Dev diary 175

hello everybody,
 
the month of surprises continues and today we present you a new kind of them - instead of a new plane it will be a new tech. Our lead programmer and lead landscape designer were developing new stuff for a couple of months already: it will allow us to make the visual image of the sim drastically more realistic and modern looking in the next update. Their main task was increasing the rendering distance of the terrain almost four times, from 40 to 150 kilometers, and they completed it successfully.
 
This task automatically brings several smaller ones with it in tow: increasing rendering distance of the clouds and making them more diverse, improving the air haze, the horizon, making additional, simplified landscape beyond the map borders since you can see so far now and so on. Ofcourse, one of the main objectives was to not allow significantly FPS drop appear due to this new feature, and we succeed in this. For example, today's discussion on how the new haze should look was so tense and spirited you won't believe it, with many members of the team participating - producer Jason Williams, lead programmer Sergey Vorsin, lead landscape designer Evgeny Isaev, lead physics engineer Andrey Solomykin, build manager Andrey Dineev, physics engineer Roman Kovalenko and yours truly Daniel Tuseev, of course  .
 
You can see the current result of the work on the following screenshots that were taken during daytime at 5000, 2000, 500 and 100 meters altitude. This improvement will get rid of likely the last important thing our engine lacked in comparison to our competitors, and now it looks like we're taking the lead instead. Otherwise, our graphics engine is hands down the best among the combat flight sims. But we won't stop at this, that's for sure, we'll move forward!