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Here we have scenes from a suburban neighborhood in X-Plane 10. It features a variety of houses, trees, and cars, with the sort of sprawling, haphazard layout seen in suburbs across the US.

The scenery here is still “in progress”–there are a few artifacts here and there, and it’s a bit repetitive in places–but it does exemplify the kind of look we’re going for in Version 10.

These images were taken on a latest-generation iMac–a nice machine, but the specs on it are not spectacular for home use. Our (quite acheivable) goal is to have this level of detail (or near it) available on any moderately fast home computer. In practice, X-Plane 10 should be reasonably scalable, with nice graphics for high end machines and the ability to turn off resource-intense features on slower machines.

Images (click to see full size)

If you missed the story behind cloud rendering in X-Plane 10, see the Cloud rendering in X-Plane 10 post.

What you see in this image is amazing detail at one point far away, and very little detail close up to the camera. Here is what’s happening: Remember how we said the detail clusters all around the airplane, with all the fine detail near the plane and much less detail farther away?

In this screenshot, the airplane is in the middle of the high-detail area far off in the distance. The camera is far from the airplane in an external view. What you’re seeing is the high-detail area that surrounds the airplane from a distance, and floating amongst the low-detail area that is far from the plane.

For the final release, we will keep the higher-detail area near the camera, and the lower detail area farther away, so that the cloud resolution looks more consistent. You won’t see such a highly-detailed area so far away, and you won’t see such a low-detail area up close. It will be more consistent, which is what we probably want.

Click the image below to enlarge it, or right-click here and select “Save as…” to download the 4 MB full-quality version of it.