New Aerofly FS 2 update 2.0.1EA3.30 is live

[pmb 5,137]

Unfortunately this market is just too small to support so many "options" ... I think we'd all be much further along if there were just one flight simulator product and LM, LR, DCS, Aerofly, DTG were not fragmented and they combined into a .

Much of the present situation is of course caused by Microsoft. MSFS was a quasi standard for decades. First they left the market desolate, and next they created the LM/DT schism in the hope to double their royalties.

 

You know that magical investor will not appear. However, it already would help users - as well as makers!) -if LM and DT could create sort of a few standards for future 64 bit file formats and interfaces, but I don't even believe this to happen.

 

And back OT: It's anyone's choice, but I do what I can (not much actually) in supporting IPACS. They have done all proper and right with that (pre)release and I only hope at least a few brave developers will acknowledge the potential of AeroflyFS2.

 

Kind regards, Michael

[HiFlyer 9,343]

But I don't think there is enough interest in flight simulation to come up with the $60-$90 million or provide sufficient return even if funding was there.  

 

Which makes that whole line of reasoning kind of moot, since we all know that simply isn't going to happen.

 

In the end, I think we can only work with whats available (not what we wish was available) and even that should require us to stand up and be counted. Microsoft left the building years ago, and I can't see another big savior with bottomless pockets arriving on the scene. In the meanwhile we have what we have, and anyone new brave enough to step up to the plate has my support. Otherwise, its like that old joke about the person waiting for rescue. 

 

http://storiesforpreaching.com/i-sent-you-a-rowboat/

[barrel_owl 304]

I agree it's worth the $50, but you need to be honest, it's missing A LOT of features relative to P3D (or even Xplane).  

 

Unfortunately this market is just too small to support so many "options" ... I think we'd all be much further along if there were just one flight simulator product and LM, LR, DCS, Aerofly, DTG were not fragmented and they combined into a single larger entity of pooled resources with no duplication of work.  There is only one way this could happen, a very large investor lures (read financial incentive) devs away from their respective companies/products into a single new flight simulation company.  But that would take an investor with big pockets (think $60-$90 million) and would be a risky investment.  Attempting to build a major new flight simulator "on the side" seems too daunting to me and couldn't possibly deliver feature for feature.

 

Why should any big investor risk so much money to develop a new flight simulator, when the expected return is so low, due to our very small share in the gaming market?

If Microsoft jumped off the bandwagon and Lockheed Martin never seriously jumped on, why should any other attempt to do this? Obviously, no new flight simulator, no matter how advanced and graphically compelling, will ever reach 65 million copies like GTA V or similar market winners. Or even 20 or 10 million copies.

 

On the other side, I understand your point and share your concern. Competition brings fragmentation. A possible solution is a future with several flight simulators focused on different segments. For example, P3D focused on liners, Aerofly focused on GA and business jets, DCS still focused on military planes and so on. Every platform focused on a different subsegment. Not sure this is going to happen, though.

 

 

[HiFlyer 9,343]

Something occurs to me: Is the market really in danger of fragmentation, or is it mostly P3D, FSX, DTG which are in peril, since they will all be (essentially) just different versions of one base program.

 

That leaves X-plane, which is essentially its own universe........

 

And Aerofly.

 

3 Is not exactly a crowd (well, not in my book) or at least not a big one! 

[Guest]

 

 

Microsoft left the building years ago, and I can't see another big savior with bottomless pockets arriving on the scene.

 

LM have pretty big pockets, bigger than Microsoft ... but allocation of funds is a different matter.  I agree, finding investors with that kinda cash would be highly unlikely.

 

 

 

If Microsoft jumped off the bandwagon and Lockheed Martin never seriously jumped on, why should any other attempt to do this?

 

Not sure I understand this?  Microsoft have abandoned flight simulation, there is no "if".  Lockheed Martin has seriously taken on the task ... sounds like you might have some expectations that weren't met yet.

 

Liners and GA and Business Jets and Military aircraft aren't really different segments, they're all aircraft (this is something 3rd party would continue to take on along scenery, airports, and anything else that could be sold).  File interchange or standardization of file formats and support file structures would be a good objective, but it wouldn't solve the issue of coding redundancy on core elements like graphics, terrain, ATC, weather, seasons, AI aircraft, etc. ... Aerofly have the 3 weather sliders (adjustable presets), P3D has it's own weather engine, XPlane has it's own weather, DCS doesn't really have weather, just presets (similar to Aerofly) ... but 4 companies coding weather engines ... that's the redundancy aspect.

 

The software engineers from all these companies are VERY talented people such that "combined" and "managed" as one could bring the end user experience to that next level.  These talented folks would be partitioned out more along the lines of:

 

Project Manager

Core unification engineer

Flight model engineer

Aircraft systems support engineer

Other vehicel support engineer

Terrain engineer

3D Graphics engineer

Animation engineer

SDK engineer

ATC engineer

AI world engineer

Deployment/Patch engineer

Digital Artists1

Digital Artists2

Support Staff1

Support Staff2

Support Staff3

Operations Manager

CFO Manager

Admin1

Admin2

Admin3

 

So figure about $3.1m in yearly salary/medical, office space about $360,000/yr, equipment expense $130,000/yr, power/connectivity/insurance $80,000/yr, misc $60,000/yr ... so about $3.73m yearly ... lets assume 4 year (all full time) to deployment/release cycle ... so round up to about $15m.  To break even that's requires 300,000 sales at about $50 per license ... obviously the goal would be to make a profit/operating margin so lets suggest 5-15% is a good margin for a software company ... so product price would be around $55-$60 per license.  

