Ironic this thread came up after my post in FSW Farewell thread.  I'm not aware of anyone willing to invest $100-$200 Million in a new flight simulator platform, anything less will be exactly that "less" not more and will fail.  Why not work with existing two major established platforms to help them along and speed up their development efforts?

If you think an "engine" or ground up new Flight Simulator is going to solve performance limitations of the today's hardware, that unrealistic ... you'll never see a FC5 or GTA5 type of experience on a global world simulator with 200+ mi view distances within the near future, maybe 20 years from now, but we'll need a significant CPU and GPU technology shift away from the current transistor based operations.

Compatibility would be close to impossible as most objects are built with 3D graphics programs like 3DSMax, Blender, and custom exports (plugins) ... textures and various light options are either added or not based on the type of graphics engine being used.  PBR requires a different set of textures than HDR.  A long time ago there were attempts at converting FSX scenery into XP and that had some partial success but failed too many times and became time consuming to attempt to correct and make work in XP.  There are base similarities such as source assets (base images used) but beyond that the application of those assets varies significantly.

Cheers, Rob.

FSXI, x64 with revamped graphics, weather, and volumetric clouds and up to date nav systems and a better interface for VFR and IFR flight planning and monitoring while flying, better ATC with speed control, and on and on... The works.

Cheers,

 

1 hour ago, rtodepart said:

I know some will not like this but if we do go forward with this project because of some of the things you mention we prefer to start from scratch .other than the 4 of us we do have 7 guys that are current devs for a bigger company thats not aviation related . its alot of money out of our pocket to pay devs  so they can spend time trying to work on backwards compatibility , we rather go forward with newer development ... 

Completely understandable, it's quite the can of worms, I think especially with FS addons which don't always stick to published interfaces. Lots of scenery addons for FSX use the FS2002/4 SDK tools and ASM tweaking for example.