Flytampa, Flightbeam, FSDT and 29Palms future products to be P3D4 only

[Zatoichi 45]

Sorry to see you go as I an not going to follow.

I'll wait a couple iterations and new hardware before changing platforms. Maybe 2020?

FSX does what I want.

 

[Christopher Low 5,341]

I do not think that every developer will dump FSX quite as quickly as some seem to think. There are still a LOT of FSX users out there, and abandoning a rather large chunk of the market immediately may not be financially desirable. Gary Summons (UK2000) has stated that he would create FS9 versions of airports until he has completed the "UK set of large airports", so dumping FSX at this stage is highly unlikely. Of course, that may change depending on the state of the market over the next few months (and the estimated workload required to develop for 32bit and 64bit flight simulators at the same time).

We will just have to wait and see what happens

[airernie 263]

Probably a good move, especially for Flightbeam.  While their KMSP is "compatible" with FSX it is essentially unusable because any complex aircraft brings the at gate VAS to below 1 Gb.  

As for the switch, both software and hardware wise FSX will serve my purposes for the next couple of years.  After that, I'll probably retire everything..

 

 

 

[Luis_KMIA 242]

16 hours ago, markdf said:

You realise that none of the base scenery provided by Lockheed Martin is compiled with anything newer than the FSX SDK (with *very* few exceptions), right?

These "v4 SDK" posts really don't mean much at all when it comes to graphical assets. A texture or model is neither 32 or 64 bit, and the actual decision of which tools are best to produce those assets isn't always that simple (which is why end users repeatedly asking about it isn't helpful to anyone)

It's possible to compile a model with the latest tools that runs like garbage in v4, and it's equally possible to have a model compiled with the FSX tools that runs flawlessly in v4.  How's about we just leave it to the experts to do their jobs rather than second guessing them?

Perfectly fine to leave it to the experts.  I mean no disrespect to these developers since I own all their products.  I found the PMDG (a team of very credible experts) post about system stability with v4 and add-ons very insightful, and that's where my questions stems from.  I want to install these to v4, but want to make sure they are compatible.

[markdf 84]

Just now, Luis_KMIA said:

Perfectly fine to leave it to the experts.  I mean no disrespect to these developers since I own all their products.  I found the PMDG (a team of very credible experts) post about system stability with v4 and add-ons very insightful, and that's where my questions stems from.  I want to install these to v4, but want to make sure they are compatible.

I apologise sincerely if that came off too harshly, I was somewhat overdue for my evening pain meds when I typed it up, it just seems a lot of people read the PMDG post and started chasing developers without really "getting" what Robert was saying - there's a few posts further in where one of the scenery devs (I think Flightbeam, but my memory fails me today) came in and gave a bit more detail and Robert then clarified things a bit better - I think it would ease everyone's concerns a bit if the clarifications were copied into the initial post on the first page though.

[Luis_KMIA 242]

1 minute ago, markdf said:

I apologise sincerely if that came off too harshly, I was somewhat overdue for my evening pain meds when I typed it up, it just seems a lot of people read the PMDG post and started chasing developers without really "getting" what Robert was saying - there's a few posts further in where one of the scenery devs (I think Flightbeam, but my memory fails me today) came in and gave a bit more detail and Robert then clarified things a bit better - I think it would ease everyone's concerns a bit if the clarifications were copied into the initial post on the first page though.

Good to know!  Thanks!   So far, things are working flawlessly with PMDG, AS2016, and all v4 ORBX, and I'm really enjoying it.

[markdf 84]

Agreed - v4 has really given me my passion for it back, it's kind of felt like we've been on "pause" for the last few years.  I think this is the first time in many years where the only tweak I've had to make to my config files was to change that awful default AI Aircraft to ATC text colour from that terrible orange to something more readable.  Other than that I haven't had to mess with it at all to get good performance.

