I think that, for me, the most important aspects would be:

• An SDK for developing add-ons for most aspects of the simulator. SimConnect-like I/O is a must. For most things below, if it's possible to make something as an addon it's maybe not necessary to have it in the base sim.
• Weather simulation: winds, clouds, rain, snow, turbulence, you name it. Preferably real time real world weather.
• Textures matching climate and time of year.
• Use of real world data for roads, cities, waters, coasts, terrain. Autogen buildings based on roads and location, e.g. larger buildings in a city vs. houses in suburbs.
• Real data for runways and taxiways, FS-like placement of airport buildings.
• Possibility to create custom placed buildings, etc., for all scenery types.
• Possibility for advanced systems and avionics, 3D-modeled gauges, etc.
• Real (and updateable) navaids, nav instrument simulation
• Wide range of controller support, someone else said FSUIPC like controller configuration. I would expand on that and say to have a large set of basic commands which cover most aircraft functions, so that add-ons can use the same keybindings. One could imagine e.g. leaving controller configuration to each add-on, which would be terrible for the user. The possibility to have that as well would be nice though, it's something that is sort of missing from FSX, though it is possible through SimConnect.
• Multiple objects at the same time, to enable AI or multiplayer flying.

I could probably go on, and on. I don't think it's feasible to have on Kickstarter campaign to create the full fledged simulator, as the project would be too long and too expensive to be able to raise enough interest and money. However, if a reasonably small subset of features were selected that would provide a better sim experience; which could be solved in a shorter time span, say 6 months to a year, I would be interested in providing support. I would expect there to be a rough plan with milestones for the development period, and updates on progress throughout the project. I think it would be useful for everyone if there were alpha builds available to backers (or everyone) throughout the project, so that interested backers can give feedback in an open dialog with the developers.

 

I think it would be important for you to reach out to FSX add-on creators to see what kind of support they want to have in the simulator; having the support for add-ons is paramount. Maybe you could partner with some developer to create aircraft and/or scenery during the development period, so that there is something which can show the full potential of the sim. I would expect it to also help raise money.

What's with some of you simmers wanting a new sim. to be FSX add on compatible???  Hello!!! I, myself, spent a good amount of money on add on for FSX....I said FOR FSX... New sim = new engine = new add on, ...if not, you just have to stay with FSX.

 

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

Right, there are no videos of OT showing detailed airports or urban scenery, nor of it running in the context of a flight simulator processing all the other essential elements.

 

Present evidence = already implemented (to me).

 

So there is no present evidence that Outerra is better at rendering detailed airports or urban scenery than any other application.

 

Present evidence means evidence available at the present time. That's now when you come here seeking support. 

 

To reinforce my point about the lack of evidence we still we still don't know if the simulator will use Windows or Linux or both.  Without such basic evidence there is no way to assess if this is even worth considering

My input as follows:

 

1. I agree with Alain, "backwards compatibility with FSX should not be an issue we must have".

 

For argument sake lets say Outerra decided to produce our next flight simulator. Really, why handcuff yourself to one type of simulator? I have always said just give us the world to work with. I wish MS would have left aircraft and upgraded airports to the real professionals. I would hope the next company to take on this dream would take a page out of MS playbook and contact the major developers for input. This communication channel needs to be open and on going during the life cycle of our next simulator. Including these companies would be key, as they will provide the tools to be used in that simulation world. Everyone can and would profit from this type of teamwork all the way down to hardware manufactures.

 

Oxiin, I personally would love to see Outerra taken on such a task. If Outerra or whoever started such a project would provide updates/video of what is in the works, I know that would excite the community and get us little bees buzzing. As you know, social media would be a somewhat free tool to reach across the world.

 

That is my afternoon rant Hopefully someone will take on this task and hopefully they will not be like MS and request input then kick the door shut on the developers who actually made FS into what it is today....! I thank each and every one of you who keep my hobby and love for virtual flying up and running.

