NexGen Sim - dead in the water

[HiFlyer 9,343]

18 minutes ago, MidFlight77 said:

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

There is healthy skepticism, which is to be expected, and then there plain old rude.

[MidFlight77 8]

16 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

There is healthy skepticism, which is to be expected, and then there plain old rude.

Get over it. Nexgen failed.  Finished,  kaput!

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things".
-Winston Churchill
 

[HiFlyer 9,343]

5 minutes ago, MidFlight77 said:

Get over it. Nexgen failed.  Finished,  kaput!

An excellent example. Thank you.

[MidFlight77 8]

1 minute ago, HiFlyer said:

An excellent example. Thank you.

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things".
-Winston Churchill

[HiFlyer 9,343]

4 minutes ago, MidFlight77 said:

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things".
-Winston Churchill

And I would counter with another saying: It's not what you say, it's how you say it. 

[MidFlight77 8]

Just now, HiFlyer said:

And I would counter with another saying: It's not what you say, it's how you say it. 

Exactly! 

[HiFlyer 9,343]

Just now, MidFlight77 said:

Exactly! 

Which goes back to what I originally said. I believe much of the conversation at that time went past healthy skepticism and even criticism, into plain, simple, rudeness.

The level of vitriol that that eventually led to seemed to me both now and at the time, to be completely avoidable and unnecessary.

I can't even imagine the nightmare of moderating all that.

Yuck.

[MidFlight77 8]

36 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I can't even imagine the nightmare of moderating all that.  Yuck.

Exactly. And I feel your pain for being a part of it these past few years..
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/will-this-sim-ever-fly.437453/

But as the Nexgen website used to say:  "With Time Comes Change".

[HiFlyer 9,343]

4 hours ago, MidFlight77 said:

Exactly. And I feel your pain for being a part of it these past few years..
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/will-this-sim-ever-fly.437453/

Yes, one admin in particular when I pm'd him about it, since I was new to the forum and wanted some guidance, was not pleased with the exact type of rudeness I mentioned, but noted that any discussion of NGIS (or even just any non microsoft-based sim in general) tended to attract it, and he was not sure why. 

And of course, when Flightsim.com opened a forum, much merriment ensued.

In fact at this very moment, somebody has been unfortunate enough to bring up this same subject over there, and immediately........ 

 

[Luke 782]

27 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

... noted that any discussion of NGIS (or even just any non microsoft-based sim in general) tended to attract it, and he was not sure why. 

And of course, when Flightsim.com opened a forum, much merriment ensued.

I can't speak to the discussions of non-Microsoft sims, but NGIS attracted a lot of derision because Stephen's postings made it clear that he had no idea what he was doing, but that didn't stop him from talking a lot of smack about simulator authors who knew had a lot more knowledge and experience than him.

In between the derision and criticism, he got a few pieces of sound advice. One of which was to take a look at FlightGear, the existing open-source simulator. A sim is thousands of moving parts all bolted together and it's a good learning opportunity to see how others have done it, the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and then working on incrementally improving one component at a time. It's not flashy, sexy or grandiose but it's how solid engineering actually works. And even though Stephen wasn't a software engineer, he did claim to be a Project Manager on LinkedIn - and as a PM you have an iron-clad rule for success: limit the scope. This is basic. There's a ton of mundane stuff that FlightGear or any other sim will need to do that doesn't need to be rewritten.

(As an aside, if you haven't already, go read Ben Rich's autobiography and Chris Pocock's book on the U-2. The Skunk Works put together three amazing aircraft - the U-2, the SR-71 and the F-117 and Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich are great examples of what good engineering leadership looks like. One great lesson was how much Johnson reused from the F-104 to the U-2; he had a nasty hairy problem to solve and went out of his way to use tried and true wherever he could. A good lesson.)

In one of the linked threads I asked him that since FlightGear was open source, his (dismissive) conclusions were therefore based on an analysis of the code - so what problems had he identified? As you mentioned earlier, it was a trap - I never got a response because Occam's Razor suggests that they had never looked at the code and he was just talking smack out of his rear end. Skepticism for a new simulator project is natural. What turns it into hostility is when you make grandiose claims, refuse to back them up, denigrate the accomplishments of others despite having no ability to even match them, and to top it all off have a remarkably thin skin and accuse anyone who calls you out on your BS as "slandering" you.

I have no idea why Nels put in the forums. It was pretty clear that NGIS had no product and was more interested in putting out vacuous press releases that sounded important but had no verifiable details. They were designed to impress the credulous who had no understanding of the process or the discipline, and they loved fawning commentary and excitement. Excitement doesn't generate code.

I personally stayed away from their site deliberately. I wanted to give them the space and courtesy of not crapping on their own property, and just stood back and watched the contradictory Trello board (again, good engineering is about conflicts and compromises) and saw them give out titles like a silly startup that instead of making a product is discussing the size of their corner offices, the tropical hardwood used for the desks and whether the corporate jet would be a Gulfstream or a BBJ.

