Episode IV: A New Hope

After much tweaking of Demo2, flying out of and around Princess Juliana airport, I decided to try a different location. Wow, what a difference! The first two shots here show me flying out of TNCE. (Sorry, my knowledge of Carribean geography is very poor, and I can't remember which island this is). Here you can see a nice amount of autogen, gorgeous ground textures, and quite acceptable frame rates! Click on one of the first two images, and you can see the framerate counter in the upper left. This is on my middle-of-the-road machine (2.2 GHz, 1 meg ram, 128MB Radeon 9600XT AGP card).


Look how nicely the autogen trees line up with the boundaries of the trees. I'm very curious to find out if this is strictly generic autogen or if it has been cleaned up by hand as part of the highly detailed region that it is adjacent to.

This is why I am so impatient to get my hands on the final product. I can't wait to find out if my favorite places to fly will give comparable performance and visuals. If I can tool around New England and have frame rates averaging around 20 (or better) with this kind of autogen, I'll be very happy indeed. If things get choppy and blurry if I fly into Logan International, well, I can live with that.

Just for kicks, I tried the sam location in FS9, with Bill Lyons Challenger ultralight. This final shot shows that. It actually doesn't look as bad as I thought it would, but there is no question that FSX is a great leap forward.