A bigger picture of the new MSFS

[yanfeng12342000 132]

The announcement of the new MSFS is a thunder among flight simmers. It also causes heated disputes over the direction it is going. Everyone has his own preference, and wishes MSFS be the realization of his own desire. MS also has its own agenda, which should consider but not equal to our wishes. Now this can sound correct and boring, and I will offer another perspective.

The world is changing. It's going digital, aka virtual. I have no doubt that we will enter the Matrix sooner or later, in this form or another. This process has already begun, and we simmers are among the very first batch of people that have tasted the beauty of the virtual. Notice the word "simulation". It's the heart of the virtual, of the Matrix.

Here comes the new MSFS. This is the next generation of simulation. It will let us flight straight into the next stage of the Matrix. No matrix is complete without the fidelity of the world. And here MS give us 2000 tb of world scenery. I want to say MS truly knows where the world is going, but do you think it only wants the simmers to go alone? No way!

So this is the plan. Or this might be the plan. Or this should be the plan. A nextgen flight simulation, but more, a nextgen simulation of the world, another step into the Matrix. I will not talk about the philosophical or ethical consequence of this. All I want to say is: bring it on!

Think of virtual tourism. I have always dreamed about touring the world in VR. Some people might say it's not real. You can't touch it, or smell it, or taste it. No we can't, but in real tourism you can't fly by Everest either. You can't look at Half Dome closely from any angles. You can't visit Notre Dame, which is under repair. Virtual is void, but virtual is also power. 

This might shed light to the real face of the new MSFS. Do you think MS will take pains to do a tens of million dollar project only to please us simmers? Maybe so if Bill is still on the stage, but no way today. Yet we need not to think that's hazardous to the development of flight simulation. We have a small (flight) simulation, and we have a big (world) simulation. They are not incompatible with each other. On the opposite, they go with each other hand in hand.

So we have come to the demand of VR again. How can we imagine a VR project without VR implementation?

Those are some of my thoughts of something big. I tweeted about the new MSFS trailer in Weibo (Chinese twitter). It got 780000 readings and 360 retweets: I saw overwhelming enthusiasm from the general public, who are mostly non-simmers. It dawned on me those are the ones that MS is targeting, but it does not mean we simmers will be left behind.

 

[Montie 124]

MS targets all gamers with interest in flying/aviation - it's a business. You can be a "casual flyer" in FSX  as well a "sim flyer" they are not going to change that approach.

[Dominique_K 10,146]

7 hours ago, yanfeng12342000 said:

I tweeted about the new MSFS trailer in Weibo (Chinese twitter). It got 780000 readings and 360 retweets:  I saw overwhelming enthusiasm from the general public, who are mostly non-simmers. It dawned on me those are the ones that MS is targeting, but it does not mean we simmers will be left behind.

 

A very interesting info knowing that the common wisdom is to say that there is no customer base for Flight Simulation in Asia. Would common wisdom be, once again, wrong ? 

[yanfeng12342000 132]

5 hours ago, domkle said:

A very interesting info knowing that the common wisdom is to say that there is no customer base for Flight Simulation in Asia. Would common wisdom be, once again, wrong ? 

I can't say it's completely wrong. There are some flight simmers in China, and some sim societies and web sites, but the simming population is quite small. One likely reason is that flight sim requires a lot of technical terms that are in English, which are doubly alien to the Chinese and difficult to learn. As I said the above mentioned enthusiasm comes not from flight simmers, but from more general public that is attracted by the stunning visual of the trailer and the prospect of "virtual tour" of the world which I believe to be one of the selling point for a larger crowd of people all over the world. This "side benefit" of MSFS is not a bad thing at all, since it's not in conflict with the "real" flight simming. On the contrary, the increased interest in MSFS from the general public can lead to better sales and stronger motivation for MS to continue the development of the brand. And from the larger user base there will grow some real simmers, and this add real blood to the niche hobby. That's the way of the positive circle.

[Dominique_K 10,146]

1 minute ago, yanfeng12342000 said:

 

Thanks !  Yes, China maybe not there yet but things are hopefully moving into the right direction.

I've been a great supporter of an OrbX product which has been on their blackburner for years (OpenLC Asia). I know that language might be a powerful barrier. I lived 10 years of my life in Asia including the PRC. But you don't have to be an engineer or a linguist to install a sim or an addon or even understand how to drive an aircraft in a sim. 

One thing : there is no real simmer. I've been simming for a long time and I've learned that there are many varieties of simmers, everyone enjoying the hobby in his or her particular way. Casual or hardcore or in-between, all simmers. That will be the same in China.

 

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

12 hours ago, yanfeng12342000 said:

I have no doubt that we will enter the Matrix sooner or later, in this form or another. This process has already begun, and we simmers are among the very first batch of people that have tasted the beauty of the virtual. Notice the word "simulation". It's the heart of the virtual, of the Matrix.

I think we’ll have a better chance of time travel or remote viewing before we enter the Matrix 😂

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

Who says that Microsoft is spending "lots of money" on this release?

We have only seen a trailer that was put together by a French games studio..

[Dominique_K 10,146]

5 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

Who says that Microsoft is spending "lots of money" on this release?

We have only seen a trailer that was put together by a French games studio..

It is a fair assumption (remember  : this is the Speculation Forum) knowing the cost of the major releases of the game industry these recent years

Edited June 29, 2019 by domkle

[Paraffin 2,197]

3 minutes ago, domkle said:

It is a fair assumption (remember  : this is the Speculation Forum) knowing the cost of the major releases of the game industry these recent years

True, AAA games can have budgets in the millions of dollars, but a flight sim avoids many of the costs involved in those games.

