HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Before I talk about the new technology I would like to have a brief moment to discuss the historical context which influences our design processes and approach to Flight Environment X. Many of the readers of this article will be familiar with Flight Environment for FS9, for those that are not I will explain what FE did. FE was a texture replacement for FS9 supplying many new variations of clouds, water and skies in higher resolution than the defaults, transforming the look of the world dramatically. FE enabled users to make selections of their favorite clouds textures, water textures and sky textures, all of which could be combined to make a ‘theme’ and all through an easy to use interface.

Many themes were supplied with FE pre-selected, allowing users to just simply scroll amongst the many designs and try them out.

FE also provided the ability to randomize options, to create a theme or to even randomize amongst the themes already defined, again through a user interface.

This format proved popular and FE was what we could consider a success with its users, it was the definitive texture package for FS9.

OUR USERS

During the lifecycle of Flight Environment for FS9 a number of conclusions were reached via feedback from users, the most important one being that everyone used FE in different ways; some clicked to randomize texture selections before each flight. Some scrolled through the many options and selected something they liked then stuck with it and others spent many hours trying different combinations. This led us to a whole new way of thinking about how textures selections could be made.

With Ground Environment Pro, this concept was touched upon. Ground Environment Pro allowed colorization of tiles and the environment based on weather conditions. This worked very well and was again well received in the FS community.

In considering users we must also consider how people use Flight Simulator; some like Peter strive for absolute realism where possible. He flies primarily airliners to detailed flight plans and takes enormous pleasure ‘flying to the numbers’. I on the other hand tend to prefer nothing more than flying a Spitfire or Extra 300S inverted at 0 feet, if I see a bridge in FSX I have to fly under it. These are all things which of course in real life I can’t do and expect to keep my license and liberty. My own use as I am sure most can relate to is often according to my mood, sometimes I like to sit high in the cockpit on auto-pilot and just watch the beautifully rendered world go by whilst drinking a coffee, or other times I will fly approaches in IMC to minima following the real world approach plate.

The same principal is true of how I want Flight Simulator to look and feel; sometimes I enjoy the clear blue skies with unlimited visibility when outside it is rainy and grey. Sometimes I like to see an amazingly vivid sunset, or crystal clear oceans that I just don’t see in the real world. Imagination and mood has a lot to do with how I use flight simulator and it is clearly also true for many other simmers. People want different things all the time, it is variation which captures our imagination and allows us to immerse ourselves in our hobby.

One other point to make recognition of is that our users have many different hardware capabilities with many using different settings, such as “low water x2” or 3D clouds at 50% and so forth. Flight Simulator copes with this by providing generic textures that work well regardless of settings, this point is important for what I will say later.

So how is all this the relevant to your technology? I hear you cry.

I will explain more shortly, however the examples I am giving are to reassure you the reader (and potential customer!) that we have been thorough from the beginning. Starting a massively ambitious project such as ours we needed to be clear from the start what we wanted to achieve. To that end many days of research and proofs of concept where tried and tested, professionals were consulted and endless informative discussions took place to build a picture of what we could achieve.

THE REAL WORLD ENVIRONMENT

The real world environment is as diverse as it is rich; however it does operate to a given set of rules dictated by nature, let’s ask some questions of it:

• Why is water greener on warmer days?
• How about weather effects such as an inversion layer?
• What governs the height of the waves?
• Why is water clearer some days more than others?
• Why is the sky blue and what color blue is it?
• Why is the horizon looking towards the sun direction a different color to the opposite horizon?
• Why during the midday flying across the Arabian deserts is the air so thick with yellow dust you are in IFR conditions?

The phrase “limitations of flight simulator” is heavily used in the Flight Simulation world, human beings are similarly limited, we CAN NOT fly.. at least till the Wright brothers overcame that limitation of our physical nature and invented the airplane. Microsoft has delivered a powerful simulation that does everything very well indeed! For the most part it renders airplanes beautifully, it has weather that no body is going to think is horrible and textures which work for mostly everyone. Furthermore they have built a platform on which we can build. The key point I am crawling towards is that using the term limitations has promoted a mindset that says “we can’t do this because..”. Keeping within all reasonable bounds we have found that that is simply not true for the most part. It may not be easy to overcome a problem but it can be overcome and Microsoft have done all they can to make the task as easy as possible.

