I currently live in South Africa so in some cases it is faster to employ a carrier pigeon with a USB stick then brave the internet but it is getting better. Luckily I am moving back to the UK and will have a fast fibre connection on arrival 🙂

I think the future is always on connected internet and everything will be in the cloud, it just makes sense. In this regard Microsoft is really taking our genre into the future and beyond.

1 hour ago, Farlis said:

No, thank you.

I want to fly with real world weather and sudden shifts outside the forecast or reports should only happen at a rate at which they happen in real life.

And who said those sudden shifts aren't coming from real world weather?

As I understand the Azure AI can be simply calculating and rendering from the available data and this data can be real weather data. Let's put into perspective: A supercomputer like the ones MS has for the Azure AI can calculate/render things from the weather data better than our PCs. We will have to see if the real weather data will be available day one or not (I believe it will).

5 hours ago, Farlis said:

I used them all and I love that they exist. But I won't shed any tears if MS brings all that into one package and I don't have to run three seperate programs everytime I chose to fly.

Can’t speak for the rest of you, but I find that response to be really sad. Flight Simulation, as a hobby, means a great deal more than many of us will admit. That journey / experience has, over many years, been enriched immeasurably by 3rd Party input and yet, it seems, some are only too ready to turn their backs on that partnership at the first opportunity. 

They say there is rarely any sentiment in business and that I can understand. However, the time, love and effort expended bringing so many wonderful Addons to our screens, usually for scant reward, deserves much more than the utterance of dismissive comments such as in the quote above. 

Active third party development has been and continues to be the life blood of our fascinatingly complex hobby. In all conscience, why on Earth would we want to threaten it’s existence?

I can only hope that the new MSFS will still leave room for continuing broad 3rd Party participation and there is sufficient flexibility provided within the core structure of the simulator to allow us choice when it comes to customising our installations. From what we know, it seems likely that, indeed, this will be the case and that should be applauded!

I appreciate that some will prefer the all-in-one approach but, like me, the rest of us will always favour that ability to create our own bespoke flight simulation environment by employing the best that the creative 3rd Party community of developers has to offer. In any event, it does seem unlikely that even MS has the capacity or talent/know-how to accomplish everything we would want to be included.

Regards,

Mike

2 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

Active third party development has been and continues to be the life blood of our fascinatingly complex hobby.

Mainly because MS walked away a decade+ ago.

Third party add-ons were far less necessary for a great complete experience when MSFS was in the midst of it's prime run with consistent releases and support from MS.

3 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

I can only hope that the new MSFS will still leave room for continuing 3rd Party participation

I agree - I just want them to really push the envelope here and start anew as much as possible.  Additionally, I don't want core things (like great weather or clouds) to essentially require 3rd party add-ons to simply be acceptable and performant.

47 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

I can only hope that the new MSFS will still leave room for continuing broad 3rd Party participation and there is sufficient flexibility provided within the core structure of the simulator to allow us choice when it comes to customising our installations. From what we know, it seems likely that, indeed, this will be the case and that should be applauded!

There is always room for improvement in any game with the size and complexity of MSFS.  Microsoft will certainly not release the perfect God-like golden sim of all time which meets everyone's wishes.

That said, third party devs might simply need to focus efforts on improving new areas of the game.  MS might nail the weather simulation beautifully, but that still might leave room for improved textures or weather effects.  The photogrammetry areas might look out of this world, but that might leave tons of room to improve the non-photogrammetry regions.

I'm pretty confident third party devs will have plenty to do, as long as MS enables them to do so.

Edited July 27, 20196 yr by Mengy

Goodness, Rob. You just moved to Oregon. Hope you haven't completely unpacked and setup.

Good luck in Norway. If I was going to emigrate, that would be my first choice.

 

12 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

On a side note, we plan to move to Norway (seems to be the new Technology hub of the world) or Portugal (Algarve) in the not to distant future ... anyone from either of these locations able to provide information regarding ISP performance?

Cheers, Rob.

I'll try my best rgd

- Portugal....

We have some sites in Algarve. 3G / 4G coverage with our present provider isn't that great. We also still use ADSL at most of our sites / airports / radars..., although OF is the trend / reference these days, with 100Mbps being a "standard"... Home users are almost all in OF.

