Raventech wrote:My PCs are above the minimum specs but neither of them are at recommended and I still get good performance out of them. What P3D did is actually built a sim that can run on a system with the minimum specs they give unlike when FSX launched. Looking at PCPer.com their low end system, it reaches the minimum specs easily and probably wont have many of the bars far off from the minimum but it will run fine based on my P3D Experience.
I remember the pre-production versions of FSX that would die if the thing crashed to desktop, and you'd have to kill the whole install (manually, because the uninstall didn't work) and re-install it again from the DVDs. I still have those DVDs here - quite unique looking things with plain detailing. It was a real struggle to run it with the high detail, especially to get the full visuals of birds, ground traffic, etc and everything else on high. Eventually it got better with the RTM and the later updates, plus savvy third party developers finding ways to tweak it. Still, running 2560x1440 resolution severely taxed my a computer, which has a Xeon 3.2ghz processor in it and a decent video card (which was always meaningless for FSX).
Kudos to the LM team for building it to a level where we can all use it without needing super computers.
All that said, I've pretty much left the flight simulator world totally, much as I did taking photos of planes. Found other things I liked more.
Raventech wrote:Turns out that one is not P3D or FSX fault (for the most part). It's that we still built models with tons of drawcalls and assuming that we need ~6 LODs like we did 15+ years ago.
When I did game development, I hated doing LODs, they were the worst, especially because I was doing fiendishly complicated models as well. Porsche 956C, Porsche 962C (in all of its various forms, from the factory and privateers), Jaguar XJR8, XJR9, Sauber C9, etc. It's a huge amount of work. The 962C for example:
Factory 962C, sprint form
Factory 962C, Le Mans high speed form
Factory 962C, final high downforce form
Thompson Motorsport 962C - remote rear wing
Richard Lloyd Racing 962C - remote rear wing
Alpha Team 962C (fairly similar to the factory Le Mans car)
Plus they all had various different wheels. And the RLR car had it's own little complexities, it didn't have a titanium spool, rather it featured a Salisbury differential, so it was physically a totally different beast to the standard cars, and the Thompson machines had carbon sandwich construction rather than the alluminium monocoque of the standard factory cars. At least they all had basically the same engine with the same noise, so that didn't need to be redone or made custom to each one, that's good because it isn't easy to even get a 962 to record the engine.
Argh, I don't want to do that stuff again.
I'll leave that to all of you very clever and dedicated people. I think it was in the FS community where I met some of the most clever developers.