Flight! in PC Pilot mag!

[Chuck_Jodry-VJPL 663]

Windows Live is something one can get familiar with now, Cuckoo-Crack was produced by a FlightSim Company learning the ropes and familiarising themselves with the console games platform , as well as mobile applications .What is a Flight Sim? , in this case a Cuckoo flying but the manner its drawn and the environment projected create a "Flying Game", there is a lot to be learned from recent history and how quickly the " Cloud " has formed on the horizon, keeping up with changing distribution networks and various platforms is going to be critical to surviving long-term for independent producers, discussions about should it happen are moot , like combat flight in FS the future is already upon us.

[january 19]

Question- What happens to the concept of online games (and movie downloading), as the ISPs place restrictions on the amount of bandwidth consumed by users? Verizon announced recently that they will be doing this for the top 5% of their highest usage customers. I believe ATT is already doing this. And in Canada, the telcos and cable providers have also applied to the regulator to do similar. (The Canadian regulator agreed but was rebuffed by the politicians who sense an election this spring!)I suspect that the widespread view of "Unlimited Internet Capacity" is about to end.After all there is no such thing as UNLIMITED.Already my Shaw Cable so called High Speed service frequently slows to a crawl and sometimes isn't even connectable for an hour or so.AR

[Guest jahman]

...I suspect that the widespread view of "Unlimited Internet Capacity" is about to end.After all there is no such thing as UNLIMITED....

That's funny, South Korea is planning to wire every home at 1 GBit by 2012, "only" a tenfold increase over the current 100 MBit average household BW.ISP BW indeed is unlimited as long as technology provides more BW than is required.In any case the BW required for multi-player MS Flight is minimal.Cheers,- jahman.

[Kosta 122]

Question- What happens to the concept of online games (and movie downloading), as the ISPs place restrictions on the amount of bandwidth consumed by users?

I believe it's all gonna become the question of money.Limiting bandwidth is probably going to lead back to stores.And to be honest, the problem are not general users: online games, online movie stores etc... The real problem is the "free" online content (music, movies, applications...).Just take a look at the concept of binaries newsgroups. I can't even stop imagining what traffic such things cause. Pay some 20€ per month and you get free access to virtually everything?Now double/triple/quadruple... that, cuz it has to get uploaded too...And a regular Joe here in Austria (I know, this is not USA), according to network usage statistics, uses about 1-2GB of network per month.Now how many are there really who use up to 50GB? And how many are there who use up to 500GB or more?We either have to build faster and bigger networks or just shut the half of the internet down.Now, who's up to that?? ^_^EDIT: And now back to topic for meself...

[Guest veeray]

Games don't take up much bandwidth at all... it's more about latency than anything else so a fast connection helps. Actually what's going on in canada has less to do with bandwidth, than it does with Telco's getting their fair share for the services they render to other ISPs. The fact these ISPs use to provide unlimited service is irrelevant to an extent. They made a promise they couldn't keep, while Cable and Telcos always have had limits even if they were never enforced.

[january 19]

Q. Will the Cable and Telcos invest in expanded capacity to deliver better service down my street if-A The customers are unwilling to pay more? and-B The regulators (read 'politicians') are unwilling to allow user rates sufficient for an acceptable ROI.AR

[dr1fodder 0]

Well lets not forget MIcrosoft already tried this with FSX and they didn't have much success selling it at $1000 dollars , and then dropped the price to $500. Seems the price right now is 9.99/month over at Prepar3d and even that hasn't attracted too many developers. The optimal price is free with the "deluxe edition" I think.

There are quite a few Prepar3D developers, just not many that are vocal or posting a lot because a lot of us are already on other development forums like Avsim or FSDeveloper. As a former ESP developer I can tell you that the price started at $799 for a license and they didn't drop it to $500 as far as I am aware. There were certainly different price-points depending on the Enterprise/Volume license agreement that someone had with MS, but the average developer didn't have that.The 9.95 is for the Prepar3D Developer Network subscription, not the retail license. I am not sure if you were trying to make a point that the price has gone from $1000 down to $9.95 and that this is proof that the products are failures? It isn't the case and the information you are presenting isn't correct if that is what you are implying. People are always trying to compare ESP and P3D as commercial software to FSX the game and it isn't apples to apples. What gamers fail to appreciate is that the commercial market has a different price-point not just because of the market, but because of the different legal and liability implications. If I supply data to a game, such as say navdata, I want to make sure that there are disclaimers everywhere that it is not to be used for training or actual navigation. It is for entertainment only. If I supply navdata for a simulator that is used for training, now I am in a completely different arena of risk. If a pilot augers into a mountain because I supplied bad data, I am potentially now facing $$$$$$ lawsuits. As such the navdata is now sold for $$$$ to the simulator software company and I will charge $$$$$$$ for regular updates to that data. Same with up-to-date terrain, aircraft systems and flight models and so on. One company I dealt with wanted to charge me $100,000 for data (I won't go into exactly what the data was) for just one country! Some of this data is basically the same as what is in FSX, but because I wanted to use it for training, the legal risk just went up.So, the price point of $499 for Prepar3D for commercial use is astoundingly good. Not that the average gamer would appreciate, but after putting together some simulators that cost the company I worked for over $1M in simulation software alone, BEFORE CODING AND INTEGRATION and the fact that P3D could probably do 75-85% of the functionality for under $10k without modification, the 25-15% loss of functionality is more than offset by the savings. In any case, I estimate that of the remaining functionality, 5% was not required anyway and the other features could have been built using SimConnect.

