by exploremore » Sat Mar 19, 2016 4:00 am
a post from John Venema on the OrbX forum
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There is no real difference for terrain scenery and airports in 32-bit versus 64-bit, the raw content is the same. What changes is the texture format which is now DDS instead of BMP for terrain textures, and also the tools to compile them are slightly different. So developers would create the same core content but compile them using different SDKs. Of course with the extra memory footprint available to developers with 64-bit, it's possible that 4096 textures would become the norm for airports on the DTG sim. You'd get much higher fidelity with those versions in that case, ie terminals, ground poly, aprons; they could all be extremely detailed.
The other new thing to possibly expect from DFS as it evolves is new material attributes; meaning that there may possibly be all sorts of eye candy applied to textures to have specular lighting, shine, reflections etc, depending on whether they are concrete, glass, timber, plastic, gravel, grass, sand, asphalt, metal and much more. So this means a lot of extra work at the modeling stage where textures will need to use material attribute maps to take advantage of new lighting tech. This same lighting tech may well filter down to landclass terrain textures as well. You'll end up with incredible depth and reality to everything in the world if the developers take the time to apply material attribute masks. Don't quote me on this happening in V1 though, I am sure this capability will filter to the sim as it evolves over the next few years.
I can't talk to what LM may do for a possible 64-bit version of P3D, that's all conjecture at this point and we envisage continuing to support 32-bit P3D for some time yet with our quad installers.
P3D v3.4 & 4 | FlyInside 1.8 | Oculus CV1 | ASRock X99 | Intel i7 | 32Gb RAM | 1Tb SSD | Titan X | Windows 10 | Saitek X52 | Many OrbX items