57 minutes ago, sl55on20s said:

So my question is what happens with P3D with the announcement of this sim? There's a lot people thinking they'll be a major overhaul for V5 but do you guys think P3D will scale back on any major overhaul and just focus on smaller upgrades for their enterprise customers moving forward?

That would depend on how the development project is financed internally. If it is dependent on sales, and if sales go away, development will slow down. If it is paid for by R&D or Marketing instead, nothing will happen.

Corporations often play this game as if the project was a separate company altogether. The project has to pay for every resource that it uses (=the engineers working hours mostly). Development is driven by what the project can afford. Obviously most projects for new products start out on R&D budgets, since there are no sales to back them for a long time to come. Some projects don't have any sales, ever (internal operations. marketing, research etc.). They still get financed because business processes depend on them. Kind of like the carpenter making his own hammer and screwdriver.

I don't believe that the roadmap itself will be affected by anything that other home-sim companies are doing though, at least not short term.

Microsoft could just relax and concentrate on the casual user, since there is a professional simulator out there already taking care of the commercial applications that need things like an API and structured scenarios. I wouldn't be surprised to find a "Flight Simulator" tile next to Candy Crush and Minecraft on an initial install of Windows 10 at some point. Just a demo region of course, with in-app purchase option.

Best regards 

Edited June 12, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

11 minutes ago, threegreen said:

What kind of bandwidth are we talking about for streaming/cloud service (in numbers)?

Not sure but 4K TV requires around a constant 25 Mbps, preferably more. I would imagine streaming games would be similar

5 minutes ago, yidahoo said:

Not sure but 4K TV requires around a constant 25 Mbps, preferably more. I would imagine streaming games would be similar

And then there's me with my 5 Mbps. I know I'm stuck in the middle ages but if bandwidth like that is a requirement, surely a lot of simmers would be left in the rain. I couldn't even upgrade because it's the digital infrastructure like internet which is lacking around where I live which I can't influence. Wouldn't that compromise their sales?

59 minutes ago, sl55on20s said:

So my question is what happens with P3D with the announcement of this sim? There's a lot people thinking they'll be a major overhaul for V5 but do you guys think P3D will scale back on any major overhaul and just focus on smaller upgrades for their enterprise customers moving forward?

Clearly the future of flight simming now is global real world ortho scenery, I would suggest P3D now need an alternative to XP and FS2020's ortho capabilities if they are to survive

That's one of the key reasons I ditched P3D and went to XP - if I'm not flying over a real representation of the world then it's just not immersive enough any more

If I fly an airliner, I want to arrive somewhere that looks completely different - somewhere that simulates what it's actually like to arrive in that place. It's no longer enough to arrive somewhere with the same textures arranged differently

The fly in that ointment of course is the quality of the aircraft that are available to do this in XP compared to P3D

A new MS FS platform with the 3rd party support that platform traditionally has had, with what looks like stunning global real world ortho and a breathtaking world environment/lighting engine would have me back on the MS FS platform in a heartbeat

I would expect this announcement has sent a bit of a shockwave through Laminar Research

Simulation games are kind of niche, and alot of them loose interest from many gamers.  So alot can be learned from ones that have been very successful. Take the farm simulator series. You wouldnt think farming would have a huge appeal as it would get rather boring driving a tractor on a massive field. That what I thought, but hey i bought into it because of the huge player involvement, videos and the biggest thing that drives farming simulator..... MODS.  Its open to the community.  Theres a huge appeal to get the next greatest big powerful equipment to use and assign your AI to use it.  The amount of farming equipment choices is vast like aircraft choices. XP and P3D/FSX have this to an extent but certainly no where near as robust.  With MS resources, this could be put to great use, in having mods, for flight simulation, in addition to DLC from 3rd party which would obviously have very high quality ones be it aircraft or scenery.  Its hard to ignore the success of farming simulator but that is really what drives it, and Giants software has been reaping the rewards.  Not bad for a game that has to license all the brand name equipment out there.  Cant imagine the likes of John Deer being cheap. 

1 minute ago, threegreen said:

And then there's me with my 5 Mbps. I know I'm stuck in the middle ages but if bandwidth like that is a requirement, surely a lot of simmers would be left in the rain. I couldn't even upgrade because it's the digital infrastructure like internet which is lacking around where I live which I can't influence. Wouldn't that compromise their sales?

