POLL/QUESTIONAIRE - for new flight/combined simulator kick starter

[Dillon 2,197]

Think of Outerra as something for your children's children.

 

 

I don't think Outerra the simulator is that far out, maybe X-Plane.  X-Plane for example can't seem to get city scenery to look quite right and that horizon line reminds me of Fly!. 

[GHarrall 494]

The future probably is something like X Plane. It's not in the mainstream yet but the breakthrough will come and when it does it'll probably be when PMDG start releasing stuff for it. Despite John Venema's verdict on X Plane thus far he will soon change his tune if and when the big switch comes.

 

Remember FSX only appeared in 2006 and really only got into its stride a couple of years later in terms of aircraft and sceneries. Once the rush for the exit comes to take advantage of being able to fly the 777X or the FSL A320 in X Plane with Orbx sceneries and 64bit support, FSX's demise will come quickly.

 

Actually, I think there is a large number of simmers who will stay where Orbx and the GA market go. PMDG is not the be all and end all. Great products but Flight Sim doesnt revolve around them, at least not in my world.

[quadraspleen 7]

Bruno, "If you build it, they will come"

 

 

What Alain said.

 

 

Ignore the doubters. Make it. Refine it. We will all buy it if it's good enough. Period.

 

FSX has taken years to get where it is today, and out of the box is nothing like what 90% of the simmers here run. I imagine your proposed sim will look much the same as Outerra does (big OT fan here - downloaded one of the first betas and was hooked but then I love world builders; used to be a Bryce nut) and as such, will be better looking than my "on-steroids" FSX. This will obviate the need for me to have any compatibility with my FSX scenery. Airports can and will be re-made with better frames and higher detail THIS IS A GOOD THING!

 

As for A/C, I imagine, being an "now-gen" game, it will allow for equal or greater systems modelling, and thus allow for better performing and more complex A/C addons; somethig that I will be happy to purchase. THIS IS ALSO A GOOD THING!!

 

As I said, some people just don't want to see the future, no matter how far it may be it's still gonna be here at some point. Get on board, I say

 

Good luck guys and in answer to your questions:

 

1. I can't remember what the questions were now.

2. See 1.

3. You get the idea?

 

best

 

jake

 

p.s I think one of the questions were around crowd-funding - forget it. Flight simmers are an uppity bunch. Get your money from money men and tell them it'll sell lots of copies

[mgh 89]

 

 

Ignore the doubters. Make it. Refine it. We will all buy it if it's good enough. Period.

 

Would you invest millions of dollars on the basis of that?

[japascoe 98]

To return to the original question of what it would take for me to even consider supporting a new flightsim on Kickstarter, it would mainly take a very clear business plan.

 

A viable FSX replacement would have to give everything FSX does: weather, flight physics, full world scenery coverage, etc and then upgrade it to a modern day graphics engine and preferably iron out all the kinks in FS as well. As far as I can tell that means you are looking at a AAA development, which means a 50-100 person team, 2+ years of development time and probably a budget on the order of tens of millions. That's an order of magnitude greater than can feasibly be collected via Kickstarter (based on curren experience).

The current record holder is Star Citizen, who have collected something like $7 million (which is only half their budget, the rest is coming from traditional investors), most other games (if successful) are stuck around the $1-3 million mark. So for me to support a Kickstarter I would want to see a convincing plan for either a) where the rest of the money is going to come from, or b ) how you are going to deliver AAA quality with only a tenth or less of the budget.

Note a convincing plan to me means sharing the numbers, no hand-waving, but really showing, $X will be used for salaries, $Y will be used for licensing scenery data, etc.

 

As for the 'if you build it they will come' line of reasoning, I think it may be true, but to win over a significant portion of the hard-core crowd you will have to be able to offer an upgrade not of default FSX, but of FSX+add-ons. To give an example, it's not enough to just offer a platform on which PMDG could develop a better version of the NGX, the (hypothetical) NGX v2 has to be available on your new platform and obviously better than the FSX NGX before people will switch.

[LHookins 3,103]

japascoe, on 19 Jun 2013 - 5:05 PM, said:

To return to the original question of what it would take for me to even consider supporting a new flightsim on Kickstarter, it would mainly take a very clear business plan.

