27 minutes ago, Longranger said:

Not really- In fact it might be more succesful to talk to them on a developer conference.. And if you simply didn't understan d the simply send you to the support. Under normal circumstances people of the higher levels don't care about the size of your company but about your qualification. In fact Laminar had pretty high access rights since they were  one of very few companies  that used OpenGL so extensively.

You might not be used to it but if you really are interested in a thing  that you need you are one of about 30 qualified people on this planet. They simply know that you are someone that knows what he is talking about. This is normally more important than your company.

Well, Laminar (Ben) was always complaining how hard it is to code on OpenGL, mainly the multi-threaded features. Reason why they are moving to Vulkan (low level and all). Having access on conferences or through support tickets is different from having access internally/daily on inside the same company. Larger Studios have this same kind of access.

If you have access to the guys behind the API, you can understand it better and ask for implementations when  possible. Phil Spencer made it clear that's what they are doing for the Xbox Games enviorment, trying to bring everything together in the best way. 

On ‎6‎/‎20‎/‎2019 at 5:58 PM, roarkr said:

Designed for PC, optimized for multiplatform support (e.g. Xbox).

 

This is the only part that makes me nervous....

 

Are they planning on making two completely different games or optimizing the main PC game to also run on Xbox one specs?

 

At Xbox One optimizations I would cringe at what would happen when some serious add-ons are added, like real world AI traffic, not to mention the CPU and memory hungry PMDG style planes!

 

Xbox one:

1.75 GHz, and 8 GB of shared DDR3 RAM (Shared between video card and system memory)

 

 

 

59 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

Fair enought, but seeing how Microsoft evolved and how their PR improved, I really doubt they would do something like that. 

Oh, I really doubt it, too.  I just wanted to point out the genesis of some of the "cautious optimism"

38 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

Well, Laminar (Ben) was always complaining how hard it is to code on OpenGL, mainly the multi-threaded features. ay. 

That was a basic problem of OpenGLö. You can complain about it as you like but the solution is simply Vulkan.

You have simply the basic peoblem: If you donh't have the reputatation you are simply not qualified enough to even talk about the change, but if you have the reputation your company doesn't really matter it is simply your reputation. Furthermore at a developers conference you are normally under an NDA.So you don't have to care about patents in your talks.

47 minutes ago, Kilo60 said:

This is the only part that makes me nervous....

Xbox one:

1.75 GHz, and 8 GB of shared DDR3 RAM (Shared between video card and system memory)

Don't be nervous!

New FS to run on a new Xbox codenamed 'Project Scarlett'.

Announced to be built with as yet unreleased AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPU and AMD Navi GPU with ray-tracing.

"While AMD is yet to properly detail its ray tracing solution, Microsoft has made it clear that ray tracing is a priority and that it is "hardware accelerated" by the custom AMD chipset."

Scarlett Xbox expected to also come with 24Gb of DDR6 RAM and a PCIe 4.0 SSD.

2 hours ago, Mace said:

I think a lot of us remember the Banff lake render...so I think that may be why we see more cautious optimism rather than something a bit more, at this point in time.

Is that the one that clearly says “artist’s impression” in big letters at the bottom or something different?

5 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Both, to distribute via Windows Store (if that is required) which includes distribution to XBOX platform, that is 20-30% taken from sales (that's a fact from MS policy as it stands today for Windows Store).  That's just for distribution alone.  If there are additional "license fees" (beyond the already 30% cut) to be allowed to have content in MSFS 2020 that's a BIG concerned especially since Microsoft make NO guarantees they will improve volume sales ... we just "hope" 

My 2 cents,

Cheers, Rob.

 

Not to be sarcastic, but if this is your job I’d strongly suggest of thinking of a way to get better market research. Some really big sweeping statements here that aren’t matching up to the reality I’ve seen. There’s plenty of initial interest in this sim by non-fs fans on fora I read - granted a lot of it is initially caused by eye candy, but also a common theme is a hope that if it is coming to Xbox then it may not require a pilot licence to get into it and it’s up to the user to add depth over time. Assuming this massive market is all made up of one or two types of people means that everyone is going to miss the window of opportunity. If a flipping farming simulator can be successful, I’m sure a flight simulator can, but not if all the grown ups think it’s too complicated for the kids. 

Edited June 26, 20196 yr by 188AHC
Pruned long quote

37 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

...if all the grown ups think it’s too complicated for the kids. 

A bigger problem is that there is a segment of the flight simming community who think everyone who doesn't use the sim the same way they do is a kid.  That includes other flight simmers as well.

Hook

1 hour ago, Superdelphinus said:

Is that the one that clearly says “artist’s impression” in big letters at the bottom or something different?

I think that is the one, although you may remember many taking that pic and creating high expectations that the "next sim" would, largely, look like that.  That is precisely why, I think, many have "cautious optimism" rather than something a bit more, right now.

There are two other reasons too, one being the dropping of the ACES Studio, and the other the MS Flight! episode.  Together, I think those three things are the source of some concern with Microsoft, in some corners.  Note that I didn't say that I share in that concern.  I was merely pointing out why there is a little more "wait n see" than you might otherwise see.  Some of you guys questioned why that might be.  That's my take as to why.

 

37 minutes ago, Mace said:

There are two other reasons too, one being the dropping of the ACES Studio, and the other the MS Flight! episode.

Hmm.

On the former I am glad they moved on, and on the latter I just don’t care because it was so long ago in Microsoft leadership has completely changed and they are rolling these days. 

