P3D V3 and AIcarrier

[JensOle]

Hi,

If anybody wanted to know if AIcarrier works with V3, it does! I have seen no issues so far except for the ship wake issue which first appeared with V2.5 and the 3D waves.

[spatialpro]

I sure do wish LM would fix that darn wake issue! I was really hoping v3 was gonna be the one...

[JensOle]

Yeah, it sort of ruin the ship experience. If you have followed the wake thread there are workarounds for most ships with changing the fx file, but a few have hard coded wakes which cannot be edited except removed.

[Paul Domingue]

I don't think we're going to see a fix for that until they get around to having surface vessels react to ocean wave height. That would take a major revision in software architecture so don't look for it until version 5 or 6.

[spatialpro]

Simply 'cos I have a curious mind and I'm keen to learn, what parts of the architecture would need to change and how?

[SkippyBing]

For starters you'd need more information in the sim.cfg for the ships to have them react to the waves in a realistic manner. i.e. centre of mass, centre of bouyancy, moments of inertia etc. If you want real accuracy you'd either want to read the 3D model to see how the centre of bouyancy changes as waves pass along the hull or have a look up table to achieve the same. The maths is relatively simple, but you do need a lot of information which isn't currently in the sim to make it look accurate.

[Paul Domingue]

Skippy said it better then I could. Since P3D comes with a submersible that tells me that they are seriously considering future development on this. The waves are currently only an effect. To turn the waves into an actual environment variable seems to me to be a very complex undertaking. Not only do you have to take all the things that Skippy pointed out into consideration but you have to link it to wind variables and then project it over a constantly changing effect that covers a relatively large area. Once they do overcome all the problems the coders will encounter it will probably require a very high end computer system. Or I could be entirely wrong.

[roger-wilco-66]

I second what Paul said. Water or waves are just an effect and have no physical properties except being a hard surface (for landing and crash detection). If you look closely at the shoreline you even will notice that the 3d waves continue a tiny bit on the land surface, so I suppose the tesselated land and the moving water surface are rendered as part of the same 3d model with limited special properties to each part.
Static models of ships don't bob on the water surface, and it appears that simobjects that do bob do so in a disconnected way, it's just an algorithm that lets them pitch and roll a bit, hence this is not a model that is connected to the properties of the moving water surface.
I also observed that "water" is not excluded in 3d models that are "hollow" and have open space beyond the waterline. The waterlevel just cuts through the model and appears in the ship wherever it can be visible. That's the same on land, except that we have tricks here that can be employed to sculpt the land surface and make room for pits or submerged hollow cavities.

However, knowing that P3D is a large beta stage project, I'm confident that things like that will be addressed sooner or later. I also don't worry about the math and impact on the sim - today's systems are extremely fast with math calculations and there are even frameworks like the PhysX engine that explicitly deal with the simulation of natural environments, like water (every, even older Nvidia GFX cards can employ that).

It is also interesting to have a look at other Sims or FP shooters, most of what we want or ask for has been done before (e.g. Silent Hunter or the latest FP games).

Cheers,
Mark

[Paul Domingue]

Mark, I forgot about Silent Hunter. That's an excellent example. Although the aircraft are AI they must have some rudimentary FDs. Imagine if you could merge FS+SH, my wife would have to drag me away from the computer!

[roger-wilco-66]

One of the great things in SH and other Sim-type games is that the texture mapping is not so rudimentary. It would be great if we could employ techniques like ambient occlusion or shadow maps, or even displacement (adaptive tesselation) maps. I hope that if LM introduces DX12 one day they will incorporate some state of the art DX12 features. To close the circle and return to the topic, an enhanced environmental model (e.g. water with some water propterties) also would be great!

Cheers,
Mark

[fsafranek]

Yeah, it sort of ruin the ship experience. If you have followed the wake thread there are workarounds for most ships with changing the fx file, but a few have hard coded wakes which cannot be edited except removed.

Sorry, just getting interested in this but what was the name of the wake thread you refer to?
And is this below from P3D v3.1 what you mean?

[SkippyBing]

Sorry, just getting interested in this but what was the name of the wake thread you refer to?
And is this below from P3D v3.1 what you mean?

If you've got 3.1 the default wake effects now decal onto the water so you don't get that issue. However you need to update the Content as well as the Client modules to get effects with the new command in.

[fsafranek]

If you've got 3.1 the default wake effects now decal onto the water so you don't get that issue. However you need to update the Content as well as the Client modules to get effects with the new command in.

You're right, this is only v3.0. I downloaded the v3.1 beta but didn't update before the holiday break.