Basically, the same things that would be used to attract traditional venture capital.

 

Hook

[cameni 9]

@ Brano,

 

What Mike and Gerry are asking (in their own way) including me is.... what do you think it will it take to have Outerra ready for 3PD to be interested in making sceneries of any kind or any kind of simulators (trains, boats, planes, submarines ++) using your engine, time and money wise?

 

That's one of the things we were interested to find out here using the feedback - whether there exists a subset of features that can gain support from the sim community in the form of community funded development, in a similar way like various other developments got funded on Kickstarter.

 

A simulator project will require a dedicated development team working solely on the simulator specific code, basing it on the generic OT engine. Development of the simulator part itself will take a couple of years regardless of the relatively independent development of the Outerra base engine running in parallel. It will require a separate, skilled development team and sufficient funding for it. There's a considerable risk in the project, the simulator market is both demanding and relatively small.

The questions here were aimed to find if crowdfunding was a viable option for the development of such project, and what requirements it would have to meet to get the support from the community.

 

Many people here (including me) think that crowdfunding won't work for this case (for flight sim), because of the specifics of this sim base, the complexity (and thus the amount of money needed to fund it). There are other, more classical funding options with their advantages and disadvantages, but these require a different approach and it wasn't the subject of this inquiry at all.

 

OT is being developed independently, licensed to special simulation projects already. But even if it was ready tomorrow, it's basically "just" a world rendering engine with simulator hooks, and you'll still have to invest 2-3 years into the development of the simulator itself. That part can be started in parallel, or one can wait for all the proofs and begin only after OT is complete.

[alainneedle1 97]

As some have mentioned here the #1 problem is money, if you can assemble enough BIG players with deep pockets in the same room for a project like that you may have a shot at it, and that include banks. 

 

That's one of the reason why Aerosoft did put their project on ice, funding (speaking of millions) is not easy to find for a project like that, further more, who's welling to invest that kind of money on a "maybe" and wait 2 > 3 years (probably more) to see some results with the hope of cashing out at the end?

 

Now, you can always ask all simmers (not only here) who would be welling (for the love of flight simulation) to give $20.00, $50.00, $100.00 or more to fund such project (after putting all your/their cards on the table with a definite business plan) and see what kind of response you'll get.

[P*Funk 9]

The interesting thing to consider is the fact that while there are considerably fewer serious simmers in the market than there are general gamers willing to invest in a more populous product like a DnD based RPG or a return to older style RTS gameplay, the one thing you can count on with simmers is that they're comfortable and familiar with investing considerably more into individual products financially than almost any other type of gamer.

 

What it costs to buy an add on plane often amounts to the price of a new game on its own. The price of terrain expansions, flight plan aides, weather generators, and anything else really usually comes in at or even higher than a normal Steam game's price tag. A simmer's gear set up probably cost on its own more than someone's Xbox, and thats without considering the cost of the PC itself.

 

I think that a very convincing and thoughtful Kickstarter could illicit a huge chunk of change from the simming community. Imagine instead of buying a $60 terrain pack this month, just invest in that could be/would be sim. If the average bit from supporters is higher than the average one from normal gamers you can make up for the shortfall, also since there are fewer competitors out there its easier to expect more of the community to potentially get into it.

 

Thats all speculation, and as its been said before the cost of producing a high quality sim is very very high, perhaps too high. A bare bones game earns a record in the millions, probably can't cover the cost of a flight sim.

 

The only other option seems to be to go the way of Star Citizen. Combined crowdfunding with private backing. Combined you could get what you need out of it. Obvious this should mean the private backing comes before the crowdfunding.

 

I think its possible, but it would need to be a VERY mature project pitch before anything conceivably happens. I'm not aware of any parties with the capability or the desire who'd be able to draw in the necessary funds or talent.

[mgh 89]

I think its possible, but it would need to be a VERY mature project pitch before anything conceivably happens.

That's going to require a realistic, verified business plan rather than mere questions about what we'd like. I'll take this idea seriously when Outerra produces one.

