New MS Flight Sim shown at E3

[eslader 1,823]

And who says we have to switch? Maybe I fire up FS2020 when I want to do a pretty flight along the coast, and I fire up p3d when I want to do a high-level PMDG/Leonardo plane - at least until the aftermarket catches up with 2020.

There's nothing that says we can't run both sims, and if the new one brings in new customers looking for new hardware and stimulating *that* market, all the better for us.

 

[Pastaiolo 1,690]

46 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

 

FSUIPC and WideFS, Radar Contact or equivalent, GoFlight hardware working at the outset, PMDG and similar quality aircraft and Air India Ai. Active Sky may well be involved and maybe Aerosoft.

That is an enormous price to pay to switch over and one I won’t be making unless FSL make a version of Concorde specifically for that sim. Good luck to all the pioneers and trail blazers. 👍

The world does not revolve around PMDG and co.
If you are happy with what you have, stick to what you have. Nobody is forcing you.

You are missing out on the fact that some of those addons might not be needed in the new sim, you might find that what it offers is enough for now or that new developers might start releasing new planes and addons for it (not necessary being the same ones you used to).

It's the beauty of having a choise of different flight simulators with different features and offering. If you want another P3D, stick to the original. I personally do not.

[Ray Proudfoot 9,067]

11 minutes ago, france89 said:

The world does not revolve around PMDG and co.
If you are happy with what you have, stick to what you have. Nobody is forcing you.

You are missing out on the fact that some of those addons might not be needed in the new sim, you might find that what it offers is enough for now or that new developers might start releasing new planes and addons for it (not necessary being the same ones you used to).

It's the beauty of having a choise of different flight simulators with different features and offering. If you want another P3D, stick to the original. I personally do not.

 I fully intend to. In all the versions of flight sim I’ve had the default aircraft have been extremely basic and with dubious flight models. Like being able to land a 747 at Meigs Field, Chicago. I very much doubt the new sim’s aircraft will be much better. The target audience won’t know what’s realistic and what isn’t. I don’t include those in AvSim as the target audience.

If you think the new sim will give you a better ATC Program than what’s available now you’re the eternal optimist. Enjoy yourself!

[Murmur 3,978]

28 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

If you think the new sim will give you a better ATC Program than what’s available now you’re the eternal optimist. Enjoy yourself!

Maybe some simmers might prefer vastly better (and more realistic) visuals, scenery and weather with a basic ATC, rather than a less realistic, old-gen engine with a better ATC. And in my very personal, very subjective definition of "serious simmer", I rank the former as a more "serious simmer" than the latter.

[eslader 1,823]

If we're talking default ATC, one would think it could hardly get worse than FSX/p3d... But then one fires up Xplane and changes one's mind. 😉

If I had to guess, 2020's ATC would likely be the same interface as FSX, but possibly with a much more robust approach (SID/STARs, more intelligent direction from ATC, etc) and possibly with a voice option for those that want it, which I usually don't because I sim in the same room as my wife's computer and she'll whack me if I keep yakking on the radio while flying. 😉

 

50 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Like being able to land a 747 at Meigs Field, Chicago.

Or worse, taking off from Meigs, which I managed a few times. 😉  I agree with your assessment - the default aircraft are probably still going to suck from a high-fidelity-systems standpoint. And that's understandable. You don't dump a guy who's brand new to sims into a PMDG-level plane and tell him "have fun," because he won't. High-level flight simming has a very steep learning curve, and there needs to be a way to flatten that curve out at the beginning or you'll repel a lot of people who might otherwise become decades-long customers.

I was just a kid when I started simming in subLOGIC's offering. As in, definitely not old enough to grasp programming an FMS in a 747. Barely old enough to grasp the idea that you want to know your airspeed when flying a lot more than your ground speed. Certainly not old enough to gracefully handle VOR to VOR navigation. That bewildered me for a good long while, especially since we didn't have neat things like Youtube tutorials and Avsim forums to find help.

