FSX / ESP licensing to Lockeed Prepar3D totally halted the evolution of flightsim

[tarere 45]

So I was thinking, here we are all, spring 2014, using an exe program from 2006. The ten years mark is not far ahead.

 

I heard some people get excited here because a military company has ended eventually releasing a patched version of FSX with partial support for cloud shadows or something. Oh, great, eight years later, seems we are on a speed track for evolution !

 

I mean, i see games on dumb smartphones thats look to handle more 3D on a fluid pattern than my FSX running an i-stopped-counting number of overcloked cores i7 whatever coming along with a state of the art GPU and all the stuff in a massive tower PC. Woah, let's tweak the number of trees to lower value to gain one FPS ! Yeah baby, see that DX10 fixer ? Yes that's it, almost cockpit shadows, and steady one more FPS than DX 9, paradigm shift man, go get it only 20 bucks !

 

Ok, this is 3rd party addon company talking, listen guys we have great news for you, we made a rear camera view for our massive airliner but we warn you nobody will be able to use it because you'll kill your eight cores super computer. Yeah baby, feel the reality. I actually remember playing a game called F-29 retaliator on Atari ST in 1990 or something where you had in the cockpit an in-screen 3D camera view of the missile you lauched to the target. We want the 90's back guys.

 

At BUILD 2014 Microsoft announced a fair amount of proprietary project going Open Source, a trend they go on since a few years. Yes, you get it, if MS has ditched FS i'm not sure they still make relevant revenue from it, and sure this is not going to grow in the years to come. Should they chose to make it Open Source I guess they would be in a way still leading the legacy and possibly they could have figured a way to monetize a plateform as a service around the open sourced product, the same as they do with Azure with great success and constant dollars flow (asp.net is open source, Azure host tons of it).

 

But the deal is there, FSX is stuck by legal contracts. FSX is a dead horse beatten by a military company. Choices that were made since 2006 we're all wrong, counting the closed scheme of Flight!, sure the ecosystems exists and some companies make moneys on this dead horse, but the result is we are now 8 years late on technolgy for Flight Simulation. Not to offense the small players like X-Plane but a bunch of developper can't keep up especially without market pressure (only two player in the market, you can be sure seeing no real innovation).

 

I was wondering what the IT Crowd would have done in 8 years with an open sourced FSX.

MS, release the FSX code on Codeplex, and see the magic happens.

[pmanhart 176]

Not sure where to start with this post...

 

You do realize that simulating a globe, an aircraft and the environment around it as lifelike as possible is much different than 99% of all computer or video games, right? Have you downloaded infinite flight or X-Plane for your phone and noticed that the graphics are stuck in the 90's and wondered why? Have you even tried Prepar3d v2? From your post I think the answer to these three questions is definitely no.

 

While it would be great for MS to release the source code and rights for FS, I don't see that happening anytime soon instead of the licensing deals they have in place with Lockheed and anyone else licensing ESP.

 

EDIT: I thought I should add that it wasn't MS licensing ESP to Lockheed that slowed (not halted) the evolution of flight sims, it's that MS and other big publishing companies realize there's much more money to be made in FPS, MOBA, MMO, RTS and casual games then there ever will be in flight simulation.

[Brian Doney 127]

There are alternatives.

 

Many tick a number of the boxes that you mention.

 

That they aren't as successful has nothing to do with LM/MS/FSX/ESP, and might actually be the best counter to your entire argument, as I understand it.

 

It is a bit difficult to really see what your point is, though. Maybe it's just me.

[N2056 33]

You could start an on-line petition campaign!

[KingGhidorah 209]

I don't think it was the licensing of ESP to LM that "halted" the progress of flight simulation, or had anything to do with it.  They sold it because it wasn't profitable to them.   It's all about the bottom line.  A lot of people still doing flight simulation are an older demographic who grew up during the Transportation Age.  Airplanes were cool and taking a trip on an airplane was a relatively rare and special experience, and every little boy probably entertained the idea of being an airline pilot.   In this day of smart phones and instant gratification and flappy birds and console gaming, however, the market just isn't there to justify the development costs. 

[Lewis B 14]

Given that we currently have more choice in flight simulation right now than ever before I find your argument somewhat strange. It also seems to be  based on some strange assumptions on how computers and the sim/digital entertainment and commercial simulation industries work.

[mgh 89]

Not sure where to start with this post...

I'm quite sure where to start.

[altstiff 71]

Pfft! I still play Grand Prix Legends (circa 1998), FSX is not that old.... :lol:

[towerman 0]

Pc gaming is on the brink of extinction, flight simming is a niche of pc gaming... most of us were born before 1970 and feel that 1990's nostalgia when flight sims were extremely popular..

