to those who complain about stutters at this stage

[dtrjones 356]

2 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I don't know who is going to lose out the most (if anyone), but I do know it's NOT going to be P3D since their world of operations and customer base is far different than that Microsoft are aiming at, which is the XBOX user ... and that's ignoring the fact P3D is ESP contract with ... drum roll ... Microsoft! 😉   Do you know what's in P3D V5?   Do you know what's in XP12?

Personally I view MSF new product as a potential gold mine if they can attract and keep the XBOX users.  The PC release first is a great idea to bring around proof of concept, get feedback, and then tune the product for XBOX user base where there is a huge potential of revenue ... and heck, PC simmers benefit from it also.  The Windows Store supports PC and XBOX deployments, copy protection, sales, updates, etc. etc. ... it's a huge benefit for Indie devs like me and mainstream devs.

IMHO, IF MFS released today, the platform at most risk of losing users is XP followed by DCS (if Microsoft include "combat" or provide an SDK that supports combat).  P3D will not lose government contracts because of MFS.  But it's not going to happen overnight, never has in the past and never will today ... it will take time and that's making considerable "assumptions" of what MFS will turn out to be.

I have and will remain cautiously optimistic ... it's Microsoft's job to draw in that XBOX market.

Cheers, Rob.

Yeah I was trying deliberately to exclude the word of operations and core customer base from P3D, that will live on and the work Lockhead are doing is fantastic to support and make such a system available. But for the likes of the casual simmer it looks like the younger sexier MSFS will steal wannabe pilots and many who have been in this industry a while, I think that's inevitable especially once the DLC market grows.

I've seen a trailer for X-Plane 12 - it didn't do much for me. X-Plane is an outstanding sim, it's my go to platform right now. But Laminar Research are a small team, they are lacking severely in X-Plane where FS2020 will be particularly strong (I don't really need to see FS2020 for that - FSX still does a lot of things better than X-Plane) however it is sufficently different enough to sustain interest with its flight dynamics, lighting model, ease of use (yes really) and growing array of quality aircraft and scenery.

I just don't see the same 'advantage' for P3D that X-Plane has, it's just to similar. Maybe version P3D v5 will change all that...

[HughesMDflyer4 470]

13 hours ago, nickhod said:

There's no reason that a flight simulator shouldn't achieve the performance that we see in AAA FPS titles. In many cases a flight simulator scene will be less polygon and texture heavy than a complex FPS scene. A character model in an FPS might be 50k polys, and you might have 4 or 5 on screen, all with their own physics an AI, then all the highly detailed scenery. For comparison a polygon budget of an entire aircraft (inside and out) might be 200-300k polys.

Thanks for clearing up so much of the misinformation in this thread. Many flight simmers don't understand how graphics engines work at a core level, and would be surprised by how much more actually happens under the hood in AAA open world titles and "3D shooters" (as people keep calling them) compared to flight sims. Some scenes in GTA V have nearly double the poly count of your average scene in P3D, for example.

[Mace 1,927]

1 hour ago, dtrjones said:

I just don't see the same 'advantage' for P3D that X-Plane has, it's just to similar. Maybe version P3D v5 will change all that...

What 'advantage' would that be?

[JonP01 104]

On 9/15/2019 at 8:54 PM, 767lover said:

If you cannot resist talking about, maybe write a letter to the team or start a separate topic on it, but please do not bring it up every time.....thanks a lot!

Last time I checked the forums on this website were democratic rather than dictatorial. If people want to complain, they should. I'm honestly heartily sick in this day and age of people telling other people what they are not allowed to say.

[Superdelphinus 718]

How on earth do we know they are targeting Xbox users with the new sim? From what I’ve read it pretty clearly suggests the target is PC and then make it work somehow with Xbox at later date. It seems to me that people referring to Xbox and/ or Xbox users is used as some sort of sleight on this forum, which is odd to me given how large the install base (I.e there are likely to be many Xbox and PS4 users registered to this forum). 

[Superdelphinus 718]

10 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

.EDIT: XBOX Scarlett projected at $1000 retail, 8K @ 120 FPS support ... the numbers are in favor of XBOX not the PC in terms of market share and cost of entry.

