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Is there a FlightSim Con presentation from DTG?

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The interview was cool, and interesting to hear the info direct from the dev(s). 

I was there and listened to the whole thing. 

In Summary:

LM, There's a hotfix coming out next week according to Rob. He said it'll address a couple of issues we are dealing with right now and a couple fixes are also coming. I don't recall them off the top of my head but they will certainly be in that video. We can look forward to that. 

X-Plane, Ben and Austin were great I thought. Ben even more so, they seem to have several great things planned, the A320, more functionality, adding more ways to calibrate and fine tune controls in the next release this summer, and a few odds and ends here. Overall I am happy with what they said.

FSW / DTG. Here, boy oh boy. I can't swear in this forum but what a you know what show. The gentlemen from FSW was good and seemed passionate about aviation and he did mention some topics that he was genuinely interested in improving. Aimee however, wow. I somewhat felt bad for her, I don't think she was ready to answer the questions that were asked. Furthermore her answers to the questions we wanted answers to, ie. Steam holding 3rd party profits, freeware use in FSW, PMDG addons etc, they were all very roundabout. Very beating around the bush, circle type answers, at one point she basically answered a question about policy of 3rd party content with saying how great the flight sim community is and how happy she was able to be at the event. Uhm okay? Thats not what we asked... 

Thats pretty much the sum of it. Xplane, LM, both seem strong and have solid plans, DTG.... Well, just watch the video. 

Thats my recap. 

 

Sidenote: I tried Aerofly2 VR in ORBX LOWI and WOW O WOW! Yeah the resolution was 720p but my god, 200fps and flying the A320 around Innsbruck. What a feeling! The flare experience was something else I will never forget. I felt 20 feet off the ground and really in the cockpit. That experience alone made me a believer in what VR has to offer down the road. That one experience was worth the trip alone. :-)

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I must have watched a different version where DTG said they are not holding gun to anyone's head in term's of addons payware  or freeware and are trying bring improvements to weather ATC and update the data, LR made a big thing about I`phone and android smart phone for XPlane as for what customer wants we don't do that we provide a platform for the customer. Will we be seeing X plane on PS4 in the future .

Ray Fry. 


 

Raymond Fry.

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1 hour ago, jabloomf1230 said:

4K looks perfectly fine for me with very high IQ settings, both in XP11 and P3d V4 and I can get 30-40 fps loaded up with complex aircraft, scenery, weather and add-ons, I'm not sure why 60 fps should be some type of visual nirvana.

It's just a matter of time before the GPU hardware makes these frame rate discussions obsolete, just like 64 bit sims made the word VAS archaic.

I hope you're right. On the other hand, in all the years I've been involved with flight sims, since the days they were just monochrome green lines on a screen, the developers have been able to cram in enough new features to bring every new generation of hardware to its knees. We have brief periods where the hardware catches up, then it's back to struggling for frame rates. It's just how this hobby works. I don't think we've hit a plateau on what can be done in the sims.

As just one example -- none of the current flight sim platforms have even begun to touch the modeling of sophisticated, dynamic weather systems. I think that may be the next frontier, now that ground terrain is looking so good. Modeling a more realistic and fully dynamic sky environment will require some major CPU/GPU grunt to get past the current "clouds as eye candy" stage. 
 

17 minutes ago, rjfry said:

LR made a big thing about I`phone and android smart phone for XPlane as for what customer wants we don't do that we provide a platform for the customer. Will we be seeing X plane on PS4 in the future .

I don't care if it shows up on PS4, if that helps fund further development of the desktop PC platform.


X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator on Windows 10 
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2 hours ago, Angelo Cosma said:

Thats pretty much the sum of it. Xplane, LM, both seem strong and have solid plans, DTG.... Well, just watch the video.

Let's not overlook the fact that both XPlane and P3D (whether V3 or V4 or whatever) are released products, FSW is not even a beta, and is certainly not released as a final product, it is accessible to those who are curious about it as it goes through its creation process, and for many people, they didn't even have to pay for it to be able to be witness to that, whereas both LM and LR's sims are 60 quid. Even if you buy DTG's sim in this early state, it is only a third of that price.

