Unigine based Steamship Simulator by Ai3D

Sometimes you find things you did not expect, mostly when you're surfing the web or when rummaging in the attic.
In my case, as I don't have an attic, it was in the internet.
As you might have heard unigine is planing a version of their Valley/Heaven benchmark that supports Occulus Rift. This new version should release somewhen in july.
Somewhen.... not yet it seems. But there was this press release about a "Steamship simulator". They say curiosity killed the cat, lucky we're humans.
While flying over the press release my eyes stopped at this picture. It was like love at first sight, and i knew I had to get this picture as a desktop wallpaper.

I would have used the rightclick and "Set as desktop wallpaper" function instantly if not for the black bars and the low resolution of 4200x960 pixel.
But I would not give up that easily. As mentioned in the pressrelease even the Australian Prime Minister used this Simulator. So it's not just some backyard programmer but profesionalls at work, which means there should somewhere be high resolution screenshots around.

But who exactly made that thing? Who's Ai3D? in short, an Australian company specialized in creating simulators, 3D visualisation and architecture (oh and according to their homepage they even do 3D printing). Check out their videos on Youtube for a short overview.

So reading their own press release I found a version of that Picture without black bars.
Sadly its in 1920x438 pixel, even worse than the version with black bars. So right then I was in a dead end. And when you're in a dead end you have two choices. Either stand into a corner and start swearing or ask for help.

Sending an E-mail to Ai3D did the job and I got a fast reply from Nat plus the picture in full resolution (8400x1920). But there was still a little problem. If you take a close look you can find some graphical blemishes. Why is that? For that we have to look a little deeper on how the simulator works. (And I really mean just a little!)

As you can see there are 7 FullHD Monitors in portrait mode. You might have guessed this right, this is not done via AMD Eyefinity but in unigine engine internally rendering 7 different viewpoints with a FoV of 25.7° each, resulting in a 180° total. For the rendering there are 3 computers (and 7 GPU's), 2 screens on the left end, 2 screens on the right end, and the middle 3 screens go to the master computer that also does the calculations for weather, physics, particles, AI and the synchronisation.

Taking a screenshot over 3 computers and 7 monitors does not seem as easy as pressing the Printscreen button on the keyboard. In the end they made the screenshots on a single computer which rendered the 8400x1920 pixel but this caused a little synchronisation problem which is to blame for the graphical glitches.

Thanks to AussieTimmeh's photoshop skills these errors got fixed and the picture is ready to go as Wallpaper.

You can download different resolution suitable cropped wallpapers in the Gallery