3 hours 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.. 

IMHO it doesn't really make sense to have an NDA in effect after the platform has been announced. If there is something to be shared with the customer, the time would be now?

I think that MS was looking for launch titles for their streaming service. Then they remember an exclusive legacy brand that they own all rights for and go for it. Azure AI hasn't been around that long, so the concept may in fact be brand new, trailer or not. So they get a launch title for two new products at the same time. They invest 6 months into making a prototype, and it turned out so well that they got the go-ahead for the project. Now they have at least 18 months to finish the product. And we are talking about a company that can draw on the resources of 130000 employees. They could task 100 engineers without breaking a sweat.

Personally I think that we should abandon old thought concepts about how a flightsim works. This may be a entirely different type of application architecture. And I am leaning towards those opinions who say that this doesn't bode well for the established addon developer community. We will see if there are snide remarks or "we too" statements coming forth.

Best regards

Edited June 10, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

The video sure is impressive. I hope it's a completely new set of engines for terrain, flight dynamics, gauges, weather, ATC etc. As far as SDK goes my hope is that it's  more like a modern game engine where you can jump into a built-in edit mode and import models, textures, sound, data etc in standard formats, then set up scenes, add colliders, hook up scripts, create materials and so on. That way you can use dev tools of your own choice (eg Blender, Modo, Zbrush, Houdini, Maya etc) instead of being stuck having to get the expensive 3dsMax dinosaur.

To say it another way, this should be a new, modern and open engine for flight simulation, not just a closed game.

29 minutes ago, MattGarner said:

Any chance for the links to the images?

https://fsi.microsoftstudios.com/blog-article-formatting/ 

Edit: the link got taken down

 

Edited June 10, 20196 yr by aeroflyer93

Signed up and in, awaiting news from Microsoft.

Do I believe that Microsoft is capable of producing a new "game-changing" root flight simulation program that renders all others obsolete?

Yes

Do I believe that the released MS Flight Simulation trailer, with the stated and implied descriptions contained therein announce just such a revolution?

Yes

Does this mean that it's a brand new era in Flight Simulation that will re-orientate not just the general public but ourselves within this community as well?

Yes

Will it make and/or break many commercial entities who made it possible to modify old ESP based code and produce various add-ons, or alternate flight simulators?

Yes

Do I trust Microsoft to get this right, not perfect mind you, but light years ahead of where we are now? 

Yes

Bottom line for myself (me, myself and I), after decades of flight simulation interest, personal investment, immersion and addiction?

I am in and expecting the best, and will make all my decisions regarding hardware, software and participation accordingly.

 

Kindest regards,

Spirit Flyer (Stephen) 

29 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Just for fun, I'm going to go out on a limb and make the following guesses:

1. Several addon developers have known about this for some time but due to an NDA have had to keep quiet.

2. The scenery, i.e. the photoreal base, will indeed be streamed and buffered.  The airports, vegetation, buildings, etc. will be stored on the local machine.

3. The scenery will be much like ORBX Trueearth in that it will combine photoreal with landclass, vector scenery, objects, and AFCAD-based airports.

4. The core scenery engine is likely brand new, but the aircraft have probably not changed much from FSX, so with minor changes many FSX and P3D aircraft will work.

5. The flight dynamics have been improved.

6. ATC is the same as FSX with minor bug fixes and improvements.

 

Mostly pure speculation but also some educated guessing.  It'll be fun to see if I'm right.

Dave

 

I'd say all of this is very likely and probable, given what we know right now.  Time will tell...

1 word WOW 😍

1 hour ago, Jim Young said:

It appears to me, based on the promo video, the simulator is polished and ready for release.

Wouldn't be the first time MS engaged in a bit of.. Hyperbole in its advertising. 😉

 

Box art:

Actual product:

 

That said, I imagine the visuals will be excellent. The question is how MS is currently defining "realism." Merely including an accurate physics model isn't going to appease the simmers who are used to flying PMDG/Leonardo/A2A planes through real-world weather. On the other hand, having that level of simulation out of the box is a recipe to make the casuals look elsewhere.

 

If they're smart, they're gonna make a modern FSX - good bones for 3rd party addon makers to build on and give the hardcore guys what they want without making all the other guys pay for it up front.

 

47 minutes ago, skully said:

Why would orbx have been involved considering their product line has just been rendered obsolete with a brand new scenery engine from MS?

the reaction is similar to the pony express riders seeing the first railroad coming through.

