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We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

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We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby Hooray » Sat May 15, 2021 11:06 am

Flying at Speeds up to Mach 17 Could Become Reality with UCF’s Developing Propulsion System
The UCF-developed propulsion system could allow for flight speeds of Mach 6 to 17 (more than 4,600 to 13,000 miles per hour) and would have applications in air and space travel.

University of Central Florida researchers are building on their technology that could pave the way for hypersonic flight, such as travel from New York to Los Angeles in under 30 minutes.

In their latest research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers discovered a way to stabilize the detonation needed for hypersonic propulsion by creating a special hypersonic reaction chamber for jet engines.

“There is an intensifying international effort to develop robust propulsion systems for hypersonic and supersonic flight that would allow flight through our atmosphere at very high speeds and also allow efficient entry and exit from planetary atmospheres,” says study co-author Kareem Ahmed, an associate professor in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “The discovery of stabilizing a detonation — the most powerful form of intense reaction and energy release — has the potential to revolutionize hypersonic propulsion and energy systems.”

The system could allow for air travel at speeds of Mach 6 to 17, which is more than 4,600 to 13,000 miles per hour. The technology harnesses the power of an oblique detonation wave, which they formed by using an angled ramp inside the reaction chamber to create a detonation-inducing shock wave for propulsion.
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby TheEagle » Sun Nov 14, 2021 10:12 pm

Yeah … either a better terrain engine, or a 5000 MB/s superfast SSD plus a 100 Hz CPU plus 100 GB RAM, which would make FlightGear exclusive for the 10.000 richest people on the world … :mrgreen: :lol:
I imagine me going at Mach 17 around the world in FG … recently I found the end of the world even in a Cessna 208B … :shock:
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby MasterGamer » Fri Nov 19, 2021 5:39 pm

I thought the terrain engine was great as it is, but THIS is amasing!
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby MasterGamer » Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:08 pm

Yeah, mabeye mr. Rich will be rivaled. If I knew more about programming I would try to help. This is a very grim video. https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/stea ... 1637269770
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby TheEagle » Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:38 pm

Are you telling me this video has been captured in MSFS ? This is impossible. No simulator can look that real. Or can it really ? If it can, we'll never reach that level … we don't even have real reflections - when you set something to full metallicness in Blender, zero roughness, all you get in FG is a little shiny point on the object … while in that video, even the buildings are visible on the water …
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby merspieler » Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:12 am

Give it a decade or two, and even FG will have raytracing.
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby TheEagle » Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:15 am

You want me to wait a whole decade ? I can't ! :wink:
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby V12 » Fri Dec 10, 2021 8:45 am

TheEagle wrote in Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:38 pm: … while in that video, even the buildings are visible on the water …


Why not ? P3D is on older technology than MSFS2020, but can do this :
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There are no buildings near wather at Skardu, so no buildings reflections.
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby Thorsten » Fri Dec 10, 2021 10:16 am

Why not ? P3D is on older technology than MSFS2020, but can do this :


All very cute, but nature usually can't do it - because of wind ripples and because you need to look under a really shallow angle - which usually means you're flying dangerously low.

I know, I know - plenty of nice photographs from Canadian lakes everyone admires - but the reason they're so admired is that they're done on the one day in a blue moon where it actually looks like that.

Every day I go for a walk and pass three lakes on the way - want to take a guess how often they look mirror-like?
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby TheEagle » Fri Dec 10, 2021 10:44 am

Hmm, about every third time ? :mrgreen: No, you are right. But there are many other reflecting surfaces which are not subject to wind rippling 1 :wink:
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby TheEagle » Fri Dec 10, 2021 10:54 am

LOL, they talked about it already 15 years ago, yet it doesn't seem to be there in OSG: https://groups.google.com/g/osg-users/c/yR9HEcnsMb0 Did I read somewhere FG should be / will be migrated to VulkanSceneGraph ? In that case we would get ray tracing out of the box with an RTX extension …

and sorry for spamming this thread … will stop that now.
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby MariuszXC » Fri Dec 10, 2021 11:38 am

I think we will never win with commercial products in the 'eye candy' department. One aspect is lack of manpower, another a different philosophy. Yet you will get effects where it matters. For example sun reflection on water, or northern lights, sun pillar you recently admired, a rainbow..
If you look closely on the image from P3D (a pretty image for sure) you will start noticing things like presence of wind ripples on the water surface, yet the reflected mountain range does not seem to be distorted...
Years (centuries actually ;) ) ago, IIRC in late 1990s, there was a popular Java applet which would make ripples on any configured background image. It was quite intensive computationswise, but at least the result looked plausible enough.
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby Ysop » Fri Dec 10, 2021 11:51 am

Additionally the time setting is around noon with clear sky. A large pond in a mountainous area will never(!) have zero wind across the complete surface in these conditions. For a paid product more perfection can be expected.

FGFS continues to be great fun.
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby Thorsten » Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:31 pm

Did I read somewhere FG should be / will be migrated to VulkanSceneGraph ?


This is a 'should' as in 'someone really should be doing this eventually' with no idea who that 'someone' is and what the timescale is. :|
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Re: We'll soon need a MUCH better terrain engine :-)

Postby merspieler » Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:38 pm

TheEagle wrote in Fri Dec 10, 2021 10:54 am:Did I read somewhere FG should be / will be migrated to VulkanSceneGraph ?


https://wiki.flightgear.org/Vulkan_Scene_Graph

Tho for ray tracing to become really popular, we need to see a few more GPU generations with it... not only from NVidia but also AMD and Intel...
Because of performance impact and pricing of performant cards (even at MSRP)
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