A couple of new screenshots showing our latest work in atmospherics and weather effects:

Afternoon and haze:








Sun glare:




stratus cloud formations:









Meanwhile, some important corrections are being made at the code, specially subobject collision check and its stability.

All the screenshots look good Dante, even the ground textures look improved!

I'd like to see more of the cloud formations though (always seem the toughest effects to convincingly produce IMO).

Looking Good....

so any other updates you like to share with us...

Beautiful!

Very nice!

Great Dante

Please keep on pressing.... just a few more months.

The sky and the atmospheric effects are beautiful, the colors are also pretty AND realistic at the same time (not like in the over-saturated Il-2 or Lock-On, with the strange blue color of their skies). Very good also to have low-sun conditions without über-funky colors!

Just a comment on the cockpits: in the final version of the game, will they have a little more polys? Especially for some more depth on the instruments (I'm waiting at least for the standard of Lock-On).

P.S. Another thing on the cockpit: would it be possible to have a virtual camera for the pilot'view without any distorsions, more precisely with round instruments which are seen.... round and not ovoid?

Maybe with an ortographic projection camera, but then everything else will look funny (reduced field of view/no sense of depth/no vanishing point etc etc etc)

This ovoid effect is quite inevitable, when I worked at a space sim mmo it was a typical complaint that planets and other 3D spheres getting near the corners of the screen started to look ovoid..... a quick googling and the explaination:

Perspective projection distortion is the inevitable misrepresentation of 3-dimensional space when drawn or "projected" onto a 2-dimensional surface.




We plan to add normal-mapping to make the cockpit instruments less flat and keeping the polycount not that high - it also will look really good in shaded relief with the light moving through the bumps. Ah, the Skyhawk's cockpit frame will be re-modelled with more polys, it's quite obsolete now (and obviously missing the mirrors and other details).

Hi Dante, thanks for the explanation about camera, very interesting.

And great infos for the cockpits :-)


"it also will look really good in shaded relief with the light moving through the bumps."

Is it about the same method that is used for getting a high-details map from Zbrush or Mudbox?

Btw, I can' wait until this sim is out!!!!!

That looks specfreakingtacular! Can't wait!

Any word on release date?

Yes, quite the same.

Looking as good as ever.

Looks very good!

I love haze effect.

Looks Amazing!

Looks amazing Dante, JT, and all!!!

ps will you be adding real-time shadows?

It does indeed look beautiful, possibly the best skies I've ever seen in a simulator. As mentioned, Lock On: Modern Air Combat and especially IL-2 had funny sky colors. In fact, IL-2 was positively wrong in that the sky got deep blue, almost midnight blue, at about 40,000 feet. That's wrong. In reality, the darkening is almost imperceptible at that altitude; it's like Oleg Maddox was trying to play astronaut.

Jet Thunder's skies, on the other hand, look very realistic. The only thing I don't like about these screenshots is the canopies; they look like they're going to share Lock On: Modern Air Combat's problem of being too badly scratched up. I've never seen a real aircraft canopy that was nearly that bad.

Benny, yes that canopy scratches that still remain now in 2008 are overlooks - I've did that years ago and they will be replaced with better canopy textures as the engine programming advances and new transparency/material effects are available.

Really looking forward to this, looks great.

Looks nice. How many people are working on this project?