New MS Flight Sim shown at E3

[irrics 1,517]

3 minutes ago, ganter said:

Me too. What do you fly? I have over 250 Hours PPL, mostly flying South Coast UK.

Where are you?

My ambition is to acquire a C421 and fly it.

These days I fly seaplanes in the Pacific Northwest (US/BC).

Been at the helm of lots of equipment over the decades

Probably not the right spot for this chat though. Cheers

[irrics 1,517]

@Woozie

Great post and I totally agree.

The reality is that the cream of the crop of third parties will be just fine assuming there is some architecture for them to participate in.

I think there will be at least a way to add aircraft and hopefully airport scenery because I can’t imagine Microsoft even wants to try to tackle super detailed airports all over the world.

There just isn’t a return on investment for that level of detail work on their part and is absolutely best left to third parties.

Edited June 12, 2019 by irrics

[CaptBmckay 22]

5 hours ago, domkle said:

Nope, I am not a MS basher. On the contrary, I see them as a great company. But I don't like the timing of the announcement because I don't want all the little guys go under.

Agreed

[Flic1 976]

I have been simming since 1988 (Sublogic Flight Sim on C-64) with some breaks here and there but have owned nearly all MS titles.  I have to admit that I am getting a bit of flightsim fatigue lately due to many aspects of the hobby that are both frustrating, time consuming and somewhat annoying.  I am happy MS is moving forward with what I hope is brand new technology as I think it is very much needed right now. Having an out-of-the-box sim that looks great, performs well and just works correctly without spending thousands on clouds, shaders, runway textures, building textures, trees, photo-textures, rain, time zones, navaids, contrails, weather, cameras, AI, shaders for shaders, sky colors for winter, prettier sky colors for summer, more shaders... ..and my favorite so far is the guy charging $16 for new shadows when all it does is change an existing entry in your .cfg😕  Addon aircraft and airports are a different story and I hope they have a place as I don't think it is feasible for MS to do all of that. Don't get me wrong, I am happy that we have all of these choices and options as it has brought simming back to life but I feel like I spend more time updating and keeping track of these things than I do flying only having to reinstall everything after every P3D update.  

 I'm really not even looking forward to P3D V5 at this point (even before the MS announcement) as I really don't think that much is going to change as we will still be using mostly ancient code and technology with some exceptions (PBR, DL).  I appreciate LM's efforts for sure as I probably would have stopped using the sim a few years ago.  But....we will still be dealing with the same stutters, blurries, autogen popping, disappearing shadows, sky texture banding (why do we still have this in 2019??) and then waiting for all of the addons to become compatible. My SSD is nearly full so I'm not buying much more in the addon arena.  I don't understand the new ORBX stuff that takes up more space than you can fathom and it only covers relatively small areas but it seems like this might be solved for in the new MS sim.  I welcome this new sim and maybe some of the developers that were riding high on easy-street (especially the one(s) that double-charged customers to port their FSX product to P3D....although what better opportunity to charge a 3rd time for the same product!!), the ones that fail miserably at customer support and the developers releasing unfinished/broken products with seemingly very little beta testing done (several released recently) will start re-thinking things a little bit.  Hopefully this will at minimum wake some people up.  Sorry, but it's time for a completely brand new sim.  I welcome some disruption in the world of flightsim... it will be interesting to see how this plays out....

Edited June 13, 2019 by Flic1

[irrics 1,517]

2 minutes ago, CaptBmckay said:

Agreed

If they are going to go under due to no third-party architecture being there in the future, there is no “timing of the announcement” that is going to make it better.

 

Now...if there will be a third-party architecture hopefully they do get that message out there as best they can even if it’s just behind the scenes.

This sort of news could drastically alter how much more investment people put into P3D at this point, and certainly FSX.  

Honestly I can’t believe anybody even uses FSX let alone develops for it at this point. 

Edited June 12, 2019 by irrics

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, irrics said:

These days I fly seaplanes in the Pacific Northwest (US/BC).

Been at the helm of lots of equipment over the decades

Probably not the right spot for this chat though. Cheers

Sounds good. True enough you guys have had some problems recently but what a lovely place to fly from. I'm sorry I haven't had the pleasure of flying in that part of the World.

I mostly fly EGHF and EGHH. Last few days we've had CB's a plenty so, basically, grounded!

Anyways, back to what the hell this new MS Flight Sim is going to do to the Simmers!