I don’t think they’ve said it’s 8k@120 fps have they? Everything I’ve read has suggested 8k, 120hz, ray tracing, etc. So it can do 8k, it can do 120fps - none of the press (I’ve seen at least) suggests it does both at the same time.

sony have said that the PS4 is going to target standard 4k@120h fps (in the same way that PS4 pro targets 4k/30 - that would make the Scarlett need to be at least 4x more powerful (not to mention somewhere between 16 and 32 times more powerful than the current Xbox). Seems unlikely. 

Edited September 18, 2019 by Superdelphinus

[Krakin 5,773]

5 hours ago, Superdelphinus said:

How on earth do we know they are targeting Xbox users with the new sim? From what I’ve read it pretty clearly suggests the target is PC and then make it work somehow with Xbox at later date. It seems to me that people referring to Xbox and/ or Xbox users is used as some sort of sleight on this forum, which is odd to me given how large the install base (I.e there are likely to be many Xbox and PS4 users registered to this forum). 

Well I think he's way off base on that point for sure. MS know they'll get the bulk of their customers getting the sim through Game Pass Ultimate on PC and more people will buy it full price to play on PC. Xbox customers have not been buying first party games by the bucket loads and I don't see a flight sim turning that around.

[dtrjones 356]

19 hours ago, Mace said:

What 'advantage' would that be?

That X-Plane has distinctive qualties which differ to the existing Microsoft based flight simulators that it will not suffer as much when Microsoft introduces the new Microsoft Flight Simulator.

[dtrjones 356]

22 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/next-xbox-release-date-rumors,news-27484.html  ... Phil Spencer said 4K 60 FPS is there current focus.  8K is important support as within the next 2 years 8K will be mainstream and 4K hard to find.  Good news is one can still run 1080p or 2160p and get the benefit of up-scaling to 4320p.

Can I have a go Rob 😛 Lockheed Martin and Laminar Research have relatively small development teams, Micorosoft's ACES was bigger around 60 poeple in the studio, not sure how many devs though. But the problems were the same being to evolve a title to largely fit the same set of 3rd party content creators and consumors. The mantra never changes, we need more features, better graphics, more complex planes, more airports, better SDK and the release is in 18 months time...

It's only when Microsoft had an enforced break that they started to look at development differently which for me is when we saw a decent change in the graphics engine in Microsoft Flight. Microsoft are doing the same thing with the new Microsoft Flight Simulator and will have the progress they made in MS Flight and Dovetails FSW to draw back from but without any of the time pressures to make this stuff somewhat 3PC friendly in 18 months time frame before the next release. 

Basically this means more time has given them the freedom to go back to the drawing board to implement a more modern approach to the flight simulator platform which can perform better, look incredible and still allow content creators to contribute as they have done before with hopefully relatively minor tweaks.

Well thats my hope anyway.

Edited September 19, 2019 by n4gix
REMOVED EXCESSIVE QUOTE!!! Please don't quote the entire post you are replying to!

[LHookins 3,103]

2 hours ago, dtrjones said:

Micorosoft's ACES was bigger around 60 poeple in the studio

My understanding was that the team that created FSX was 250 people, and the team working on Microsoft Flight was around 50.  Your "60" sounds about right for Flight.  No idea how big the current team is.

Lots of new technology since 2006.

Flight's Hawaii looked like it was assembled the same way as the scenery in a shooter.  Not everything was super high resolution, but there was an incredible amount of detail.  Text on a PortaPotty was blurry, but text on a fuel pump was easily readable, although not as high res as what you'd see in a cockpit.  Although never mentioned anywhere in the sim, someone discovered the Robin's Nest from the Magnum P.I. TV show.  Odd that it never became an Aerocache.

Flight's scenery wasn't quite good enough to be a shooter, but certainly good enough for a flight sim, even one where you could walk around on the ground and explore things.  I expect similar with MSFS.  Remember, it doesn't have to be perfect, just better than what we currently have.  We don't need Arma graphics for the whole world, but they'd be nice in special locations like airports.

Hook

[vortex681 806]

14 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/next-xbox-release-date-rumors,news-27484.html  ... Phil Spencer said 4K 60 FPS is there current focus.  8K is important support as within the next 2 years 8K will be mainstream and 4K hard to find.

You'd have to hope that Phil Spencer has done his research, but I think his statement is very (very!) optimistic, at best. You only need to look at Steam's hardware stats (probably the largest, publicly available gamer database: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam) to realise that even 4k may not be mainstream in 2 year's time - less than 2% of gamers were using it in the survey and that number has hardly changed in the last year or two. The vast majority use 1920x1080 or less. Most gamers just don't have the hardware to run games at 4k and, unless prices drop dramatically, are not likely to be able to afford it in the foreseeable future. Manufacturers are still producing new full HD and QHD monitors - they understand the market. I shudder to think what hardware would be required to run 8k games at reasonable framerates - or what it would cost!