[Lenny777 299]

I couldn't care less if they continued to create for FS9, FSX, or Bruce Artwick's original FS. As long as that doesn't impede development and creativity and dumbing down of stuff for the P3Dv4 sim.

 

I also gave up on FSX, P3Dv.1ff over eight months ago when I could no longer enjoy flying with OOMs and the threat of OOMs. I switched to XP10 and then 11. I put a moratorium on any further purchases. Now, with 64 bit this is real sim heaven.

[fluffyflops 1,848]

Great news will you now be working together with Orbx,  Justsim,  and Aerosoft so you alldon't make 3 versions of the same scenery like Let's say... Las, Bcn,Inn,Nce??? 

And instead make scenery that needs doing Like EWR,  RAK???  

 

[tonywob 4,768]

Whilst I agree on the 64-bit argument (although less so for scenery), I'm sat wondering where DTG, Aerofly FS or X-Plane fit into this equation?. Putting all your eggs into one basket for a sim that isn't readily available on gaming and common channels seems a bad choice to me and not one I would have personally taken, considering the way the market is moving forward. 

Time will tell....but I suspect the market will start to look quite different over the coming years, especially with VR taking centre stage.

 

[zmak 331]

56 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Whilst I agree on the 64-bit argument (although less so for scenery), I'm sat wondering where DTG, Aerofly FS or X-Plane fit into this equation?. Putting all your eggs into one basket for a sim that isn't readily available on gaming and common channels seems a bad choice to me and not one I would have personally taken, considering the way the market is moving forward. 

Time will tell....but I suspect the market will start to look quite different over the coming years, especially with VR taking centre stage.

 

The best summary of the over all picture so far! 

[markdf 84]

3 hours ago, tonywob said:

Whilst I agree on the 64-bit argument (although less so for scenery), I'm sat wondering where DTG, Aerofly FS or X-Plane fit into this equation?. Putting all your eggs into one basket for a sim that isn't readily available on gaming and common channels seems a bad choice to me and not one I would have personally taken, considering the way the market is moving forward. 

Time will tell....but I suspect the market will start to look quite different over the coming years, especially with VR taking centre stage.

 

Although, scenery is responsible for a large amount of our RAM usage in sim - there's probably more scenery loaded at any given time then there is aircraft.

Being on Steam isn't the be all and end all of software distribution - it costs a not insignificant portion of your profits, and it's update mechanism isn't always the best thing for software with complex interactions such as P3D - once a patch is applied via Steam you're pretty much stuck with it, and any changes to core files are overwritten if it ever checks the integrity of the game cache, and that's before we get into different versions for different license levels. On top of that you've got scenarios which P3D supports yet Steam has no ability to provide, such as running across multiple machines.  Steam will let you be logged in in multiple places, but it will not allow you to run the same game/application at the same time.

I don't really think you can say that it isn't "readily available on common channels" either, unless we now class everything on the internet that isn't Steam as uncommon, in which case you might want to pass this news onto EA, Ubisoft & Microsoft

1. Go to website
2. Click Store
3. Pick license you want
4. Enter payment information
5. Download and Play
6. There is no step 6.

The website is as easy to find as anything - heck in Chrome, just type P3D or Prepar3d into the address/search bar and it's the first result for either.

DTG isn't really going to get anyone's focus until they sort themselves out and publish a decent SDK, which on their track record for content creation tools isn't something I'm that optimistic about. 8 years on and there's never been an SDK published for their Train Simulator, just some very buggy in game editing tools. (Plus their attitude towards things such as FSUIPC) - I suspect the only reason we have DirectInput joystick support in FSW is because they inherited the code for free - Train Sim got Xbox pad support, and nothing else - someone had to essentially patch the game in memory to get anything else working.

Aerofly is still also very early in it's lifecycle, but I imagine it'll start to get more love as time goes on. If I'm remembering correctly, didn't OrbX just start releasing some stuff there?

