I like how you can pull the fuses on the PA-34 fuse panel and mess the plane up pretty bad.

 

Nice touch

On 5/3/2017 at 7:38 PM, DTG_Aimee said:

I don't have specific information on tools as that information sits with our third party team. 

In order to market as an official FSW add-on, you will be able to sell your add-ons on your own store as long as it is made available on the Dovetail channels as well. 

But IS there or will there be an SDK, so that those who want and can, can build there own airplanes and/or scenery?

On 17/05/2017 at 7:09 AM, mike4 said:

What is BEMT?

As for CPU FSX only used one or two cores. So by moving stuff to GPU they not really improved stuff, unless they support multicore CPUs like XP. 64bit is a must but they should also gone Vulkan or at least DX12 for VR. So if they're to lazy to support VR, I'll be to lazy to buy stuff.

"To lazy to support VR" - not at all fair... They never said that. Dovetail don't have it on there to do list because they have 1000+ priority items to complete first and VR has to wait it's turn.Dovetail is probably less than a quarter of the old ACES team and has far less experience. I think sometimes we ask for too much... Anyway FlyInside might step up to the plate...

Looks like Cold and Dark starts will be worked on next which will be very welcome and I dare say they'll also look at performance. Flight School has similar shocking performance issues as have pretty much most (new game platforms) when first released.

4 minutes ago, rodeback said:

But IS there or will there be an SDK, so that those who want and can, can build there own airplanes and/or scenery?

100% there will be an SDK. Dovetail have confirmed this. It's part of Dovetail's strategy to grow FSW.

The question you should asking is will is be a PUBLIC SDK?

16 minutes ago, dtrjones said:

Flight School has similar shocking performance issues as have pretty much most (new game platforms) when first released.

And why didn't Dovetail address that then? If they didn't fix Flight school during the last year, who says they will fix FSW during the coming months? Why release as EA so you can ask for feedback while your previous effort already gave you tons of feedback? The fact that problems in Flight school still exist in FSW doesn't sound like good news to me.

3 minutes ago, J van E said:

And why didn't Dovetail address that then? If they didn't fix Flight school during the last year, who says they will fix FSW during the coming months? Why release as EA so you can ask for feedback while your previous effort already gave you tons of feedback? The fact that problems in Flight school still exist in FSW doesn't sound like good news to me.

That's a good point, but isn't that why they released in EA? You also have to accept that when Dovetail bought the rights to build on Microsofts platform these issues would be carried over. I think when FSW is finally released you'll see that there are parts of the simulation that have been completely overhauled and other parts which look similar but just the fact the product is being developed again should mean there is always hope.

I've worked in the software industry for over 20 years and there isn't much you can't do with enough time and money. Contrary to popular belief there are very few brand new engines of any genre around today. At least we'll get 10 years development into a new platform and not another 10 years stagnation. I'm grateful as wonderful as X-Plane and P3D have been to have something new, something different.

Dovetail haven't revealed all there cards yet, so lets wait and see...

2 minutes ago, dtrjones said:

That's a good point, but isn't that why they released in EA?

I would say that Flight school was their EA already! Why do they need yet another year of EA and feedback? If they don't know what to do by now they never will.

 

2 minutes ago, dtrjones said:

Contrary to popular belief there are very few brand new engines of any genre around today. At least we'll get 10 years development into a new platform and not another 10 years stagnation. I'm grateful as wonderful as X-Plane and P3D have been to have something new, something different.

You are forgetting Aerofly FS 2. The newest and (by far) best running flight sim engine (loads everything in literally seconds and fps refuses to dip under 100). And it didn't take 10 years to get there. (Although I sometimes, in all honesty, do wonder how long it will take to progress beyond what it is now LOL).

36 minutes ago, dtrjones said:

 I think when FSW is finally released you'll see that there are parts of the simulation that have been completely overhauled and other parts which look similar but just the fact the product is being developed again should mean there is always hope.

I've worked in the software industry for over 20 years and there isn't much you can't do with enough time and money. 

Time and money can do things, but I'm wondering if there aren't some partnership issues affecting how this scenery looks. 

(Warning -- Wild guess alert):

DTG has partnered with Orbx for the default scenery overlay. Maybe it actually is possible to use the 64-bit address space to expand the LOD and eliminate pop-ins with this tweaked FSX code base. But when you do that, it means you have to start showing a lot more content out there in the distance. IIRC, another poster made this point in one of these threads.

Maybe that complicates the idea of expanded LOD, because Orbx scenery isn't designed to work that way. The content just isn't there, and would have to be further modified or created from scratch, making it impossible to just easily port their existing scenery products over to FSW.