Even if Phil Spencer was talking about consoles, I'd be very surprised if 8k TVs were widespread enough in 2 years to be considered mainstream. Here in the UK, TV programmes broadcast in 4k are still very much in the minority - half the people I know don't even own a 4k TV yet. Unless the next XBox (Project Scarlett) has some special, secret way of processing the data, I just don't see how you'd be able to successfully play games at 8k with it using "Zen 2 and Navi architecture".

Edited September 19, 2019 by vortex681

[nickhod 425]

16 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

So Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Laminar Research all did this out of spite?  Or are you just saying all these developers are bad software engineers?  So what exactly is the reason?  Please don't say "old code" because Laminar Research claimed they re-wrote over 80% of XP11 code to leverage modern hardware.  Polygon count isn't the only metric to performance.

Where has this 80% rewrite claim come from? Can't find a reference to that anywhere. LR haven't even finished porting the engine renderer to Vulkan, seems hard to believe they would rewrite that much but not target Vulkan.

I'm not sure what's contentious about what is being said.

A game is either going to be CPU or GPU bottlenecked eventually. (If it's IO bottlenecked something is really wrong).
For a GPU bottlenecked game, you'll see frame rate improvements, to a point, by using a more powerful GPU.
For a CPU bottlenecked game, you'll see frame rate improvements, to a point, by using a more powerful CPU.

Unlike FSX, P3D and XP, modern games are almost always GPU bottlenecked due to they way they've been written.

Specifically, using libraries like Vulkan they can asynchronously populate command buffers across many CPU threads and let the library handle the command pipeline.
From that you can achieve a much higher degree of parallel and asynchronous processing than you could in the past.
You can also let the GPU handle so much of this work, where you couldn't in the past.
For example, vertex and fragment shaders, running on the GPU, can achieve a lot of effects that would be done with CPU draw commands before.

The net result of all that is that you drive the GPU much harder with more efficiency.

Developers didn't write code like that in the past, because the hardware and libraries didn't exist to do it.

Aerofly FS2 is an example of a sim that's been written recently from a "clean slate", targets Vulkan, and achieves amazing frame rates even in complex conditions.

[ca_metal 2,025]

5 hours ago, nickhod said:

Where has this 80% rewrite claim come from? Can't find a reference to that anywhere. LR haven't even finished porting the engine renderer to Vulkan, seems hard to believe they would rewrite that much but not target Vulkan.

And MS has the tools to handle well the new APIs/libraries as they designed the O.S (Windows 10) and the API (Directx12). Besides that, they have direct contact with Nvidia guys, I would'nt be surprised if we had a new Nvidia driver launch when MSFS2020 is released, with custom profile for it.

Being a console title means they will aim for efficiency. They will try to the GPU as much as possible as it will be way more powerfull than the CPU.

Edited September 19, 2019 by n4gix
REMOVED EXCESSIVE QUOTE!!! Please don't quote the entire post you are replying to!

[vortex681 806]

11 minutes ago, nickhod said:

Aerofly FS2 is an example of a sim that's been written recently from a "clean slate", targets Vulkan, and achieves amazing frame rates even in complex conditions.

What "complex conditions" are you talking about? I was under the impression that framerates in AFS2 were so good because it generally lacked the complexity of other flight sims.

[nickhod 425]

57 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

What "complex conditions" are you talking about? I was under the impression that framerates in AFS2 were so good because it generally lacked the complexity of other flight sims.

Complex scenery. The downtown NYC for example.

Aerofly has improved a lot and now has, via addons, Garmin navigation systems, third-party ATC, a demo of road traffic, animated traffic in airports, a demo of dynamic water. None of of these have affected frame rates at all. The simulation depth of airliner controls has also improved massively this year.

The two big omissions I see over XP are complex weather and full dynamic night lighting.

You could argue that adding those would see frame rates drop from highs of 150+ to 15-20. I think that's questionable. No doubt there would be a performance impact, but an 70 - 80% drop doesn't sound right to me.

On the flip side, you can take rendering settings down to minimums in X-Plane, fly on a clear day with minimal cloud, and frame rates don't shoot up into the 100s.

Edited September 19, 2019 by nickhod