54 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Except that MS reacquired the licence from Dovetail games and according to a post by PMDG (in their forums) it means that MS are able to use all the improvements that Dovetail made.

Seems likely FS2020 is based substantively on FSW.

Obviously no one knows at this point, but it's possible that they went the other way and started with a new engine, but pulled in parts of the existing code base where it made sense.

For instance, maybe all the avionics code could be reused.
Maybe the flight model could be used as a starting point to improve on.
Maybe the airport rendering code and assets were resued as 24k airports is a lot to recreate
Maybe some of the UI code could be salvaged, but with a different skin.

The "external world" rendering certainly looks completely new from what we've seen. I would guess that you'd have to start again with that part of the engine to get the performance people are expecting.

My point is that you can get a lot of value from an old code base without building on it completely.

MSFS2020 = FSW modded to 64b + Bing data + Azure AI.

 

28 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Because PMDG were considering taking up the licence BUT decided against it because according to the terms of the licence MS could take back the licence at any time and PMDG would also grant MS the rights to use whatever improvements they made to the code.

I don't think it was nearly as simple as that. It appeared that PMDG was very keen to acquire the licence and it was only when DTG got it that they seemed to suddenly start criticising the arrangement.

With regards to the graphics engine, the bottom line is that no one outside of the actual devs involved has any idea what is being used. Anything else is just pure speculation.

Edited August 20, 20196 yr by vortex681

13 minutes ago, nickhod said:

Maybe some of the UI code could be salvaged, but with a different skin.
 

That was the weakness of FSW in my opinion.

The User Interface looked so cartoonish and basic, not to mention the loading screen without any progress bar, you basically had to wait in front of your screen without knowing for how long. That was just a nightmare.

I would love an XPlane11 like UI, were you can see the position of the gate on an airport diagram before selecting it, it is so convenient. So you don't have to look on a separate chart and hope the gate numbers are the same.

Hopefully, we will have our hands on it in the alpha phase and maybe have a word to say about it before release!

FSW was 64bit but I think Microsoft have a new code for MSFS to take advantage of more modern hardware, the GPU has advanced faster than the CPU in the past 5years, and the present sims do not make full use of todays GPU.

Late September "Feature Discovery Series-Preview" 1 World  2 Weather  3 Aerodynamics 4 Cockpits, this may tell us all we need to know.

Edited August 20, 20196 yr by rjfry

My God, some of you guys are making my head hurt.

The only thing we know for sure is that MS uses Unity to develop products for Mixed Reality and that it seems that these products might be used in FS20.

 

We won't have to wait too long to find out the details. We'll be getting plenty of info sooner rather than later at least. Nothing wrong with speculation though. Personally I think it looks like some kind of ESP 2.0. Not built off what fsw was because that ended up being an unoptimised mess unfortunately, I looks like they've really recoded a lot and built something new.

23 minutes ago, domkle said:

The only thing we know for sure is that MS uses Unity to develop products for Mixed Reality and that it seems that these products might be used in FS20.

Or it's just as likely that they might not. Whilst I'm not accusing you of it, there are so many opinions here being delivered as pseudo-facts.

1 hour ago, MatthewS said:

Because PMDG were considering taking up the licence BUT decided against it because according to the terms of the licence MS could take back the licence at any time and PMDG would also grant MS the rights to use whatever improvements they made to the code.

Read about it in their forums.

So, guess what?  MS have now taken back the licence from Dovetail and it's now the basis of FS2020, IMO.

If all that was true they would have done it years ago at the beginning of the project, not right now at the point they are starting to go public. What did they base the alpha builds back in March/April that half of those clips are from if they weren’t able to use any of the improvements in the fsw engine until August?

none of the assets we’ve seen so far look anything like FSX or fsw either, and from what we’re assuming about the AI and streaming tech, none of that is in either of those two engines either. 

It may be that is based on an old engine after all, but absolutely nothing we’ve seen so far proves, or even hints, that it is. 

25 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Or it's just as likely that they might not. Whilst I'm not accusing you of it, there are so many opinions here being delivered as pseudo-facts.

Hence the word "seems" and "might" in my post.

Then again, it is reasonable to surmise that a product developed with Unity for MR would find its way to FS20, specially when early teaser pics (eg Houston) show something  similar.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that Unity will be used in the sim proper.

People who believe that MSFS2020 is using FSW engine need to get their eyes checked.

At this moment on 8-20-19 not one of us here have any idea how Microsoft have developed the engine for the new sim.  We don't know if it's reused code from FSX or FSW, we don't know if it's coded completely from scratch, it could be any comination of any concept we could come up with.  It's all pure speculation.

What we do know, from the pics and vids we've seen so far, is this new engine is extremely capable and much more powerful than any previous version of the sim to date.

Personally I don't care if they are recycling some previous code or not, what matters is the final result, and so far it's looking very competent.  I am an amateur (hobbyist?) game dev myself and I often re-use code of mine from previous projects into new ones.  Good code is good code no matter how old it is or when it was written, and when recycled properly it can save tons of time while running just peachy integrated into new code.  IMHO of course.

3 minutes ago, Mengy said:

 

What we do know, from the pics and vids we've seen so far, is this new engine is extremely capable and much more powerful than any previous version of the sim to date.

 

We don’t, not through a few pics and 3-second trailers . We may surmise, speculate, imagine, hope, conjecture, guess, presume, suspect, suppose but we certainly do not know.😏

 Guys, if the people say they're not building on fsx but from it, shouldn't we just take their word for it? Why are we still speculating that it's the fsx engine?