suggestion for designers with eye candy in mind

[loomex]

I  DL'd the B-1b and its a real nice looking plane, however, making a "stripped down" version is not a bad idea. Eye candy is great, but making a plane for those that just want to fly and dont care about a VC, or what the passenger cabin looks like, or a working bomb bay in a game that there is no need. A good example of this would be the family of Meljets. His planes look awesome, but for me, I could care less about seeing the toliet or the seating. When I modified the B-52 into the EB-52, I removed most of the interior stuff. This improved the framerate a great deal. The B-1b is a great addition and its not a bad fps killer for me, but a "lite" version would be cool also.
Just my $.02 (US) worth

[Felix/FFDS]

Blasphemer!  You've been brainwashed by Chuck Dome!




Of course, I tend to agree with you...

There are two schools of thought, like you've pointed out .. and both are equally valid and can share the flightsim world.

eye candy - because you can (and as a work of art)

eye-candy as a valid enhancement to the flying experience (VC with working instruments)

From any model I ever release, you won't have to worry... compared to me - Chuck Dome overmodels everything!

[loomex]

I must re-word myself a bit. First, I give great respect for those that build the planes with the interiour views, highly detailed DVC's, and VC's because it is truely an art and a gift (one I dont have )

Second, the issue I was trying to point out was FPS. Not everybody has that new pentium 10, 56ghz intel chip, 14g RAM with the Gforce 56XPT 9090LE video card. I know, I'm getting silly, but you see my point.

If you run a high end machine, try to find somebody with a lower end machine to flight test. It might seem to be a bit much but you will likely get less emails complaining about your plane and will get more downloads and good reviews. Also for us poor folks that still use dial-up and one phone line (damn, I miss my cable ISP!), it sure makes getting you plane easier.

Thanks
Chris

[ICE/GfORCE Team]

I fully respect your opinion, but I think eye candy is great...but true eye candy, details that are from the plane. As an example, Dreamfleets new cessna 310 will inlcude a opening briefcase in the VC, that is an unusefull eye candy that just kills frames(this is not a complain against DF)...In the other side we have Carenado models, they have less eye candy, but they have true airplane details.

I know what you feel when flying a highly detailed model, I had a AMD K-6 450Mhz, 56Mram and integrates 8Mb videocard and I couldn'y fly most detailed models(not even my models), but I could fly without much problems the carenado piper Warrior II, Beech Bonanza and the cessna 172, wich are really nice and don't have unusefull details...

But I also asked a designer to do 2 versions, one with and one without eye candy details, but the designer told me it wasn't easy to do that(I am a designer and I know it aint any difficult to do a model without that much details whn you already have one with details), maybe it was not his idea of creating a model...

Just my opinion

[RIC_BARKER]

But I also asked a designer to do 2 versions, one with and one without eye candy details, but the designer told me it wasn't easy to do that(I am a designer and I know it aint any difficult to do a model without that much details whn you already have one with details), maybe it was not his idea of creating a model...

This depends really, let me explain how I viewed the subject.

The FTD 757 is a real frame rate hog, I'll admit, but right from the outset I tried to make the shape as accurate as possible. There is no real way to do this without using lots of polys. Of course, in certain places, you can use as few polygons as possible, and still get a reasonable shape. Generally the tighter a curve, the more "edges" is needs.

As for a "lite" version, it's not always that easy. For example, I could have removed all the interior views, which would have saved some 20,000 polys, but other than that, removing them from the outside view means completely re-engineering the model, (for example, changing the fuse from 38-sided to 32-sided).

For my next model, I will try to plan in more "adjustability" in terms of poly count, but it will still be a high-end model.

In the end, you can't please everyone I guess. If it had been a low poly model, you get complaints about poor detail, and vice versa  ::)

[Hagar]

Hi Ric. First of all congratulations on your 757 & the SR-71 Pete mentioned in the Design Feedback forum.

[Brian_Gladden]

Another thing to keep in mind for the model's performance is the number and size of texture bitmaps. Models that have a seperate large high rez bitmap for almost every part (posky's are a good example of this) vs a model that may have only 5 or 6 different bitmaps for all the textures will have better performance on lower end systems.

[Bonzonie]

Better modeling would greatly reduce the overall complexity and increase FPS as well.

On the B-52 I redid some of the parts a few times and the poly count got smaller 'n smaller.