 

This quote comes to mind,

 

"If you can dream it, you can do it"

Walt Disney

 

 

What's with some of you simmers wanting a new sim. to be FSX add on compatible???

 

I agree that binary compatibility should not be a requirement and could hamper any new sim's development. Having migration tools, format converters etc to help to port over products would be useful so devs don't have to start completely from scratch.

A requirement of backwards compatibility with FSX would doom any project like this if you ask me. I understand people want to be able to use the things they've purchased in the past, but it is just asking for trouble to require something like that instead of doing an all new engine that does things in its own more efficient way from the ground up. There are *a ton* of issues present in the FSX infrastructure that directly contribute to all the performance problems and limitations it has - you don't want to bring those issues over into a new platform. The idea that you'd ever just be able to run a complicated airliner addon or something like that in a new sim without any additional development work is not at all realistic. There's major differences even just going between FS9 and FSX.

Branno,

I downloaded the latest Outtera Anteworld demo and I will admit that I'm impressed with what I saw at least in pure graphical terms. The lighting and the way terrain in the distance looks is very close to how things look in reality. I love how you can go seamlessly from orbital type altitudes where you can see the whole planet all the way down to the ground without noticing any jarring pop-in or anything - very cool. What I didn't like is the obvious lack of cities/airports or of any variation in environments aside from that alpine forest type look it starts you out in. I set it to Phoenix's lat/long where I live and while the general shape of the terrain was decent (I'd like to see higher mesh resolution personally), it didn't look like what I see outside - it still had that alpine forest type of look even though Phoenix is in a desert. You'd definitely need something akin to how FSX's landclass system handles different types of terrain for this to work. Obviously all the roads, waterways etc would need to be there as well. Basically just look at what FSX + some of the big addons for scenery give us and know that you'd have to at the very least equal that for this to be viable.

Tabs, on 16 Jun 2013 - 12:40 AM, said:

 

DCS World has the potential too if they ever do get to the point of modelling the entire planet in the sim. It's an amazing sim engine right now but the limited flying area present in it kills any chance of being able to use it as an FSX replacement.

I do not share your adoration for the DCS engine. My experience with it has been nothing short of frustration. There are aspects that are excellent, it runs really well at higher settings than FSX. It is however, as I understand it, limited to 2 cores, and progress in expanding it seems to be nothing short of cromagnon. Further, as a combat simulator the inherent limitations in presenting world AI units is so laughable as to make you wonder why anyone would ever stop playing Falcon BMS and its dynamic campaigns.

 

When I last played we had a hard time consistently retaining 5 person multiplayer sessions, and missions which had more than even enough to keep barely 5 people occupied tended to lag so badly as to discourage big missions, lest you utilize every scripting function known to a mission maker. Even then there seem to be mission scripting issues, namely that its hard to get AI to consistently do things you want them to do. The first missions in the A-10 campaign is clear on this. You need to bomb a bridge, but there has to be a SEAD element (Basically friendly jets that bomb Anti-Air for you) that goes in first. When you trigger them attacking the enemy AA, rather than them killing anything, the mission just triggers the AA to self destruct. Apparently you can't predictably get the AI to perform specific things on cue.

 

The flight dynamics? Lovely, for the most part. There was the long standing issue of ground handling. Apparently LOMAC suffered from really wonky wheel-on-tarmac behavior, and DCS supposedly fixed this, but there's still issues in the A-10 for instance where you can't land it like you would the real one. In a real A-10 you can run out and slow to a crawl easily, and it is in fact SOP when returning from a sortie with any live ordnance still attached to your plane, ie you don't brake. If you tried this in DCS you'd do a runway overrun most of the time landing at normal VREF. Furthermore using the Anti-Skid ironically causes inferior braking performance, so the only way to get realistic brading distances is to turn it off, which you'd never do, so that you can stop something reasonably short of the reciprocal landing threshold.

