Cram as much stuff as you can into the box I say.   As long as the box doesn't explode I am all for ultra detailed airports and airplanes.   Sadly, I think that while the 3rd party devs are upping the game the simulation software it's being upped for isn't keeping up with their talents.   I just put a GTX 980 in my machine, coming from a 770.  The benchmark performance is off the charts better but in Prepar3D it yielded not one difference in performance.   Skyrim, my test bed, went from struggling with 30 FPS with detailed add-ons to 60 pegged and room to spare.  I wish we could get that kind of 'WOW' when talking simulation platforms.   More and more processes need to start getting shoved on to video cards and away from the CPU.  Nvidia has physics technology in place and not one simulation takes advantage of it.   Would a simulator benefit from having a dedicated PhysX video card?   I would hope so since all it is doing is number crunching.   I love this hobby but it can be so frustrating to watch the hardware way out pace the software.   It's usually the software the drives the hardware forward but we get no such innovation in the simulation world imo.

 

But I ramble.   Bring it on devs!   I wanna see people sitting in the terminal bay waiting to board!  

I would say it's safe to say that 3PDs are giving simmers exactly what they want, greater realism and more "wow". We have aircraft which operate within 5% of their real world counterpart, strobe lights which light up the ground exactly the way they do in reality, golf courses and streams exactly where they should be.

 

All of these enhancements are being built into a sim which traces its roots to single core high speed processors. The base software is slowly catching up to the what 3PDs and the community want out of it. Now, please do not take this as a bashing of FSX/FS9 and XP.

 

Flight simulation has always been somewhat of a mess in terms of 3rd party content, legacy and cutting edge technology must come together into the sim. The community has always demanded it.

 

I would say 3PDs know the plot and LM/LR are trying to keep the platforms updated to utilize current hardware and give the proper SDKs to 3PDs.

To add to Rob's (Young) post, clients also want the price to stay the same while we have to absorb the added cost of all these new (and costly) features... You have any idea how much a moving armrest costs to make????

 

Clients need to have a grasp of reality. Obviously a moving armrest , for example,  costs money to develop and that has to be reflected in the developers selling price. The developers also need to have a grasp of reality and only include such features unless clients are prepared to pay for them - that's what most real-world companies has to do!.. Otherwise margins will shrink and developers will begin to go out of business which is no good to anyone.

I noticed in the video for the new Fly Tampa Toronto scenery they had a shot of the HVAC unit on the roof of the terminal and it showed the fan blades spinning around....Not sure if that is a feature that is really needed as well. I followed the thread regarding this airport and heard mixed reviews (Toronto is a drag on frame rates anyways) so I went with ORBX Parry Sound instead......Awesome airport