There's too many BS artists in this world. I feel sorry for the fools who got sucked in by them - there are other parasites and scam artists out there who will be more adept at separating these people from their valuables.

Cheers!

[HiFlyer 9,343]

I think valid suggestions were given and that Mr Borick certainly could have approached things differently.

But I also remember, waaaaaay back at the start of all the drama a few years ago asking a question:

Let's suppose NGIS, (still with no evidence that I'm aware of) turned out to be a scam of some sort. (And it was never explained exactly what sort of scam, since no money was ever sought, that I recall)

Suppose that Mr Borick was indeed completely out of his depth, and that the product had no chance from the very beginning, which is all very possible.

Suppose that in the end, the whole thing failed miserably, and fell on its face with the most embarrassing splat imaginable.

My questions was, and remains: Who exactly was harmed by letting him/them try? What damage was caused, and whose interests were injured?

It seems NGIS is gone, and while people are still quite vehement, I look around and see nothing busted, no investors howling about being cheated, no damage at all except perhaps to the sanity of those reading these threads.

A tempest in a teapot: all the angry words, insults, nasty insinuations....... all the people called fools (about what, exactly, since essentially nothing happened) all blown away by time, signifying not a single thing, except perhaps people's proclivities to get unnecessarily twisted out of shape for little reason.

 

[Groovy_Kincaid 71]

40 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I think valid suggestions were given and that Mr Borick certainly could have approached things differently.

But I also remember, waaaaaay back at the start of all the drama a few years ago asking a question:

Let's suppose NGIS, (still with no evidence that I'm aware of) turned out to be a scam of some sort. (And it was never explained exactly what sort of scam, since no money was ever sought, that I recall)

Suppose that Mr Borick was indeed completely out of his depth, and that the product had no chance from the very beginning, which is all very possible.

Suppose that in the end, the whole thing failed miserably, and fell on its face with the most embarrassing splat imaginable.

My questions was, and remains: Who exactly was harmed by letting him/them try? What damage was caused, and whose interests were injured?

It seems NGIS is gone, and while people are still quite vehement, I look around and see nothing busted, no investors howling about being cheated, no damage at all except perhaps to the sanity of those reading these threads.

A tempest in a teapot: all the angry words, insults, nasty insinuations....... all the people called fools (about what, exactly, since essentially nothing happened) all blown away by time, signifying not a single thing, except perhaps people's proclivities to get unnecessarily twisted out of shape for little reason.

 

Well said. 

[MidFlight77 8]

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

My questions was, and remains: Who exactly was harmed by letting him/them try? What damage was caused, and whose interests were injured?

The obvious answer in my opinion is that the flight sim community was harmed by NGIS's flight of fancy project because it sucked two years worth of time, focus and attention from the community.  Time that we wont get back.

Imagine if all those hours, months and years of endless debate and planning and dreaming about the Nexgen sim had gone instead into focussing on existing and up-and-coming flight sims, how much further on we'd be at this moment.  

[Luke 782]

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

My questions was, and remains: Who exactly was harmed by letting him/them try? What damage was caused, and whose interests were injured?

That's a fair and valid question.

Certainly there's no harm to letting them try, and I think everyone did. No one attempted to stop them, and based on your posts and others there were a lot of individuals who weren't deterred by the discussions and decided to see for themselves. I think they all went into it eyes wide open, which is a good thing.

As we've seen over the past few years, what appears to be foolish and having no chance of success today may end up being perfectly viable and successful despite its lack of value and actively causing harm to people. And while this saga has ended with nothing more than wasted time and effort (which is a loss, unless your time and energy is infinite or worthless) it's worth contemplating for a minute what might have happened had the community given NGIS an undeserved level of acceptance and credibility over several months or years. At that point a call for funding might well have succeeded, causing a far more tangible loss.

The bottom line as I see it is that speech is a two-way street. Stephen wanted the ability to post content that was a combination of irrational exuberance and outright falsehoods, and demanded that he not be challenged on any of it (although adulation was always welcome!). The world doesn't work that way. Charlatans succeed because people do nothing; sunlight is a great disinfectant and good ideas can and are vigorously advocated for. Stephen clearly had no communication issues.

He eventually did the right thing and stopped posting and started trying to actually do work (I think - you saw the forums.... did anything tangible ever get done?)

Luke

[HiFlyer 9,343]

7 minutes ago, MidFlight77 said:

 because it sucked two years worth of time, focus and attention from the community.  Time that we wont get back.

The basic fact of an internet forum is that anyone has the right to skip any thread they feel is wasting their time at any juncture they feel is appropriate.

There are threads I glance at that, based on their location and headings I would not touch with a ten foot pole.

However, once you open the thread and get involved, you're essentially donating your time and energy to the subject voluntarily, and it seems a stretch to then regret the voluntarily expended energy......