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Flight 3rd party addon update thread.

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Was thinking about this again and really hope it works out and no major roadblocks bring the project to a halt/ standstill.

 

This will be so Kool if it happens!!


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Yes it will!!!! Looking fwd for it!


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Will be the bigest addon the sim has seen yet.

 

Moe

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Such a sad story... If only tools were developed with 3pd's in mind Flight could have been a true successor. I really think it was marketing that held it back. Wish you guys well in reverse engineering and hopefully in ten years we will have something to work with!


Tyson Rose

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One issue is that so much of the FSX scenery is so old and low detailed by Flight's standards that it won't be a very good experience.

As I said a few times on the beta forum, I'd rather have the rest of the world in "FSX resolution" than nothing else at all. This was before Alaska was released, and some of Alaska seems to be "FSX resolution" anyway. If I could fly the Flight planes over my home town, using the dynamics from Flight, I probably wouldn't ever fire up FSX again. With additional planes, that's even more likely. The only thing missing would be a good real world weather generator that took advantage of the phenomenal weather effects in Flight. Other people might want other things, but I don't miss ATC, for example, at all.

 

I do love what you guys are doing. Thanks muchly.

 

Hook


Larry Hookins

 

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

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If only tools were developed with 3pd's in mind Flight could have been a true successor

 

They were, actually.  The team just didn't have the time during launch to properly support and document them which is why they were never released.  There were actually major design decisions and changes to the code to better support DLCs and 3rd parties.  Lots of time went into making a good platform for others to use.

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I persist in saying that Flight was well thought-out, planned, and prepared. It should have been a great success, the greatest version of FS if only it had been given the time to establish itself and gain market share.

 

Thanks for that info, Stonelance.

 

Best regards.

Luis

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I have to agree that I also would be happy to have the lower quality FSX scenery if it could be imported into MSFlight. I would see this as better than FSX/FS9/P3D because the engine for MSFlight is far superior. I am not going to go into a rant on the this vs that thing as that has beed done enough. What I will say is even though I spent about $2200 on Hardware and software for FSX and P3D I use MS Flight now because of one over riding reason above all others... It works without crashing to desktop.

 

Good Code

 

Good Job Folks

 

So Stonelance. What reason can you say that those tools are not released now? What could anyone gain from them being locked away even now that MS has dropped development? Painful. Almost like watching good food wasted.

 

You guys are doing good things for the MS Fight community and I appreciate it.

 

Moe

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I don't know exactly but I have a couple guesses:

 

1) The tools were built against an internal build of the game that had features added for the tools to use, but enabling the SDK would require rebuilding and testing Flight with those options on.

2) The tools were never tested for public consumption, and would probably require testing and signing before MS could release them

3) The current community team doesn't have any resources to do any of that.

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As someone who has worked with both the FSX and Flight tools, the Flight tools were LIGHT YEARS beyond what you could do with FSX.  Dev work in FSX takes a LONG LONG time during the "tweaking" phase.  You could not simply change something small.  You need to exit FSX, recompile it, load FSX, then load the asset to see the change.  In Flight, the tools were designed for "agile development".  I would have 3D Studio's Max open in 1 screen, Flight in another, and the moment I saved the file, Flight was updated.  Depending on the side of the project, the change happened almost before I could look over at the monitor.  This really helped in fine tuning things, like textures, animations, and even physics.  Things like oleo compression could be tweaked and tested almost instantly! 

 

The tools were designed from the ground up to help 3rd party dev's design add-on's faster then ever.  To help populate Flight with content!  There were a few big name 3rd party dev's already testing tools, and I even saw aircraft in Flight before it was released in FSX!!!  The 3rd party dev's LOVED these tools, and was chomping at the bit to get content into Flight and ready for sale.  Then something happened.  All communications with 3rd party dev's stopped cold, and they got a cold shoulder from MS.  This is when you started seeing a bunch of hate post's about Flight on many of those 3rd party dev forums.  What happened?  Lawyers happened.  Again, licensing issues cropped up.  If a 3rd party made a Boeing aircraft without Boeing's permission, MS could be on the hook for a lawsuit. 