Obsolete, in what way? Firstly, we know very little about what the scenery can do apart from a few carefully chosen shots for a trailer, and secondly, P3D/X-Plane/AF2 won't suddenly vanish overnight. It will be quite some time before addon developers will make products for it (and we don't even know yet what Microsoft intends to do in regards to third-party developers). Just like other developers, I'm sure ORBX will adapt to the new platform just like they did for X-Plane etc, and as one of the main developers working on the X-Plane regions for ORBX, I'm excited about the possibility of another sim to work on (and to play with), and what the new engine is capable of doing.

 

31 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Just for fun, I'm going to go out on a limb and make the following guesses:

1. Several addon developers have known about this for some time but due to an NDA have had to keep quiet.

2. The scenery, i.e. the photoreal base, will indeed be streamed and buffered.  The airports, vegetation, buildings, etc. will be stored on the local machine.

3. The scenery will be much like ORBX Trueearth in that it will combine photoreal with landclass, vector scenery, objects, and AFCAD-based airports.

4. The core scenery engine is likely brand new, but the aircraft have probably not changed much from FSX, so with minor changes many FSX and P3D aircraft will work.

5. The flight dynamics have been improved.

6. ATC is the same as FSX with minor bug fixes and improvements.

 

Mostly pure speculation but also some educated guessing.  It'll be fun to see if I'm right.

Dave

 

Uh oh.  Already it looks like perhaps #1 is wrong.

J. Venema at ORBX stated that they didn't know about this.  Interesting.

It could still be the case that some aircraft developers knew about it.  Who knows?

Dave

2 minutes ago, eslader said:

Wouldn't be the first time MS engaged in a bit of.. Hyperbole in its advertising. 😉

 

Box art:

Actual product:

 

That said, I imagine the visuals will be excellent. The question is how MS is currently defining "realism." Merely including an accurate physics model isn't going to appease the simmers who are used to flying PMDG/Leonardo/A2A planes through real-world weather. On the other hand, having that level of simulation out of the box is a recipe to make the casuals look elsewhere.

 

If they're smart, they're gonna make a modern FSX - good bones for 3rd party addon makers to build on and give the hardcore guys what they want without making all the other guys pay for it up front.

 

Well, that's just box art.  Back then flying the sim required a lot of user input, i.e. imagination, where scenery was concerned.

What I didn't like was the artist rendering that MS showed for FSX which was grossly exaggerated.

This time they actually showed a video which is a bit more revealing, although those can be doctored as well.

Dave

I wonder how long this has been in development? FSW was cancelled around April 2018. If that had been a success it is interesting to speculate whether MS were in the process of building a flight sim to compete with their own licence. 

1 hour ago, Jim Young said:

It appears to me, based on the promo video, the simulator is polished and ready for release.

If it was, I'm sure we would have it in hour hands by now and not in 2020 😛

2 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Obsolete, in what way? Firstly, we know very little about what the scenery can do apart from a few carefully chosen shots for a trailer, and secondly, P3D/X-Plane/AF2 won't suddenly vanish overnight. It will be quite some time before addon developers will make products for it (and we don't even know yet what Microsoft intends to do in regards to third-party developers). Just like other developers, I'm sure ORBX will adapt to the new platform just like they did for X-Plane etc, and as one of the main developers working on the X-Plane regions for ORBX, I'm excited about the possibility of another sim to work on (and to play with), and what the new engine is capable of doing.

 

Tony, I'm sure ORBX will adapt, I was referring to their regional scenery, I should have clarified.

There will always be a market for detailed airport scenery as MS can't cover it all.

What they do is give us the world to populate with details. The trailer shows us extremely dense city areas and excellent detail of outlying areas such as the Great Meteor Crater shown briefly.

This is all very exciting and the move into the future that we all want.

We move one step closer to the 'world simulator'.

 

People would agree that LM team have to get something really impressive to sell their version 5 (I doubt they would care for the type of business they are in and purpose of the sim  mainly are the client training..). In all sense, they extracted far more juice from MS's legacy through 4 versions in their product which could have been only 2 iterations at the most - first 32 bit adaption + and second 64 bit + one.

Healthy competition always better. 

Interesting times again. Wondering about MSFS-2020 compatibility etc and how much $ needed to be spent more on sim + add-ons... Waiting for some devs to speak up.

Even if it delivers half of the visuals shown there, it definitely is game ON.. sorry Sim on...

Regards