Hello everyone I am David Dedeine, creative
director at Asobo Studio.
I am super proud and happy to talk about the
weather today for the new Flight Simulator.
There is five important things we want to
cover today about this.
New atmospheric engine, in order to unify
the rendering of the sky, in the simulation.
Everything related to the weather special
effects.
Also the new day and night cycle.
The Volumetric clouds.
And the live real-world weather implemented
natively into the game.
So to start with the new atmospheric simulation,
we had to completely restart from scratch
this aspect of the sim because we really wanted
the lighting of the world to be as realistic
as possible.
And to take advantage of new technics coming
from the video game industry to make this
as best and as realistic as possible.
So in this case the new scattering systems
allows us to unify all the different source
of light and to render all of them all together.
Typically, the sunlight, the moonlight, the
starlight, the city lights.
All of those things are informed by the air
density, by the humidity of the air even sometimes
by the pollution.
And all those different layers of atmosphere
are taken into account to scatter all the
photons coming from all those different light
sources.
So the shadows have also been really improved,
now the mountains cast shadows on the clouds,
the clouds cast shadows on the mountain, the
clouds cast shadows on themselves and all
those different layers of clouds cast shadows
on the ground which gives a general feeling
of realism which is never seen before.
So now what about the new weather special
effects?
We got now fully volumetric 3D rain natively
into the game,
We also have volumetric rainbow scattering.
It’s really based on what would happen in
real life if you have the right context the
right level of humidity; typically rain and
the right angle you will see a rainbow where
you would see it in real life.
At the level where actually as in real life
most of the time there is an echo to the first
rainbow and you can see it in game you can
see the echo of the first rainbow propagating
the atmosphere because it is a scattering
calculation, so it works as is in real life.
So the rain impacts also the cockpit itself.
Each water drop on the windshield is informed
by the speed of the plane or the thrust of
the engine.
Depending on this we will see each drop of
water being stretched on the windshield, which
is pretty neat.
We also have fully volumetric fog.
We also have the icing depending the real
life parameters and context.
You will see the ice propagating on the wing
and follow all the systems to the pilot to
de-ice the wing.
This clip is cool because it shows what I
was talking about
you can see this cloud in the middle of the
picture which is lit directly by the sun because
there is a hole in the clouds ceiling and
the other clouds in the world are darker.
And it works also for the rain, which you
can see under the cloud, which lit directly
by the sun too, you can see the nice movement
of the rain.
It’s a time lapse so it has been slightly
accelerated in order to demonstrate what I
was talking about.
Here you can see the rainbow.
And if you look at it closely you can see
the echo of this rainbow behind it.
Again because it’s really based on physical
calculations.
Here we can see the rain impact the cockpit
rendering and typically the way the water
propagates on the windshield itself and you
can see that depending on the speed the drop
of water will be stretched in the direction
of the wind, which is pretty neat
We have also improved the night engine.
Now we are talking about the fully yearly
based day and night cycle
what it means is that the position of the
sun will be really informed by the moment
of the year.
In summer the sun will be higher in the atmosphere
in the north hemisphere—obviously—and
be lower during the winter
But it is the same thing for the position
of the moon depending of the moment of the
year or the month.
Same thing for the stars, which will have
the accurate position in the sky
We have also completely revamped the lights
on the ground.
So the city lights, the road lights, the runway
lights or the airport lights in general all
those lights will also inform the rendering.
You can see the clouds being lit by the city
by night
And it allows as a result VFR navigation by
night, which is pretty cool.
All the reflections also are taken in to account
So you will see all those lights reflect on
the water for example, which is also rendered
as any layer of the atmosphere, it sounds
weird but it’s actually the case.
So you can see on those videos that during
a dark day the water will be super dark and
the reflections of the buildings are really
dark.
And in a bright day you can see that suddenly,
in this case the Seattle bay, is pretty colorful
and you can see that the ocean now is at the
same spot much more blue due to the color
of the sky.
And the reflection of the buildings themselves,
it’s much more colorful too.
Now a few words about the volumetric clouds.
To us they are the star of the show because
obviously they are super important during
a flight.
They are generated based on 32 layers from
sea level to high altitude.
Each of those layers are informed by fuzziness,
density, cloud shape and all those clouds
can be seen from any angle there is no billboard
effect.
It’s truly fully volumetric.
They are not only visible from any angle they
are also informed during their life by the
updraft, the wind, their dissolution, their
formation that you can see if you observe
them exactly like it would be in real life
informed by the real life weather.
So it’s really neat.
Thanks to this system, we basically have a
native support of all the cloud types, depending
on the width of the layer or the density of
the layers,
we can basically display any type of cloud
thanks to this system.
Which is super cool.
And we simulated this all around the globe
and the view distance is 600 km (370 miles)
which is really important,
because especially when you fly in airliners,
you can see them from very far and it will
have the same level of accuracy, which is
really great.
In this video we can see that even inside
a cloud the density of the cloud can evolve,
in that when we go under them we see that
the clouds cast shadows on themselves, these
two layers of shadows also cast on the ground.
on this one you can see how the updraft informs
the formation of the storm.
As a result, now we would like to show you
this video where we can see the different
types of pre-sets we’ve got in the game,
you can change them on the fly,
from clear sky, to broken sky, to stormy weather,
to rain etc.
All those pre-sets are accessible directly
from the in-game interface.
I would like to show now something pretty
cool that you haven’t seen before.
It’s the ability for the user to change
seamlessly the time of the day just with this
slider.
It’s real time, no loading, and it is really
cool.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Now a few words about the live real world
weather,
Based on everything I have said so far on
the weather system, the architecture of the
rendering of the weather has been made in
order to also be able to receive real world
data and to inject those data directly in
the engine to represent the real world as
close as the data we actually collect all
around the world,
Those data have somewhere around 60 different
layers everywhere in the world, each of those
layers again define the level of humidity,
density, fuzziness of the different clouds
type.
We inject that directly into the engine and
it gives as a result exactly what we would
observe in real life.
If there is a cold front in real life or a
hot front in real life, a storm, if it rains
somewhere all of that will be directly injected
into the engine and will reflect what happens
in real life.
On top of all the information related to the
clouds themselves there is also all the information
related to pressure, to humidity, to temperatures,
to wind gusts.
As a result, we have a native support of jet
streams for example.
The navigation will be based on actual recent
information, which you will have to take in
to account, which is super important, typically
for airliners where the navigation is really
based on the speed of the wind on higher altitudes.
On this video you can see a screenshot of
a website with real life data, how we pour
this in the menu of the game and how you can
actually see the exact same clouds in the
game.
So to conclude this video there is 3 highlights.
The fact that we have a full spectrum weather
that you can edit on the fly, real time, seamlessly.
That we have a fully volumetric sky also that
the live real world weather data can be injected
natively in the engine and gives you exactly
what you would have in the real world.
I hope you have enjoyed this video, thank
you for watching, see you soon.