 

The thing I don't understand is this issue has been worked out with app stores on Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone.  Nobody has sued any of those company's for an un-official app because the TOS clearly states that the DEVELOPER is liable for all licensing rights.  If Boeing has a problem with an iOS Boeing app that's not properly licensed, Apple takes it down.  This would of been a real threat that 3rd party's would need to deal with. 

 

All in all, its a sad sad story.  Lawyers come in scared of a lawsuit, then suddenly your sim gets transformed into a play thing full of warbirds with no cockpit. 

 

Flight had such amazing potential.  The engine was solid, robust, and made to be upgraded and modular.  The SDK and tools were amazingly good and efficient.  It could of been something so amazing... 

 

I wish I could start a Kickstarter, buy the Flight code, and turn it back into its original format. 

  • Upvote 4

Kevin Miller

 

3D Artist and developer

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Was a Windows 8/Snow Leopard style distribution model ever considered, where there's both the Windows Store/Mac App Store and the traditional desktop environment? I'd think that way, Microsoft wouldn't be held accountable for third party developers who don't publish through their store, and for those who do, they could enforce store requirements, similar to Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

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As a developer for FSX, having such amazing tools would make life so much easier. It's so sad that the potential of that SDK will likely never be fully utilized.

 

I wish I could start a Kickstarter, buy the Flight code, and turn it back into its original format. 

 

The code for Flight will never be touched again, I'm sure. You'd think Microsoft would be pretty open to selling it off at some point. How much do you think they'd want for such a platform? I imagine it would be quite an insane number.


Brandon Filer

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As a developer for FSX, having such amazing tools would make life so much easier. It's so sad that the potential of that SDK will likely never be fully utilized.

 

 

The code for Flight will never be touched again, I'm sure. You'd think Microsoft would be pretty open to selling it off at some point. How much do you think they'd want for such a platform? I imagine it would be quite an insane number.

 

MS has not been known to let go of IP's (Intellectual Properties).  They have recently in the form of Mech Warrior and Crimson Skies, but trying to wrangle Flight Sim from them would take millions.  Its there "plan for the future, not the present" mentality that makes them not want to let go of IP's in that come 5-10 years from now, they may want to get back into flight simming.  I think they burnt all there bridges now, and releasing the IP would be there last chance of making any money from FS, but there would be no way to convince the pencil pushers of this without a dump truck full of cash. 

 

The question is, would the community support such a venture?  Recently Kickstarter has funded games to the tune of millions of $$, but this community is picky, to say the least, and very much devided.  It would be hard to unite them all for something like this.  I would say the only shot in hell of gathering enough money to get MS's attention would be to get Bruce Artwick involved in it some how. 


Kevin Miller

 

3D Artist and developer

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I think there is still potential for money to be made in the sim business, but it will take new tech, new business models, and a change in expectations of the customers for it to be viable I think.  There is a reason X-Plane 10 costs $90 and comes with almost no content.  It is just too damn expensive to make for the whole world at today's level of quality.  I just don't think the risk vs. reward is worth it for MS.

 

My understanding of the whole 3rd party alpha thing was that almost all the devs had trouble even getting the tools installed and running, and we never saw anything productive out of them and it was decided that we didn't have the resources to properly fix up and support the tools for external development at that moment when we were trying to ship and had to put it off.  It could be there were other motivations that I wasn't aware of.

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Not just potential. Don't forget as we speak, War Thunder is making money hand over fist, with modeling and physics getting progressively better.

 

There is a market and a hunger. Just not sure if its a market this community can coexist and share with.


We are all connected..... To each other, biologically...... To the Earth, chemically...... To the rest of the Universe atomically.
 
Devons rig
Intel Core i5 13600K @ 5.1GHz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series Ram 32GB / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC 12G Graphics Card / Sound Blaster Z / Meta Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 1x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB / 2x Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB /  1x Samsung - 970 EVO Plus 2TB NVMe /  1x Samsung 980 NVMe 1TB / 2 other regular hd's with up to 10 terabyte capacity / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX Motherboard LGA 1700 DDR5

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