New outside Graphics Engine for PSx?

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Just remember that most current scenery generators don't play this game well. They all absorb all system resources they can get, as they are all overdimensioned for the available hardware. Given a good CPU scheduler it should work, but you miss the power to bring the scenery to full life. Running scenery with all sliders on minimum is exactly what people don't want.


Jeroen

[Richard McDonald Woods]

I am expecting to have to have a third PC for PSX.
 
At present I have two fairly powerful PCs - one to run MSFS + PMDG B744, AES and FS2Crew; and a second to run Active Sky X, Squawkbox, XPAX, BA Pegasus, Breitling, maps, Teamspeak, TOPCAT, vroute and WideClient.

R

[Hardy Heinlin]

I just made a frame rate test with FlightGear and PSX each running (not networked) in a separate monitor half.

System: iMac, 1920 x 1200, 2.93 GHz Core 2 Duo, Snow Leopard.

PSX: EFIS / EICAS in motion with radar on: 30 - 50 fps
FlightGear: San Francisco: 30 - 40 fps with trees, 40 - 50 without trees

Without PSX, FlightGear runs at ca. 60 FPS.

FlightGear sometimes freezes for ca. 50 milliseconds when entering complex scenery, although the frame rate is high (the indicator shows average FPS only, not FPS peaks within a second). It may have less pauses when it runs solo, but I'm not sure if that is an illusion. I just tested it for a few minutes.

Running two sims on one computer is certainly not optimal, but it can be done. Of course, it always depends on how high the level of details is set etc.


Cheers,

|-|ardy

[Richard McDonald Woods]

Hi H,
Sounds very promising.
Cheers, R

[Will]

Thanks, Hardy.  Interesting.  Did you grease it on? (grin)

[Holger Wende]

Hi Jeroen,

This topic "New Outside Graphics Engine" just raised annother question w.r.t. "Outside Online World"?
Will SquawkBox747 be upgraded such that it can communicate with Router, too?

I had the impression that you are not really eager to "maintain" Squawkbox747 any longer but with some modifications SB747 probably could talk to Router, too, thus opening the online world to PSX without MSFS.
As far as I know Flightgear has no interface to the online world yet.

And PSX will not have any of the online network protocols implemented internally.

Regards, Holger

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

For SquawkBox and many other MSFS-centric add-ons, we still take the detour. They will only ever run inside MSFS, and nobody is interested in porting them (which most likely isn't even possible). So we keep them inside MSFS and slave MSFS to PSX. The flying camera drags all add-ons with it, and nobody out there notices they are looking at a camera instead of a 744.

Technically it is easy to make SB747 run with PSX, but I do not want to have to maintain a complete SquawkBox, following both VATSIM and IVAO's protocol decisions. I tried this for two years and it ate all my spare time. Since nearly nobody will "fly online" without MSFS scenery due to the airport ground environment, why bother?


Jeroen

[Holger Wende]

Hi,

Inspired by Ivans great WinTwy which unfortunately regularly crashes on my WinXP laptop after a while, I started to think about annother alternative to display the airport ground environment (and potentially more).

I cannot install MSFS due to my limited compute(r) resources.
And I was looking for something simple and configurable for PS1.3/Broker and PSX/Router as well.
So I started tests with a small program than can read/display native sector files and follow our Queen...



It is far from being finished but the prototype is running quite stable already :-)

I just wonder how to access external traffic when SB747 will not be available in the future?
And without MSFS I feel like an endangered species and I wonder whether its worth to continue this program.
Maybe there is really no need for it and hooking up to e.g. GoogleEarth or MSFS is much better?

Just thinking...

Holger

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Wow, nice.

In any case, without a doubt, this thing is valuable to function as a ground position tracker, which becomes a very important item in tomorrow's electronic flight bags. If it could import official charts, I would consider selling it to airlines, really. So for us simmers it is a "must have".

The external traffic always is a pain in the ass. You're right that this needs a SB feed of some kind. And SB747 surely can deliver. But I am not sure I will be able to reconnect SB747 to PSX (time-wise) and make sure it keeps running for a few years.

It's possibly restating the obvious, but with PSX only due for at least a year, many people now switching to Win7 with associated heavy hardware demands, and FSX being buried, there should be a possibility to get a second-hand notebook that will pull MSFS in low resolution? Even in low res, you get more details than with the sector files, and on top you get nearly every airport, not just the ones that have been redrawn.

With this plan A in mind, we can look around for nicer plan B and C options in peace.


Jeroen

[Hardy Heinlin]

Hi Holger,

heyho, I didn't know you're a Java coder! :-)


Cheers,

|-|ardy

[Holger Wende]

...If it could import official charts...

Hi Jeroen,

Importing (official) charts was actually my first thought, either Google map, flight charts in PDF or other publically available databases.

But I postponed the idea of importing such charts (at least temporarily) because using the sector files seemed to be a more straight forward approach for a prototype and I have better crontrol over all map details. Currently it can only import sct and sct2 files.

And I failed to quickly undestand how to access e.g. Google maps in a non-web based application.
And reading/transforming/displaying charts (e.g. PDFs) is something I did not investigate yet because I suppose it requires removal of map distortions. And unfortunately some maps come without coordinate system references. But I will keep this in mind...

heyho, I didn't know you're a Java coder! :-)

Hey Big Brother,

Nothing is overlooked in this forum

But you are right - of course! Actually I was inspired by your decision and I wanted to have something platform independent (as far as possible) and something that performs reasonably well.
And I am finally really surprised by the performance...


Regards, Holger