[Guest jahman]

Q. Will the Cable and Telcos invest in expanded capacity to deliver better service down my street if-A The customers are unwilling to pay more? and-B The regulators (read 'politicians') are unwilling to allow user rates sufficient for an acceptable ROI.AR

Yes, BW will continue to increase as long as the cost of doing so keeps falling, because offering higher BW at a lower price is an opportunity for a newcomer ISP to win existing customers off the old ISPs, so the end result is all ISPs increase available BW sooner or later.Cheers,- jahman.

[Guest veeray]

There are quite a few Prepar3D developers, just not many that are vocal or posting a lot because a lot of us are already on other development forums like Avsim or FSDeveloper. As a former ESP developer I can tell you that the price started at $799 for a license and they didn't drop it to $500 as far as I am aware. There were certainly different price-points depending on the Enterprise/Volume license agreement that someone had with MS, but the average developer didn't have that.

I was specifically commenting on the price of an SDK. Nevermind the binaries I think the pricing is just fine for the added support one would recieve versus the zero support with FSX. But still just about anything I ever needed from the "newer" SDK was included in the free and improved documentation/examples. I've never seen an SDK(FSX versions) written so poorly. The ACE tool is beyond "undocumented" the CABDIR tool requires you to be in "My Documents".... Should we be paying anything for this $#*#*?

[dr1fodder 0]

I was specifically commenting on the price of an SDK. Nevermind the binaries I think the pricing is just fine for the added support one would recieve versus the zero support with FSX. But still just about anything I ever needed from the "newer" SDK was included in the free and improved documentation/examples. I've never seen an SDK(FSX versions) written so poorly. The ACE tool is beyond "undocumented" the CABDIR tool requires you to be in "My Documents".... Should we be paying anything for this $#*#*?

Sorry for misunderstanding, I did read the post and because the Prepar3D SDK is free, I thought you were talking about paying for the application. The Prepar3D SDK is a free download from the Prepar3D website in their downloads page. The tools still work for the most part with FSX I believe and they have a couple of new tools that are compatible with some improved documentation.

[n4gix 4,955]

the CABDIR tool requires you to be in "My Documents"....

Eh? I've had CABDIR installed in its own folder for years! I also created a custom shortcut and put it in the "SendTo" folder.All I have to do is select ANY folder in Windows Explorer, right-click, pick CABDIR from the list, and......voila!The CABDIR shortcut:

Target:       "C:\Make CAB\cabdir.exe"Start in:     "C:\Make CAB"

One merely needs to learn the most effective and efficient way to USE the tools provided... :Thinking:I also have similar "SendTo" shortcuts set up to make compiling aircraft and scenery using the Max9 SDK commandline tools just as easy... :(

[Guest veeray]

Awesome! Thanks Bill!

[n4gix 4,955]

Awesome! Thanks Bill!

No problem! Actually, creating and using Desktop Shortcuts in many ways is analogous to the venerable and ancient practice of creating batch (.bat) files back in the Dark Ages of DOS.I once created an entire single screen "menu system" from a 6,000+ line .bat file!For maximum flexibility though, one could create a Desktop Shortcut that itself simply launches a .bat file for multiple sequential tool operations.

[Guest veeray]

That's a lot of echo commands. I use to just use Norton Commander in those days, had a nice split view so you could work in two directories at once. I never really got pass the autoexec.bat though. Personally I'm a bigger fan of Unix shell scripts, there's a lot of power in piping stdio through a series of commands.

[beatle 0]

With DOS batch (.BAT) files, and the newer command (.CMD) files, you can pipe the stdout of one command to the stdin of the next command just like in Unix. If you get into the even newer PowerShell scripts, you can basically pipe .Net objects from one command to another :->Tim