If you stuck little-kid me into p3d with the Maddog, assuming I ever managed to get the engines started without setting them on fire, I'd crash it off the end of the runway a few times before getting bored and going outside to play. The learning curve would simply be too steep, but because when I was that age you could at least get off the ground without undergoing a huge learning curve, they made a life-long customer out of me.

That should be the goal here as well. A platform that's approachable to the masses, including the kidlets who can't be expected to grasp more than very basic concepts of aviation, with the flexibility to be a lot more powerful for those who want to go farther.

Edited June 18, 2019 by eslader

[Pastaiolo 1,690]

53 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

 I fully intend to. In all the versions of flight sim I’ve had the default aircraft have been extremely basic and with dubious flight models. Like being able to land a 747 at Meigs Field, Chicago. I very much doubt the new sim’s aircraft will be much better. The target audience won’t know what’s realistic and what isn’t. I don’t include those in AvSim as the target audience.

If you think the new sim will give you a better ATC Program than what’s available now you’re the eternal optimist. Enjoy yourself!

In Microsoft flight sims, okay. But did you ever try XP11 default ones?

[petepawn 38]

With regards to eslader's memories.. I by chance found a sim from Sublogic called ATP Pilot or something like that in the early 2000's, maybe 1992 -1994. I had then a 386Sx computer with which I did enjoy the tasks and flying really. Scenery was made up from triangles and other simple things, but the paper maps included and VORs made me enjoy flying across USA. Anybody else remember that thing?

 

Petteri Pulkkinen

EFNU

Edited June 18, 2019 by petepawn

[LHookins 3,118]

I landed the 747 at Meigs.  And took off.  Just to see if it could be done in the sim.  Think about the skills necessary to be able to do this.  I developed short field techniques, and who cares if a real 747 could use the field or not.

I also flew it under the Golden Gate bridge.  Inverted.  

Another exercise I did many many times was to take off from Meigs in the Cessna and try to climb high enough to fly between the antennas on the John Hancock building, then turn around and fly between the antennas on the Sears tower.  Realistic?  Who cares.  I learned a lot about best climb speeds after a lot of practice.

Even the gamey elements teach you something.

Hook

[Woozie 732]

Wow Ray, based on how little information we have at this point, your list of things that are NOT going to be in MSFS is growing daily 😉 

39 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

If you think the new sim will give you a better ATC Program than what’s available now you’re the eternal optimist. Enjoy yourself!

Call me an eternal optimist then. Why is it so unthinkable that MSFS will have a better default ATC than something that was developed decades ago? There are two main reasons why we still have ancient, sub-standard ATC in P3D: LM never really bothered to even touch ATC and 3rd party ATC addons have little to no control over AI traffic, unless using custom made traffic like Vox ATC. 

Mega-Corporations like MS do a lot of cross department development. You want completely dynamic, autonomous and situation-aware ground traffic, all being controlled by AI that acts like real ATC? "Outsource" it as a small project to a team of interns/new joiners in the AI department, it wouldnt take them more than a few weeks to develop something that would blow current standards out of the water. Need naturally sounding voices including different accents or dialects? Call the Voice-Lab and ask for help. The newest generation of synthetic speech is practically indistinguishable from real human voices and they can create an infinite amount of different voices based on just a few "base voices" all with unique characteristics like speed, flow and pitch.  

Honestly, its not really difficult to improve what we currently have in terms of ATC 😉

 

[LHookins 3,118]

4 minutes ago, petepawn said:

a sim from Sublogic called ATP Pilot

I might have flown Air Transport Pilot a lot more if the elevator response was a little less twitchy. 🙂

Hook

[Paraffin 2,197]

57 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I don’t know the details either, so I’ll avoid.  But online stores, Steam, Apple Store, Microsoft Store will all take a slice of revenue for services provided.  

It’s my job to determine:

1.  What metrics do they provide (if any) to show increased sales?

2.  Are those metrics showing enough sales increase to warrant their service cost?

For example, if I sold a product on Steam and they took 30% of sales, but I have verifiable metrics to show I sold 35% more, then I’m 5% ahead.