[Kaboki 437]

Count me in I would donate 300 Euro easely into getting Outerra into a flightsim B) Why don't we put up real poll and with how much people are willing to donate so we can get an estimate for the outerra devs how much the avsim community is willing to give?

[BilboBaggins 82]

Alternatively, you might want to contact Bill Gates, remind him what a shame it is that his favorite game got dropped by his company, and ask him what it would take to compete FSX, P3D and Xplane completely out of business. Both time and money required, all features included, including _all_ the systems FSX currently has, plus full dev resource code and SDK support, and an open architecture that could like Linux be improved over time by the whole community of developers, instead of leaving black-box broken parts everyone has to fight with.

 

Let me know what he tells you.

 

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

I paid for all MSFS versions from FS95 up to and including FSX - that's a considerable amount of money: FS95, FS98, FS2000, FS2002, FS9, FSX.

 

(Not to mention all the hardware and peripherals along the way ... and all the addons ...)

 

Result was that the complete engine/development was sold to Lockheed Martin. What's their business again? And what are they turning that piece of software into?

 

More of my money? For whom? And for what?

[Kaboki 437]

FleetingThought, on 20 Jun 2013 - 2:41 PM, said:

Alternatively, you might want to contact Bill Gates, remind him what a shame it is that his favorite game got dropped by his company, and ask him what it would take to compete FSX, P3D and Xplane completely out of business. Both time and money required, all features included, including _all_ the systems FSX currently has, plus full dev resource code and SDK support, and an open architecture that could like Linux be improved over time by the whole community of developers, instead of leaving black-box broken parts everyone has to fight with.

 

Let me know what he tells you.

Why don't you do that yourself :huh:

 

The way I see it outerra gives us an great rendering engine for the whole world with Incredible graphics all that is left is get the the 80% development of a sim into that engine and we would be in flightsim heaven. I could maybe be possible to get this kickstarted if the communety is willing and the 3 party devs.

[Timmo 0]

_{Here are my thoughts.}

 

_{FSX is a very capable scenery engine- Apart from a couple of issues related to the period in which it was developed (i.e. lack of proper multi-core threading, under utilization of GPU, 32 bit pipeline etc) it still holds its own in the current day IMO, not least of all because of the ability to upgrade most things within the simulator install.}

 

_{X-Plane 'feels' more like a flight simulator than FSX does....but the scenery engine isn't quite up to par yet (the lighting is infinitely better than FSX and flying very low is generally more immersive but at mid-high altitudes, their procedural rendering can't match the realism that FSX's tiled aerial textures + Autogen give) and I really dislike the interface.}

 

_{Flight had some really nice additions to the FSX code and would make the perfect base for a new simulator with the addition of global landclass, terrain and Navigation data- The lighting is far nicer (i.e. on autogen objects especially) and the flight model seems far better too....It would have been a hit if MS had simply provided their own marketplace where payware developers could have integrated their products into the 'store' and paid a small fee. This would have provided the post sim sales revenue that was lacking with the FSX release.....they swung too far the other way.}

 

_{In other words- My ideal simulator would have the flight model of X-Plane, the scenery data of FSX, the scenery engine of Flight + procedural terrain refinement and lighting of Outerra.}

 

_{Where does this leave Outerra?  Currently Outerra has the capability to provide the scenery base- The new 'biomes' in development should allow more accurate representation of the world (i.e. landclass) along with the other parts in development (importing of vector data/roads, water bodies etc). As mentioned, the use of 3rd party physics/flight modelling libraries provide that portion of a sim and it can already import common 3D object formats. This leaves a decent proportion of the requirements for a flightsim not (yet) filled which begs the question, what should Outerra provide and what shouldn't it provide? If the consensus is that a fully fledged flightsim is too large a project for a small dev team, then the project moves to being split between the base engine (Outerra) and 'everthing else' (possibly created by the community)}

 

_{Obviously 3rd parties can develop aircraft and improve the scenery/Airports...leaving items such as weather modelling, Airways/ATC needing to be developed within the 'Outerra Flightsim' (or at least the ability to add it)....this does run the risk, however, of a 'moving target' for development- I.e. the base engine breaks older data requiring it to be re-compiled.}