if flightschool is anything to go by - they have a Lifetime before they catch-up with XP11 and Laminar; not only on simulator level but also as company policies / restrictions applied to their products.

Nope. Nothing, nada, nichts.

 

 

I understand your argument and share your concerns. However, fact is DTG was harshly attacked and criticized both before and after the release of Flight School. Our community has an incredible capability to destroy all attempts to innovation. We saw this happen with Microsoft Flight, we have seen this happen recently with Aerofly FS2. Leaking information is the best way to make speculations and, what is worse, bashing grow. Given this situation, i perfectly understand DTG. I would do the same.

 

To be honest, innovation required a new engine. Not a tweaked nor modified one.

 

Regardless tho, i agree with you. Flight School never was part of "our" deal, nor was it aimed at us. HOWEVER, by DTG statements themselves, it was supposed to also be a partial tech demo (and this explains the flight community interest in it) of what DTG was doing on the engine itself and eye candy.

I don't understand why people have to complain about developers not telling us what they are working on. When did that become a requirement? You haven't paid any money yet, so why complain? If you're going to complain about something, complain about the simulator that you bought 3 times over the last 6 years and has barely changed. Complain about the price gouging that's going on with it. And what do they ever tell us about development?

I don't understand why people have to complain about developers not telling us what they are working on. When did that become a requirement? You haven't paid any money yet, so why complain? If you're going to complain about something, complain about the simulator that you bought 3 times over the last 6 years and has barely changed. Complain about the price gouging that's going on with it. And what do they ever tell us about development?

 

First, I think it's only natural to speculate, when DTG was making a big PR push last summer calling their project a "next generation sim" with Orbx partnership. And then a sudden announcement of a delay, followed by radio silence for a couple of months now.

 

The Orbx connection also raises some questions. Recently, the Orbx web site was promoting a slew of new "Projects" -- Project A, Project D, Project P, Project X, all 64-bit. Then after a brief fan dance and backtracking about X-Plane support, the Orbx home page now only lists Project A, after announcing a partnership with Aerofly FS2. That seems odd to me, if they're still in full partnership with DTG for an upcoming sim. But maybe DTG just doesn't want them promoting anything until there is more news.

 

P.S. I can't agree with an earlier post suggesting that everyone here was "attacking" DTG over Flight School. Most of what I read here, and the posts I made, were aimed at helping them improve their product. It's not an "attack" to post an opinion that the sky colors were weird, or that they need to do better with blurries and pop-in in the full FS product. A good developer takes on that feedback, and may not respond to every end-user complaint or suggestion, but it's important to hear what the market is thinking. 

 

And we here at Avsim and similar forums are the market. There is no "casual" market for flight sims at the level DTG has been talking about (IMO). MS Flight proved that. No amount of trash talk from hardcore flight simmers will stop a product being successful, if there actually is an alternative market for it. For casual flight sims, the market just isn't there except for arcade combat.

 

 

First, I think it's only natural to speculate, when DTG was making a big PR push last summer calling their project a "next generation sim" with Orbx partnership. And then a sudden announcement of a delay, followed by radio silence for a couple of months now.
 
The Orbx connection also raises some questions. Recently, the Orbx web site was promoting a slew of new "Projects" -- Project A, Project D, Project P, Project X, all 64-bit. Then after a brief fan dance and backtracking about X-Plane support, the Orbx home page now only lists Project A, after announcing a partnership with Aerofly FS2. That seems odd to me, if they're still in full partnership with DTG for an upcoming sim. But maybe DTG just doesn't want them promoting anything until there is more news.

 

Speculation is fine, I'm referring to the complaining that they owe us an explanation, which I don't think they do. Delays in software development are pretty standard. There are always unexpected hurdles which sometimes cause you to backtrack. They are working with very old code, so I'm sure they've run it to a lot of hurdles.

 

And I wouldn't worry too much about the announcements from ORBX, that's just silly marketing. I'm waiting for "Project show me something on a platform that won't OOM". Then I'll compare it to X-plane default and probably won't buy it.

And we here at Avsim and similar forums are the market. There is no "casual" market for flight sims at the level DTG has been talking about (IMO). MS Flight proved that. No amount of trash talk from hardcore flight simmers will stop a product being successful, if there actually is an alternative market for it. For casual flight sims, the market just isn't there except for arcade combat.

 

I don't know... First of all, how does one define a "casual" simmer? I'm not sure there's a black-and-white delimitation between casual and non-casual simmers nowadays. Take Avsim members. There is a group of them that spends a lot of their sim-time doing screenshots, maybe buying significant payware; are they casual simmers or not? Another group may be mostly interested in scenery, flying non-study level aircrafts; are they casual simmers or not? And so on.

 

I think the upcoming explosion of VR could enlarge the flight simmers community. Probably that's what AeroflyFS is trying to do with their product: easy to use, focused on photorealistic scenery, developed with performance and VR in mind, but at the same time equipped with a complex and capable flight model and with a development path also towards more complex aircrafts.

 

Maybe it's no surprise that, even in this early-release state, it received either positive interest or at least some attention from many different types of simmers alike, except ironically for the less casual simmers of all, i.e. the (self proclaimed) "serious" simmers who are only interested in full IFR flights on study level aircrafts under ATC.

VFR flying consists of ogling at clouds and scenery and has far less to do with real flying than IFR flying.  And I say that in the context of doing about equal amounts of each type in various flight sims. At its present state of development, XP11 is the sim most suitable for VFR flying and P3d is most suitable for IFR flying. If I want a video game experience with a limited realistic world I'll fly around on a PS4 with GTA 5. BTW, there is a term for a flight sim with a limited world. It's called a demo.

