Having both a subscription and an outright purchase is good for me.  I can try the Game Pass for a month, check out the sim (and anything else I find of interest) and if the sim going to meet my needs I'll purchase it.

I have my eye on another sim that has both.  A major advantage of the subscription version of that sim for me is that it doesn't use a dongle.  In any case I'll spend less for a subscription for the amount of time I'll use the sim than I would to purchase it outright.

Hook

Edited June 20, 20196 yr by LHookins

6 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

FS Labs do the same for the Airbus so it’s got to be something they have to pay for with a current aircraft. There is no extra to pay for Concorde as it doesn’t fly any more.

Or they simply foun an (stuipd) excuse to increase the prices. Otherwise the prices should be the same across all platforms and this is not the case.

If MSFS2020 will help to stop all this I will consider it a victory and I will be happy about it, I will buy it any case couse it looks really good.

17 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Because when you have up to 2 Petabytes of data

Why are we thinking that much data is going to be involved? I find it highly unlikely they'll do actual photographic imagery for everything. The smart move is to do the cities and the airports, but farm country is randomized texture tiles. No one's going to know the difference between a faked farm field and a real farm field unless it's *their* farm. Similarly, mountains get appropriate randomized textures and dynamic scenery (or whatever they'll call it) trees, but no one's going to catch on to that white pine that's 20 feet to the left of where it is in real life.

And then more than 70 percent of the planet is ocean, and you don't want that to be photoreal scenery because you want the water to move, so that's 7/10ths of the planet right there that's rendered from code rather than stored as high-res imagery.

Two petabytes of raw data will condense to somewhat less storage needed for in-sim scenery.

Let's make something perfectly clear.  A members post count in no way reflects their knowledge or ability to participate in any conversation on this site.

To call someone out because of their count is offensive and is covered in the TOS as abusive behavior. Please let's not stoop this low.

Now we need to carry on with reasonable conversations concerning our opinion of the new MFS.

 

At least there's one thing come from the announcement ........... its got people talking again :)  and I bet a lot of people revisiting flight sim websites like myself 

31 minutes ago, francy25 said:

Or they simply foun an (stuipd) excuse to increase the prices. Otherwise the prices should be the same across all platforms and this is not the case.

If MSFS2020 will help to stop all this I will consider it a victory and I will be happy about it, I will buy it any case couse it looks really good.

I’ve given you a plausible reason and you’ve dismissed it out of hand. I don’t make these things up. I did read about this on the FSL site but I’m not going to search for it. It is definitely related to the aircraft being used for training purposes.

17 minutes ago, 188AHC said:

Let's make something perfectly clear.  A members post count in no way reflects their knowledge or ability to participate in any conversation on this site.

To call someone out because of their count is offensive and is covered in the TOS as abusive behavior. Please let's not stoop this low.

Now we need to carry on with reasonable conversations concerning our opinion of the new MFS.

If you’re directing that at me perhaps you missed my apology.

On the SDK...I've used MS products (MSFS, MS Office, MS Project, MS Visual Studio, etc) for years and years, I cannot point to one MS software product (not talking specifically about arcade style console games) that cannot be extended via API, SDK or whatever.  MS is well aware of how the old FS products could be extended via SDK; therefore, I'd be VERY VERY surprised if MS releases a new sim without that capability.  It just doesn't make sense otherwise IMHO.

34 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Two petabytes of raw data will condense to somewhat less storage needed for in-sim scenery.

This is my view, but then nobody knows for sure and now I'm wildly speculating 🙂

 

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Because when you have up to 2 Petabytes of data there’s no way that amount of data can reside on a home computer. Ergo, the only alternative is to keep it on servers and the user streams it.

It isn’t speculation. Remove what is impossible and whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the answer. The reason they will start with this sim is because of the amount of data.

Phil Spencer mentioned they have 2 petabytes of geographical data available in-house and they used it to build the FSim world as accurate as possible and besides that they used AI to fill in the gaps. 

He never said the Sim will have more than 2PB of size.

As an example, if you are writing an article, you can use 100 books to acquire the knowledge and build your arguments, it doesn't mean your final article will have more pages than those 100 books. They have 2PB of raw geographical data, not everything will be useful for the sim world. There are a lot of tricks developers use to make the files smaller, they just have to make the engine read and understand the data. 

Edited June 20, 20196 yr by ca_metal

@ca_metal, time will tell.

None of us knows how Microsoft intends to pack, stream or deliver sim data onto our PC's.
All I know is that there are many ways to "skin a cat".

Just as an example:
A single Medical 512 x 512 DICOM CT image (262,144 bytes) can be viewed in more than 68,719,476,736 ways. or if we to apply color and alpha (RGBA) in more than 274,877,906,944 ways. 
(Using just linear Window and Center, didn't calculate permutations, blending, image addition, filters etc.)

The possibilities are endless.

 

Been simming since 1986 and have enjoyed each and every simulator I have installed (SubLogic, Sierra, MS, LM, etc)

Many of us were lucky enough to see some of the first personal computers and  I welcome whatever comes out from any developer as long at it enhances the sim experience.

I will patiently wait for the new Microsoft Flight Simulator release (and hopefully participate in the beta)
In the meantime I will enjoy what I already have (FSX-SE and Prepar3D v4)

By the way, I reinstalled Microsoft Flight (IMO the best flight model until now) onto one of my PC's and I am having a blast.

Cheers.

Edited June 20, 20196 yr by RamonB

3 minutes ago, RamonB said:

None of us knows how Microsoft intends to pack, stream or deliver sim data onto our PC's.
All I know is that there are many ways to "skin a cat".

Just as an example:
A single Medical 512 x 512 DICOM CT image (262,144 bytes) can be viewed in more than 68,719,476,736 ways. or if we to apply color and alpha (RGBA) in more than 274,877,906,944 ways. 
(Using just linear Window and Center, didn't calculate permutations, blending, image addition, filters etc.)

The possibilities are endless.

Agreed. And that's what I tried to explain with my article example. But sure, It can be huge and they can opt to run it from the cloud.

That said, I really doubt they would develop a sim running from the cloud exclusively. At worst we would have two options of complexity scenery, one ran in the cloud and the other ran from your own PC.

We will see.

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Because when you have up to 2 Petabytes of data there’s no way that amount of data can reside on a home computer. Ergo, the only alternative is to keep it on servers and the user streams it.

It isn’t speculation. Remove what is impossible and whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the answer. The reason they will start with this sim is because of the amount of data.

There is no doubt FS2020 will stream data from the cloud to the client, it has to since it is using 2 PB of Bing data for scenery.

However, that does not mean FS2020 will absolutely be subscription based.  Microsoft has many games using their cloud today which do not require subscriptions, so FS2020 might not either.

Streaming: YES, very likely.  Subscription: we don't know.  Possibly, but probably not given their trends as of today.

Edited June 20, 20196 yr by Mengy