5 minutes ago, DaWu said:

not better but without 3rd parties we will get maybe 2-3 airpots a year. but we need hundreds

Airports I agree are likely a different animal - I just meant the general regional scenery of buildings/city scapes, etc

My hope is that MS invests a bit in building out mostly "good enough" airports in many areas.  

The vast majority of mainstream customers just want reasonably accurate airports/buildings, etc.  The ones demanding study level airports are best served by third parties charging them a lot for it.

Edited June 14, 20196 yr by irrics

3 hours ago, Nemo said:

I'm a bit surprised of the length of this thread. 60 pages now in less then one week, Hundreds of "Likes" for circling discussions and many, many speculations. And best, it keeps me busy reading 10 pages per day 😊

Proving once and for all that we've got both a hobby and a meta-hobby - that is, a hobby about a hobby.  We could easily devote all our flightsim time to the forums and never touch an airplane.  It's a kind of greatness, clearly....

Interesting:

Quote

Why did you bring Flight Simulator back? What led to that moment?

We do have some pilots on the teams that are big fans of flight, and flight sims, and flying themselves, who are passionate about it, so we said, 'okay, let's see what we can do'. Flight Sim was a game in our past that sold millions and millions of units and had a very, very passionate community—in fact, they're still out there. So, okay. Can we do something new with Flight Sim? Can we actually move it forward in an interesting way? 

I remember in February or March we were looking at gameplay that we had the option to bring and it was pretty close to what you saw on stage, we saw it [during the Xbox Briefing, the room just went silent as we were looking at this. Afterwards, it was Shannon Loftis [GM of Microsoft Studios Publishing] who brought it in, who happens to be a pilot, and I said, "is that the game?"

"Yeah, that's the game."

'You're going to have to put at the bottom that that's in-game. because nobody's going to believe that's in-game." You notice the video says '4K in-game'. And then I said, "why does it look like that?". There's 2 petabytes of geographical data behind that game, that they're then using as your AI to stitch the seams together so as you're flying, you're seeing a seamlessly connected Earth. I was like "you've gotta put that in the video because it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen". It's using real geographical data, real weather data, to give you the ability to literally fly around what looks like a living planet.

That's new. To me, that's exciting. They can do it on Xbox and they can do it on Windows and it look like that on stage. This whole thing—'can we really put Flight Sim in an E3 press briefing, because Flight Sim's kind of its own thing, some people don't even call it a game'. But it was visually stunning in my mind. Maybe I'm a little bit too close to it.

What about that part:

Quote

It's using real geographical data, real weather data, to give you the ability to literally fly around what looks like a living planet.

The weather depiction was looking nice on the video and it was all real weather data. That's more than awesome!

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/xboxs-phil-spencer-on-game-pass-steam-and-the-epic-games-store/2/

Edited June 14, 20196 yr by ca_metal

Flight simulator, at its core, is a world simulator.  We just choose to use it to simulate aviation.  

9 hours ago, Wobbie said:

Actually, did anyone see this?

https://www.pcgamer.com/xbox-game-pass-pc-game-list/

Announced at the Microsoft E3 press conference, the Xbox Game Pass for PC has entered into open beta today—meaning you can get access to around 100 PC games for $10 a month (there's a deal to try it for just $1 as a special E3 promotion). That's a pretty significant value—and it gives other similar subscription services like EA's Origin Access a run for their money.

E3 is all about announcing new games, and Microsoft laid out 30 upcoming releases that will all be available through Xbox Game Pass at launch, meaning you don't have to shell out upwards of $60 for each game. Here's the full list of upcoming PC games that will be available on Xbox Game Pass at launch along with their expected release date.

• Killer Queen Black (fall 2019)
• Microsoft Flight Simulator (TBA)
• Nightcall (summer 2019)

So, no doubt that it will be a subscription service!

That's the access cost to the Games platform, NOT the cost of the game!

Based on what?

People still don’t know what XBOX Game Pass is?

With new msfs:

p3d=steady, lower uptake by fs hobbyists

xp=toast

addon devs=tbd

those who want fs on the cheap=whine

13 minutes ago, Montie said:

Based on what?

People still don’t know what XBOX Game Pass is?

Yeah, I tried to explain some pages back. Xbox Game Pass has nothing to do with streaming/gaming on the cloud.

The gaming/streaming cloud service will be called XCloud and it's not finished yet. They didn't announce any game yet that necessarily needs the cloud to work right. Until this point, the cloud will be a service for the people who don't want to have a powerful computer/console could run the games on their smartphones/weak computers.

Edited June 14, 20196 yr by ca_metal

14 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Standard disclaimer: I am excited for this and hope it does well. But I don't like the approach MS is using here with a fancy trailer and so many questions unanswered.

I mean, I don't like it either but announcement trailers followed by a lull are pretty much standard fare with AAA developers. I wouldn't expect real information dumps until 3-4 months before early access (or whatever they are calling it in their insider program). At that point, they have to have a roadmap and full transparency.

Hopefully they see fit to release another trailer at some point to keep the us all jacked up...

We may have another clue in the pc gamer article. When Phil Spencer was asked why they brought back FS, he answered....

"We do have some pilots on the teams that are big fans of flight, and flight sims, and flying themselves, who are passionate about it,

Flight Sim was a game in our past that sold millions and millions of units and had a very, very passionate community—in fact, they're still out there."

If these guys on the team are big fans of FS and are still flying, then perhaps we actually have an inside voice, and surely they would know what drives p3d and xp forward with the possibilities of aircraft and detailed scenery. Saying that there is a very passionate community means they acknowledge the strong loyal contingent to flight simulation, and they would be stupid not to take their desires into consideration. 

 

@HighTowers  Totally agree.  You don't put this much time and money into something by accident if you're MS.  They exited this space a long long time ago and a re-entry is something that surely was calculated and likely had to pitched and sold internally on the merits and potential.

That all points to nothing but great things, especially with the quotes we are seeing trickle out.

In regards to 3rd party developers and SDKs, they did say in the press release that they are going to work with the flight sim community and "industry partners."

I'm not sure what other industry partners there are besides 3rd party developers. They obviously don't mean Playstation or some other studio.

Now, that may mean a partnership is required, but frankly, I'm not against that if it means increased quality control and proper integration into the sim. Part of the reason I'm not playing flight simulators anymore is the amount of work it takes to keep the hodgepodge of addons and plugins going, most of which don't even use the proper structure in the sim to install.

Edited June 14, 20196 yr by bonchie

35 minutes ago, kdfw__ said:

With new msfs:

xp=toast

 

That's gonna depend

MS will need to drastically improve their approach to physics simulation to get people off Xplane

A prettier version of P3D will only placate so many people (I'm one of them FWIW!!) but I do get it when people say there is a more realistic feel to Xplane, and if MS don't go some way to matching that, it will remain a rather stale simulation of actual flight

9 minutes ago, EGLD said:

That's gonna depend

MS will need to drastically improve their approach to physics simulation to get people off Xplane

A prettier version of P3D will only placate so many people (I'm one of them FWIW!!) but I do get it when people say there is a more realistic feel to Xplane, and if MS don't go some way to matching that, it will remain a rather stale simulation of actual flight

I'm an XP supporter (or was when I still played sims regularly), but the same could be said about Austin finally making ground physics a priority. All these sims have issues.

That wasn't the point I was making though, it was posed that XP would be "toast" now thanks to FS2020

My point is, unless MS address the reasons people went to XPlane, it won't be toast