Flight Sim World - First Impressions

[vololiberista 205]

14 hours ago, Chock said:

I would have thought you (of all people, since you like the VC-10) would have been aware that this:

https://www.justflight.com/product/vc10-jetliner

Is being developed by Just Flight, who are on record as saying this:

'We strongly welcome a new iteration of FS - we've been waiting for ten years! Once the full SDK (Software Development Kit) becomes available, our development team will be exploring the possibilities with FSW - for creating new content as well as possibly porting over titles developed for FSX. We've been working with DTG for some time now, adapting some of the products we've developed for FSX and Train Simulator for distribution via Steam. As a result we have a very good relationship with them and this is set to continue with FSW.'

That doesn't sound much to me like they are not interested in doing stuff for FSW, more like what it is, i.e. the features of FSW are not yet finalised, hence there is no SDK yet, and they are awaiting the arrival of it. Presumably will be a priority for DTG to get that out to developers when they can, especially those who as noted above, say they 'have been working with DTG for some time'.

If/when it comes out it had better be accurate. Correct tail plane incidence settings, stick pusher, P7, correct engine start-up procedure, correct EGT, Oxygen delivery system, airframe anti-ice, correct thrust values for cruise etc. and so on and so on. I have been in touch with them but they don't seem interested. And there is a lot missing from their photos. The Super VC10 available for FS9 in the avsim library is 70%  study level just missing the electrics and hydraulics panels which are extremely complicated to model.

[Alphafoxsierra 166]

On 2017-6-2 at 9:31 PM, Paraffin said:

The requirement for all developers to pay their own separate license fees for use of trademarked names, logos, etc. is going to have a major impact on how many smaller developers sign on.

Not sure where you are getting that from, but this is a false statement. 

[fs4fun 366]

11 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

That microsoft hardwired north/south east/west orientation of the roads that's been part of MS flight sims forever is long past due to be removed from history.

 

Interesting point, I never really gave that much thought. I suppose this happens because all LOD cells have that orientation and when FSX tiles the landclass textures they need to be likewise oriented to butt up against each other in the cell, but more importantly, the roads in the "grid" landclass tiles generally do have N/S E/W orientation. On the other hand, "non-grid" landclass roads do not. Maybe the problem is that landclass is often not chosen well to represent the real world.

Example of non-grid landclass used in a scenery I made recently:

[HiFlyer 9,361]

11 minutes ago, fshobby said:

Interesting point, I never really gave that much thought. I suppose this happens because all LOD cells have that orientation and when FSX tiles the landclass textures they need to be likewise oriented to butt up against each other in the cell, but more importantly, the roads in the "grid" landclass tiles generally do have N/S E/W orientation. On the other hand, "non-grid" landclass roads do not. Maybe the problem is that landclass is often not chosen well to represent the real world.

Example of non-grid landclass used in a scenery I made recently:

Interesting.

Hmmmmm..... If you really want to see it in action though, go to default New york and you will see that the buildings and streets align on a completely different axis than the roads, When I saw it in FSW I groaned. Heck, when I noticed it years ago in Orbx Australia, I groaned.

And have never been able to unsee it, since. (I hated it in FLIGHT, too) :-/

 

[fs4fun 366]

43 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Hmmmmm..... If you really want to see it in action though, go to default New york and you will see that the buildings and streets align on a completely different axis than the roads, When I saw it in FSW I groaned. Heck, when I noticed it years ago in Orbx Australia, I groaned.

 

Yup, the FSX terrain engine is unable to reconcile the landclass and vector scenery. For NYC, I'd just cull out a lot of the vector roads (aside from the highways), and that should result in better frame rates as a bonus.

I think the way to go is to migrate the terrain engine to 100% vector-based. That would result in scalable scenery that could represent the real world with good accuracy, including road placement, without requiring terabytes of raster imagery or the high cost of sourcing such data (and would be easier to adapt for season and night lighting). The disadvantage is that it might not be as GPU-friendly, but it might be CPU multicore-friendly.

[fs4fun 366]

20 hours ago, Paraffin said:

(e) the UGC must not be used in, or made available to, any other simulator software which is similar to or competes with the Software

I doubt this applies to source code, but rather to the compiled output of whatever developer tools DTG supplied.

UGC is defined as "content for use with the Software", which specifically means FSW in this case.

In other words, the developer can take the same source code and export it through the dev tools of another sim platform, and the restrictions above do not apply to that output.

Disclaimer: IANAL

I agree that platform developers want addon devs to make their product take advantage of any unique features of the platform. On the other hand, addon devs might prefer to be able to maintain a single set of source files with minimal platform customizations so they can easily cross-compile to the different platforms. It's not impossible but can be a challenge to use special platform features without splitting off multiple copies of the same project, which can end up as a maintenance headache.

[HiFlyer 9,361]

2 hours ago, fshobby said:

For NYC, I'd just cull out a lot of the vector roads (aside from the highways), and that should result in better frame rates as a bonus.

I've wondered for years if could that be done.

[fs4fun 366]

7 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I've wondered for years if could that be done.

I've never done it but I don't see why not. I'll give it a try in the next day or two. There's a tool over at fsdeveloper that can de-compile vector terrain. It's been a while since I played with it but I recall it's easy enough to extract the data, load it up in a tool such as SBuilderX or even QGIS for editing (the latter being OK if you're not working with vectors that need altitude values such as airport backgrounds or hydro polys), then re-compile.

[HiFlyer 9,361]

20 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Hmmmmmm...... Aerofly dissed again with scant mention. *Shakes head*

 

Seems my other thread, about the state of the flight sim world went "Poof!"