 

To keep yearly updates/development moving forward (and the company in business), that would mean yearly end user upgrade price of about $15-$20.

 

The key is the 300,000 sales goal ... if that turns out to be only 150,000 then per license costs will need to double for the company to survive.  Keep in mind these are core product sales.

 

So maybe my $60-90 million guess is a little off or I'm being optimistic with my adjusted amount of $15m.  Perhaps the issue with finding investors (as I'm sure many have tried) is that the cost sits in market that does catch the eye of big investors, but also doesn't catch the eye of smaller investors ... maybe sits somewhere in the middle where the investment pool is small?

 

Anyway, that's my Friday speculation tip of week

 

Cheers, Rob.

[clayton4115 56]

I am all for this simulator, even though it is missing key features, we desperately need a new flight simulator not something which is 10 years old, we need something that can utilise the latest technologies on offer now, this flight sim sure looks promising and i hope it will eventually take over fsx.

[barrel_owl 304]

If Microsoft jumped off the bandwagon and Lockheed Martin never seriously jumped on, why should any other attempt to do this?

 

Not sure I understand this?  Microsoft have abandoned flight simulation, there is no "if".  Lockheed Martin has seriously taken on the task ... sounds like you might have some expectations that weren't met yet.

 

I am afraid I did not make myself clear given to my inappropriate formulation. Therefore, I will rephrase the statement. Taking into account that Microsoft jumped off (abandoned) flight simulation years ago and LM never actually jumped on (did not develop any real brand new flight simulator so far), I seriously doubt that any other big investor of that size will ever show up and risk so much money. DTG sat on the fence for a long while listening to the market feedback and eventually they ended up opting for a conservative approach. Reason being, many simmers are not ready to switch to a new platform and give up their addon investment.

 

Of course, I will be very glad to be proven wrong.

[HiFlyer 9,343]

So lets see how it all looks from the perspective of one of the developers about the future and user wishlists....

 

http://www.ipacs.de/forum/showthread.php/7462-Comments-from-a-former-Flight-Sim-journalist

 

 Originally Posted by DennyA 

Wonder if anyone from the team spotted this? 

Well yes, I've seen it, had not had the time to respond back then 

I'll "briefly" comment on it... and sorry for the load of mistakes and violations in English gammar, I am tired, its a Saturday evening and I am not getting paid for writing this in my free time lol. Also it took long enough to write all this.... (oh yeah and there are a lot of ... where I could go on for ages probably)

We all have our personal wishlist, but we as developers can't just snip the fingers and make everything appear out of nowhere. Software development is a process that takes very long because you can only take baby-steps at a time until the stupid machine "knows" how to do things. We humans talk on a way more abstract level, we can say "add multiplayer" or "add ai traffic" and everyone could tell you their version of how that would look like. But in the end we have to settle for one solution that works for all users on all machines and then we have to tell the computer the precise instructions how to manipulate the numbers correctly. Getting everything working is way more complicated than it sounds at first.... but enough of that here are my thoughts on your points

Disclaimer
All of what I am about to write is my view on the things as one member of the development crew, it might not reflect the actual outcome of how the company will do it. I don't know the final priorization, so some of your requests will be "taken care of" sooner than others...

"Fuel gauge never changes when flying F/A-18 in afterburner."
known issue, has to do with the fact that the actual afterburner stage isn't modelled as such yet

"Clouds rotate when you change angle of attack or look up/down"
thats one thing that I notices right away, I got used to it really  That has to do with the current weather rendering engine in use. As far as I know the weather engine will be completly rewritten at some point so that we can add nice effects like cloud shadows, local rain showers, towering cumuls clouds, thermals under cumulus clouds and turbulence on the edge of thermals as well as in clouds, low level fog and what not. Thats one point that is very high up on my own wishlist.

"Storms and really bad weather. Morning fog over rivers"
Really bad weather can be quite a bit of fun. I'd like to actually need to use the windshield wipers and be scared by a nearby thunderstorm. The FSX incredible scary thunderstorms of 1km diameter with incredible bright lightning every 5 seconds kind of ruined that for me up to now. I want to hear the thunder and see small lightning flashes on the windscreen 

"Some shimmering polygons on tops of mountains in Switzerland in VR. (GTX 1080, Win 10 Anniversary, Oculus Rift.)"
Do you mean z-fighting? I have that on my machine, too, I hope we can fix that. Its not as easy because you want high detail close to the camera (near clipping plane) and you don't want the world to end anywhere in the distance (far clipping plane). But the distance of the two planes greatly affects that z-buffer fighting. In great distance the precision of the graphics cards, which render only floats (except some newer very expensive cards) and floats have a lower precision, so sometimes a value for one triangle is greater than the other simply because of these calculation errors.
So question to you: do you rather want the cockpit to be clipped away at a radius of 1m or do you rather have z-fighting until the weather engine adds fog and hides all that lol

"Night lighting on the photoscenery textures"
I don't know if our images also have a "road" spline dataset. If you are ok with the street lights beeing a few meters off from the images, we could use OpenStreetMap data to add them. Otherwise we would have to redraw all roads and that is not gonna happen any time soon. We would spend years just for one State of the USA.

