The graphic engine had to be rewritten to provide the necessary performance and stability to allow people to actually play the sim. It appears the rewrite has succeeded in its main objective of the performance increase and fixed CTD's etc, but there are still enough graphics bugs to delay the release. Not sure how you figured a major rewrite of the graphic engine would be a quick fix, the developer certainly never alluded to that.

Chivas said:

>>The graphic engine had to be rewritten to provide the necessary performance and stability to allow people to actually play the sim. <<

Yes, it would appear that way.

>>It appears the rewrite has succeeded in its main objective of the performance increase and fixed CTD's etc, but there are still enough graphics bugs to delay the release.<<

Correct. These are deductions we can all agree with...apart from the silly whiners and complainers of course.

>>Not sure how you figured a major rewrite of the graphic engine would be a quick fix, the developer certainly never alluded to that. <<

Correct again. I wonder if the devs should not consider hiring you in some capacity - perhaps in the PR dept - since your knowledge of the dev process seems second to none, and your predictions have unerring accuracy. Perhaps the role of liaison officer?

They alluded that it is "almost finished" at Christmas.

Actually it was advertized as a quick fix. They said we'll have it by Christmas.
Also remember, this bad patch, we are stuck with for six months, is part of that "new graphics engine. The online crashes were introduced with this "primer" for the new graphics engine. My game was looking a lot better, runing faster and was a lot more stable before this last messy patch.

No part of the Performance/graphic engine rewrite has been released. They did release tweaks to the old graphic engine, but found it wasn't going to work, and then decided to do the total rewrite of the graphic engine to fix the performance and CTD issues. There is no such thing as a quick fix major graphic engine rewrite.

August 6 2011 update:

"1. Graphics. Our graphics team is in the middle of a dramatic revision of our graphics engine. The new engine, still in alpha stage, is both faster and better looking. I won’t get into the technical details, but in a word it’s faster and more streamlined. From the appearance point of view, the change is equally as dramatic but is easier seen. Colors are calculated differently, especially in terms of distance. I’m attaching some screenshots showing before and after. The colors are not yet tuned, and there are some other issues but we are much happier with the game’s visuals today than we’ve been for quite some time."

Some of those changes were introduced in the next patch, the one we have now. The patch notes also said, they are in the final stages of testing for this "new" engine.:

From the patch notes of the current version released october 17. :

"MAIN * Drastically reworked graphic algorithms dealing with in-game color;
.....


3. Performance. We are in final stages of testing a thorough overhaul of the game’s graphic engine. It won’t look any different but it will be much more streamlined. It’s too early to say what the FPS increase will be in the final version, but it shouldn’t be less than 50%."


So, as you said. There's no such a thing as quick fix new graphics engine..... they found out the hard way.:(

I' just curious how much beauty was lost with this engine change. I hope they can restore the reflections.

It was pretty obvious that they were modeling the world and the aircraft to apply the coding of the new engine to, is it just me? Isn't that how all game designers work? 2 separate departments, one for the 3d modeling and one for the coding of the engine.

What do you mean?
Yes, generally in the industry I would assume that while some may be qualified in both professions, they may be taking a role in only one of the departments.

Because the whole context of this post is about how they are testing BoM without the new engine in place. The reason why they are only showing static screenshots. I just thought it was obvious that they were just showing the 3d modeling and had not implemented the engine into the game. Sorry, it did look confusing without the above explanation.

Yeh, a 3rd party team is creating the BoM landscape/maps with what I presume would be the same old 3d modelling team also working on related grounds objects, planes etc while the engine coders are re-creating the graphics engine.