There is no denying that DTG's contribution was not exactly full of reveleations, yet having said that, it's all very well LR saying 'we've got this or that big plan', but their product has some major problems with what is in it right now which need sorting (and what is not in it), notably ground handling, which is terrible. And this is not a beta, nor an early access, it's a full-price supposedly usable product which has been out for almost three months, which is more than enough time to bang out a quick patch to sort out that ground handling issue, instead of ignoring the need to fix basic stuff which is broken and moving on to other things - we can leave that kind of working methodology to Carenado lol.

Similarly, check out how nebulous LM were on the subject of updating the nav and airport database when that question was asked, and P3D has been out for SIX YEARS, and has been worked on by LM for EIGHT YEARS. Moreover, LM are not exactly forced to work on a shoestring, it's Lockheed Martin for chrissakes, the people who make missiles, jet fighters, bombers and yes, real world nav aid and comm stuff such as their super-duper, super-secret new Einstein Box for modern warplanes, so it's not as if they haven't had some time to address that, or know nothing about the subject lol. Even the early access version of FSW has had some of that older nav database of ESP issue addressed already, although admittedly, not as much as we'd perhaps hope will be eventually the case, but that said, at least they've had a bit of a stab at it as well as having a look at the ATC from its ESP legacy form.

One of the reasons DTG are not saying we have this or that planned, is because they are already on record as having said: 'We want to harness your knowledge and expertise to make Flight Sim World the best that it can be. We will be releasing updates and interacting with you regularly to test ideas, resolve issues, and help guide us in the right direction.' And they are indeed doing that; the latest forthcoming update (due next week probably) has changes to light scattering and the overall HSB settings (which is what many people have suggested needed work) amongst other things, and in relation to that on DTG's forum today, they have said they are looking forward to hearing what people think of those changes.

So if we want this or that feature in FSW, we don't have to await DTG promising this or that, we can ask them to consider those things and we are seeing evidence of this occurring. The same is true for AeroSim FS2, which is also in early access and not a finalised product, where people can also make such requests.

Now, I'm in no way suggesting that any of this means FSW will definitely be some kind of super world-beater sim, or that if we ask for a feature we are sure to get it, but one has to at least acknowledge that it is early days yet, because it's only been out as early access for around three weeks. Yet even in that small window of its availability, it's a had three updates to it, including the addition of a mission editor where you can create your own content, and we know there's another one coming in the next week or so and already know some of what it includes feature-wise and that some of that is in direct response to early access user feedback.

Promises of upcoming features are one thing, but anyone can make a promise, it's keeping that promise and delivering on it which matters.

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Alan Bradbury

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On 6/14/2017 at 0:14 PM, Paraffin said:

nuts to run one of today's modern flight sims on a 4K monitor

Using AA is effectively running at higher resolution.  Increased pixels, matched dot pitch, match screen size, and hit correct view distance with an 8K display should allow users to remove the need to use AA at all ... this is a good thing since AA is sorta a variant of a blur filter.  Not to mention AA causes all kinds of rendering issues and performance issues. 

But no matter how you slice it, multiple GPUs being leveraged by DX12 EMA and SFR will bring about those dramatic performance benefits we currently "need" (maybe desire is a better word) and will want moving forward.  I don't know if Vulkan has similar capabilities where tiles (parts of a whole frame) are sent to multiple GPUs for rendering in parallel - hopefully someone with Vulkan experience can chime in?

BUT, having the ability to fully scale with GPUs using DX12 EMA and SFR is certainly going to provide "leverage" over competition.  But it has implications of more development time and the possibility of losing compatibility ... something many users forget ... your GTA V type game/environment nevers has to consider compatibility.

Cheers, Rob.

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The problem with DX12 windows 7 users, most of which say they will not touch windows 10 with a barge poll.

Ray Fry.


 

Raymond Fry.

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18 minutes ago, rjfry said:

most of which say they will not touch windows 10 with a barge poll.

Not sure about that, just need incentive and 200-300% increase in FPS would be incentive for many (not all) ... but Windows 10 market share has been steadily growing every month unlike Win8 that never saw a steady increase in growth and was then eventually replaced by Win10.  But I agree that Win10 is far from "ideal" operating system, even with 1703 build I still have some rather obvious bugs.

However, I'd happily overlook Win10 issues if I got a FS platform that leveraged DX12 EMA and SFR that produced drastic increases in FPS when used with multiple GPUs (one's willingness to spend and financial commitment to the platform would be the ultimate determining factor).

Cheers, Rob.

 

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20 hours ago, rjfry said:

The problem with DX12 windows 7 users, most of which say they will not touch windows 10 with a barge poll.