 

Frustrating to say the least. lastly, the Air to Air refueling suffers limitations that make it actually harder than real life. progress on those changes never seem to come very often, and ED seems to be relying on the new content from third party module makers to pump up excitement. They've been talking about releasing a Nevada map for ages, but it was scrapped then restarted and is apparently delayed ahead of them fully rewriting the entire terrain mapping system.

 

It seems to me that DCS is lightyears behind even being FSX level of polished, and its owed mostly to them being I think rather surprised at DCS's fortunes, and the engine itself being rather outdated for the ambitions of their designs.

 

I REALLY REALLY want to be a DCS fanboi, but lets put it to you this way. I left DCS frustrated and only began playing FSX because of that frustration. If I was entirely satisfied with DCS, I would never have even begun playing FSX. The only reason I'd ever go back to DCS is to fly that A-10 that I adore (even with the niggly landing distances), but in the end my judgment of the game engine, as an end user not as someone with any programming understanding or competence, is that its a poor sandbox for an otherwise excellent, nearly PMDG level, Flight Model and airframe, be it A-10 or Black shark. The current air to air stuff doesn't count in my opinion because its just a bootstrapped integration of last gen ED stuff from Flaming Cliffs. There is speculation that ED will make a new A2A dedicated module for DCS, but I've not heard anything lately on that.

 

If they make an F/A-18C as someone I know is CONVINCED they will, then I may return for another go, as Air to Air is much less gimped in that environment owing to the fact that its less dependent on scripting believable ground AI and having enough of them to make it fun.

 

Long post I meant to make shorter, but I suck at self editing.

Thanks everybody for the input so far!

 

I downloaded the latest Outtera Anteworld demo and I will admit that I'm impressed with what I saw at least in pure graphical terms. The lighting and the way terrain in the distance looks is very close to how things look in reality. I love how you can go seamlessly from orbital type altitudes where you can see the whole planet all the way down to the ground without noticing any jarring pop-in or anything - very cool. What I didn't like is the obvious lack of cities/airports or of any variation in environments aside from that alpine forest type look it starts you out in. I set it to Phoenix's lat/long where I live and while the general shape of the terrain was decent (I'd like to see higher mesh resolution personally), it didn't look like what I see outside - it still had that alpine forest type of look even though Phoenix is in a desert. You'd definitely need something akin to how FSX's landclass system handles different types of terrain for this to work. Obviously all the roads, waterways etc would need to be there as well. Basically just look at what FSX + some of the big addons for scenery give us and know that you'd have to at the very least equal that for this to be viable.

 

RIght, the landclass system (a vector based system that runs atop of the base biomes) is in development, among other mentioned things. We are going up from the base system that's designed to be almost purely GPU-based and using vector data to generate the environment in a scalable way, so that there can be sufficient detail at the ground level as well as from the height. This also reduces the amount of data that needs to be streamed between the CPU and the GPU, which tends to be a bottleneck.

 

So there is no present evidence that Outerra is better at rendering detailed airports or urban scenery than any other application.

 

Present evidence means evidence available at the present time. That's now when you come here seeking support. 

 

To reinforce my point about the lack of evidence we still we still don't know if the simulator will use Windows or Linux or both.  Without such basic evidence there is no way to assess if this is even worth considering

 

Sorry, but we didn't "come here seeking support". Kelvin (who isn't Outerra member but he is a big Outerra fan) came here seeking information about what are the important points that need to be addressed for something like an OT-based simulator to be successful, please if you could read the topic post again and ignore the line that something is in development, that seems to have irritated you or something.

 

Is the Linux/Mac support important for you? Please say it so. Outerra was designed from the start to use only portable libraries so that it can be ported on Linux and OSX when it becomes economically viable.

 

What we wanted is a feedback about important points, and we didn't want to bias it with what Outerra is now. But I can address your earlier points here wrt OT:

 

• how compatible will it be with existing flight simulators?