I don't think anyone seriously expects us to have to stream 4K from a central cloud Flight Sim platform, I would think the only streaming here would be the scenery - i would think a decent benchmark would be to test Bing and Google Earths virtual earth platforms to see if they work for you, my guess is these are far less demanding than it would be to stream 4K

These are the Google Stadia requirements - 35 Mbps for 4K, 25 Mbps for 1080p. I would imagine Microsoft would be in the same ballpark. https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-stadia-game-streaming-internet-requirements/

I've been thinking about this over the last couple of days and really think they could make something great. I'm not just talking with the graphics but with how the community and add-ons are managed. They've been making all the right noises, but they could really push that further. Here's a couple of things I'd like:

1) A common market place available in the game to get free / purchasable add-ons. I know this fills a lot of people with dread, but if MS charged a small percentage to creators to host their wares then it would really simplify the process and open it up to a lot more people without having to mess around with the file system.

2) As part of this, they could have different categories like custom created missions or even... certifications! Just think how amazing it would be if you could do the majority of a pilots license by using videos and actual practise with tie into the game. That way if you do actually go for your real license, you've already covered the material / tests you'd need. They could even get these two involved: 

3) Have the option for a streaming or local option. Most people are assuming they'd stream the assets (scenery) from Bing onto your local machine which will mean it's an online only. This is great but not everyone has a good internet connection yet. As such it would be great if they'd offer a simplified offline option to broaden the appeal.

Obviously it's still a long way to go yet until release but I don't think I've been this excited for anything in a while  It was so out of the blue but roll on a year and I guess we'll have some of these answers.

Edited June 12, 20196 yr by tronied

Apple and Amazon are doing the same launching a streaming service, just because this will be ported to XBOX some are downvoting it but you have hardware now for game consoles, and we are talking 4 times the power of the present XBOX 4K on a 55inch 4k TV with a flight stick and keyboard, I know XBOX users who have a 55inch 4K TV already with steering wheels made for the console   

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer confirms that the trailer was actually in game footage. Also they have around 2 petabytes of scenic data stictched together...

Check out this very interesting article https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/microsoft-wants-to-bring-back-flight-simulator-to-show-it-supports-pc/

How about the sim including basic default scenery of a particular area only, then, as you fly out of that area, the 'missing' scenery is then downloaded/streamed to your PC?

I'm not to enamoured with the idea of a central curated library, administrated by MS. The backbone of any of our sims has been the freeware developers.

Do not forget about them.

3 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

I'm not to enamoured with the idea of a central curated library, administrated by MS. The backbone of any of our sims has been the freeware developers.

I didn't, which is why I said "free / purchasable add-ons". If you want to sell something then a small cut would be taken, much like the way Steam works. Free will remain free and available to all. I can't see why this wouldn't be a good thing and would really simplify the way in which add-ons are installed / managed.

8 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

The backbone of any of our sims has been the freeware developers.

Do not forget about them.

We don't know if 3rd party scenery contribution will be possible at all. We will have to wait and see. It is not like MS can just make that happen if the technology they use doesn't support it. 

Personally, if this was my launch title, I wouldn't allow any 3rd party content for a long time to come. Every addon puts the base platform at risk - and at launch, I want it to be stable. Plus, processing support requests that actually stem from a 3rd party product compromising my platform, costs money too - cost that can be avoided.

Best regards

Edited June 12, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

The sort of detail we are looking at here will likely be streamed scenery. I don't think for a second they will distribute the entire world in that level of detail for you to install on your PC, and certainly not on an XBox.

I don't have a problem with that as long as the scenery is good and loads well. I found TileProxy in FSX using Yahoo Maps was great so this is an update of that concept. I just want the third party aircraft to be involved and don't mind a streaming scenery as long as it looks like what we've seen so far.

40 minutes ago, yidahoo said:

These are the Google Stadia requirements - 35 Mbps for 4K, 25 Mbps for 1080p. I would imagine Microsoft would be in the same ballpark. https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-stadia-game-streaming-internet-requirements/

but that's for streaming a game, there is nothing to indicate FS will require the streaming of the whole game