For those who don't follow the OrbX scene closely, excellent news from the dominant scenery developer.  John V who seemed to be until now a little  "reserved" about FS20 says in a post today : 

With regard to the new MS simulator, we’re very excited about its entry into the market and as MS have already publicly committed to working with third parties then I am confident there will be opportunities for Orbx and the many other FS development studios all over the world.

In the same post, he announces an expansion of the regional LC scenery program !

We are hiring 3-4 more GIS specialists and texture artists for our UK Dev Centre. They will be involved in creation of new landclass textures for openLC and LC regions. We do intend to broaden our LC region reach to different parts of the world, for sure. (emphasis by me).

For the record he announced  the reactivation of the OpenLC program two weeks ago, I suppose that he doesn't say all this without good reasons. If you catch my drift.

The first conclusion I draw is that FS20 will not be a total new sim but will be built over the foundation of the FS family (including P3D). Which is good IMHO.  

 

Edited July 27, 20196 yr by domkle

All versions of FS have been built on top of the previous one. It’s not a bad thing, just how big software usually works. You can still make progress and you don’t have to cut all ties with older versions to do so. 

4 hours ago, domkle said:

he first conclusion I draw is that FS20 will not be a total new sim but will be built over the foundation of the FS family (including P3D). Which is good IMHO.  

That would be really bad. I hope you are very wrong. I am hoping for an entirely NEW sim. Please, MS, don’t make this an FSX v2.

4 hours ago, domkle said:

The first conclusion I draw is that FS20 will not be a total new sim but will be built over the foundation of the FS family (including P3D). Which is good IMHO.  

 

I seriously hope not! That would be quite the mistake from Microsoft, if they decide to re-use older code from software which is +12 years old, IMO... The screenshots/video material so far has been amazing and the tone and feeling from Microsoft about this new addition is very promising.

But please, please, ... I sincerely hope, that Microsoft (and whoever they have hired to develop this) will scrap ALL old code, and start completely afresh! That would mean no backward compatibility. No older legacy code, which could influence stability. 

OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised, if this new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (or XX or MMXX or whatever it ends up being called?) is really the old Microsoft Flight Simulator X (recompiled in 64-bits), with a new weather system (TrueSky for instance) with the possibility of utilizing streaming services for weather, ground textures etc as an extra service (for a fee of course 🙂). I really hope that it's not true (and I don't think it is, to be honest) but - as I said - I wouldn't be surprised. 

5 hours ago, domkle said:

The first conclusion I draw is that FS20 will not be a total new sim but will be built over the foundation of the FS family (including P3D). Which is good IMHO.  

How on Earth do you draw that conclusion on the basis of what was said? JV saying they are hiring new devs for landclass regions speaks more about their continued focus on P3D. Stop joining dots on lines that aren’t there.

5 hours ago, domkle said:

The first conclusion I draw is that FS20 will not be a total new sim but will be built over the foundation of the FS family (including P3D). Which is good IMHO.  

 

Eh, that's quite a "conclusion" to make by pure speculation.  I hope your assumption is wrong, as I want this new sim to be built as a modern game engine from the ground up with efficiency and performance in mind.  Leave the old tech in the past and lets start anew with a modern revolutionary platform instead.

We'll know in good time which direction FS2020 is going.

This is obviously pure AND biased speculation from my part 😃. Give me an evolution over a revolution anytime.To suffer years of aches coming with an entirely new flight simulation code ? Not for me. So yes!,  I see what I want to see. Like you do maybe, the hopeful of a New Age   😉 ? 

The important piece of news is obviously not my "first" conclusion (pure and biased remember !) though, it is that OrbX believes now that the new sim is an opportunity for all 3rd party developers. We are not talking of a small dev here, but of a major scenery company. The crispation/worries observed after the initial announcement seems a thing of the past. That is good.

We need all the good developers that made our sim world what it is, still in the game with FS20, the OrbX, Hifi, A2A, PMDG and others.

My guess is that Orbx has a potential market here for individual airports, if nothing else (i.e. if the scenery engine is as advanced as we're all speculating).

