Aerosoft failed, Flight failed. Xplane10 is still in beta x. What's needed is a series of serious committments from users in the flight sim community which is not likely to happen. Perhaps an offer to pay thousands per copy....

 

You'll need serious capital to get this finished and marketed. Not to mention several committments from established developers to reduce development time.

 

I hope we can maintain the feature set of FSX and move forward into the future with P3D. If there is another alternative in the wings (sorry!), I'd like to hear about it!

 

Yes, this path seems to make the most sense which presumably is in part why LM bought it.  Having most of the elements of a total sim seems easier to work with than starting from scratch, though I've wondered if having a working template, i.e., the existing code, and working to build an entirely new engine off of that should be easier than truly starting from scratch.   I am hoping they open up better access to CPU to GPU offloading, multicore, and who knows maybe 64bit some day.

Sounds like you're hitting all the right points, I wish you the best of luck!

 

I have a few questions for you, if you don't mind and are comfortable answering.

 

Do you have a team of developers or is it a one man show for now?

  We currently have 4 team members with hopes that others will want to join in.

 

Is this a full-time project?

  We all have full time jobs so no it's not a full-time project.

 

Do you have experience with DX10/11?

 Yes we have experience with DX from the beginning .

 

Are you planning on leveraging the power of the modern GPU via tesselation or other methods to offload calculations from the CPU? (Please say yes)

 ALL features of DirectX will be utilitized which is very core to the design, especially tessellation & soft shadows will be GPU based.

 

Will the sim feature a real-world scenery model or a "plausible world" model?

 The sim will be a real earth round world designed.  As far as whether or not there will be generated textures based on landclass and/or mixture of real world textures remains to be determined.

 

Do you have plans for an SDK?

 We do plan on this being externally controllable hence an SDK will be forthcoming.

 

Have you spoken with any add-on developers to gauge interest?

 As of yet there is has been no talks, however I plan on speaking to a VERY well known "environment" team which I have had talks with in the past with hopes that their textures become the default.

 

How do you intend to preserve add-on compatibility and to what degree?

 This is currently under testing and so far it seems that it is plausible to import any current FSX aircraft with their associated animations/effects/textures/sounds/air file.  Most other scenery objects will be determined as we progress.

 

Do you have any legal concerns, or is this an entirely new program?

 No legal concerns because this is our code base and will be all original textures/models etc...  As far as being able to import other manufacturers items, there is plenty in their SDK's which allows for the understanding of user designed  items hence we can make the sim able to read the same items however, there will be a legal side to this which will be addressed accordingly.

 

Have you considered Kickstarter or similar crowd-sourced funding methods to really get the ball rolling?

  At this point, there is no consideration for kick starter.  I appreciate the offer and idea but we'll have to see what happens down the road and where this takes us!  

 

That's all I can think of for now, thanks and good luck!  Thanks for the questions!

Норе you really succeed with this project! Good luck!

The problem(s) with the idea of importing FSX aircraft into a new sim are quite major...

 

1) FSX is built on an underlying system that depends utterly on being able to execute 3rd party 32bit code - in the form of DLL and GAU files principally. Building the environment that allows you to run these with 100% compatibility will inherently mean 'write FSX'. The same problem is going to hit LockMart with 64bit, you can't just move to a new execution environment without having to write some kind of DLL shim if you want compatibility. Given that LM's goal isn't to 'be a better FSX', I'd expect 64bit P3D to involve throwing away all previous custom guages and other sources of dlls.

 

2) Even to this day the community does not have a full documentation of .air files, and there is a lot of cargo cult behaviour when it comes to how to setup some of the tables. You could, in theory, compile a list of every .air file table used in 'out in the wild' aircraft, it'd be a massive undertaking to compile, and I bet that even some of the big names will answer 'we set it to that because that's what everyone sets it to'. LM don't have this problem with P3D because they have the ESP sourcecode, which is documentation of the air file tables. Even if you make something that 100% supports the known/out-in-the-wild tables, there is a chance LM or a third party that they give information to, could produce an aircraft that works fine with FSX and P3D, but uses tables that aren't documented currently. To be honest, even though LM has the ESP source code, I bet they have no idea what some of the tables do, and would need to spend months/years reverse engineering what does what from the source code - even MS didn't seem to know how all the tables worked at the end (remember that the air format has evolved with FS* releases, and there is probably code in the flight modelling that noone working at Aces had a full understanding of anymore).