[Morph 9]

I completely agree, I also think about this sometimes and realise that we are in fact stuck with something just because its the best thing we can get (right now), and we keep dumping money in it, its really sad to see 3rd party developers having to limit their creations because of the limitations that FSX poses upon them. Imagine if simulation games were as popular as these moba games, then we would have had an insane sim experience I think. P3D is not that impressive at all imo.

But when you look at it from an outside perspective, we are the nerds, we have our community, our super tweaked and modded / personalised FSX files, our online vatsim/ivao communities that essentialy are mods for FSX. It's a small niche living on something old but gold, it could be better but at least we have something that works!

[masneoquil 66]

Pc gaming is on the brink of extinction, flight simming is a niche of pc gaming... most of us were born before 1970 and feel that 1990's nostalgia when flight sims were extremely popular..

 

Here see this. And then tell me what you think.

 

[Sirxamoc 22]

You know everything is in cycles, when I first started gaming, we had these systems called the Atari, the Atari ST, the Comodore.  Gaming on a PC, phew! that is not what a PC was used in those days for.  Fast forward, PC's are in fashion, cartridge systems are passay!  Fast Forward - Xbox and other like boxes are now in fashion.  Do you know what the driving force of this has and always will be,,, Pirating.  That is why on-line like World of Tanks and EVE and other like have a following.  Can't be pirated, must pay if you "Really" want to play, and the term MORPGG takes center stage.

 

Why do you think X-box and like boxes are becoming more internet capable?  My prediction before my time is done.  A flight sim will return bigger and better as soon as an affordable, updatable control system, resembling a flight station can be jacked into an X-Box.  The platform will be online, you the user will just pay for flight controls and anything more than generic planes.  ie PMDG module that can be plugged in, updates burned in as needed and piracy checked everytime the planes is loaded.

[simmerhead 885]

Microsoft could have taken us somewhere. Flight showed a lot of progress, but they focused on the usual corporate b*###### instead, so here we are.

 

Instead of looking back I enjoy what the guys over at LM has done for us. It isn't a revolution, but it is way better than what Microsoft left us with. I have left FSX and Microsoft for good.

 

Happy simming to all!

[G MIDY 101]

I have tried the latest games and their graphics are all okay but I wouldn't say there has been a huge jump. We are at the stage now (gaming wise anyway) where we are meeting the limits of technology not in performance but in what can be physically done. We can only make something so realistic and getting something to the highest level requires massive investment and justification for doing so. I don't think we will ever see better Flight Simulation software because the economics are just not there to justify developing it. Making something OpenSource will not matter because there is just not enough people willing to spend such a huge amount of time on something for free. We are talking here of a multi-billion dollar company developing the Prepar3d platform with what is teams of coders all on good salaries. I can never see that happening with any Open Source platform, there just isn't any reason to put in so much effort to do it for free.

 

Microsoft may of sold out but at the end of the day they are a business and I can understand them not caring about the community when they are under threat. The likes of Apple and co did not have any power until relatively recently and the shift towards mobile computing has certainly killed off any hope of some revival in the PC market. Unfortunately this means any kind of development for something like FSX is just too costly and the market does not exist to warrant development.

 

I'm pretty sure LM have developed Prepar3d with the intention of selling it to the professional market for big money, big money really is what counts and it is where they will make the most from what is a very small market. Yes it has some great new features but there is nothing in there that is revolutionary and the core code is pretty much all FSX yet it costs $200 for a standard license. Anything more for them is a bonus and it is surely pitched at the professional market where they can seal lucrative training provider deals. There are many reasons LM has made it quite clear that LM is not for the desktop entertainment market.

 

Right now I think the future is in making the best of what we have, I have never seen the FSX market for example thriving so much and it is because we now have access to hardware that can run it pretty well. Prepar3d looks great and I'm sure it will potentially change how we look at Flight Simulation but right now it still for me looks sketchy (certainly too sketchy to spend $200) and until the big developers get truly onboard it will never fully take off.

[xplanery 250]

 

 

Pc gaming is on the brink of extinction, flight simming is a niche of pc gaming... most of us were born before 1970 and feel that 1990's nostalgia when flight sims were extremely popular..

 

Thanks to Steam & new "Early access game" boom PC gaming is going on healthier than ever before, small, committed indie developers are making awesome & creative games while all the big companies are stuck with well established but boring titles such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, GTA etc. 

 

Small, committed indie developers, that's where the future of PC gaming is.