Hi everyone, 

Back in 2018, Active sky has published their roadmap for 2019/2020, and I've been very curious about a project they have for 2019/2020 call Project Alpha. 

"Our secret skunkworks project, in the works for several years, continues development.
While we still can’t share any details on Project Alpha, we hope to announce it sometime in late 2019 or early 2020"

As they already have project for p3d and Xplane, I was wondering if it could be a project for MS2020, especially because they don't want to talk about before 2020, maybe due to an NDA 🤔

What do you think ? 

Source: https://hifisimtech.com/forums/showthread.php?10166-Development-News-Update-November-2018

Edited June 16, 20196 yr by popite78

If they are involved, I really hope it's in a "first party collaboration" that brings the functionality right into MSFS 2020 natively.

I love add-ons, but I'm exhausted with very core features like weather being something that isn't natively done really really well.  It's totally central to a flight simulator to have that be a first party, really well done and integrated, function - at least in my view.

Edited June 16, 20196 yr by irrics

I'm very, very skeptical that HiFi, Aerosoft, or whoever are directly working for MS on this.

But, if you are looking for a glimmer of hope, they did say they are working with the community and "industry partners." What's an industry partner in this case? I honestly have no idea, but it's at least possible they mean 3rd party devs.

Edited June 16, 20196 yr by bonchie

Hopefully, for their sake. Because if something that has been "in the works for several years" for FSX/P3D might just be for little or nothing if FS2020 is what we hope it is. 

2 hours ago, bonchie said:

I'm very, very skeptical that HiFi, Aerosoft, or whoever are directly working for MS on this.

Why?

Well, FSX and P3D aren't going to go away.  There are some people still flying FS9 as shown in a recent poll.

Depending on how well the new sim fulfills my needs, and even if I can run it on my limited satellite Internet connection, I may be flying P3D for a long time to come.  Including P3Dv5 whenever it is released.

I am "cautiously optimistic" about the new sim.

----

As an example of limited Internet, it is raining today and my connection has been going up and down all day.  I composed the above post and lost connection just before I hit Submit and had to rewrite it.  What happens with the new flight sim in this case?  If I'd been flying in P3D, Active Sky would just switch to a custom mode based on the current weather until I could reconnect, and the sim wouldn't be affected.  I'd lose skyvector.com but I have a paper copy of my flight plan so it doesn't matter.

Hook
 

35 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Why?

General skepticism that anything that cool is happening.

I'd be curious if the money could be worked out for either side. Guess it depends on how much of a budget Flight Simulator has. Could they afford to dump millions to a 3rd party contractor to do an entirely new weather engine? Maybe, but if they've got the developers in house, already salaried, the bean counters might push them that way. HiFi would obviously have to see more money in it than selling numerous iterations of weather engines later on as well.

But, if it they are working together, geez would things suddenly get a lot more exciting.

Edited June 16, 20196 yr by bonchie

2 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Could they afford to dump millions to a 3rd party contractor to do an entirely new weather engine? Maybe, but if they've got the developers in house, already salaried, it'd probably be cheaper that way.

It makes more sense to me to see if existing add-ons from experienced developers could be adapted for the new sim rather than writing them from scratch. Not to mention the development time it would save.

3 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

It makes more sense to me to see if existing add-ons from experienced developers could be adapted for the new sim rather than writing them from scratch. Not to mention the development time it would save.

"Industry partners" has to mean something right?

I certainly hope it means what we hope it means.

1 hour ago, LHookins said:

As an example of limited Internet, it is raining today and my connection has been going up and down all day.  I composed the above post and lost connection just before I hit Submit and had to rewrite it.  What happens with the new flight sim in this case? 
 

I know what you mean. I live in the Dallas metroplex and we got hit pretty hard today and my internet speed was all over the place making it hard to watch the US Open stream on my Firebox. Last weekend we had a bad storm as well that knocked power out to 300,000 people and even after I regained power my internet didn’t come back online for a few days after.

Something I believe was first posting on Avsim some years ago:

We had a power outage yesterday and my PC, TV and of course my FlightSim was shut down immediately; it was raining - I couldn't take the dog for a walk or go play some golf, so I talked to my wife for a few hours.
 
She seems like a nice person.

Hook

1 minute ago, LHookins said:

so I talked to my wife for a few hours.
 
She seems like a nice person.

Hook

😂😂😂😂😂😂

11 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

I know what you mean. I live in the Dallas metroplex and we got hit pretty hard today and my internet speed was all over the place making it hard to watch the US Open stream on my Firebox. Last weekend we had a bad storm as well that knocked power out to 300,000 people and even after I regained power my internet didn’t come back online for a few days after.

I'm just north of Bonham, so in Texas terms, that makes us neighbors. 🙂

The power went down for about 6 hours last night affecting about 1000 people.  A few days ago it went down in the middle of a long flight (only 250 people affected on that one).  When you can never be sure of your power you have a good UPS battery backup.  After a few minutes I saved the flight then continued it later.

Hook

1 minute ago, LHookins said:

I'm just north of Bonham, so in Texas terms, that makes us neighbors. 🙂

Hook

Oh yeah, Bonham is just a stones throw, I agree.

We got it pretty good a few hours ago in Dallas, tornado warnings and all. Was listening to ATC at KDAL, KDFW And KAUS where all the majority of traffic was diverted to. 

Fortunaly no powwe outage for me this weekend but I could see a few transformers blowing out in the distance.

This is a photo from my living room right before it all broke out. That’s 13L at KDAL on the left side of the photo.

 

Doubtful!  Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar corporation; to that end, it's highly unlikely they would collaborate with an LLC as small as HiFi. 

I can appreciate how difficult the current paradigm must be for some of our beloved 3rd party developers.  If you believe the initial reports, MFS may render scenery/texture developers obsolete. I have mixed feelings on the subject; I've enjoyed our ecosystem but can't wait for the day I don't have to open/update 20 applications to facilitate a simulated world.  On the surface, MFS appears poised to deliver on FSX's moniker: "As Real as it Gets."  

I'm also hopeful MFS brings some 'price control' to our ecosystem....