Author Topic: JetWays  (Read 3674 times)

Southwestman84

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JetWays
« on: June 13, 2014, 07:32:00 am »
Just a simple Question the gates at kord dont need AES and they dont sink into the ground the move up and down why dont we use these today?

virtuali

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Re: JetWays
« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2014, 12:50:20 pm »
Just a simple Question the gates at kord dont need AES

All jetways at all our sceneries don't need AES, KORD is no exception.

Quote
and they don't sink into the ground the move up and down why dont we use these today?

FSX animated jetways can be made in two ways: with discrete geometry and with a skinned mesh. The discrete geometry method doesn't suffer of the problem with sinking wheels. The skinned mesh has this problem with SOME airplanes. This is a longstanding bug in FSX, which has been acknowledged by ACES developers years ago, and there' nothing we can do to fix it, unless we would replace the jetway system entirely.

The discrete geometry takes a larger toll on the CPU, while the skinned mesh are being handled by a vertex shader, so they run on the GPU. This means, on a large airport, the fps benefit of having many objects handled by GPU can be significant.

Our earlier products like Zurich and OHare, were made using discrete geometry, and this obviously made sense when they were originally released (6-7 years ago), because GPU of that time weren't nearly as powerful as the current ones.

More recent sceneries like KDFW, KLAX, all use the more efficient skinned mesh method, with a very large benefit on performances, which becomes more and more visible, the more powerful your GPU is and, opposite to the CPU power, you WILL get more and more powerful GPUs along the years (CPU power hasn't increased *that* much in the last 6-7 years), that's why it was right to switch to the faster skinned mesh method in later sceneries, regardless of the annoying sinking wheels problem.

You'll see the wheels sinking (and NOT on all airplane models) only for a few seconds during the jetway animation. A bad fps due to the usage of discrete geometry for all jetways, instead, will affect you *constantly* so, it's the less of two evils.

Southwestman84

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Re: JetWays
« Reply #2 on: June 13, 2014, 08:46:38 pm »
Thanks that explains why