(Blue Skies)

Edited June 12, 2019 by Guest

[eslader 1,783]

1 hour ago, irrics said:

I applaud 3rd parties for filling that void and making businesses out of it, but it’s actually in everyone’s best interest to not have a third party trying to make weather depiction acceptable (as just one example).

I think there's two ways to think on that. One is that you're right-  everything should be baked in. Of course, that means the released product is going to be a lot more expensive. If they can charge $60 (actually I'd guess it'll come out at $100) for a modern interpretation of FSX, then they can charge $250 for FSX with good weather, good ATC, good scenery, etc etc.

That's not necessarily a bad thing on the part of Microsoft because they need to charge more if they're doing more work. But it will be a bad thing for a lot of simmers who are not loaded, because buying the sim in chunks, adding what you want as you go, is a lot more manageable than buying the whole thing in one big payment. $60 gets you going with p3d. Then after a few more paychecks maybe you upgrade the weather with AS. Then you save awhile longer and grab the Maddog. Etc.

From a psychological standpoint, spending $60 every few months is a whole lot more palatable than spending $250 all at once. I know, that's kinda dumb, but it's how humans work, and so if everything's baked in from the beginning and the sim is more expensive as a result, it might actually hurt sales.

That's why I kinda like the second way, which also has the advantage that you don't get elements you don't want. Don't care about simulating the economics of flying? Don't buy Air Hauler. Don't care about accurate weather? Skip AS. There are certain things that should be baked in from the get-go, but there's other stuff that a lot of buyers don't care about and won't be interested in being charged for.

 

[irrics 1,517]

1 minute ago, eslader said:

$60 gets you going with p3d.

Yeah but does $60 actually get you going?

I find the base offering to be pathetic and you are likely well into the hundreds of dollars to get an actually good experience off the ground on that old platform

[CarlHill 79]

3 minutes ago, Flic1 said:

I have been simming since 1988 (Sublogic Flight Sim on C-64) with some breaks here and there but have owned nearly all MS titles.  I have to admit that I am getting a bit of flightsim fatigue lately due to many aspects of the hobby that are both frustrating, time consuming and somewhat annoying.  I am happy MS is moving forward with what I hope is brand new technology as I think it is very much needed right now. Having an out-of-the-box sim that looks great, performs well and just works correctly without spending thousands on clouds, shaders, runway textures, building textures, trees, photo-textures, rain, time zones, navaids, contrails, weather, cameras, AI, shaders for shaders, sky colors for winter, prettier sky colors for summer, more shaders... ..and my favorite so far is the guy charging $16 for new shadows when all it does is change an existing entry in your .cfg😕  Addon aircraft and airports are a different story and I hope they have a place as I don't think it is feasible for MS to do all of that. Don't get me wrong, I am happy that we have all of these choices and options as it has brought simming back to life but I feel like I spend more time updating and keeping track of these things than I do flying only having to reinstall everything after every P3D update.  

 I'm really not even looking forward to P3D V5 at this point (even before the MS announcement) as I really don't think that much is going to change as we will still be using mostly ancient code and technology with some exceptions (PBR, DL).  I appreciate LM's efforts for sure as I probably would have stopped using the sim a few years ago.  But....we will still be dealing with the same stutters, blurries, autogen popping, disappearing shadows, sky texture banding (why do we still have this in 2019??) and then waiting for all of the addons to become compatible. My SSD is nearly full so I'm not buying much more in the addon arena.  I don't understand the new ORBX stuff that takes up more space than you can fathom and it only covers relatively small areas but it seems like this might be solved for in the new MS sim.  I welcome this new sim and maybe some of the developers that were riding high on easy-street (especially the one(s) that double-charged customers to port their FSX product to P3D although what better opportunity to charge for a 3rd time for the same product!!) and the ones that fail miserably at customer support will start re-thinking things a little bit and hopefully this will at minimum wake some developers up.  Sorry, but it's time for a completely brand new sim.  I welcome some disruption in the world of flightsim... it will be interesting to see how this plays out....

Yep, been there, bought all of that stuff over the years. Often times seemed like putting new paint on an old wagon, albeit expensively.  Time for a totally new sim.

[Sethos 4,333]

Just now, irrics said:

Yeah but does $60 actually get you going?

I find the base offering to be pathetic and you are likely well into the hundreds of dollars to get an actually good experience off the ground on that old platform

Doesn't even come with a weather engine. The base P3D is a very, very sad affair overall.

