July 11th development update

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, chass32 said:

I´d bet that´s exactly what they do.

Cheers

Carlos

Question from a Dodo;

What are assets? I own a dog - he will bite burglars - that's an asset but what are you guys alluding to in this context?

Thanks in advance.

(Typed while flying real world with a dusk-lit landing about 20 minutes away on the south coast of England.)

Thanks.

 

 

 

Edited July 17, 2019 by Guest

[Woozie 732]

2 minutes ago, ganter said:

Question from a Dodo;

What are assets? I own a house -that's an asset but what are you guys alluding to in this context?

Thanks in advance.

(Typed while flying real world with a dusk-lit landing about 20 minutes away on the south coast of England.)

Thanks.

In this context its 3D objects like airplanes, vehicles, buildings and other parts of the game world. Microsoft Game Studios' new strategy is to work with 3rd party developers, rather than employing a full force of inhouse devs. As part of this, modelling work is often being outsourced as it requires quite a significant effort and allows MGS devs to focus on the core of the game.

[Paraffin 2,197]

Asset could refer to separate elements like 3D aircraft models, textures, custom 3D landmark buildings like the Eiffel Tower, giraffes, flamingos. Sound recordings are another kind of asset. 

We don't actually know to what extent ASOBO is involved yet. Could be "assets" only, or working with the underlying systems as well. Sometimes it's better to keep everything in one studio. For example, 3D objects and textures need to interact with the lighting and weather engine. It may not be efficient to split that out into separate contractors.

OTOH, in today's connected world, companies can work in a more distributed fashion. My understanding is that Laminar Research employees and subcontractors are working in different locations, and there isn't a single home office as such.

 

[chass32 138]

8 minutes ago, ganter said:

Question from a Dodo;

What are assets? I own a house -that's an asset but what are you guys alluding to in this context?

Thanks in advance.

(Typed while flying real world with a dusk-lit landing about 20 minutes away on the south coast of England.)

Thanks.

 

 

 

Is what we usually know as "content". It can be textures, to audiofiles, models, backgrounds, images and even some code. Here we are "probably" talking about aircraft modelling.

Cheers

Carlos

[Paraffin 2,197]

2 minutes ago, Woozie said:

In this context its 3D objects like airplanes, vehicles, buildings and other parts of the game world. Microsoft Game Studios' new strategy is to work with 3rd party developers, rather than employing a full force of inhouse devs. As part of this, modelling work is often being outsourced as it requires quite a significant effort and allows MGS devs to focus on the core of the game.

That's still an assumption unless we know more about how this is being done. Has it been confirmed that there actually is a separate group of MGS devs working on the "core" of the game? I may have missed that.

[chass32 138]

4 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

That's still an assumption unless we know more about how this is being done. Has it been confirmed that there actually is a separate group of MGS devs working on the "core" of the game? I may have missed that.

Working on assets is not working on the "core" of the game. And yes, it´s still an assumption 🙂

[Woozie 732]

3 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

That's still an assumption unless we know more about how this is being done. Has it been confirmed that there actually is a separate group of MGS devs working on the "core" of the game? I may have missed that.

I was just generally stating how MGS develops games nowadays, it wasnt particulary referring to MSFS

[Guest]

49 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Asset could refer to separate elements like 3D aircraft models, textures, custom 3D landmark buildings like the Eiffel Tower, giraffes, flamingos. Sound recordings are another kind of asset. 

We don't actually know to what extent ASOBO is involved yet. Could be "assets" only, or working with the underlying systems as well. Sometimes it's better to keep everything in one studio. For example, 3D objects and textures need to interact with the lighting and weather engine. It may not be efficient to split that out into separate contractors.

OTOH, in today's connected world, companies can work in a more distributed fashion. My understanding is that Laminar Research employees and subcontractors are working in different locations, and there isn't a single home office as such.

 

Thank you Paraffin.

Good clarification.

[ca_metal 2,015]

1 hour ago, Woozie said:

I was just generally stating how MGS develops games nowadays, it wasnt particulary referring to MSFS

Not just Microsoft, actually. Any large gaming studio does that, just look at Asobo's portfolio, there are some big names there.

