Hello Everyone!

While we continue to work to finish several aircraft for BON and FC2, we would like to take a moment to show you something else we’ve been working on - our new sky technology! Many of you have complained in the past about “banding” that occurs in our sky-dome, especially as the light begins to fade late in the day and at night. We agree that this was not ideal and we have decided to do something about it.

We have now adopted a more physics-based technology that has more or less become an industry standard these days. Before we had more of an artistic approach, but it had some limitations as many of you pointed out. The new sky is meant to simulate the sky on a round globe and we have adapted it to our engine. The results are pretty nice. The end result should be no banding, including the glow around the moon. This should give you a more realistic picture. Our new sky also allows us to change how we do dust and haze in the atmosphere which we will look at in the not-too-distant future as well.

This technology should not have much of an impact on your performance, however, it does use more Video Memory, so we highly recommend you have at least 2GB or more. This was one of the reasons for the Video Card Survey we asked you to participate in last week. Which, if you haven’t taken the time yet, please do participate. It’s very helpful to us.

We feel that this new sky along with our new clouds create a really great atmospheric environment to fly and fight in. We still need to tweak our lighting for each season and make some further small adjustments, but here are several pics that show where we are headed. Some pics are on clear days and some are on hazier days. We also show how the moon looks now and some of the new sunset colors that occur.

Note: The compression caused some loss in quality which may show some slight banding. This is not from the game itself. Please download and look at the originals here in this archive to see the difference if you feel it necessary. In-game there is no banding.

Uncompressed Originals

We hope you like it. Enjoy!