September 26th Update - Feature Discovery Series Preview: World

[pracines 823]

1 hour ago, HughesMDflyer4 said:

Except the problems a select few are reporting have nothing to do with execution of the sim, they are related to the current stage of development. It would be like having the fire department come to your house to put a fire out, and as they're actively putting out the fire, yelling "my house is still on fire!"

I understand what your position is. Your analogy about a fire would be ok, but nobody is suggesting that MS is not working or not improving the sim or that they are doing a bad job.  

We select few would not assume "everything is going to be fine, don't worry", and we don't assume we know the outcome of the sim is going to be without long standing issues even from the past. In the context of Matthew's feedback, to me he is wanting more substance/revelation of practical day to day in sim use, as this would be of more use for MS to get some possibly very beneficial early feedback. It would definitely make the alpha and beta test be more productive.  

Again I understand there is going to be an official Alpha test, but what are all these previews for, but  for us to comment on? Nobody's opinion about what they perceive is invalid unless its a plain lie about the product.

Avsim would suddenly be of no use if the only feedback that was acceptable was positive and never negative.

So many times I have seen flight simmers type something like - I just want to fly without problems, issues, flaws, CTD, ect. - If there are graphical issues now (pre-alpha) that get solved BEFORE the alpha test, all the better.

It is possible that Matthew saw something that nobody at MS saw concerning the cloud popping - Mathew may have excellent vision and a well trained eye that very few people have, who knows. But to attack him w/o knowing him, its not right. He may have done the community a great service by pointing out specifics like autogen popping that we ALL want to avoid this time around....this needs emphasis now, not later.  

 

 

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

20 minutes ago, pracines said:

Again I understand there is going to be an official Alpha test, but what are all these previews for, but  for us to comment on? Nobody's opinion about what they perceive is invalid unless its a plain lie about the product.

Simply to give us a sneak peek of this unreleased simulator and to make us excited. I am sure none of us would be content if they just kept silent and didn't show anything new until its release. Most of the footage they've been posting is several months old, so there is not much reason to report every single flaw right now. I understand you don't want a repeat of the Flight Simulator X beta, but this one is still in pre-alpha.

Posting the same things over and over again about the same issues and demanding for longer and more specific videos is a bit disrespectful towards the developers who go out of their way to capture, process and upload all that footage, while working hard on preparing a playable alpha version. If they were actively looking for feedback, they'd definitely not be posting screenshots captured almost a year ago. The Feedback Pipeline is coming in October, and it looks like they will be taking our feedback very seriously, when the time comes of course.

And regarding those issues, we can expect a huge visual leap over what we have now, but expecting visual perfection in 2020 will just make you disappointed. The hardware is just not there yet to present a realistic scene without any visual artifacts or cut corners. For example, the grainy clouds, the ray-traced reflection noise and the cut-off screen-space reflections in that hangar shot in the E3 trailer. A LOD system is still very much necessary today, so looking at an image that has non pop-in of any kind will remain impossible for a very long time. You just get to notice such issues much less in other modern games because their pace is so much faster.

[Poppapete 13]

So now I have:

Clip#1

Clip#2    SF Bay CA

Clip#3    Lake Powell UT

Clip#4

Clip#5

Clip#6

Clip#7

Clip#8    Central Park NY

Clip#9

 

 

[jcomm 5,961]

Did you guys notice they're teasing me ?

All of those Wonderful daylight colours and light variation, the stars, but still no Moon with proper phases ?

This was all arranged to tease me at the Seattle meeting - I knew they were at me...

 

Edited September 27, 2019 by jcomm

[FAZZ3 815]

“The information you seek, is much closer than you think.” 
 

I wonder what they mean by that? 🤔 

[ErichB 3,647]

Every MS based flightsim platform release in the past (since I've been simming), the comment was 'oh it's evolutionary, not revolutionary'.  Well, I think for the first time in my simming history, this will be the first revolutionary leap from everything we have known before.

If they can make a significant difference to the weather and aerodynamics, then this will surely kill other civilian based sims.

Edited September 27, 2019 by ErichB

[HughesMDflyer4 470]

1 hour ago, pracines said:

I understand what your position is. Your analogy about a fire would be ok, but nobody is suggesting that MS is not working or not improving the sim or that they are doing a bad job.

I think you may have missed the meaning of the analogy. My point is, clearly visible issues with something obviously unfinished are being pointed out as if the team working full time jobs aren't already aware.

 

1 hour ago, pracines said:

We select few would not assume "everything is going to be fine, don't worry", and we don't assume we know the outcome of the sim is going to be without long standing issues even from the past. In the context of Matthew's feedback, to me he is wanting more substance/revelation of practical day to day in sim use, as this would be of more use for MS to get some possibly very beneficial early feedback. It would definitely make the alpha and beta test be more productive.  

