Advanced Graphics Summit: Designing the Terrain System of 'Flight Simulator': Representing the Earth

I thought some folks might find this fascinating, especially those interested in the design of the Terrain System in MSFS.

Lionel Fuentes from Asobo gave a talk at GDC this year and shared this insightful deck about it. Check out the 100-page presentation:

Recommended by @FlyingCookie650 to post this in the forums.

Cheers!

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Thanks a lot for sharing this officially.

Some user shared the link a few days back already.
It was an interesting read, although I found some possible error causes.
AI for determination where is forest.
Calculations with floats, where integer arithmetic done proper would not result in any error. But the younger devs don’t learn this in university anymore. Todays devs got lazy, me as well. But when real-time precise calculations need to be done I still take the hard, rocky path :wink:

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Saw that a few days ago too, an extremely interesting read indeed and it does put a lot into perspective. I hope we can get more in-depth presentations on how the engine works in the future, for example the lighting/shading, volumetric cloud rendering, ray-marching techniques etc. which I feel are cutting-edge among today’s games.

The weather subsystem needs a solid technical description that is the most current. I haven’t found any.

I read the slides in the PDF file. Have many questions. Is there a version of this presentation with audio?

This is the kind of stuff that is interesting.

Not the advertisement-update (excuse me
weekly dev-update as they call it)

Would also like to know if there is a recording somewhere?

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Perhaps they will create a new Feature Discovery series episode when they overhaul the weather system later in the year, like they’re doing with the aerodynamics. The one posted in the pre-alpha days is likely out of date indeed, but there will supposedly be massive changes from here on out.

Very interesting, makes you realize just how complex this sim is and how making everything “play nicely” together can be a real challenge. Thanks for sharing!

@Jummivana Is there any way we can please grab an Audio from the event to go with the PP?

I have to wonder what they do learn there days, and how relevant it is when they actually get a real job, and have little or no real world practicle experience.

@osd9933 @thecoronadian @wazitdoinnow
This was part of the Game Developer Conference, which was back in March, but they recorded it as a video posted in the GDC vault as they call it. Sadly it requires an expensive subscription.
If still of interest, you can find it here: https://gdcvault.com/browse/gdc-22
Just control+f and type ‘flight’, you’ll find it there.


The first one is the slides, but the video requires the subscription as highlighted by the star

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Thanks, too bad about the paywall.

Yes, that’s a shame.
Any chance of a sneaky link for us Devs here to have a watch quietly? :wink:

I believe, although I’m not sure, they do publish them for free the following year, or at least some of them. Keep an eye out on their YT page.

(10) GDC - YouTube

Often devs also give the same speech/presentation at multiple conferences, so maybe it’ll come up somewhere else. I googled
sorry binged, but didn’t find anything yet sadly

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