So U are saying??? there is 50/50 chance of making LAX for fs9 or what?
We don't know yet, because no actual work has been done on this, we'll see in the next weeks.
Perhaps you would understand better if I explain what usually happens in the development process: whenever there were internal discussions within the team to do something in a certain way, we always factored in the FS9 porting implications so, if something that looked good for FSX but would make the scenery too difficult to port or looking bad in FS9, we usually scrapped it. This means, we always had to give FSX users some kind of compromise, since no scenery really took advantage of the sim. We always made a "spiced up FS9 scenery" rather than a true FSX scenery.
With KDFW, we went a little bit further, but not entirely, which means the port to FS9 was surprisingly easy and not bad to look at.
With KLAX, we removed any restraint we had, and simply did whatever we wanted to do, without caring at all about possible problems for FS9.
The easiest to understand example is the usage of 4096x4096 textures: we are NOT using them to get higher than normal resolution, we are using them for SPEED. The overall resolution is exactly the same as (for example) KDFW, but with 4096x4096 textures, we use 16X less of them, which is way more efficient, since every separate texture is at least one material, and every time the graphic engine has to *switch* materials, it drops performances so, the less materials you have, the better. Ideally, if all graphic card could support it, the fastest scenery could be a *single* huge texture, with everything in. This is very well known to mobile phone game developers that are accustomed to run with limited resources: they all do all textures belonging to the same game in a single, large texture, otherwise called "Atlas"
Unfortunately, having designed the scenery for 4096x4096 textures, which FS9 doesn't support in any way, would present us with the following dilemma: just scale the FSX textures to 1024x1024, resulting in a 4X more blurred scenery OR manually remapping everything to conform to many 1024x1024 textures instead of few 4096x4096, which is a very long work.
This was just the more obvious example, but there are many others, like the fact the materials were designed to look good when associated with detail textures (which FS9 doesn't support) and not just plain detail textures, we used bump maps on the *detail* textures, which is something that can't be even simulated in FS9. Another example is the fact we used some very tricky shaders in FSX to allow for multiple layers and areas of customized detail textures, which are more complex than the already tricky ones we used in KDFW, and they port badly to FS9 too.
Last but not least, there's the issue of the polygonal complexity of the scenery, which makes the FS9 SDK going bonkers trying to compile it (we don't have any idea if FS9 would then be able to *run* it, provided we ever manage to compile it in the first place...), manually splitting the scenery to please the FS9 compiler is out of the question, the only way would be writing some new tool that does it automatically, but as I've said, I've no idea how difficult would be, because no work on it has been done right now.