7 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I provided my answer, you elected to reject it as an answer. 

"new games are optimized better for new hardware".

The statement is just too generic.  Tell me what specifically is optimized better?  If you want a technical discussion then lets move in that direction, but "new games are optimized better for new hardware" has nothing to connect with in order to establish a working discussion.  It's just a generic supposition without any supporting evidence.

I'd be happy to go over technical details of say Cloud Modeling (FBM - Fractal Brownian Motion and Perlin-Worley noise, density and height functions) and Cloud Lighting (Volumetric Scattering, Beer's Law, Henyey-Greenstein Phase Function, etc.) and finally Cloud Rendering ... BTW, none of these are in anyway optimized to specific hardware, they are computational methods.

Cheers, Rob.  

 

Yes, "new games are optimized better for new hardware" is a generic statement just like "newer cars have better tech to work with newer devices." However, one doesn't have to go into "naming" apple car play and android auto to qualify the statement.

So let's stick to the original context around that "generic" statement, and move on.

 

 

I didn't realize saying 'new games are optimized better for newer hardware' would be so controversial. 

I can't speak of the specific shaders or lighting or latticing or whatever, but my common sense tells me that the game will run smoother than how FSX, P3D and XP11 did out of the box. If you want me to get in the nitty gritty and ask me why, I can't tell you, because I don't have experience in graphical architecture. All I know is that MS released the trailer at E3 for a reason, because this is a chance to show off their latest tech and make MSFS appeal to the masses. If the game runs like FSX did out of the box, they will be ridiculed not only by the core fans but by the tech community as a whole. Times have changed, social media pressure is a real thing now. FSX would never have left the ground (pun intended) if it released in 2019 as unoptimized as it was on release. I'm pretty confident MS won't repeat their mistakes. 

MS' recent track record and 2019 technology make me optimistic about sim performance.  E3's reveal makes it clear that MS means business and I doubt they will screw up something as basic as having a smooth game. I can't tell you the science behind it, I'll leave that task to the capable MS developers, but that's what my intuition and common sense tell me.

 

 

Edited June 26, 20196 yr by A330-300

10 hours ago, france89 said:

Would be interesting to know what's the cut that current flight simulator addon stores take.

it is normally 20% to 30%, it varies from store to store, SimMarket is 30% if you are not exclusive with them otherwise they will go down to 25% or 20% if you get a good deal. Now personally I think 20% to 30% is very high, specially for the size of the market available on such stores and the added value they really give (you still do all the support, all the work, most of the marketing, etc.), while if I sell using my own website I can keep up to 93% - 95% of the sale price, so you can appreciate why many developers are doing the same recently. 

You have to also keep in mind that sales are not as big as many believe, most add-on's only sell 1,000 to 2,000 copies in their lifetime, you have the odd exceptions of course, these are what some users call the "must have" add-on's (ActiveSky, GSX, FSPUIPC, PMDG or FSLABS, etc.) which will have a much high number of sales, but these are the exceptions rather than a guideline for expectations of sales.

Many developers are being a bit cautious with MS because in the past Microsoft Flight wanted to charge 60-70% to allow 3rd party content to be sold for this platform, which IMHO is absurd.. so there are concerns about how much they would charge as a fee to allow 3rd party developers to sell for the MS2020 platform, we hope they will be sensible and use their normal policies of Microsoft Window Store which is 20 to 30%.

We are still waiting confirmation on this subject as we are being keep in the "DARK".

Regards,
Simbol

Edited June 26, 20196 yr by simbol

3 minutes ago, simbol said:

it is normally 20% to 30%, it varies from store to store, SimMarket is 30% if you are not exclusive with them otherwise they will go down to 25% or 20% if you get a good deal. Now personally I think 20% to 30% is very high, specially for the size of the market available on such stores and the added value they really give (you still do all the support, all the work, most of the marketing, etc.), while if I sell using my own website I can keep up to 93% - 95% of the sale price, so you can appreciate why many developers are doing the same recently. 

You have to also keep in mind that sales are not as big as many believe, most add-on's only sell 1,000 to 2,000 copies in their lifetime, you have the odd exceptions of course, these are what some users call the "must have" add-on's (ActiveSky, GSX, FSPUIPC, PMDG or FSLABS, etc.) which will have a much high number of sales, but these are the exceptions rather than a guideline for expectations of sales.

Many developers are being a bit cautious with MS because in the past Microsoft Flight wanted to charge 60-70% to allow 3rd party content to be sold for this platform, which IMHO is absurd.. so there are concerns about how much they would as fee to allow 3rd party developers to sell for the MS2020 platform, we hope they will be sensible and use their normal policies of Microsoft Window Store which is 20 to 30%.

We are still waiting confirmation on this subject as we are being keep in the "DARK".

Regards,
Simbol

This is why I think it will be streamed and need a game pass the development income will come from that and not third party`s, third party`s will sell direct to the users and your PC will link to the sim.

4 minutes ago, simbol said:

while if I sell using my own website I can keep up to 93% - 95% of the sale price, so you can appreciate why many developers are doing the same recently.  

Understandable, but I think that many people prefer to purchase from one place in order to easily manage downloads, updates etc. I would rather buy from "my" main store than directly from the developer, even if the addon might cost 5% more there.

In my experience I'm not the only one with this preference, so if we assume that for every addon sold on your website, you could sell two through Simmarket, you might still make more money at the end of the month.