IV/JG1_Oesau wrote:The views that have been shown of the terrain have look great, But the real tester is how it looks when you are down low. That’s the same of any flight sim though. Look at BoBII WOV, from high alt it looks great, down low I personally think it looks horrible (the argument is that BoB was mostly high alt fighting, which is true).
I agree completely. With the possible exception of LOMAC none of the modern flight simulators look at all convincing at low altitudes. IL2 FB is good apart from the forests which on close inspection are just "blur layer sandwiches with collision detection".
One day we will have the bandwidth and computing power for the landscape to have something approaching the level of detail commonly found in most first person shooters for infantry these days although that will not be for some years yet. Until then we can only hope that the "additional graphics CPU" concept (to supplement a graphics card with massive RAM) gathers momentum as that will enable the handling of many tens of thousands of ground objects instead of the mere hundreds our GFX card/CPU combinations can handle now.
I am definitely NOT one of those geekish gamers who dismisses things as "eye candy that merely waste CPU cycles". Indeed if we had listened to those guys we would all still be using DOS and flight simulators would never have developed beyond the white lines on a black screen wire-frame flight sims of the earliest days.
On the contrary, an effective virtual experience depends on convincing us that "we are really there" in a real situation, in a real place so I am 100% for 3D photo-realism ASAP.
Never forget that it is we gamers, as discerning and extremely demanding consumers, with specialised requirements, prepared to invest in the hardware to enable us to enjoy our entertainment, who are actually DRIVING the cutting edge of development right across the computer software and hardware industries. As the single most demanding form of dynamic software that one can ever run on any form of computer, "ultra-realistic" simulations are absolutely key to this development.
In the larger scheme of things this is certainly a non-trivial matter and has knock-on consequences in a vast range of other industries and realms. Although always dismissed as a trivial waste of time by bean-counters and techno-philistines, "play" and "what if" scenarios have always been a major source of creative and scientific development and discovery.