Dear Pilots!
We invite you to view some new and important elements that are currently in development for ROF and will be added in future updates scheduled for later this year. To help demonstrate one of our new technological achievements we have prepared this video:
During video codec conversion YouTube causes some small distortion of the video. So we recommend watching the video at maximum size of 720HD. For those who want to watch the video with minimum distortion please download the video from here (43 Mbs)
Now that you have seen our new cloud effects, let me try to explain it in more detail. It was not enough for us to simply make a cloud shadow texture and place it on the ground like other simulations do. We knew this was an important feature to some and one in which we felt could be improved upon by our team given enough time. It is important that cloud shadows look good, as it really makes the surface look more realistic from high up. Once we finished the basic feature we decided to move forward and make this shadow not only influence the surface, but also other objects such as buildings, bridges, vehicles, forests and, of course, any aircraft which may cross underneath. This was a complicated task because we aren’t making a movie, but a virtual environment and such a feature should exist in real time and be calculated by the PC in real time. When we develop a feature such as this, it’s important to note that we have to make a trade-off when taking into account your requests try to make all our features work on an average powerful PC. However, in this case we think we have created a cool feature with minimal impact on the average machine.
Once we accomplished the basic goal of a working cloud shadow, we contemplated stopping there, but it became evident to our team that “Clouds should move as they do in real life!” So, once again we set out to make a new feature and find a new solution. And with a little more time we found it and now this video means that after the next update you will be able not only to see cloud shadow, but also enjoy clouds moving. To experience them you will need to set the wind parameter in your missions, because clouds move according to the wind speed and direction you set. In the movie above we’ve made clouds move faster than normal. In reality, based on a wind speed of 3-5 meters per second clouds will move very smoothly. We do not know of any consumer grade flight-sim that has this feature currently. If this is indeed a flight-sim first as we think, we congratulate our team on such an achievement.
We hope that you will like this new element and we think it will make the ROF environment even more interesting and realistic. When the power of the average PC becomes even stronger in the future, we will continue our work with clouds, wind and precipitation to make weather effects even more realistic. This will allow is to imitate even more accurately the conditions experienced by flyers in WWI.
Also, we have made our development news a bit more social in nature by adding the special «Share» button below each news post to make it more comfortable for you to share our news with your friends on various popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter or in your blog.
We wish you a good flight and happy hunting! We will begin to make a new video for the next post in the near future.