Voice acting is expensive, especially if famous names and faces are used like Keanu in Cyberpunk 2077. Music licensing is expensive, and so is creating original music for a game. Motion capture is expensive. The animation and editing for cut scenes in the middle of a  game also costs time and money. Flight sims don't need any of this, unless it's a hybrid like the Ace Combat series.

This could be offset if there are other licensing costs for aircraft names and such, but it seems to me that even a state of the art flight sim could be made at lower cost than something like Assassin's Creed Odyssey or Cyberpunk 2077 with all that voice acting and motion capture. Otherwise we wouldn't have relatively small outfits like IPACS (Aerofly FS2) and Laminar Research producing sims.

[Dominique_K 10,146]

Just now, Paraffin said:

 .

I agree with most of what  you said but licensing imagery for the whole world is not cheap. See how OrbX has decided not to include the whole tiny Victoria  Is. in their Washington TE . To need large computer time to run the AI is not cheap either (even ift you own it). If we look back at FSX there was also a huge promotional campaign on TV. It may not reach the 100 MUSD mark of a Skyrim or a Fall Out but that they are spending a lot of money is a fair assumption .

Voice acting now. Who says we won't have Patty Wagstaff back to teach us how to fly 😄 ? Or, even better, Harrison Ford to land on a taxiway ?  

 

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

2 hours ago, domkle said:

I agree with most of what  you said but licensing imagery for the whole world is not cheap. See how OrbX has decided not to include the whole tiny Victoria  Is. in their Washington TE .

 

The Victoria area is in Canada, and the imagery is not readily available since the Canadian government does not make this data available (unlike the U.S. government..)  Which I guess proves your point..

[Longranger 148]

27 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

but it seems to me that even a state of the art flight sim could be made at lower cost than something like Assassin's Creed Odyssey or Cyberpunk 2077 with all that voice acting and motion capture. Otherwise we wouldn't have relatively small outfits like IPACS (Aerofly FS2) and Laminar Research producing sims.

Sure, this is the case. While many normal games needs higher level of expertise in arts, sounds and so on many jobs for a flight simulator still depend on programmers, BUT...there is a border.

The reason behind it  planes and a slightly simplified buildings and so on this is in fact computable, this means you can compute it in real time where they are,, how they behave and how they look if you have some sophisticated algorithms. Especially if other people can bring their own planes building and so on into the simulator. You don't need artists, but the other groups do.

So in a way you only implement a special rendering engine. But we have one element we can't compute in real time: clouds. Clouds are a dark secret because we canb't simulate them in real time. While we know what is happening in clouds the number of ineractions is to vast to even attempt something like it in real time. And in fact we have no foundations to do this. And we have very few of the needed data contrary to some beliefs. In fact we have very rough data about the weather conditions in a circle of 10000 feet around the Airport (the famed METAR data) and we have some wind predictions for three height levels, that was it . Not enough data to really say anything special about the weather. The weather engines like Active Sky go further. They gather additional weather data and try their own weather predictions to generate the base data that they need to guess the real data in area s of the sky. And then they to place their clouds accordingly. But you have to be careful, the weather data have NOTHING to do with the visuals. They are only an artwork that is placed according to their internal values.

In FSWS we have the pretty likely based on Flight Sim World and they bought an weather renderer (True Sky and they are now licensed by the Microsoft Game Sudio) that was only responsible for the Artwork . They are not based on datra but on themes and they were pushed by some customers especially Flight Sim World to offer some techniques to add some kind of real weather. And suddenly people dream together that Microsoft would somehow add a real weather model. Sorry , but we are talking about a simple game and they should suddenly start a big project .Unlikely.

[Dominique_K 10,146]

9 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

The Victoria area is in Canada, and the imagery is not readily available since the Canadian government does not make this data available (unlike the U.S. government..)  Which I guess proves your point..

Hi Bert

From the horse's mouth, John V : 

Bottom part of Vancouver Island is included as well as Cityscape Victoria. XP11’s 1-degree grid boundary system forces us to make hard choices. The Canadian ortho imagery cost us a fortune just for that area alone.

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/171260-trueearth-us-washington-for-xp11-sneak-peek-video/?do=findComment&comment=1505708

About extending further into BC

"No, not unless the Canadian government begins to sell data at a reasonable cost. The tiny area we used in this region cost over $20,000 for 1.5m/pixel resolution"

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/171537-trueearth-us-washington-official-announcement/?do=findComment&comment=1507215."

He also said a couple of times that France (and some other EU countries) orthos were prohibitive (as a French I do not doubt him a minute !).

Edited June 30, 2019 by domkle

[vortex681 806]

17 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

The Victoria area is in Canada, and the imagery is not readily available since the Canadian government does not make this data available (unlike the U.S. government..)  Which I guess proves your point..

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding here, but the whole of the Victoria area is available in glorious 3D in Google Earth so the imagery doesn't appear to belong exclusively to the Canadian government. Or am I somehow missing the point?

Edited June 30, 2019 by vortex681

[Dominique_K 10,146]

18 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding here, but the whole of the Victoria area is available in glorious 3D in Google Earth so the imagery doesn't appear to belong exclusively to the Canadian government. Or am I somehow missing the point?

Might be that Google has deeper pockets than John V, who knows 😏 ?

Edited June 30, 2019 by domkle