[andy1252 3,846]

Just waded through this thread. Some interesting stuff I'd never heard of as well as the more opinionated stuff.

I just wanted to be the first, and probably only, person to say that I actually liked MS Flight. It's what got me into this lark. Although I'm a long term (since 1967) computer kinda guy, I never saw any attraction in the wire-frame graphics of the early sims so I ignored the whole development of the environment until one day when I saw a copy of PC Pilot with MS Flight on the cover and took interest. Got myself a copy and was well impressed with the visuals. I had, and still have, no significant interest in the mechanics of flight, and I can't tell my SIDS from my STARS at 50 paces. What I want is to be able to cruise round and gawp at the planet. And the limited bit of it I could see in MS Flight appealed to me.

Of course, by now I am hooked. I got a copy of FSX when Flight vanished, then discovered ORBX, then P3D and by now I'm happily immersed in P3D 4.5, XP11, AFS2, and I have copies of FSX, Flight School, FlyInside, DCS and various other bits and pieces spread across my 25 tb of disk (OCD is a wonderful thing really <grin>). My tastes now tend to favour XP and Ortho above anything else, and ORBX's True Earth competes for top place with the US Orthos' project materials with all the various addons. I still like to see the world, and it just so happens that a 'plane is a good way to do it.

I have my own mixed feelings about Microsoft, I'm not a fan of Windows 10 at all, but I will bite Microsoft's corporate hand off to get a copy of this when it comes out. I neither know or care to know their reasons for doing this, and even if it comes out and gets killed in a couple of years, if it looks anything like this trailer I'm in there! And it won't stop me buying and using and keeping stuff for the other sims in the meantime. S'all good man!

[sjt 49]

Oh, what fun!

I'm more a reader in here than a writer, but here goes.... I've a Private Pilot's License, have owned and flown competition sailplanes as a fully qualified instructor, been a flight simmer almost since the first MS sims, and develop (for myself) apps using SimConnect and .NET. I also have a son who is a network team manager on the MS XBox team, but he's a good MS employee who's signed an NDA, and has told me precisely nothing about this...

Getting down to practicality on what we have seen, most of the eye candy is not new - nor should it really be quite such a big surprise as it seems to be. 95% of what is attracting everyone's attention is not a new simulator - but the scenery. And about time too....it was only a matter of time before someone in the flight sim world had the common sense to use the myriads of map data that's now available, and apply it to a flight simulator. Don't let's kid ourselves that someone at Microsoft decided to write a new flight simulator because they felt P3D or XPlane weren't meeting our needs. This new MS Flight Simulator is just a by-product of something vastly bigger - much more strategic. The revenue from flight sim hobbyists is not even a drop in the financial ocean to the likes of MS or LM. 

If you look on YouTube, you'll find people have been playing with the concept of using Google Maps overlaid by a flight simulator for several years now. Those have just been one-man-band amateur attempts but they worked quite well as proof of concept. I've been using the Bing Maps API (2D only of course) coupled with Google's REST API data in my own P3D and FSX applications for years, and it's very easy to use and highly effective. Obviously 3D terrain is a quantum leap from that, but my assessment is that MS knows more than just a little bit more about it than I do, and they also have a few more resources than me...just a few...

Realistic scenery and terrain has always been the bete-noire of flight simulators and is the single-most area that needed a complete revamp. Think about FSW. All their hype was about pretty aircraft, super cabin graphics and shadows, uncomprehendingly endless focus on cockpit rain effects - and precisely no improvement whatsoever to the scenery. Big mistake, or.........??

P3D too.... to all intents and purposes, not a single thing has been done to improve scenery, other than the way in which it is paged and cached and a couple of tweaks on those largely useless speed trees. They've worked hard on aircraft physics and realism - not so much on scenery. It's not their business.

So - pretty much all you are looking at is a smarty pants "P3D V5" application with existing scenery mechanics stripped out, and the remainder overlaid on top of Bing Maps data - rendered with Azure AI. The rest is just stuff we've seen before, and already own. 

