The feature list for Flight Environment X is simply huge.
A few key features of the product are outlined below:
EASE OF USE
Flight Environment X provides an easy to use interface with many stunning and varied themes using the same principles as Flight Environment for FS9. You can select from the many themes or allow FEX to intelligently select themes for you, varying your experience every time you fly.
You can literally click and go! With one click you will experience the vast difference our textures make to bring your simulator to life.
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Large selection of realistic themes for water, sky and clouds |
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Instant community access to a free library of other users themes
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Surrealistic themes to create amazing screen shots |
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Individual themes for weather conditions such as storms and pollution |
CONTROL YOUR EXPERIENCE
 Xenvision Technology brings a revolutionary new approach to how you control your experience of the Flight Simulator world.
The range of customisation is enormous, allowing an incredible depth of control, from adjusting the transparency of clouds and the colour of the bottom of clouds, right through to adjusting how the water colour scales in depth. Intuitive tools allow even the novice to be able to achieve stunning results.
Above is an example of our Cloud Theme Designer. Every time the 'Randomize' button is pressed a new cloud texture will be generated dynamically according to your preferences and shown in the preview window. You have a greater chance of winning the lottery than seeing the same cloud twice - it is nearly impossible.
Now if you think about that for second, imagine the problems we would have showing you this unique cloud with screen shots. We would literally have to take millions and millions of screenshots - also nearly impossible.
The only solution was a complicated one and has taken many months to develop.
What you are seeing in the preview window is not a screen shot but the fully rendered actual cloud texture using the artwork and alpha channels which will be used in the simulator. This technique is also applied to the designers for our Sky, Water and Water Animation themes. Using our tools you can create unique themes and looks, then save them for selection in the user interface and also publish them to the community.
SAMPLE SCREENSHOTS
COMMUNITY INTEGRATION
There is no denying that over the past 10 years of flight simulation, the community surrounding 'simming' has grown and provides a wealth of experience, knowledge and creative talent. With Flight Environment X we have developed features to make it easier for our users to interact and share themes through our interface.
All members of our team strongly share a vision to make using our products fun. Imagine what it’s like to make an amazing sunset or water set or cloud set with our Xenvision technology. Just think about this for a moment. Either by chance or design, the whole combination works together like an explosion of reality and you’re like "Wow, this is incredible!". What do you do, make a screen shot? Everyone is saying "...which clouds, which water, what settings?" Our community approach means when you hit that magic moment of truly "as real as it gets" you have all the tools to just hit "Publish Theme" and our web site will publish screen shots and settings for you.
How does this work? You can create new themes which effectively originate a new set of textures; the settings used can then be uploaded to our dedicated servers and shared with other users with one click of a button, along with screenshots showing the theme in effect in FSX. You can then browse the themes other users have created and simply download any themes which you would like to try and install into FSX using your settings for texture resolution and compression.
One additional advantage of this is for multiplayer so everybody can see the same thing.
INCREASED REALISM
  All the artwork used in Flight Environment X has been wholly originated from high definition photography taken by Peter Wilding using state of the art camera equipment. Many flying trips have been undertaken to photograph clouds from every angle along with water photography, sunrises and sunsets.
This has enabled us to master all textures at a very high definition and resolution (ten mega pixels) which is then scaled to your requirements in FEX. We have gone to exhaustive lengths to quality check every piece of artwork found in FEX.
We can confidently state that this is as good as it gets in terms of realism for clouds, water and skies.
PERFORMANCE BENEFITS
Optimized for performance and quality, Flight Environment X has no adverse extra performance requirements from the default FSX installation.
FSX default texture resolution for clouds is 256x256 (please do not confuse this with your monitor resolution as this is a seperate thing). Until now, programs like FE for FS9 have supplied improved cloud textures at 512x512. FEX goes one step further and is the first to market truly high definition cumulus, stratus, wispy and cirrus cloud textures mastered at 1024x1024.
The benefit is realism as never seen before in Flight Simulator and we trust our screen shots in the Gallery speak for themselves.
All our textures are provided in four screen resolutions: 1024x1024, 512x512, 256x256, 128x128. 1024x1024 looks visually stunning and FEX is so versatile that you can balance all textures for smoothness and clarity. This puts you in full control to balance visual quality with performance. However, you will be pleased to know, in our experience our test team have reported no performance impact from our textures at any texture resolution.
What you may find particularly interesting is at even lower texture resolutions the visually stunning impact is still relatively maintained. For example; if a cloud is mastered at 1024x1024 and then made smaller to 256x256 it will look better than a 512x512 made smaller to 256x256. In other words experience has taught us that high quality masters produce superior results. Primarily, this is due to high quality source photography used in combination with 1024x1024 textures.
MASSIVE VARIATION
Variety keeps the flight simulation experience a dynamic and immersive one. Our goal is to emulate the diversity and variation found in the natural world. We have surpassed our own expectations and we are confident you will be as thrilled with the results as we are.
The variety of artwork in FEX is truly enormous, much more than has ever been released to date by any other product.
It is all about the attention to detail. For example in FE for FS9 the main cumulus cloud is derived from three seperate elements; that of cumulus, wispy and stratus. FE for FS9 was the first to bring you this degree of variation. FEX goes even further, we now have sixteen individual elements of carefully and intelligently selected artwork, all working together.
Using this same method we can provide a massive variation of water artwork, including many different wave patterns, swell effects and unique coral patterns which if distributed in the traditional manner would equal a download running into gigabytes.
Additionally we will continue to expanding the range of artwork along with accepting user submissions to continually grow the library of variation you can achieve. Regular updates are a long term feature of using Flight Environment X.
ENVIRONMENT SIMULATOR
The technology in FEX allows individual adjustment of all texture parameters on the fly. This allows us to integrate fully with our forthcoming Environment Simulator providing weather depiction and other environmental factors to a degree never before seen in a flight simulator.
Once you are using Flight Environment X it will quickly become apparent to you the possibilities we have of influencing the depiction of the environment within FSX. Such as harder cloud edges, darker clouds and high waves for stormy conditions etc.
The Environment Simulator is a massive future project. We will deliver a free upgrade to all customers of FEX to include a light version of the Environment Simulator, which will provide weather depiction comparable to other weather applications. A later full commercial product will then be released taking the concept much further and providing a suite of graphical products which will integrate fully into FEX.
MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X
- Processor: 2.0Ghz+
- RAM: 512MB (recommend 1GB)
- Hard Drive: 4GB of free space
- Video Card: 32MB DirectX 9 compatible
- Other: .Net Framework 2.0
- Internet connection required for full features of FEX
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