NexGen Sim - dead in the water

[WingZ 547]

8 hours ago, domae001 said:

If you look at Aerofly2 - that's the way a "new" simulator does it: Not promising the flight sim revolution, but clearly focussing on two or three key aspects (performance, visual fidelity, VR) and raising the bar in those regards.

Yup: under-promising means you don't have a constantly disappointed audience.

Also, listening but not giving in to pressure to meet some artificial time scale.

What caught my eye is the bits they have produced, are pretty good. This fuels the optimism that what follows, isn't hamstrung by poor base code.

[Olmba 27]

At least he was trying, I don't belive many of you guy's that comment above have dont the same.

All credit for trying.. Nothing wrong to give up..

 

[HiFlyer 9,343]

1 hour ago, Olmba said:

At least he was trying, I don't belive many of you guy's that comment above have dont the same.

All credit for trying.. Nothing wrong to give up..

 

I always felt that way as well. 

As I said at the time, I always felt the chance for success was low, because creating a new sim is such a complicated endeavour. But I also thought there was no harm in trying, and years later, I still see no harm to be found.

 

[OzWhitey 3,353]

I had never even heard of NGiS until I read this thread. For no apparent reason, I sat up late last night reading through the whole saga. It's a pretty good soap opera. Luke, your many comments were prescient. IMHO, as someone joining in at the end of the story, I think some people were overly kind. The lack of insight displayed by the (one-man?) NGiS team was astounding.

 

[pmb 5,137]

Although very sceptical, I have been following the project from its very beginning until their website disppeared a few weeks ago. Initially it looked promising indeed, as long as they aimed at integrating the Unigine engine. Maybe they discarded this approach too early when issues emerged (yes, I recall them). There still might be a chance for an unigine-based simulator. 

I started to smell fish when Stephen and a couple of his men continually replied the project being in excellent shape and a demo to be released soon, but all having to be kept completely secret because of NDAs with high-ranked partners. Usually there are press releases at a certain stage of agreement, which were never released.

At a point you get a gut feeling when something is starting to derail. 

Kind regards,  Michael

[MidFlight77 8]

2 hours ago, OzWhitey said:

Luke, your many comments were prescient. IMHO, as someone joining in at the end of the story, I think some people were overly kind. The lack of insight displayed by the (one-man?) NGiS team was astounding.

Exactly! Spot on.

Michael said "Usually there are press releases at a certain stage of agreement, which were never released. At a point you get a gut feeling when something is starting to derail".

The thing is that many of us right from the start had that 'gut feeling', which we expressed time and time again on Avsim and other forums, yet we were labelled as 'naysayers' and 'whiners' by Stephen and those with more hope than intuition and foresight.

Kinda sad though for all those guys who joined the Nexgen team and were given high flying titles to their names such as Senior Vice President, Quality Assurance Director,  Leadership Team Consultant etc,. These guys are now just ordinary members of 'the public' (as Nexgen used to call us mere plebs.)

A brave new sim

Nexgen article

"With the recent arrival on to the market of the NGiS (Next Generation iNTERACTiVE Software©), Group, there is a feeling of electric anticipation gathering high up in the atmosphere. They have recently announced the beginnings of a newly constituted gathering of industry professionals, intent on producing a product that will literally blast all other comers right out of their newly generated graphical water interfaces!

It is a grand boast, but far from an idle boast. With the confidence of those with years, even decades of expertise in the production of all things ‘flight sim’, the team is already hard at work setting the scene, (and the scenery!). As they get down to the task of beginning the process of writing a completely new program, with no remnants or traces left over from any previous flight simulator versions. This is not an adaptation. It is after all a completely fresh start....."

http://www.simflight.com/2016/01/23/ngis-new-flight-simulator-project/

A 'grand boast' indeed. Or what many of us at the time called Hype and Vaporware!

 

 

 

 

 

[HighTowers 1,434]

Kind of says something for LM and DTG who chose to go the route of renovating from an established foundation rather than go to a break new ground stage. Both of them are more than capable to do the latter, but its such a monumental task, the chance of success is far less than going with something well established despite replacing/optimizing alot of old code. No one likes to see failure, but If this failure happened 4-5 years ago, this mightve been a much more depressing situation, but with the likes of P3D, XP11, FSW, and AF2, Id say we have a strong flight simulation movement going forward. 

[Guest]

58 minutes ago, pmb said:

I started to smell fish when Stephen and a couple of his men continually replied the project being in excellent shape and a demo to be released soon, but all having to be kept completely secret because of NDAs with high-ranked partners.

I wonder how you can call the project genuine and honest if you say things like this while now it turns out they have only been talking about the engine... I am not a developer but it looks to me they were simply lying.

[Chock 17,769]

Whatever the truth of it, it's a moot point anyway if the thing is dead. As I say, props to anyone for having a try, because around the time when MS dropped FS and started polling us all on what we wanted in a flight sim (anyone else remember that survey questionnaire?), and then roundly ignored it all and made Flight instead, it was a depressing time, so it kind of made the notion of picking up the ball if not a likely dream, then a pleasant dream for us all nonetheless. Some of you might remember that Aerosoft suggested they might have a stab at it too; anyone remember that? But as we've seen recently, all they managed was Ready For Take Off, which is a considerable scaling back of ambitions. But, it was kind of an open field back then, so it is hardly surprising some might want to try.

