I think it should be subscription based if it is on-demand/streamed world wide or near world wide ortho scenery. Probably you would also be able to set a local cache for most flown airports.

I think it could be a huge success if they open it up to third party developers to bring in their aircraft and airports.

MS should focus on the physics and display engine of the globe, and let outside devs do their magic on detailed aircraft and airports.

The silence from the big devs on their various forums also speaks volumes.. Most likely smells like an NDA.. Otherwise, they would have said "whoa, we never saw that coming."  and some devs who haven't been in the loop have said it in this topic itself.. 

Just now, vin747 said:

The silence from the big devs on their various forums also speaks volumes.. Most likely smells like an NDA.. Otherwise, they would have said "whoa, we never saw that coming."  and some devs who haven't been in the loop have said it in this topic itself.. 

Most are probably suffering hangovers after FSExpo... give it time

I too think this could be a stadia kinda model, but I cringe at the thought of internet buffering on my final approach! 

5 minutes ago, vin747 said:

The silence from the big devs on their various forums also speaks volumes.. Most likely smells like an NDA.. Otherwise, they would have said "whoa, we never saw that coming."  and some devs who haven't been in the loop have said it in this topic itself.. 

Yeah but who needs orbx when you have that satellite imagery anyway. It might actually be bad for them.

 

2 minutes ago, Lucaat said:

Yeah but who needs orbx when you have that satellite imagery anyway. It might actually be bad for them.

Pretty easy, try flying somewhere with bad satellite imagery, e.g. Alaska, Canada, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, large parts of Europe... Either they've done some amazing magic here to claim worldwide coverage, or there is some sort of landclass still in there.

Yeah true. But if it really is on azure and sort of supplied remotely, I wonder how it wiil work, will we be able to have local and remote content?

55 minutes ago, 188AHC said:

Come on fellows (and ladies), why is it every time MS or any other developer announces something all the flaming arrows immediately start flying?  Haven't we been through this before?

Microsoft Flight took a serious beating before release and it turned out pretty nice for what it was. Dovetail came on board and participated in our discussions and were met with venom. 

Granted, both failed but do you reckon we had something to do with it?  Why would someone keep trying to offer something if they keep getting kicked in the gut?

It's ok to express an opinion either positive or negative but how about waiting until we know something more than a video.

 

I agree with your comments but I don’t think this would happen if there was a proper release statement with plenty of back up information not just a teaser video. So in this way they bring it on themselves. 

Probably similar to Google Earth, streamed and cached locally as you pan around. It works pretty well in the Google Earth VR App if you don't move too fast. The hope is that as you're approaching an airport, the area you're flying in has long since been streamed into memory or pre-cached earlier... I'm sure they've thought about this, as not everyone will have super fast connections and nothing would kill immersion faster than a loading screen or popping scenery.

In addition, looking at this shot:

The colouring in the mountains will be familiar to anyone who has generated orthos before, as it seems there is some colour banding going on. What this means in practice is that just like with any ortho-based scenery, shadows, seasons, sunlight, rain etc are all baked into the scenery and don't change. I'm sure we'll find out more in the coming months what the engine is capable off 🙂

 

18 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Pretty easy, try flying somewhere with bad satellite imagery, e.g. Alaska, Canada, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, large parts of Europe... Either they've done some amazing magic here to claim worldwide coverage, or there is some sort of landclass still in there. 

Probably Microsoft already launched their own satellite many months ago to shoot all those satellite imagery themselves. 😂.

Landclasses are still a thing as pointed out by a 3rd party dev in this thread. and he is right if you rewatch the trailer

9 minutes ago, antonvs said:

I agree with your comments but I don’t think this would happen if there was a proper release statement with plenty of back up information not just a teaser video. So in this way they bring it on themselves. 

Why do you think they owe you a full disclosure? Generally new releases come with early teasers. That's marketing and has been for eons. 

26 minutes ago, Lucaat said:

Yeah but who needs orbx when you have that satellite imagery anyway. It might actually be bad for them.

And the airports? Raw Bing/GE aiports are not usable for flightsim, visually, let alone navaids, and I doubt MS will themselves enhance all the 6000 or so default airports we had in FSX.

Kind regards, Michael

1 minute ago, 188AHC said:

Why do you think they owe you a full disclosure? Generally new releases come with early teasers. That's marketing and has been for eons. 

It isn't a case of them owing us anything. They know the serious simmers won't just use the default aircraft. They will want study-level aircraft which means an SDK. At the very least they could have announced there will / won't be one and it would have clarified the situation without the need for speculation.

3 minutes ago, 188AHC said:

Why do you think they owe you a full disclosure? Generally new releases come with early teasers. That's marketing and has been for eons. 

very simple. cos they want our money. and nobody asks for full disclosure. just some key facts: sim or arcade? sdk y/n? that would be enough for now to either follow the development or ignore it