Reflective Airplanes

I woke up this morning to one of those funny coincidences that defines the experience of working on X-Plane: two users had emailed me. One was asking whether we'd be extending water reflection technology to airplane fuselages (like some other programs have) and the other made the case that such an extension was not necessary. The two emails arrived in sequence! (Perhaps there was a forum debate on the subject somewhere.)

First, I can tell you that if we ever have reflective airplanes, it won't be that soon. I have a number of features for version 9 that are in progress and need to be finished off before I can start anything new.

Reflective airplanes are on my "investigation list"...that is, a feature where we want to do the initial research to see if it could be implemented in a way that makes sense (for X-Plane this means: would it look good and not kill fps too badly for at least some segment of our users).

I believe the X-Plane 9 version run will start to contain more features for serious 3-d modeling of airplanes. Version 9 already features 3-d lighting in the 3-d cockpit, key frames for animation, and a ton of new datarefs to drive that animation. We're going in the direction of being able to model the plane in absurd detail.

We're also looking at the lighting model in X-Plane. We've only started this work for version 9, but consider pixel-shader-based water. Even in the "no reflections" case, the pixel-shader based water is a reflection of the real sky (as rendered) with a procedural texture to create waves. When you compare this to the version 8 water, you can see how having really close alignment of the coloring scheme for all parts of the sim creates more of a sense of realism.

So reflective airplanes are at least on my list of things to try. I have seen users do wonderful amazing "metal" textures on airplanes, but the one thing that I think holds them back is that all metal airplanes have some kind of tinting assumption to them based on the reflection used...typically these are "blue-based" (meaning they look right on a sunny day) or "gray based" (meaning they look right on a cloudy day). But if you put the plane in the other environment the texture looks a lot less convincing. Reflective textures would let authors really use the real sky color on the plane, for consistent lighting (especially when the plane's orientation changes and the blue side isn't up anymore).

On the other hand, reflections are expensive. Planes reflect light from all sides, so we would need to take reflections from all angles (the water always reflects up, which is a huge savings). For low-quality settings for water, we drop the terrain, and since the terrain only reflects at the water's edge, this is a pretty tolerable omission. An airplane reflection with "sky on the bottom" would look absurd. (Similarly, the water tends to only reflect things that aren't on camera, so the total rendering load of water + the world tends to be static. The plane would pick up a lot of 3-d objects even in orientations where they don't do much good, so plane reflections would become expensive.) And the plane reflection isn't usable for any other plane...do we build them for all planes or just the user's plane?

Certainly right now it's still too soon to tell. Not only have I not done the research into this feature, but we still don't have comprehensive performance data on the water across lots of hardware. A number of users are reporting huge framerate loss on the lowest water settings. This implies that our "render-to-texture" code is slow on some hardware but not others. (The fps loss on my laptop with the lowest water setting is less than 4%.) Render-to-texture is new to v9 and used heavily, so we need to understand how it scales for all users before we go further.

Finally, there is a whole area of 3-d techniques that X-Plane does not yet use that could make sense for airplane modeling: artist controlled fake lighting.

For example, imagine if the airplane contained a single "reflection" texture - this texture would contain a fake ground texture and alpha transparency where the sky color goes. X-Plane could then fill in the sky color (where there is transparency) only when the weather conditions change, and then apply the texture keeping the plane's orientation in mind. Such a proposal would give the plausibility of reflections (correct coloring on all parts of the plane across lighting, orientation and weather conditions) for a fraction of the cost of "real" reflections. I'm not saying this is the best idea, just that there's a lot of intermediate ground between "full reflections" and "make a static texture".