Probably a bit more than 5% ahead, if you drop your online store and go for full Steam distribution. You won't have to pay credit card processing fees, and might be able to offload at least a portion of tech support on user-to-user forums on Steam.

 

Quote

The key is in sufficient metrics ... that can be achieved via comparing online stores with my own web store I create and it’s cost to maintain.  Being a software engineer that includes web development, is the time and cost involved with me setting up my own web site and maintaining it less costly than using an existing web store (Microsoft Store, SimMarket, Aerosoft, Orbx, etc.).  

There are a few other factors in play besides just the economics. One big one is that you don't control the marketing. An example I like to use is the 500-something bits of DLC for DTG's Train Sim on Steam. Sorting through that is a nightmare, and I assume DTG controls which 3rd party DLC gets placed at the top of the list, and who is down at the bottom. That's an issue with any secondary retail outlet other than your own storefront site, but it's especially bad on Steam due to the poor UI. It's really not designed for products with vast amounts of add-ons.

Microsoft could do a better job with its own storefront than Steam does, especially if it's part of a loading page for the sim, similar to what Ubisoft does for in-game purchases. So it's a trade-off. You get vastly wider exposure, but lose control over how your product is presented. The money might be good, but you'd have to decide if it could be better if you had more control over catching eyeballs for your product. 

Another intangible is the effect of an open platform for user reviews on Steam. You don't control what's said about your product in those reviews. Running your own storefront gives you better control over both marketing and forum moderation.

 

[ca_metal 2,086]

2 minutes ago, Woozie said:

Wow Ray, based on how little information we have at this point, your list of things that are NOT going to be in MSFS is growing daily 😉 

Call me an eternal optimist then. Why is it so unthinkable that MSFS will have a better default ATC than something that was developed decades ago? There are two main reasons why we still have ancient, sub-standard ATC in P3D: LM never really bothered to even touch ATC and 3rd party ATC addons have little to no control over AI traffic, unless using custom made traffic like Vox ATC. 

 Mega-Corporations like MS do a lot of cross department development. You want completely dynamic, autonomous and situation-aware ground traffic, all being controlled by AI that acts like real ATC? "Outsource" it as a small project to a team of interns/new joiners in the AI department, it wouldnt take them more than a few weeks to develop something that would blow current standards out of the water. Need naturally sounding voices including different accents or dialects? Call the Voice-Lab and ask for help. The newest generation of synthetic speech is practically indistinguishable from real human voices and they can create an infinite amount of different voices based on just a few "base voices" all with unique characteristics like speed, flow and pitch.  

 Honestly, its not really difficult to improve what we currently have in terms of ATC 😉

  

Cortana, GA001, request Taxi.

[Woozie 732]

Just now, ca_metal said:

Cortana, GA001, request Taxi.

"Hello GA001! I'm excited to talk to you! You have requested "Taxi", an Uber has been ordered to your current location, ETA is 10 minutes. Is there something else i can do for you?"

Yeah....could work!

[ca_metal 2,086]

3 minutes ago, Woozie said:

"Hello GA001! I'm excited to talk to you! You have requested "Taxi", an Uber has been ordered to your current location, ETA is 10 minutes. Is there something else i can do for you?"

Yeah....could work!

😂😂😂

I like cortana.

Jokes aside, I really think that Microsoft has the tech to build a top-notch ATC.

Edited June 18, 2019 by ca_metal

[Pastaiolo 1,690]

Word of advice, so far the Windows Store is not really on par with Steam. During the Sea of Thieves beta and even after release there have been lots of issues with it and for downloading the game.
On the other hand Steam is a solid, solid platform and offers way more things for the community too (workshop, forums, streaming, screenshots etc etc).

But it has been confirmed now that Microsoft have been working on a new gaming platform to substitute Windows store for its Xbox gaming franchise. And this one looks more similar to Steam.

And while in the past there was a "no steam policy" on Microsoft games, that has been changed and i really believe that we will get it on Steam  too. I am just not sure if we will get it from release or not.