The structure of scenery in FSX , P3D and Orbx files has remained virtually unchanged since the day they were first invented - about 30 years ago. They were written in C (not even C++) and are riddled with file headers, pointers, and obtuse structures to try to squeeze the max possible out of the powerless computers that existed when they were written. But P3D still uses them today - and Orbx's business is founded on them. I have most of Orbx's software (not quite all) and that counts for 348 GBytes of data (crass, isn't it?) of which 98, 000 are .bgl files. The basic scenery folder for P3D v4 is 22GB and 41, 000 files. Then there's FSG_ NG another 70Gb, and MegaScenery, and Tampa and...and... This is pretty scary disk space stuff. No amount of endless fiddling around with fine tuning that ancient technology is ever going to give us the photorealism that we all want. Stutters and idiotic artefacts would have been with us forever - at increasingly higher prices per improvement.

So here we are. As a by-product of their mapping and Azure technology - they're offering an apparently new flight simulator, in which the only the real thing is the scenery. 

Did they bring in Orbx? No - of course not. That technology isn't in the new FlightSim; it's dead technology by and large. Is JV p'd off? You bet he is. Just look at his last post in the now closed thread on the Orbx forums https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/173967-new-flight-sim-announced/page/3/ . Those are the words of a heap plenty frightened man lashing out. They always close threads when they don't like what's being said.....

Did MS really cooperate with others in the business? Of course they did. They haven't had a team of people drawing new aircraft in 3DS Max (now supported by P3D in case you aren't familiar with their latest SDK)nor have they hired a bunch of people to start writing aircraft physics from the ground up. That's already out there working very nicely by dozens of highly skilled developers and there's no need to reinvent that particular wheel. Fine tune - of course, but re-invent - categorically NO!

So who DID they partner with? I don't know, but .....how about LM, for starters? They're in the flightsim-for-real business. Maybe the license agreement with MS was a much more strategic thing than we mere mortals imagine? Where did DTG's FSW developers go? Was it really all for nothing? It could be any of the better known aircraft modelers such as Aerosoft. Who knows, and right now - does it really, really matter to us?

Will there be a huge team of developers at MS creating new add-ons for this? Almost certainly not. A few, maybe. Commercially this product will not create a vast amount of revenue because it won't be core. It's trivia in the big picture, and there will be a SDK, but how exactly that will be distributed or even licensed hasn't yet been announced. They will use 3rd party developers to bring in more people onto the platform, not their own employees because going it alone makes no economic sense at all. But - you never know who MS's ever acquisitive financiers might buy up next......

It will almost certainly be compatible with SimConnect or something very close to SimConnect. That's just a pretty basic client-server methodology, but there aren't really too many different ways of passing messages to and fro - so don't expect a big change there. Abandoning that well-proven technology, and cutting off the portal that hundreds of 3rd party developers have used for years "just because" would make no sense at all. It will remain the portal for all 3rd part developers still, but will get incremental variants just as P3D Simconnect now does. It's not broke, so no need to fix it.

So - we aren't looking at a new generation Flight simulator. We're just being shown a new generation 3 dimensional scenery/terrain engine application that's a quantum leap better than we've seen before, but needs some tuning. They've allowed about another year for that, which we should be able to live with. The rest doesn't need to change very much, because it's almost as good as it ever needs to be. That's why they can reasonably confidently put a date of 2020 on it even if - as JV rather snidely throws in, it could be January or December 2020. Neither of those is very far away, and between now and then I won't be buying another piece of scenery for my P3D to add to the 500GB's worth I already have, because I'm very excited in my belief that this thing is very, very real !!

Just my 2 cents worth.. 

 

 

 

[EGLD 436]

3 minutes ago, sjt said:

most of the eye candy is not new

So - pretty much all you are looking at is a smarty pants "P3D V5" application with existing scenery mechanics stripped out, and the remainder overlaid on top of Bing Maps data - rendered with Azure AI. The rest is just stuff we've seen before, and already own.

So - we aren't looking at a new generation Flight simulator.

 

Do you have inside info to come to these conclusions? or are they just guesses?

'cos I've seen no detail beyond a video which goes nowhere near to proving or disproving what you're saying here

[sjt 49]

...as I said "Just my 2 cents worth"

 

[irrics 1,517]

@sjt

 Totally awesome post.

I don’t know if I feel as confident as you do to read that much into JVs thoughts, but I don’t believe him when he says this won’t impact their future roadmap plans at all.

Even he knows that’s probably not going to be true… But maybe it is at this absolute moment in time since they just don’t know anymore.

If this is truly third-party extensible, it’s going to swallow up just about everybody currently on P3D using an “academic” license and probably bring back lots of people that had switched to XP. 

Any moderate level shifting like that is absolutely going to impact how much they invest in future True Earth products and where. 

Edited June 12, 2019 by irrics