range hardware when we launch. We got a shop full of products that will run fine on somewhat older systems.

Now this means that for some users our newest products will not run satisfactory. But we don't hide that, we'll tell people that they need serious hardware for some products. The Catalina will have hardware requirements along the line of the F-16.

  • Microsoft Flight Simulator X (SP 2 or Acceleration)
  • Windows XP/Vista with the latest Service Packs (XP recommended)
  • Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (2x 2666Mhz) or equivalent (Core 2 Quad CPU recommended)
  • 2 GB RAM
  • DX9 Graphic Card with at least 256 MB (512 MB strongly recommended)
Most likely we'll increase the CPU demands a bit. Even when we go up two levels we are still under the 200 Euro level and 8 levels below the top spec CPU. I think those are realistic specs early 2009. I realize some people can't afford that. But again, we got a shop full of products that will run fine. When we launched Manhattan in 2006 most people complained it looked great but was a slideshow. I have not heard that comment in the last 18 months. So if you buy the newest software and expect it to run on old hardware you can be disappointed.
Click to expand...

So while the F-16 runs fine to me at 12-15 FPS (and the strangest thing is that it runs fluently, compared to the 25 FPS I get most of the times with the Twotter), I don't know what to expect from this. Finn, beta member at Aerosoft, notes FPS is very good:
Finn said:
But progress is going well and FPS so far is very good, even on my low end maschine (AMD Athlon +3500 single core) !
Click to expand...
Perhaps Warbird861 can tell us more about this ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top