Compatibility with existing simulators would be very limiting even if you were developing another streaming engine like FSX, but it's almost impossible when using a generating vector engine like OT is, mainly with regards to the scenery. That said, there's always a way to make conversion tools that can help migrating. Once the formats or the import API is published, developers could start converting their data or creating new one, depending on what makes better sense.

• what support will it have from 3rd party developers?

With OT the plan is to offer just a platform for 3rd party devs to use. Our own focus is on the world rendering and we don't want to deal with every other aspect of simulation ourselves, especially if the simulation platform aims to support also other simulation cores than flight. We are no Microsoft, wanting all of the cake for ourselves; in fact without a complete 3rd party openness it wouldn't work at all.

• what operating system will it use - which version of Windows or Linux, or both? 
• what graphics system will it use -which version of DirectX or OpenGL, or both

The only requirement is that the OS has to support OpenGL version 3.3+. Assuming only 64-bit operating systems.

• what features & capabilities will it have?
• what will be its price point  - $5, $50, $500...?

That's what the poll was about to find out, from the feedback.

• when will it be released?

A determined time after it starts. To clarify - OT is being developed regardless of whether there is going to be a (flight) simulator project starting in the near future, finding its use in other game and simulation ares. Flight simulation is a niche and demanding area, connecting it with other simulators might actually help boost the market. Again, this here is just a research of what would have to be actually met to make it possible at all. The poll is supposed to show the minimum requirements, or more specifically if there are some base requirements that can gain enough support from simulation communities for the development to be viable.

Sorry, but we didn't "come here seeking support"

 

 

 

The initial post from kelvinr reads “1) Would you support a kick starter project for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?”

 

Your first post (#15) reads “What would convince you to support the development of an Outerra-backed  and -based flight or combined simulation platform”

 

please if you could read the topic post again and ignore the line that something is in development, that seems to have irritated you or something.

 

My point from the very beginning of this thread been based on the fact that this flight or combined simulation platform is in such an early stage of development thast there’s insufficient evidence to give a meaningful opinion about it.

 

My questions in Post #8 were to extract enough evidence in order to be able to give a sensible answer to the original question. Incidentally they were intended reveal how much planning had been put into it before going public. The vagueness in the replies suggests very litlle. They don’t even give a direct answer to the question will it use Windows, and ignore the price point question.  Of course we’d all support a new flight simulator that was significantly better than anything else and only cost $5. Fewer of us would if it cost $500 or more.

 

A flight simulator is much more than its graphics engine. It needs also needs engines for flight  dynamics, aircraft systems, nav aids, sweather, AI,  ATC etc etc. There’s no information about any those. Outerra has excellent capabilities in modelling open landscapes (trees, vegetion, rocks etc) but has not demonstrated similar capabalities in modelling airports and  rban landscapes realistically so it may be no better than other engines. Outerra uses fractal algorithms.  These  are particularly suited for respresenting  landscape but not for representing hard objects such as buildings and structure.

 

My opinion is that is premature to be able to give any meaningful opinion. Outerra think this through further and return when it has something more realistic to discuss.

The initial post from kelvinr reads “1) Would you support a kick starter project for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?”

 

Your first post (#15) reads “What would convince you to support the development of an Outerra-backed  and -based flight or combined simulation platform”

 

Precisely. It doesn't read "we seek your support with this and this", forgetting to provide the details. It asks what would convince you to support such a project, what are the elementary requirements it has to fulfil to gain your support. Yet you constantly turn it on its head and ask for the details of something that nobody knows will be actually developed, because this is just a phase of finding out what people need and if the crowdfunding would be a way to fund it. You have noticed we aren't running a Kickstarter campaign and asking you to support it, right? We are just gathering information from people willing to give it.

 

Ok, so you are unable to provide the input about what your personal requirements would be, and are only capable of answering questions of type "would you support this <exact specification follows>". That's fine, but here we are only asking about what your needs are. What you seem to want to assess is a ready made product, and you are asking for (p)reviews before you decide to support (buy) it. But that's something entirely else.