With that said, lets ask some questions of the way the environment is represented in FSX:

• What if the environment could be more real and fluid just like the real world?
• Why is everyday just like the last in terms of sky color?
• Why are the sunsets so vivid on a clear sky day with little pollution?
• Why does flight simulator depict different conditions in my area to what I can see when I look out from my window?

The answer to all of these is of course down to textures, arriving back to the generic implementation which works for everybody.

TALKING TEXTURES

It was clear, that changing the texture sets each time to represent a particular situation was just not practical to achieve, as it would require so many variations that the file sizes alone would be prohibitive and users would be overwhelmed with sheer quantity of variation.

Therefore we looked at textures themselves, how are textures made, each variation is trying to represent a particular set of conditions in an artistic fashion.

Now for some answers, textures are an artistic interpretation of how something looks to the human eye, textures are not particularly scientific and they have to follow some rules in terms of the size of the texture and the fact that each texture has to be able to tile convincingly. Additionally textures have to work well regardless of the user’s video card settings or FSX settings. In other words they are fairly generic, designed to work well in as many situations as possible.

So can something be done at this level in a logical and scientific manner to add realistic or surrealistic degrees of variation according to real world conditions?

WEATHER ENGINE

There is a clear and direct relationship between a ‘weather engine’ and graphical depiction of that weather within the flight simulator. So lets look at a weather engine, a weather engine primarily reads METAR and TAF files to derive information from which it can use to supply the simulator with enhanced accuracy of weather, it tells the simulator what the wind conditions are, the pressure and the temperature. A weather engine can also do more, such as specify visibility and instruct the simulator to depict more layers of cloud and so forth.

The graphical depiction of weather inside the simulator is handled by a texture package, changing the look of the textures to something more realistic in appearance with greater detail.

If you bring the two elements together, the weather engine and the texture package, you can make a fairly convincing depiction of weather as history has shown. However, the weather is just a subset of what makes the real world environment look the way it does, there are many more factors about which no information can be taken from METARS and TAFS. For this we have to look for additional information from other sources.

OUR SOLUTION

Our solution is about delivering those capabilities, bringing together professional artwork with scientific technology to create an Environment Simulator.

With our technology we can:

• Collect information from known environmental factors in the real world and using that information derive variables to represent as true to life in game as possible.
• Change the plankton level of the myriad of oceans around the world according to temperature and season.
• Apply horizon effects that you see in the real world, including weather conditions such as an inversion layer.
• Change the world lighting giving greater depth perception to the water.
• Alter the water clarity and wave height based on realistic conditions
• Color the sky according to moisture content.
• Influence ALL ground textures according to lighting conditions.
• Apply entirely new lighting effects as seen in the real world, with the azimuth of the sun being properly represented in the sky.
• Effect sunsets and sunrises due to environmental conditions.
• Model regional air mass qualities and movements, for example during the summer months North East USA suffers from the China pollution haze brought in the trade winds. Over Western Europe, the Azores high air mass moves northwards crossing the ocean and southern Europe bringing dust particles to the shores of England and France.
• Apply texture modifications according to your FSX and graphic card settings, such as for shader 1 and 2. No more generic textures!
• Depict winds accurately inside FSX, including winds aloft and smoothing between stations.
• Increase weather layers to more closely represent real world conditions.
• Smooth visibility from horizon to sky.
• Simulate and represent pollution based on the real world.

All the above is just a subset of the possibilities we are building, there are many more plans which have progressed from proof of concept and are on the development plan.

FLEXIBILITY

Referring back to my previous paragraphs about our users, with our users in mind we have taken some decisions as to how our technology can be presented to our myriad of users.

