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Old February 12th 18, 01:11 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Dan Daly[_2_]
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Posts: 718
Default Condor2, inbound on final glide!

On Monday, February 12, 2018 at 2:42:57 AM UTC-5, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
On Monday, February 12, 2018 at 3:06:07 AM UTC, sisu1a wrote:
https://www.facebook.com/CondorSim/

Condor2 is finally here/around the corner. The new site is up, the old forum imported to the new one, and the store is up (buy links not active yet but prices are there)

http://www.condorsoaring.com/order/?cn-reloaded=1#

http://www.condorsoaring.com/forums/ (old forum towards bottom, threads still active)

Yay!


You beat me to it my friend

Chris Wedgwood
Condor Team


Here's the 'what's new' from the webpage:

What’s new in Condor 2
Graphics engine:

Rendering code completely rewritten to DirectX 11, allowing extensive use of GPU shaders (vs DirectX 7 of Condor 1 with fixed pipeline rendering)
Screen resolution limited only to hardware (vs max 2048 in Condor 1)
Fullscreen ALT-TAB functionality is now supported (vs. full screen switching not supported in Condor 1)

Weather model:

Many improvements to thermal model (higher cloud base, thicker clouds, streeting, flatlands activity)
Completely new Cu cloud model, much less strain on the GPU and more realistic lighting, will enable much bigger clouds (2.x version)
Improved ridge lift model
A new high level wind speed setting with wind speeds up to 100 km/h (vs.. no high level wind setting and wind speeds of max 50 km/h in Condor 1)
Completely rewritten wave lift with multiple waves and lenticularis clouds (vs. single wave and no lenticularis clouds in Condor 1)
Adjustable cirrus density (vs static in Condor 1)

Multiplayer:

64 planes or more in MP with better (smarter) plane position data exchange (vs max 32 planes in Condor 1)
Automatic port forwarding (vs manual NAT setup in Condor 1)

Flight physics model:

Improvements to flight physics model
Nicer plane handling

Scenery rendering:

30 m resolution scenery, internally 22.5m (vs 90 m in Condor 1)
Default scenery texture size is 2048 (vs 512 in Condor 1, that is 16x more texture data)
Much lower terrain texture memory footprint despite higher texture resolution
Much denser forests with real size trees and more accurate tree placement (vs less dense forests with 3x too big trees and 16x worse tree placement in Condor 1)
Multithreaded terrain loading which loads terrain tiles much faster (vs.. single threaded terrain loading in Condor 1 which would now take 8+ seconds if not multithreaded)
Water is “alive” with sun reflections and waves (vs static texture in Condor 1)

Sky and shading:

New sky model with more realistic sunrise/sunset effects
Exponential (realistic) haze (vs linear haze in Condor 1)
Cu clouds cast shadows depending on the sun position (vs shadow always vertically below cloud in Condor 1)
Lenticularis clouds cast shadows on ground and planes
New sun and flares model, sun is hidden behind objects, flares disappear (vs. sun and flares always ON even if behind an object in Condor 1)
Realtime scenery lighting and shadows, mountains cast shadows (vs. static texture shadows in Condor 1)
Trees, planes, airports and all ground objects lighted from sun and shadowed from mountains and clouds (vs. static color in Condor 1)
All ground objects cast shadows (vs no shadows in Condor 1)
Realtime self shadowing of planes in cockpit and outside (vs. no self shadowing in Condor 1)
Specular highlights on planes and other objects (vs no specular highlights in Condor 1)

Planes:

Much higher poly count of planes (exterior and cockpit)
3D instrument models (vs 2D textures in Condor 1)
Reflections of pilot on instruments (vs no reflections in Condor 1)
New, high poly and high resolution texture pilot model
Completely new wing bend model, wings now have inertia (vs. no inertia in Condor 1)
New animation for hand to see wris****ch which is animated
Rotating wheels on planes (vs static wheels in Condor 1)
Improved high/low G effects

Airports:

Completely redesigned airport rendering with high resolution asphalt and grass textures (vs. low resolution textures in Condor 1)
Scenery designer controlled placement of windsocks. Multiple windsocks per airport are allowed, with adjustable size (vs. 1 windsock with generic placement in Condor 1)
Much higher poly count and higher resolution airport objects

Other:

New, higher resolution GUI
High resolution flighttrack logging (vs. low resolution in Condor 1)
Right button mouse “zooming” allows camera placement almost everywhere (vs static distance camera in Condor 1)
Moved all user files (flighttracks, flightplans etc) to documents\Condor folder (vs “virtualstore” issues in Condor 1)
Revised registration and verification to eliminate installation counter problems
Many other improvements (variable tow rope length etc.) …