Dovetail Games Direction

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.

 

Dovetail games will release Flight School in April. Flight Simulator will be released later in 2016. Both are based on FSX technology, rather than on the more advanced Flight technology. Flight Simulator will allow 3rd party addons, while Flight School is more basic and will have no 3rd party content.

 

Our hopes that Flight would continue under Dovetail's direction is gone.

 

Dick

 

[h2egc 31]

What a shame...

I have ALL the sims FS9, FSX, P3D, X-Plane and Flight. Flight is still the best out of the box for me... if I can only get the content conversion to work on my system I'd be a happy camper.

[jymp 168]

 It's based on FSX Technology, nothing more than still beating a dead horse, 64 bit or not.

[jcomm 5,890]

MS FLIGHT flight dynamics are basically MSFS's ....

 

The system's modelling the same... the problems and limitations / bugs too....

 

What we were able to see happening, for instance when opening the doors in the Maule or the canopy of the RV-6 is reproduced in the best add-ons ( A2A, RealAir, ... ) in FSX for instance when there is asymmetric deployment of control surfaces.... 

 

Ground physics were fine tuned for MS FLIGHT, somethings which can easily be done with any sim deriving from it...

 

Weather effects were great, but we can get the same in FSX or P3D, with graphics in DX10 or DX11 mode and some good weather injector , like ASN which is the one I used....

 

A 64 bit platform, with DX11 or ( 12 ? ) isn't a huge step forward guys ? C'mon, be a bit more POISITIVE about the News.... And being based on doesn't mean it'll be JUST the port to 64 bit code - I do believe it'll mean a LOT more and am eagerly awaiting DTG's Flight School :-)

[eelis 42]

I still believe we will be surprised positively and think we will see something between MSFS and Flight! from Dovetail some time this year.

 

-eelis-

[stonelance 136]

Yeah, I've known about this for a while, but couldn't really say anything.  It sounded like they didn't really bother to look at the MS Flight code, and since they had to do a bunch of work to get FSX onto steam, and had become familiar with that code base they were just going to continue with it.  By the time I talked to them they seemed pretty resolved to use FSX as a base as they had already converted it to 64 bit.  They seemed to think they could just take some of the improvements from Flight and move them over, but I told them that was close to impossible without major rework.  They may have done some of it, but I doubt it.  The impression I got seemed to be that they thought it would be too much work to convert Flight to 64 bits since they had already done it for FSX.  They also thought the perf of FSX was as good as Flight once they converted it to compile with VS 2013, which made me laugh.  Do they have any screenshots or other info about either of the products?

 

The one good thing is that older addons have a chance of working with their new sim, but who knows if they will block them so that you have to buy everything through them.

 

I still have access to the Flight code at work, and in order to learn D3D12, I ported the code from D3D9 to D3D12.  Took 1 week of refactoring, 1-2 weeks to get it running in D3D12 at the same visual parity and another 2-3 to optimize.  In the end the rendering code is 3 times faster than it was on D3D9, even without multi-threading anything.  I'm guessing the results for the FSX engine will not be as good without a lot of extra work.

 

Dovetail using FSX instead of Flight is probably part of the reason I haven't really worked on the toolkit much.  I had contacted them to ask if they would be willing to publish the resample from the Flight SDK, but they were more interested in getting information out of me.  However, over the last couple months I have been working with Kavinda and FS Tester on the fsdev forums, and we have made some good progress on aircraft conversion from FSX to Flight.  It still requires a lot of manual steps, but there are a lot more possibilities now.  I'm hoping to have a new version out in the next couple weeks.

[HughesMDflyer4 470]

Do they have any screenshots or other info about either of the products?

These are the only three they have currently of Flight School:

http://i.imgur.com/gHQ2eVV.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/cE6NoJ6.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/RQklDMo.jpg

 

I still have access to the Flight code at work, and in order to learn D3D12, I ported the code from D3D9 to D3D12.  Took 1 week of refactoring, 1-2 weeks to get it running in D3D12 at the same visual parity and another 2-3 to optimize.  In the end the rendering code is 3 times faster than it was on D3D9, even without multi-threading anything.  I'm guessing the results for the FSX engine will not be as good without a lot of extra work.

Wow, that's pretty cool. Wish we could experience that.

[Wobbie 938]

Looks like they separated the Training/Learning section from FSX, repackaged & 64bitted them & now there are 2x packages.

[BaronKen 144]

Thanks for the update Steve... glad to see you're still thinking of trying to provide improvements for Flight. I must say I'm surprised DTG decided not to use Flight's engine for their new sim(s). Looks like they took the easy way out instead of going the extra mile that would have had more benefits in the long run. Perhaps their improvements to FSX's core will be better than expected. Really want to start seeing screenshots soon, in one of the screenshots posted you can see traffic on the roads (would expect that since they are using FSX's engine); can't tell if they fixed FSX's autogen limitations or not, something Flight did not have a problem with.