[Paraffin 2,197]

14 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

Not just Microsoft, actually. Any large gaming studio does that, just look at Asobo's portfolio, there are some big names there.

The question we need answering at some point, is who is doing the flight modeling and aircraft systems, and who is doing the scenery and weather system.

The "asset" part is the easiest to outsource. Every major game studio can do 3D modeling and lighting, but there aren't any I'm aware of that are specialized in outsourced flight sim design. That's always been done by the lead developer of the sim. So is Microsoft assembling an internal team for that, or outsourcing it to ASOBO or someone else? (Rhetorical question for the moment, until we get more info).

[ca_metal 2,015]

32 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

The question we need answering at some point, is who is doing the flight modeling and aircraft systems, and who is doing the scenery and weather system.

The "asset" part is the easiest to outsource. Every major game studio can do 3D modeling and lighting, but there aren't any I'm aware of that are specialized in outsourced flight sim design. That's always been done by the lead developer of the sim. So is Microsoft assembling an internal team for that, or outsourcing it to ASOBO or someone else? (Rhetorical question for the moment, until we get more info).

Sure, it will be clear to us when they start sharing the info. What really matters to me is they already stated they are developing a FLIGHT SIMULATOR (with emphasis in the SIMULATOR LOL) so, no matter if they are doing it internally or not, it should be good, to reach the standards. 

I'm assuming all that based on their shared goals until now (build a new gen FLIGHT SIMULATOR). Making it with worst physics/systems compared to what we already have makes no sense to me. 

[fs4fun 366]

7 hours ago, charliearon said:

Those aren't flamingos in the pictures.....they're mosquitoes!  At least that's what I remember about Florida when I was there in 1969

Try Alaska, mosquito is the state bird

[mccracken 26]

Just to dig up an older topic about the screenshot, I had a conversation with a mate a few days ago about the image depth of field and it being done after the fact vs in game within the render, as he was adamant it had to be all post-processing.

Anyway I was working in Sketchup on a project one evening and thought of a way to prove him wrong. So I created a rough Sketchup model of the DR400 cockpit similar to the screenshot, and then rendered it with a freebie unbiased ray-tracing render engine using both wide open vs closed aperture camera settings. The output of the very exaggerated narrow DOF settings gave comparable results to the MS screenshot, with items within the same focal plane all of similar clarity.

For my mind, yes the wide DOF image shows much clearer detail of the cockpit the way you'd be viewing it in game, but the narrow DOF image gives a more artistic and real life photograph type view as a teaser shot, while still showing enough detail in focus to get you interested.

The thing that really interests me in Microsoft's screenshot is the quality of the textures/materials and how nicely it's been rendered with realistic lighting, reflections, shadows, etc. and all in 4k goodness. I'm keen to see the performance of this in real life. In my crappy example at 800px, the renders took a couple of hours with an unbiased engine (CPU based), and any increase in size would be a proportional increase in render time due to the same linear increase in ray paths to be traced. A biased (and GPU based) render engine would be significantly quicker, but still will be no mean feat for moving scenes.

Also the flat/lifeless textures in the sketchup view have a much more FSXish feel. 

 

[Krakin 5,726]

https://fselite.net/news/imaginesim-details-atlanta-2019-update-new-version-in-anticipation-of-microsoft-fs2020/?fbclid=IwAR030d26MCSkAlSplvyR6zpHYtLkSejycAx1X9LWBwCoQAk9RUICqr6sMBs

 

First confirmation of a third party building something for MSFS

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Krakin said:

https://fselite.net/news/imaginesim-details-atlanta-2019-update-new-version-in-anticipation-of-microsoft-fs2020/?fbclid=IwAR030d26MCSkAlSplvyR6zpHYtLkSejycAx1X9LWBwCoQAk9RUICqr6sMBs

 

First confirmation of a third party building something for MSFS

Bold chaps - having absolutely no idea what code they'll be working in - or whether or not MS will even invite third party devs to the feast.

Tell them not to work too hard on it.