But with P3D going 64 bit and FSW also being an ESP-athon in 64 bit and in Early Access, plus AeroFly FS2 coming up on the rails and XPlane also going 64 bit and (allegedly) getting some proper ATC and weather and stuff, plus a few others out there which I won't bother listing, I suspect anyone else would be mental to try and bang out a new flight sim when all of the aforementioned ones are battling for customer loyalty and wooing third party developers. One only has to look at how long FSX-SE and P3D have been using the (made steadily over the years by ACES) database of airports and such to see what even that single aspect of creating a sim entails.

If the company which makes Stealth Bombers and such can't be arsed updating those airports, the likelihood of a couple of people with bags of ambition, but little else, going for them managing to pull it off, was about as probable as me becoming Emperor of the Earth, although, in the unlikely event of that occurring, I do, you may be pleased to note, already have my manifesto planned out. Highlights include making my girlfriend, Fiona, the Empress of what will have been formerly known as France, but it will be having its name changed to FiFiWorld, which will of course mean that ESP airport database will be even more out of date.

[MidFlight77 8]

11 hours ago, Olmba said:

At least he was trying,

How right you are!  He was very trying!

[MidFlight77 8]

6 hours ago, J van E said:

I wonder how you can call the project genuine and honest if you say things like this while now it turns out they have only been talking about the engine... I am not a developer but it looks to me they were simply lying.

Lets call it 'being economical with the truth'.

Just a year ago Stephen B. was telling us that:  "On April 26th, NGiS and Diamond Visionics  sat across the table from one another and came to the conclusion that two heads are better than one and joined forces as collaborating partners".
https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?16631-NGiS-To-Collaborate-With-Diamond-Visionics

A year later and Stephen finally reveals privately that:  "After two years of negotiating with Diamond Visionics for use of their engine and never coming to an agreeable point, I felt we had lost our window of opportunity ... so we have closed up shop".

However you look at it, its fishy, and it smells the same as the 'collaboration'/'partnership' that NGIS said they had with Unigine......

Question: 'What advantage do you see your simulator having over other simulators such as P3D, X-Plane and the MSFS series?'

Answer: "Every advantage imaginable!"
-Stephen Borick
https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?16177-Interview-with-Stephen-Borick-NGiS

[HiFlyer 9,343]

6 hours ago, J van E said:

I wonder how you can call the project genuine and honest if you say things like this while now it turns out they have only been talking about the engine... I am not a developer but it looks to me they were simply lying.

I think that a team was actually assembled, and that by all accounts, some good people were part of it. At one point, there was a private forum to which I was invited and from which I later withdrew, because I eventually concluded that while I believed in Mr Boricks sincerity, the priorities of action being discussed seemed unlikely to achieve a successful result.

I believe it was a serious, if perhaps doomed effort that I'm sorry failed.

[Luke 782]

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

At one point, there was a private forum to which I was invited and from which I later withdrew, because I eventually concluded that while I believed in Mr Boricks sincerity, the priorities of action being discussed seemed unlikely to achieve a successful result.

I am curious as to what those priorities were.

I vaguely remember some of my earlier posts on the subject - even if you are developing something "in private" any company is going to talk at a general level of what they're doing, what their approach is, what the weaknesses of their competition are and the background of the people involved. One may not fully open the kimono, but a complete reluctance to talk about anything is more a sign of a complete lack of substance than any other outcome. Generally speaking, the more secretive one is about the product, the more one discusses the backgrounds of the people involved and vice versa.

IIRC I asked them to discuss how one would interface with an external consumer of the simulator data, and a broad discussion of the various options and the tradeoffs between them. It didn't involve anything specific or details, but just a way for them to demonstrate an understanding of software development and simulators in general for the community.

They refused to even touch such a generic topic, which made me suspect there was no one capable of having such a discussion. It never seemed to get beyond "setup a Trello board where we wish for everything under the sign with no understanding of the inherent tradeoffs between our wishes".

I've seen that before. Those kinds of people never make good products.

[HiFlyer 9,343]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

They refused to even touch such a generic topic, which made me suspect there was no one capable of having such a discussion.

Not quite. It was more that the storm of derision and criticism had risen so quickly, and to such high levels, that the question could have easily been imagined to be some kind of trap. By that juncture, I'm not sure there are many who could have remained civil after some of the things that had been said, and also, by the time your question was asked, attitudes were so polarized that rational discussion seemed impossible.

I remember someone in the internal forums answering the question in great detail, along with some counter-questions, but the answer was never disseminated that I know of. The wagons had been circled, and the time for talk had ended.

[MidFlight77 8]

14 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

 It was more that the storm of derision and criticism had risen so quickly, and to such high levels...

 

Damn those pesky naysayers!  If only they had shut up and not criticised and questioned Stephen's ability to produce 'the best flight simulator on the market'.

The reality of course, as Luke and others pointed out in the past, is that Stephen brought that criticism  on himself, and he fanned the flames by being both argumentative and soft skinned - a flammable combination.

Stephen used to be a fire-fighter in the past apparently.  He certainly stoked the flames on numerous flight forums rather than douse them....

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?296396-What-NGiS-really-is/page8&highlight=ngis