 

The best way to solve problem 2 would probably be to use an internal format for flight model data that is different to .air and have some kind of conversion tool that converts from a FSX/ESP .air to your own format. It would, however, still be a massive undertaking and you'll invariably have some difference between your flight modelling and the FSX/ESP flight modelling, somewhere.

 

Scenery compatibility is much much easier (since there is no 3rd party provided executable code for most scenery), which is why that's something that X-plane does have.

Best of Luck!

Best of luck! If you really want a source of concentrated ideas on what the community (or at least a good representative sample of the community) desires, then you might take a lingering look at the Aerosoft site and the huge number of suggestions given to them when they were contemplating a similar endeavor.

Is like photo realistic scenery like horizon gen x with auto gen of orbx , like earth simulations , Guernsey , alderney , isle of scilley , vox atc type atc which also powers ai aircraft with real world flight plans , more realistic aircraft graphics like photo real. As much current fsx payware add ons compatibility , how's that for a tall order.

I will repeat what was said earlier in this thread....

 

"Build it...and they (and I) will come!"

 

Stan

Nice

Carmin, thanks for letting us know what you're trying to do. This is exactly what I've been hoping and waiting for and I wish you the very best of luck and will keep my fingers crossed you will succeed in your project!<br /><br />What we already have today, an environment where we can actually "fly" almost like it was for real with help from all different kinds of great addons I can only imagine what it would be like if someone was able to find a way to overcome all current limitations in FSX.<br /><br />You have my utmost respect for trying to accomplish this!!

Sounds great, looking forward to this but to map the whole world like FSX does not sound like a 4 person task.

 

The best way to solve problem 2 would probably be to use an internal format for flight model data that is different to .air and have some kind of conversion tool that converts from a FSX/ESP .air to your own format.

That is exactly how it will work.  And well aware of the undertaking but ready for the challenge.

Sounds great, looking forward to this but to map the whole world like FSX does not sound like a 4 person task.

 

It's definitely not "easy" but it's also not impossible and not as complex as it sounds with the right data at your disposal! I have already worked on a project in the last year which used global terrain data that is similar to what we need for FSNext as that is the current working title.  I am expecting there will be more willing to help out when the time is right as well so I am not worried!

I can share just some brief design elements currently:

 

  The Weather/ATC/AI will be a module(s) that would run OUTSIDE of the Flight Sim environment and feed the data to the sim as an outside executable which can be run on any network PC or on the same machine of course.  This design model allows the resources to be fully concentrated on that of the PIC/environment as well allowing third party applications fully control any of those elements with replacements.

Hi Carmine,

 

I've been so interested in this just because I fully believe the market is ripe for a very robust core engine w/ the following features emphasized:

• Scalability (depth/resolution) so as to offer the potential for 6-10 year service life.  Publish this as well so that 3PD's know the engine will fundamentally stay the same during that period of time.
• Native 64-bit, optimized for multi-processor & multi-core, multi-gpu & big headroom on system & graphical ram, and of course excellent balance between CPUs/GPUs workloads.
• Focus on the solid core & user interface:  terrain & flight engine, user interface that is so cool you will want to open the sim after seeing it.  Very robust performance scaler.   A pretty cover on a killer core is a magical combination!  Just think about what iPhone did to the phone market, then tell me how many new flight simmers may appear.  Seriously, many have dissed the idea of a new simulator having a very big market.  Think iPhone.   So cool, you'll want one!  No, it's not that type of huge appeal I'm just using the analogy to show how past market can't always be counted on to determine future demand.
• Robust SDK development to support your model of running various non-core required features outside of the simulator which is a very solid idea and shows you are thinking big and long term.   Again, publishing the intent to maintain a very solid core for 6-10 years will attract support if the core is there.  And of course, if your team did this right, that 3rd party support becomes your bread and butter to keep the core product alive.  ATC in particular I'm not sure about if you can tie that in seamlessly.   I love the briskness and natural voice in default FSX, though the scope of content is weak.  Could you get this sort of natural voice, speed & seamlessness in a product operating out of core?   

You have FSX as a model of how well the 3rd party support community will develop under the right conditions.  I think the key will be in how strong the core is, how lovely the user interface is, and how robust the SDKs are.  If you can score high on all these, you have the potential for a whole new career IMO!

Anyone who is attempting a new flight sim gets my support. To write one that works and satisfies everyone, well...I just hope you're young.

 

Jon