 

Despite all of your help I gave up on trying to import scenery from FSX into Flight. I could only get a few objects to show up and just could not figure out why a few would and others would not. I would have been perfectly happy to use generic items such as bridges, buildings, stadiums, etc. to represent real ones in Flight but just could not get them to show up. Unfortunately I gave up out of frustration. You tried...

 

Perhaps more improvements will come in time to the toolkit to allow more scenery to be brought in to Flight, along with other aircraft you're trying to make possible. Will continue to watch for developments along that front. And, like many others I'm sure, I'm going to watch and see what DTG actually comes up with in their new sims. Should be interesting...

[majuh 14]

Yeah, I've known about this for a while, but couldn't really say anything.  It sounded like they didn't really bother to look at the MS Flight code, and since they had to do a bunch of work to get FSX onto steam, and had become familiar with that code base they were just going to continue with it.  By the time I talked to them they seemed pretty resolved to use FSX as a base as they had already converted it to 64 bit.  They seemed to think they could just take some of the improvements from Flight and move them over, but I told them that was close to impossible without major rework.  They may have done some of it, but I doubt it.  The impression I got seemed to be that they thought it would be too much work to convert Flight to 64 bits since they had already done it for FSX.  They also thought the perf of FSX was as good as Flight once they converted it to compile with VS 2013, which made me laugh.  Do they have any screenshots or other info about either of the products?

 

Well, that's pretty disappointing. It seems like they went for easy money in the short run instead of actually creating something worthwhile in the long run. I'd be really surprised if their new game works as well as Flight did 4 years ago. The worst thing is that the mesh and vector data in the screenshots seem to be exactly the same like in FSX; it would be ridiculous if they shipped their new simulator with data that's 10 years old.

[jcomm 5,890]

Sad to know :-(

[barrel_owl 304]

Wait. Please help me understand if I get you right.

So, all this drama because DTG will use FSX as a base instead of MS Flight? Is this really the reason why some people here are declaring themselves disappointed?

 

Since DTG announced their plan to release a new simulator in 2016, many people criticized it based on the (unconfirmed) speculation that it would be built on MS Flight, a platform that many simmers considered as dead and unusable. Now the bashing will be based on the fact that DTG will not use MS Flight as base?

 

Puzzled.

[HiFlyer 9,343]

Like I said in another thread: P3D, the entertainment version. I'm sure it will sell, but if you are looking for real innovation, I suspect we won't find it here.

 

Many people will be very happy with an updated FSX. Certainly many people wanted just exactly that, and not much more, and certainly it's worth a try......

 

But as I also said in another thread somewhere, I think something truly next generation is still just out of our grasp.

[MikeT707 1,181]

Well, for me the sad but likely reality is DFS will be another somewhat updated version of FSX. It will be FSX written as a 64 bit app and support DX11, so basically it will be very similar to P3D when they deploy their 64 bit platform (v4). I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.

 

How many versions of FSX does it take to change a light bulb. Good grief, we will have FSX, FSX-SE, P3Dv1, P3Dv2, P3Dv3, and DFS which will all look and feel similar within perhaps 20% difference. That is not progress in my mind. FSX was released 10 years ago and to see that is just continues to get re-deployed with minor feature advancements makes me wish I did not like the concept of flight simulation as much as I do.

[stonelance 136]

With time and money it is possible to take FSX and make it better than Flight, P3D, etc.  They are just starting many years behind.

 

 

Since DTG announced their plan to release a new simulator in 2016, many people criticized it based on the (unconfirmed) speculation that it would be built on MS Flight, a platform that many simmers considered as dead and unusable. Now the bashing will be based on the fact that DTG will not use MS Flight as base?

 

Most likely those people never really gave Flight a fair try, or the features that were removed from Flight were ones that they cared about most.  A lot of people were turned off by the initial tutorial, which was later made optional, or the limited set of aircraft and scenery in the free version.  I know a lot of people thought there was no IFR flight, even though there were several aircraft that were capable of it.  All those could have easily been remedied by DTG though.  Without even having the code to update MS Flight engine itself, we already have the entire globe of content with the Flight Toolkit and conversion of FSX content.

 

 

The worst thing is that the mesh and vector data in the screenshots seem to be exactly the same like in FSX; it would be ridiculous if they shipped their new simulator with data that's 10 years old.

I do know that some of the Flight scenery guys are contracting for DTG, so I expect that at least some of the mesh and airports will be updated.  The thing that concerns me more is the weird cyanish color lighting.  I also don't seem to see any shadows, although there is something that looks like weird self shadowing on the trees, and drop shadows around the buildings at the airport.  Looks more like ambient occlusion to me though.  They may have taken the lighting technique for the vegetation from Flight, but hard to tell with the fog and lighting.