Ray Fry.

Every couple versions there are people who have this attitude. At some point one has to move on. (There are ways to minimize the telemetry with Windows. You can disable Cortana with the registry.) The game I saw with DX12 was a lot faster compared to their DX11 version. Smart developers should be working on both versions but DTG might not have the resources. New software is what pushes people to upgrade operating systems and hardware.

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34 minutes ago, carbonbasedlifeform said:

Every couple versions there are people who have this attitude. At some point one has to move on. (There are ways to minimize the telemetry with Windows. You can disable Cortana with the registry.) The game I saw with DX12 was a lot faster compared to their DX11 version. Smart developers should be working on both versions but DTG might not have the resources. New software is what pushes people to upgrade operating systems and hardware.

Buying a new computer that only comes with the current version of the OS is how a lot of folks get there. I think the days of "build your own computer from scratch and install the OS you want" are fading, which means most people will get Win 10 eventually, whether they like it or not. You'd have to be pretty hardcore to wipe that and install Win 7 on a new computer.

The other incentive is when MS eventually drops extended support with bug fixes and protection against attacks on the OS. IIRC, that happens for Windows 7 in January 2020, which isn't looking so far away now.


X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator on Windows 10 
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On 6/13/2017 at 4:58 PM, Rob Ainscough said:

DX12 is bound to Windows 10 which currently IS a problem ... this means the FS developer(s) need to either implement two render paths/pipelines for DX11 and DX12 or wait years for Windows 10 to reach over 50% market share (currently around 27%).

Hey Rob, I was just thinking. As you have been mentioning the many benefits that the FS developers and community could realize with DX12, could one of the saving graces be that perhaps in a year, a much larger percentage of FS users would be on Windows 10? Reason I say this is generation 7 Intel CPU's (Kaby Lake) and AMD Zen cpu's only support Windows 10, so any FS user with such a cpu has W10. As we know, the flight sim community is keen on hardware upgrades to a larger percentage than the average population, which is currently reporting 27%. In addition, many FS users that have a prior version cpu have W10 installed. Perhaps by the time P3D v5 is possibly ready for production in 2019, DX12 would be a requirement. Thoughts?


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On 6/16/2017 at 9:40 PM, MikeT707 said:

Perhaps by the time P3D v5 is possibly ready for production in 2019, DX12 would be a requirement. Thoughts?

Speculation, no idea where market share will be in 2019.  The safe bet would be to run DX11 render path AND a DX12 EMA and SFR render path (but the render paths are so very different)... the DX12 EMA and SFR benefits would probably be enough to shift the OS market base (at least in terms of FS users).  But going the DX12 EMA and SFR route IS NOT trivial and IS a huge change in the render pipeline and would probably have implications for any 3rd party content provider using DX (gauges or otherwise).

Going DX12 AFR (in order to retain some level of SDK compliance/compatibility) route isn't going to produce the sorta performance deltas needed to justify the development effort over staying with a single DX11 render path.  A single render path is a gamble, it's definitely bleeding edge technology, and probably prevents the use of existing libraries like SpeedTrees, Triton (water), and Scaleform as they don't support DX12.  So it would be a massive departure from existing tools ... meaning extensive development time.

But there are plenty of talented developers over at LM so who knows what they might come up with?  Current and future single GPUs just aren't able to provide the necessary performance enable DL, DR, lots of quality AA, and max everything out with add-ons.  We still need a "bit" more CPU (flying thru dense city locations at speed and you'll see CPU's max out), but we need A LOT more GPU.  nVidia is also going to reach a point of "stagnation" similar to Intel, but I think there are still a few more years of performance innovation left before that point is reached.

My 2 cents.

Cheers, Rob.

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13 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

My 2 cents.

Cheers, Rob.

Very insightful, Rob. Cheers.

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 FSElite: Flight Sim Con: Interview with DTG'S Stephen Hood:

 

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I was at FlightSimCon and had a chance to spend about an hour with Cryss of Dovetail flying FSW one evening. First off let me state P3d is more my thing with complex add-ons etc. That said after an hour I was impressed with it as a GA sim. Rain effects were very good. Overall I think it has great promise. I will buy it on Steam with the current sale just to help support development and also for when i just want to go for a short casual flight. It's for a different market than P3d. This is really worth having a look at.

Dave

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