To begin with, flexibility was an absolute set in stone requirement of our software design process. Therefore we have built a solution that will allow users to quickly fire up Flight Environment X and achieve exactly what they want with the least amount of fuss. We always keep in mind that our software and technology, whilst incredibly exciting to us is just a means to an end for a user, the end being that they can quickly jump into a plane to experience a new environment.

Flight Environment X implements the same proven format as the previous version; you can still select different clouds, water, skies adding airport textures to this mix along with international markings variations. You can still randomly select themes and launch into a new experience each time. You can still create new themes from existing sets. However we go much further this time, delve deeper and the power and innovation become apparent.

With the technology we have created we could hide this all away make intelligent decisions in the code and just tell you it is doing it, however we decided that was the wrong approach. We expose all of it to you the user in a powerful user interface which is fully demonstrable and will appeal particularly to the artistically inclined to create whole new looks. You don’t have even have to be an artist, you have a perception of what color the sky is for example or a perception of how water looks at altitude in your local region. We give you the power to adjust just about everything, from the way the water color deepens to the tone of color it deepens to from the shallows to the deep ocean. You can easily with a couple of mouse clicks apply a different wave pattern to a different coral pattern to a different swell, adjusting the intensity of each and pick exactly the colors you desire.

The effects of the environment simulator are also adjustable; if you want subtlety or dramatic effects then it is easily configurable.

Make no mistake, the range of variation is astronomical, to give you an idea there would be more than 100,000,000 water variations alone, and there is NO definitive set, as everyone perceives things different, what we are delivering is the ability to achieve exactly what you perceive to be the most visually rewarding.

Furthermore when you are done achieving something special you can click a button to save the theme, and publish it to the FS community from within our application, even showing screenshots of how it appears in game, all collected dynamically.

In turn you can benefit from the creative talent of other users within the community, viewing the themes others have created along with their screenshots and in a matter of seconds you can download their theme with one click and experience it in game yourself.

COMMUNITY

In a departure from the previous version we recognized several characteristics of the sim community as I alluded to earlier in this article. One of which was the creativity and sense of community. We thought of ways we could make it as easy for our users as possible to take advantage of this.

Therefore Flight Environment X includes a fully dynamic user interface which can display news, product patches and most importantly facilitate users getting their creative efforts recognized. Lots of plans are in place to make this aspect of Flight Simulator X a rewarding and exciting prospect for our users.

HOW DOES IT ALL LOOK IN FSX?

Simply amazing is all I can say. The effects we can produce mean I can look outside my window or go flying in the real world then fire up FSX and see a picture as close to the way it was in the real world that it is uncanny. Alternatively, I can select a dramatic set of textures and the whole experience is changed. With Peter and Roberts stunning highly detailed clouds, water and skies, all influenced by the Environment Simulator the immersive-ness factor, if it could be measured, is increased tenfold.

Peter and Robert can spend hours talking about the subtleties of art, and they both have far more abler pens than my own in this respect so I will leave it to them to talk more about the artwork in another article.

NOTE FOR DEVELOPERS

Xenvision technology is built upon a powerful set of API’s and web-services called the X-Engine, this allows us to interface and deliver our technology to other third party developers to enhance their own products and to provide us with the ability to implement a long term vision of products. In future a full SDK will become available to ease this process.

CONCLUSION

Hopefully from reading this article I have given you an insight into what we are achieving with Flight Environment X, however I understand it will leave many questions unanswered. More information will become available over the course of the following weeks although at this stage I am sure you can appreciate we can not reveal too much information too soon.

The technology this article discusses is about all the things we can do right now, there is however a lot more we want to do and are working to achieve. The technology is there to exploit, and as we continue to learn more about how to model an environment we will continually grow the product capabilities. Flight Environment X is a major step forward from Flight Environment for FS9, whole new principals have been devised and the technology is in place and growing to meet our longer term vision, which is one we hope that you guys will share also.

Let me in conclusion also let you in on our philosophy, when you install Flight Environment X and take your first flight if you don’t fall off your chair then I am tempted to say you can have your money back because then we have failed!

Chris Norris