The other two main 64-bit civilian sims don't have this problem, because the baseline scenery is developed in-house and tweaked for distant views instead of contracting it out. Anyway, just a W.A.G., but it would explain why it's been so late in the game, and we still see these artifacts and legacy limitations in the scenery. There are other possible explanations, but this seems plausible to me.

7 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Time and money can do things, but I'm wondering if there aren't some partnership issues affecting how this scenery looks. 

(Warning -- Wild guess alert):

DTG has partnered with Orbx for the default scenery overlay. Maybe it actually is possible to use the 64-bit address space to expand the LOD and eliminate pop-ins with this tweaked FSX code base. But when you do that, it means you have to start showing a lot more content out there in the distance. IIRC, another poster made this point in one of these threads.

Maybe that complicates the idea of expanded LOD, because Orbx scenery isn't designed to work that way. The content just isn't there, and would have to be further modified or created from scratch, making it impossible to just easily port their existing scenery products over to FSW.

The other two main 64-bit civilian sims don't have this problem, because the baseline scenery is developed in-house and tweaked for distant views instead of contracting it out. Anyway, just a W.A.G., but it would explain why it's been so late in the game, and we still see these artifacts and legacy limitations in the scenery. There are other possible explanations, but this seems plausible to me.

I see your point, but as it's EA then whos to say this will not be a back and fore with Orbx to improve the situation? I know people dismiss this side of Dovetail but a flight simulation product should be more performant than a train simulator and if they really want all that candy, then they'll need to provide a platform for us to enjoy it otherwise things will fall flat pretty quickly. Dovetail are the gardians of the engine now and I'm sure they can and will show content further out than they have. I've seen a few videos and while it looks ok close up the sudden lack of autogen is quite obvious and something we need to feedback to Dovetail to address.

45 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Maybe that complicates the idea of expanded LOD, because Orbx scenery isn't designed to work that way. The content just isn't there

Well, I simply think they limited the LOD to prevent performance from dropping down even further. Before they start working to get rid of popping up things they need to work on the performance. But even when you fix the popup of autogen (like P3D sort of did) you have the 'pop up' of ground textures and mesh, which is just as immersion killing as the autogen is. And to solve that you need to work even more on the performance. Looking at what P3D achieved here (not THAT much) I wonder how much performance you can get out of this outdated engine. There simply is a limit to everything.

37 minutes ago, J van E said:

Well, I simply think they limited the LOD to prevent performance from dropping down even further. Before they start working to get rid of popping up things they need to work on the performance. 

True, it could be a temporary measure while they work on performance in other areas. Then they'll throw the switch and expand the LOD, balancing everything together to get a decent frame rate. I sure hope so.

It would require high detail scenery to actually be out there though, hiding under the LOD blur, and I'm not sure if that's part of the Orbx package (or distant geographic details like mountain ranges). That's what I was wondering about. As we all keep saying, we'll see how it turns out. Fairly soon, it looks like. 

1 hour ago, J van E said:

Well, I simply think they limited the LOD to prevent performance from dropping down even further.

Dropping down even further which value? Which and whose reference mark are you using for such a statement?
I have just made another test using a pretty heavy payware scenery for 32-bit (I will not mention it, as this is obviously only intended for internal test, so no vanilla in this case), with the following resolution:

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096

[TERRAIN]
LOD_RADIUS=6.500000
MESH_COMPLEXITY=100
MESH_RESOLUTION=25
TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=29
AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5
DETAIL_TEXTURE=1

and again I enjoyed a steady 29-34 FPS, about 40 FPS in external views, from take-off for 15-20 minutes, with no microstutters. I have a medium performing machine for this community, i7 4790K at 4.5 GHz with GTX 980 and 16 GB RAM. Not even close to some rigs I see in someone's signature here.

Again, I am not saying this is a "wow case", but based on my usual experience with FSX, FSX-SE 32-bit I would definitely call it a decent performance.

6 hours ago, J van E said:

You are forgetting Aerofly FS 2. The newest and (by far) best running flight sim engine (loads everything in literally seconds and fps refuses to dip under 100). And it didn't take 10 years to get there. (Although I sometimes, in all honesty, do wonder how long it will take to progress beyond what it is now LOL).

IPACS has been developing flight sims for a lot longer than 10 years.

1 hour ago, fshobby said:

IPACS has been developing flight sims for a lot longer than 10 years.

What? Where?

I know they have had an RC simulator, but comparing that to a full scale flight sim?

Total apples and oranges.

12 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

What? Where?

I know they have had an RC simulator, but comparing that to a full scale flight sim?

Total apples and oranges.

Ah. I was including their history with RC sims. Anyway, Aerofly FS development did start 10 years ago: http://www.ipacs.de/about-us.html