"An external camera that's not as rock-solid as the current one, but is just subtly shaky or delayed so it feels like someone is in another plane filming you. Those make external views feel so much more realistic. The "6" view is close, but too "solid," like the camera is on rails. Check out the F2 view in IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad for a nice external camera view that isn't overdone, but feels realistic."
Sure, I'd like some more cameras, too. We have an own topic for that now here in the forums...

"Local time. UTC calculations are annoying when you get as far away as the USA"
I think a user interface update would solve that issue. If you know the user interface of f.lux you also know how I would like to see it.


"Ability to turn off the engine (so you can practice dead-stick landings)"
Very high on my list, too. My personal opinion: this sim desperatly needs this since version 1. But this also comes with some issues: what if the user does not know how to start the engine, to stay physically accurate we would need to program the start sequence for each aircraft properly... 

"Ability to set fuel load"
Yep, I want that, too. The one thing is adding the dynamically chaning mass, which is not that simple as it sounds... What if the mass value goes to zero but there is a constant force acting on the same body... *Boom* 

"AI Air traffic, particularly around airports!"
(now he is getting to the big stuff) Yeeey I want that, too, really who doesn't. But a good AI is so incredible much work. Not only would you have to have some form of controller (ATC), the AI itself also needs to know "how to fly a plane". You'd have to open EVERY one of the airports and redraw EVERY SINGLE TAXILINE - if you don't get some database for that, or write a script to analyze what the scenery developers already drew for the lines. Also every SID and STAR... 
But you also want aircraft to respond to the users, right? So this is a really really big one. I'd say multiplayer is easier because the users already know how to follow the yellow lines on the ground haha

"Air Traffic Control"
Ok, I would like to hear your thoughts (all of you) on that topic. How would you like to interact with the ATC? The "FSX" style overlay does not fit into the Aerofly FS 2 sim. Also I don't want to press the numbers 0 to 9 just to navigate to the nearest airports or find my destination airport, there has to be a better solution. Would you actually prefere using your real voice, but what if you don't know the commands or are a little rusty? What if you had a simulated copilot that did the voice commands if you well-behave and follow the flight plan? Or would you like to create a setup where the atc always gives you instructions first and you only have to press one button to respond, read back what the controller told you or something like that?

"Multiplayer"
My personal request would be small personal sessions for 5 players or so. Add shared cockpit feature and add an interface to the default sim for Vatsim, pilot edge and others.

Imagine a picture of a cookie here, you deserve one for reading all of this.


"APIs for third-party planes, scenery, and maybe stuff like weather/air traffic. That's going to be the key for pulling the FSX/P3D crowd over."
Well we already have that, the SDK includes an interface to the outside world that allows communication with the aircraft in the simulator. What I personally don't want though is the same to happen with the Aerofly FS 2 as it did with the FSX. Really good add on developers created their own physics engines outside of the real simulator and we as users have to suffer from sometimes badly programmed addons that take up all the graphics memory, don't clean up as well and create instability. Each time I load the aircraft I have to wait for sometimes as much as a minute until the background systems simulation has booted up, I just want to hop in and fly.
Therefore I would want to see that add-on developers would get all the basic system components that they need and build up from that. A few components still need to be programmed, like the flight management computers and a few other systems like proper physical hydraulics and bleed simulation.


"G-force effects in high-performance planes"
ok, fair enough

"Settable and random system failures"
uhh, yeah thats a whole topic for itself. Agreed, we need some sort of failure generator system but we don't need more than an engine failure at V1 from a default aircraft.

"Emergency scenarios"
I think users that want to try and simulate an emergency will be able to do so if all hydraulics systems are implemented and the engines can be turned off. Add-on developers shouldn't be limited with that


"Hopefully we'll get moving traffic (at least lights at night) and stuff later"
If we can sort out street lighting we could probably also make cars follow the same roads. I think major highways would be enough traffic. In real life you can't really see that much car traffic movement. Large ships would be nice, but they could also be static I think, just has to look good from a normal distance. Airport vehicles would be more important to me. I'd like to see my aircraft beeing loaded but also see a log of these baggage car chains going so all kinds of different aircraft, not just me. There are inspection cars that sometimes roll down the runway and a lot more things. Much more enjoyable to observe than the every day rush hour traffic that we can't probably won't see in simulates for quite some time. Just takes up to much computing power for too little impact on the actual immersion I think.

Last edited by Jet-Pack; Today at 16:33. Reason: Added a well formulated title...