Whether it's an updated FSX or new sim written from scratch, a 3D model is an asset that's platform-agnostic except for special effects like lighting and environmental effects (snow, water). It's highly unlikely that MS will have the world covered with detailed airports in the default sim, so that's an opening for Orbx and other developers. 

1 minute ago, Paraffin said:

My guess is that Orbx has a potential market here for individual airports, if nothing else (i.e. if the scenery engine is as advanced as we're all speculating).

 

My guess is that the new sim will not cover the whole world with high quality imagery and that the OrbX GIS expertise (Holger Sandmann+Allen Kriesman now) will give them an edge to develop regional sceneries and not only airports. 

Yeah, I think I agree with Domkle.  The new sim looks to have great visuals in the places covered by serious photogrammetry, but there will still be a lot of the world populated by autogen over satellite images or random textures.  A company like ORBX could easily make a market for themselves "filling out" the areas not covered by photogrammetry.  

Edited July 27, 20196 yr by Mengy

2 minutes ago, Mengy said:

Yeah, I think I agree with Domkle.  The new sim looks to have great visuals in the places covered by serious photogrammetry, but there will still be a lot of the world populated by autogen over satellite images or random textures.  A company like ORBX could easily make a market for themselves "filling out" the areas not covered by photogrammetry.  

The problem here is that Orbx is only interested in scenery for popular flying areas, not the rest of the world. I can't blame them for that as a payware business strategy, but these are also parts of the world like the USA, UK, and Europe that already have good data for MS to work with. 

Orbx won't spend time on what they can't sell, so I can't see them being interested in filling in detail for places I like to fly. Like Papaua New Guinea, South America, or heck, even Japan where I currently have my FSEconomy PC-12 parked. 

1 hour ago, Anders Bermann said:

But please, please, ... I sincerely hope, that Microsoft (and whoever they have hired to develop this) will scrap ALL old code, and start completely afresh! That would mean no backward compatibility. No older legacy code, which could influence stability.  

Agreed - please give the addon devs the tools to link in and enhance the sim point-forward, but a revolution is needed rather than evolution to build a fundamentally new framework if we want next-gen capabilities to be bolted on for years to come. The devs will need to evolve a well, but a new platform and hooks will open up a new world of possibilities for them to take advantage of.

Those who wish to use their existing addons will still have the ability to run their other sims in parallel - they're not going to turn into pumpkins with the release of MSFS. 

I really hope the sim is groundbreaking in a way that Orbx stuff is *very* optional.

No offense to them, but I'm not interested in the realism of my scenery being tied to buying from them (or anyone like them).

To me the MSFS 2020 release will be a disappointment if somehow it's easily allowing old scenery and airports to work very quickly/easily without much change by an add-on dev.

I want a massive leap into the future here.

Edited July 27, 20196 yr by irrics

I think the new sim is two sims in one.  The OFFLINE version is the target for Orbx and all the others and the online version will have all the new bells and whistles (streaming scenery).  both will have updated code/graphics/weather etc

Edited July 27, 20196 yr by sightseer

 

11 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

The problem here is that Orbx is only interested in scenery for popular flying areas, not the rest of the world. I can't blame them for that as a payware business strategy, but these are also parts of the world like the USA, UK, and Europe that already have good data for MS to work with. 

Orbx won't spend time on what they can't sell, so I can't see them being interested in filling in detail for places I like to fly. Like Papaua New Guinea, South America, or heck, even Japan where I currently have my FSEconomy PC-12 parked. 

Specifically for PNG, who is the only developer on the market  who offers two excellent products and a decent vector overlay ? 

That being put aside, I am the same kind of flyer (PNG, Indonesia, South Am , etc.) so I feel the  pain and I was a little frustrated to see OrbX only revisiting what I call its former glories.  

If you read the whole thread at OrbX you'll see that I put this delicate issue on the table in two posts. And I found it interesting that John V wrote below "We do intend to broaden our LC region reach to different parts of the world, for sure". That's new coming from OrbX.  The FS20 announcement may have interesting effects on the scenery market.