X-Plane - I'd guess we're not going to see huge crossover as it lacks the advantages that have been had with the MSFS codebase where the same assets could be packaged and published for multiple platforms using the same file formats, and there's the time and financial costs of learning a new platform. But on the other hand, developing only for P3Dv4 might free up enough time and resources for it - in which case we may start to see a very slow transition in the short term, with (hopefully) a larger coverage overall.  Thinking about it though - have many X-Plane devs released their products for the MSFS based sims?

And finally speaking as an early adopter who's haemorrhaged a good amount of money on headsets - VR is impressive right now, but we lack the displays and GPUs to drive them at a high enough resolution to eliminate the screen door effect which interferes with clearly seeing text and small (cockpit) displays, until that's sorted it won't be anywhere near ready to take centre stage in most genres. Well, that and the initial buy in costs have to drop to get mainstream consumer adoption in large enough numbers to be worthy of taking up any large portion of developer time. (Which I suspect is why LM are devoting so little focus to it, with a very gradual implementation)

 

Now I'm running away before I get repetitive strain injury or carpal tunnel from typing this essay! :P

 

Remember though, these are just my personal opinions - please don't consider this to be any kind of definitive statement of fact, just how the picture looks from my end. I do actually enjoy people challenging my opinions - I've learnt a lot from having good debates with people.

[vortex681 806]

On 05/07/2017 at 10:02 AM, Christopher Low said:

I do not think that every developer will dump FSX quite as quickly as some seem to think. There are still a LOT of FSX users out there, and abandoning a rather large chunk of the market immediately may not be financially desirable.

Couldn't agree more. Whilst 64 bit may be the future, I think it will be some time before FSX "dies" (or even starts to fade away, come to that). Take a look at https://steamspy.com/app/314160 and click on the "CCU Daily" tab (Peak daily concurrent players of FSX:SE) and remember that this only shows the Steam version - there could well be even more using the boxed version. With the exception of just one day, there have consistently been over 3,400 concurrent players using FSX daily over the 3-week period it shows! Pretty impressive figures for 10-year old software. Compare that to Aerofly FS2 which peaked yesterday at 48 or FSW which had 89 yesterday.

I think that, certainly for the foreseeable future, it would be short-sighted of developers to completely ignore so many active FSX users when the new products that you're trying to earn a living with are aimed at a relatively small number of customers in a niche genre.

[laserit 93]

15 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Couldn't agree more. Whilst 64 bit may be the future, I think it will be some time before FSX "dies" (or even starts to fade away, come to that). Take a look at https://steamspy.com/app/314160 and click on the "CCU Daily" tab (Peak daily concurrent players of FSX:SE) and remember that this only shows the Steam version - there could well be even more using the boxed version. With the exception of just one day, there have consistently been over 3,400 concurrent players using FSX daily over the 3-week period it shows! Pretty impressive figures for 10-year old software. Compare that to Aerofly FS2 which peaked yesterday at 48 or FSW which had 89 yesterday.

I think that, certainly for the foreseeable future, it would be short-sighted of developers to completely ignore so many active FSX users when the new products that you're trying to earn a living with are aimed at a relatively small number of customers in a niche genre.

Having 3800 concurrent players is nice and all, but how many of those players purchase 3rd party scenery?

We can guess all we want. I''d bet that FlyTampa, FSDT, Flightbeam, etc. have metrics on there FSX-SE, FSX and P3D sales.

Whats the percentage of FSX users that buy addon's period?

I'd be willing to bet that theses companies are making an educated decision.

[zmak 331]

9 minutes ago, laserit said:

Having 3800 concurrent players is nice and all, but how many of those players purchase 3rd party scenery?

We can guess all we want. I''d bet that FlyTampa, FSDT, Flightbeam, etc. have metrics on there FSX-SE, FSX and P3D sales.

Whats the percentage of FSX users that buy addon's period?

I'd be willing to bet that theses companies are making an educated decision.

I would have thought all the big guns in that case would have the same metrics but so far only 2 or 3 have stepped up which makes me wonder ...