 

 

My questions in Post #8 were to extract enough evidence in order to be able to give a sensible answer to the original question. Incidentally they were intended reveal how much planning had been put into it before going public. The vagueness in the replies suggests very litlle. They don’t even give a direct answer to the question will it use Windows, and ignore the price point question.  Of course we’d all support a new flight simulator that was significantly better than anything else and only cost $5. Fewer of us would if it cost $500 or more.

 

You know, all your answers can be actually transposed and read as your vague requirements. Was the question whether it would use Windows? OT currently uses Windows so I thought it's logical. I expected something "I'd support it only if it also ran on Linux and Macs", and since this is the information gathering phase, the answer would be collected and used togather with other to asses the importance of support for other platforms out of the box. In Kickstarter these things are usually done as stretch goals, depending on the situation.

 

And we didn't go "public" with anything, it's one user asking your opinions, stemming from our loose discussion. "Would there be enough support in the community to crowdfund a sim project based on OT? What would one have to come up with in order to gain the support? Is the market actually big enough to sustain it?" I asked him. And he decided to ask the community, without mentioning OT there, but perhaps unfortunately mentioning that there's something in the development (while he meant the OT itself). Since most of people replied with their suggestions it's a fairly good way.

 

A flight simulator is much more than its graphics engine. It needs also needs engines for flight  dynamics, aircraft systems, nav aids, sweather, AI,  ATC etc etc. There’s no information about any those. Outerra has excellent capabilities in modelling open landscapes (trees, vegetion, rocks etc) but has not demonstrated similar capabalities in modelling airports and  rban landscapes realistically so it may be no better than other engines.

 

In the transposing mode I read it that you can't give your opinion unless you know how we (or more correctly the team assembled to develop the flight simulator on OT backend) can implement it, providing evidence (likely some beta builds). Okay.

 

 

Outerra uses fractal algorithms.  These  are particularly suited for respresenting  landscape but not for representing hard objects such as buildings and structure.

 

I though using fractals or procedural geometry generation to augment real world data was going to be perceived as a plus, not as a factor that would affect our capabilities elsewhere. Anyway, it's not the fractals that are any deciding factors here for the flight sim aspect, perhaps people are too much focusing on that when the power lies elsewhere - in using the GPU to process the real world data and changing from a streaming engine to a generating vector engine, which reduces the amount of data needed to be streamed while allowing to keep consistent detail down to the ground level. Disadvantage? It's more sophisticated and requires reimplementation of the scenery making tools.

 

If we can generate nearly 5 million triangles of grass at the ground level by using efficient GPU techniques, I have little doubt we can generate large urban areas while also using procedural techniques to refine them when you get close. You may doubt it until you see the evidence, which is absolutely ok. And I'm not saying it will be without effort and issues and tunning. Just like everything else that's worth anything.

 

 

My opinion is that is premature to be able to give any meaningful opinion. Outerra think this through further and return when it has something more realistic to discuss.

 

Majority of the replies here suggest that if there was a kickstarter campaign, it would need to show other capabilities in areas that are important for the flight simmers. Which is what I expected, and we would not attempt to run a campaign as it is now - all we wanted is to get more info about what are the needs of the community to win its support, and everybody seems to understand it so and started providing their lists.

 

Even if this information gathering phase went extremely optimistic and showed that there's support for comunity-funded development of a sim platform with our contribution, and resulted in the work and fund estimates to work with, the Kickstarter campaign itself would be still leagues away as it will need a very careful preparation to successfully achieve those goals. And that preparation includes proofs of concept for various areas of the simulation (flight and railway and any other that can be included), securing a development team with expertise and capabilities in required areas, a good presentation and zillion other things.

 

There's one strong note that's in the replies we got here so far - that this will likely need an early support from one of the developers that are currently creating content for flight simulators, probably joining in the effort right from the start. That's, again, *iff* this informational inquiry shows the venture would be viable at all.