This is one of the major operators in the Algarve region ( not the one we presently use at IPMA though... )

https://www.meo.pt/en/bundles?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIq82_8o3X4wIVRkTTCh1oLQcgEAAYASAAEgKBP_D_BwE

Please let me know if you're willing to take a beer 🙂

Edited July 28, 20196 yr by jcomm

We should be moving to 8 and 16 gbps within the next 5 years or so in urban Britain. Of course, we could be going pretty quickly back to carrier pigeon, post-Brexit. Virgin have already successfully tested 8gbps in Cambridgeshire (which my parents benefited from) and there are several plucky upstarts that are already doing those sort of speeds to the premises.  I just wish we’d get ahead of the curve on this sort of thing, rather than always slightly behind it. 

19 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

On a side note, we plan to move to Norway (seems to be the new Technology hub of the world) or Portugal (Algarve) in the not to distant future ... anyone from either of these locations able to provide information regarding ISP performance?

I'm not in Norway but there are some internet speed maps that you can search around for such as this one: https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php

Based on the info from the link above, Norway and Sweden are behind only South Korea and Hong Kong in terms of average internet speeds. Portugal average speeds look comparable to North America.

On 7/27/2019 at 9:35 PM, Rob_Ainscough said:

On a side note, we plan to move to Norway (seems to be the new Technology hub of the world) or Portugal (Algarve) in the not to distant future ... anyone from either of these locations able to provide information regarding ISP performance?

Cheers, Rob.

Tried to send you a PM about ISP in Norway, but were unable. 500-1000 Mbps in major towns.

Actually there is already a simulator streaming scenery over the net. The rather unknown FlyInside Flight SImulator (probably not allowed to link at AVSIM) still in EA, received an upgrade a few days ago where all scenery is streamed worldwide (based on Bing aerials).

While initial scenery of FlyInside Flight Simulator was just terrible, the recent one after the update does look much improved. (The Steam trailer still shows legacy scenery.) Ground imagery is pretty good, albeit (not unexpected) has color jumps where you can see it in Bing on the browser.

Buildings still neet some improvement. It's certainly not comparable to the Google obligue projection technique, but buildings set on ground and important POIs (TV tower and Bundestag Berlin, Golden Gate and Bay Bridge, San Francisco...) are missing. However, the streaming technique as such works flawlessly on my 100 MB/s DSL connection and the sim runs extremely fluent even in VR.

Kind regards, Michael

4 hours ago, pmb said:

Actually there is already a simulator streaming scenery over the net. The rather unknown FlyInside Flight SImulator (probably not allowed to link at AVSIM) still in EA, received an upgrade a few days ago where all scenery is streamed worldwide (based on Bing aerials).

While initial scenery of FlyInside Flight Simulator was just terrible, the recent one after the update does look much improved. (The Steam trailer still shows legacy scenery.) Ground imagery is pretty good, albeit (not unexpected) has color jumps where you can see it in Bing on the browser.

Buildings still neet some improvement. It's certainly not comparable to the Google obligue projection technique, but buildings set on ground and important POIs (TV tower and Bundestag Berlin, Golden Gate and Bay Bridge, San Francisco...) are missing. However, the streaming technique as such works flawlessly on my 100 MB/s DSL connection and the sim runs extremely fluent even in VR.

Kind regards, Michael

Hello Michael,

offtopic: But how is the quality of the Airports? Are they also streamed and better in quality as a standard P3D V4 Airport? I saw this streaming-feature-news also on Flyinside. They seem to do a nice job. regards, Marcus

Edited July 29, 20196 yr by mpo910

1 hour ago, mpo910 said:

Hello Michael,

offtopic: But how is the quality of the Airports? Are they also streamed and better in quality as a standard P3D V4 Airport? I saw this streaming-feature-news also on Flyinside. They seem to do a nice job. regards, Marcus

Forget abvout the airports. There are virtually none, just runways and you can select the ICAO from a list. There are a few generic buildings and that's it. EDDT has a generic prismatic building where the (beautiful) tower belongs.

FlyInside Simulator certainly isn't competitive to our other sims (yet), but if you want to see if/how streaming scenery over the network works (or doesn't work) it's to my best knowledge the only sim which has it realized right now. Ground imagery actually doesn't look bad either.

I'll not go into any further detail on FlyInside Simulator here not to bend the topic, though, but feel free to ask me questions in a more appropriate forum.

Kind regards, Michael

1 hour ago, pmb said:

FlyInside Simulator certainly isn't competitive to our other sims (yet), but if you want to see if/how streaming scenery over the network works (or doesn't work) it's to my best knowledge the only sim which has it realized right now. Ground imagery actually doesn't look bad either.

In regards to streaming data for visuals, it is really interesting to see what FlyInside has done with their simulator in such a short amount of time, especially as it seems to be only one person doing all of the development. It is still in beta and still has many rough edges, but interesting none the less in seeing a new platform in this space that is utilizing map data streaming for visuals.