I think the upcoming explosion of VR could enlarge the flight simmers community. Probably that's what AeroflyFS is trying to do with their product: easy to use, focused on photorealistic scenery, developed with performance and VR in mind, but at the same time equipped with a complex and capable flight model and with a development path also towards more complex aircrafts.

 

 

I think this qualifies as gamers, not simmers :wink:

I think this qualifies as gamers, not simmers :wink:

 

Great... Then we can jump into the is it a game or is it a sim argument, and even sideslip into discussing EULA's.

 

Somewhere a mod has just awoken with a gasp from a deep sleep and is now watching this thread. 

Great... Then we can jump into the is it a game or is it a sim argument, and even sideslip into discussing EULA's.

 

Somewhere a mod has just awoken with a gasp from a deep sleep and is now watching this thread. 

Yeah, your post is designed to get this thread locked.

Yeah, your post is designed to get this thread locked.

 

I was not the one who brought up other sims is this thread, especially through negative comparisons, though I remember being accused of such, when it never actually happened..... How Ironic.

 

Moving back to the original topic, I think of the lack of updates from DTG on Its new flightsim is understandable. Why would they want to feed into speculation and raise expectations when the first go around ended in delay and disappointment and probably a significant loss of trust and confidence.

 

Probably better to lay low now until they have something concrete.

 

I will say though, that Flight School was a disappointment to me. Not because of the things wrong with it: it was a first effort after all, and was not going to be perfect. And besides, it wasn't exactly intended for the audience here.

 

My disappointment was that the issues raised about clouds and etc have not been addressed, and that they seem to have pretty much abandoned purchasers to their fate. This bodes ill for the future, and was not a great advertisement for their commitment to customer service in this genre.

 

Some excellent good gained by DTG Martin has been diluted, probably for a lot of us.

For what it is, Flying School is okay. Whether you like the lessons or not, it's still a worldwide-enabled flight sim with a few decent GA aeroplanes for the cost of a couple of beers. Personally, I regard it as another version of FS that is occasionally fun to chug about in, because the Cherokee is quite nicely done; it flies well, sounds pretty good and looks a lot better than a good many payware FSX OR P3D GA aeroplanes do. Sure the clouds look a bit ropey, but then again they look ropey in FS or P3D by default unless you tart them up, so it might be regarded as DTG's intent to leave room for third party developers to do stuff.

 

I don't blame DTG playing their cards close to their chest though, the way some hard core flight simmers came down on Flying School was pretty embarassing. Like Aerosoft's A320 sim, it ain't intended to please the study-sim nerds amongst us (at least not in its base form), but even then it could still have been a platform which might have supported such things if people were willing to give it a go. People should remember that X-Plane, P3D, FSX and FSX-SE don't impress those hard core simmers either when straight out of the box before the likes of PMDG and A2A etc get their hands on them and start pushing the possibilities.

 

I think some people forget that more than one iteration of FS came in for a right hammering when it was released (including FSX) with loads of people slagging it off for not running well on their fancy PCs, but it ended up being something where people have realistic simulations of A320s and 737s and Constellations etc running on it.

 

I was actually having a blast about in DTG's sim earlier today, and took these screenshots, for a default sim, I've seen worse...

 

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago I saw a video about one of those "America's got talent" type shows in which a young artist began a drawing. Before not long at all, one of the judges got restless and began pushing other judges to ring their buzzers and end the display. 

 

Eventually/reluctantly, the other judges gave in to the peer pressure of the impatient judge, and stopped the artist from completing her work.

 

Whereupon the artist finished her work anyway and flipped the picture to show.......

 

The folly of of impatience and rushing to judge incomplete work in progress.

 

After seeing it, I thought a lot about past history, and sims that could perhaps have similarly turned into something good if only given a fair chance. It's a shame, and I don't want that to happen again. I will do what I can to make sure that it doesn't.

 

Flight School feels abandoned to me at this point, and I feel I've given it a fair chance. I will still give a fair hearing to DTG Flightsim, while admitting freely that the Flight School experience has adversely affected my hopefulness.

 

Anyway, has there been any updates of info from DTG?

I saw something on one of the Steam threads where Martin said something to the effect that DTG weren't just going to post a couple of screenshots and then go silent but would start giving out lots of info once they started giving out info. Whether that will actually be the case and how long we will have to wait before we hear anything further from DTG remains to be seen.

 

Sadly I suspect that the flightsim part of DTG will not follow in the footsteps of the trainsim part of DTG and have a beta of the new product rather wider than the one that supposedly took place for Flight School.

VFR flying consists of ogling at clouds and scenery and has far less to do with real flying than IFR flying. [CUT] If I want a video game experience with a limited realistic world I'll fly around on a PS4 with GTA 5. BTW, there is a term for a flight sim with a limited world. It's called a demo.

 

I think this qualifies as gamers, not simmers :wink:

 

I think these are examples of the way of thinking some people have in order to categorize who is a real simmer and who is not.

 

I do not agree. I think someone flying at 90FPS in VR in an ultralight without a flightplan over photorealistic scenery, is _vastly_ more close in experiencing the real feeling of flight (and hence, in a certain sense, could be defined as a more "serious" simmer) than another person flying a study level airliner in IFR at 20 FPS on a flat screen.

 

I specifically selected two extreme cases, to show that not only the dichothomy "gamer"/"hardcore simmer" is not as black and white, but also that from a certain point of view, some "casual" simmers may be indeed more "serious" than the "hardcore" simmers.

 

Now that being said, don't want to further derail the thread and will refrain from more comments.