First of all ,I think this is a great initiative, and I really hope you come up with something  :lol:

For me the most essential things is:

• Performance - A sim that has good smoothness, and can really utilize modern hardware
• Better physics - I want to feel like I'm actually flying the airplane

If you got these points, I believe that people will eventually switch over

Hi all,

 

I am starting this thread to try and get some feedback, opinions, and thoughts about a new flight simulator platform. There is a method to my madness so your cooperation is appreciated.

 

***A Current platform is in development that has potential to support a flight/combined simulator*** your opinions are needed.

 

I am in an information gathering stage. Please answer maturely and honestly from the perspective of a general simmer, enthusiast simmer, and potential simmer;

 

 

1) Would you support a kick starter project for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

 

2) What would your expectations be for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

 

3) What would convince you to switch to a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

 

 

 

Please think about your current experience(s) either with FSX or X-Plane and other simulator packages you use (including combat sim i.e DCS) and answer as clearly as possible. The more (genuine) responses this thread gets the more reliable the information gathered is.

 

Feel free to add anything else you think that relates to you (hypothetically) supporting a kick starter project and (hypothetically) switching to another simulator platform.

 

 

 

Yours seriously,

 

Kelvin.

 

 

 

 

 

This is easy, make a sim that looks like this:

 

http://www.outerra.com/

 

Cover the whole world... Make sure it's open source so the community can add things like ATC, real world weather, custom scenery, and aircraft to name a few (actually like Outerra allow the ability to add whatever we want like boats and trains if we so desired, basically a base platform for us to build on top of).  A big plus would be integrated ATC with SID/STAR capability or the ability for third party to build on what's there.  FSX/FS9 gives a good bases for what we would want we just need an engine able to run on the latest hardware with good fidelity (flight dynamic physics).

 

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/398811-outerra/

 

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/365343-outerra-the-next-fsx/

 

 

You know what, why not just take your existing idea and work with Outerra to cut back on half the work/cost.  They already have the engine all that's needed is everything I mentioned above to make is a true successor to FS9/FSX.  No use wasting a budget when the tool is out there already (actually there's a few others like Outerra).  I wish X-Plane would get a clue and dump their engine in favor of this.  That's what P3D was originally supposed to be used for, a Level-D graphics engine to go into the Level-D simulators for pilot training.  Apple used Xerox's existing tools to create the first Apple machine, Microsoft used DOS created by someone else to get started, no one needs to build a Flight Simulator from scratch.

For kelvinr and oxiin:<br /><br />I support, in principle, what is being asked of here. However, funding should not be an issue discussed on an open public forum when the funds you seek will be of a magnitude for total development and implementation and will be in the region of a requirement for a full business plan with financials.<br /><br />What those in the market are prepared to pay for what will be developed has no bearing on the total investment required. This has to be a commercial venture where the return, if any, will be way down the road.<br /><br />If you would like to contact me through PM, for an exploratory chat on total requirements for a complete commercial operational solution, I would welcome to see if there is synergy between what you would like to do and what I would be prepared to assist with.<br /><br />Sauviat

For kelvinr and oxiin:<br /><br />I support, in principle, what is being asked of here. However, funding should not be an issue discussed on an open public forum when the funds you seek will be of a magnitude for total development and implementation and will be in the region of a requirement for a full business plan with financials.<br /><br />What those in the market are prepared to pay for what will be developed has no bearing on the total investment required. This has to be a commercial venture where the return, if any, will be way down the road.<br /><br />If you would like to contact me through PM, for an exploratory chat on total requirements for a complete commercial operational solution, I would welcome to see if there is synergy between what you would like to do and what I would be prepared to assist with.<br /><br />Sauviat

 

 

Half the funds would be cut in half to create a new sim if he does what I mentioned above.  Even Microsoft didn't build Flight Simulator from scratch, Sublogic/Bao did with Bruce Artwick at the helm.  That's how it's always been done.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LPPdV2Md1c

To fast at landing but I like the light effect...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jVoNMhH_j3Y#!