Unreal Engine 5 tech for flight sims?

Probably even a couple of more years (even if you had thousands of 3d artists available).

And once you would be finished you could bet your fine a** that some hardcore simmer would complain like: „Hey! There is a tall tree standing in front of my favourite runway in NoOneCaresia! That tree had been cut down 60 years ago already!“

:wink:

A simulator with the detail of Out Skerries would be already great for me. :slight_smile:

MSFS is an earth simulator as well. That not only means having the complete earth, it also means the model should resemble the real world. This Unreal ruin rendering shown in the OP is beautiful of course, but I doubt if these remains exist anywhere on earth !

Let’s put the real thing up for comparison, you show the Roman grave monument and temple in Petra in Syria, I think it quite well resembles the MSFS version…

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there is nothing impressive about the first picture nor UE5

Xplane converted to UE5 and now uses google maps streaming AI :upside_down_face:

I wouldn’t mind waking up in that timeline

Hmm, the UE5 looks hyper-realistic compared to the real thing, there’s just too much detail in it. And the MSFS depiction is not realistic at all. Both look clearly like game graphics, what they are. I would say the sweet spot of realism lies somewhere in-between the two. A big part is of course, and always has been, how the lighting is handled. As far as I have come to understand UE5, the revolution is how it does away with the polygon count issues hampering the performance. Quite honestly, looking at my screen today and what MSFS already can do, I can’t wait foir the next gen sim in 10 years time!

I think we don’t agree on that… you can’t compare the two at all. When you have a ruin on earth, the ruin should be depicted accurately in MSFS. Not only detail counts: the architecture, shape, and size must be preserved. The UE5 scenery does not exist, shape and size differ, architecture is a different culture. The Petra monument is stylized in MSFS… i agree with you it does not look really immersive, but at least it looks like Roman Petra in Syria, from flying altitude. The UA5 ruin will not look like Petra, from a distance. Maybe a Maya temple could be found somewhere… but nothing with this level of detail exists in the jungle, as far as I know.

Absolutely. I think it would be interesting for MS/Asobo, to consider UE5 technologies and shaders. The MSFS clouds were (in part) based on that technology too, it was recently said in a topic. I don’t know if that is true, but fact is, UE5 is a very advanced toolkit. And of course, It could do realistic models as well.

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I haven’t read this whole thread, but the first couple of answers about the application of UE5 to flight simulators was uninformed!

I have created a Flight Simulator that trains aerial firefighters for the USFS. See it here: AIRATTACK2 dotcom

I also wrote the music and some code for the hit videogame Everquest. Here’s a view samples: SOUNDCLOUD dotcom/JTBARR.

I know something about this topic because the Forest Service and other customers would like a whole world database to fly in. I created AIRATTACK 2 in Unity 3D, but I’ve worked in Unity and Unreal.

Nanite just makes highly detailed worlds possible, they call it “virtualized geometry” The real issue is CREATING THE DATA for the world. You should all have read and heard by now that MS used Blackshark AI to process BING maps for the geometry of all the buildings roads and bridges plus trees and other vegetation in the world to create a STREAMABLE database for all this data. This was the real genius in making a whole world flight sim.

It only works because flying moves relatively slowly through the data, which can be streamed with normal internet speeds.

Now a great Global Illumination system such as Lumen.

Both Nanite and Lumen happen in the rendering process, Blackshark is PRE-processing. I see no reason why UE5’s latest tech would do nothing but ADVANCE a flight simulator.

Now Unity is doing interesting things also with their Data Oriented Tech Stack, and Entity Component System. This tech allows for managed multi-threading and creating “Entities” instead of GameObjects. Entitys are aligned neatly in memory so that the CACHE access is better which speeds up execution by high orders of magnitude. Check out the DOTS demo calle Megacity. Just search in youtube.

Jay

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Bad Bing photogrammetry and low quality ground textures would look as bad in UE5 as they do in the current MSFS engine.

That said, what can be done with UE5 in terms of photorealism these days is quite literally unreal. If you’ve watched The Mandalorian, you’ve seen it. The backgrounds to most of the sets are UE5 being live-projected.

That would be unreal engine 4. Ue5 is still in alpha. Though Ue4 was allready a great platform for real time photorealism and with lumen still being in early development i prefer to use ue4.

Ziggo sport (dutch sports channel) uses ue4 in their formula 1 broadcasts basically projecting the whole studio with live camera tracking.

You should look it up on youtube if you want, it’s seriously impressive!

I use it myself for creating some walktrough’s from interior projects i’ve done. Unfortunately this takes so much time it’s nowhere near profitable. I hope ue5 will speed up the workflow when it’s ready.

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My comments about Lumen were cut out somehow. What I said was Lumen is just Global illumination and that has applications on ANY realtime 3D rendering, including Flight Sims. Why would you think otherwise?

Check out Project Anywhere

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Oooohhhh…. Ahhhhhh….

Yeah!

UE5 has a lot of novelties indeed, especially their “nanite” technology which would free once for all artists from having to poly-reduce-count their models and textures (and most likely cure the “melted” PG and the “morphing” terrain in MSFS). Unigine is another “full spectrum” engines tailored for simulation besides UE5 specializing in everything needed for a flight simulator.

Here are a few examples (I’d suggest you see them through, they are showcasing a lot of features in a short time - especially the clouds simulation at the start, lots of them, and the terrain/scenery/PG import/create module):

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This is very interesting indeed. I was scrolling through the comments in one of the videos you shared and Unigine team said they are working on several flight simulator projects. This is the exact quote

“We are working on several flight simulators at the moment (not for public market, unfortunately).”

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As far as I know, unreal is an FPS engine. It’s not a flightsome engine. Or did this change with unreal 5?

Unreal isn’t a ‘fps’ engine. It’s a realtime graphics engine wich can be used for whatever you want. It’s been used in 3rd person games aswel as racing games. But it’s also used in movies, tv shows etc…

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Of course you can use it for whatever you want but it is optimized for FPS as far as I know. Nobody is going to build a hard core flight sim on it because it just isn’t optimized for that kind of application.

No. It’s optimized to be an as widely applicable graphics engine. Especially since ue4 and with the introduction of datasmith to have a much easier pipeline to attract more buisnesses to use ue4. There’s probably more non gaming stuff using ue4 in a profitable way (both for epic & the client) then fps’s. Don’t forget the buisnes model behind unreal. They need to have big partys making lot’s of money with their product. Small indy game developers won’t generate that kind of money and most big fps developers have their own engines to work with.

It will be perfectly capable as an engine for flight simming. The problem is that building a flight sim from te ground up takes yeaaaars of development. That’s why asobo had to take alot of old stuff from fsx. Doing this in an entirely new gfx engine that doesn’t share any similarity with the fsx engine means lot’s of more work.