If they were in a position to be showing practical use, we would be in the final stage of beta testing and we'd know a release date. The fact that they're being so specific with their alpha registration and participants should make it clear that they have their own goals planned out and want to test specific features as they're ready. Testing isn't about having fun, it's about finding issues with parts of a product as they become usable.

 

1 hour ago, pracines said:

Again I understand there is going to be an official Alpha test, but what are all these previews for, but  for us to comment on? Nobody's opinion about what they perceive is invalid unless its a plain lie about the product.

Avsim would suddenly be of no use if the only feedback that was acceptable was positive and never negative.

So many times I have seen flight simmers type something like - I just want to fly without problems, issues, flaws, CTD, ect. - If there are graphical issues now (pre-alpha) that get solved BEFORE the alpha test, all the better.

Like @espent said above, developers know what's wrong with their code. Sometimes issues don't even need to be visible for a programmer to know they're there. I suspect the devs don't even really want the game to be shown in its current state, as they're aware of probably hundreds of small things wrong in the rendering pipeline alone. They're more than capable of spotting their own mistakes.

The whole point of the media we're getting right now isn't for the community to critique and offer feedback, it's to get us excited and give us an idea of the level of visual fidelity the engine is capable of. Beating issues to death here isn't going to help anyone. Once we have the game on our PCs, it's an entirely different story.

Edit: It's also worth remembering that unlike us, the devs can get much closer to parts of the environment than we can, and can analyze issues in an infinite number of conditions. It's very likely the clips shown are some of the few scenes currently even remotely presentable.

Edited September 27, 2019 by HughesMDflyer4

[jcomm 5,961]

4 minutes ago, ErichB said:

Every MS based flightsim platform release in the past (since I've been simming), the comment was 'oh it's evolutionary, not revolutionary'.  Well, I think for the first time in my simming history, this will be the first revolutionary leap from everything we have known before.

If they can make a significant difference to the weather and aerodynamics, then this will surely kill other civilian based sims. 

Waether-wise and from what I could gather from the shots and videos, it looks they're really going to surprise us.

FDM-wise, I believe too, although MSFS is already a very powerful fligtht simulation engine, provided one knows how to use it to get the best results. MS FLIGHT brought some nice new features, and there were some really interesting records in it's "cab" files for the FDM component... I guess FLIGHT SIMULATOR will make even better...

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

It's astonishing how people who used an over decade old engine until today (and probably will continue to use it) suddenly feels entitled to make demands to Microsoft (which by the way also developed the engine you used for so many years, in case you forgot). Perhaps they should have raised their voices towards that other famous company who supposely improved the ESP engine so much it is a new engine pretty much.

The other interesting thing i gather from the topic is how many expected to see "feature x" in this preview when it was obvious it would have been about "y" instead. Or how what they want to see is nowhere near what even Microsoft would want to show to potential customers (which i remind you, are not inferior to some of you just because they don't fly their PMDG aircraft on a 2500 dollars computer rig in a basement without pants on and a captain hat on the head). 😛

I am optimistic about what we have seen, and i am sure that we'll get more details in the incoming Discovery Series. More over a lot of the questions raised will be answered no doubt with youtube videos, streamers on youtube and twitch, the official forum (remember the tab on the official site about it?), Reddit AMAs and so on. Plenty of time yet.

[Noooch 1,084]

I don't understand, when I go to the insider page, I keep getting a "Discovery Channel" clip instead of a Flight Sim clip, does anyone know what I missed? 😛

More seriously, are we really be able to fly in this? anywhere we want? I still can't believe it...

[DaWu 779]

Whoever expects there to be no popups does have zero knowledge how games work and what modern hardware is capable of. This whole discussion is beyond ridiculous.

[ErichB 3,647]

23 minutes ago, DaWu said:

Whoever expects there to be no popups does have zero knowledge how games work and what modern hardware is capable of. This whole discussion is beyond ridiculous.

We need to accept that many flighsimmers have some degree of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.   We all do to some extent, but for some it is worse than others and therefore it is more difficult to overlook these things - sometimes,  practically impossible,  I wouldn't give this pop-up issue any more airtime at this stage of proceedings and contaminate the rest of the thread .  You won't win the argument or be able to reason because it is by its very nature irrational.

Edited September 27, 2019 by ErichB

[Superdelphinus 718]

Apologies if I missed it, but what do they mean by et tu Connor? If it’s a Shakespearean reference then someone close to them called Connor has double-crossed them in some way, or has joined a group against them - anyone know what that’s all about? If it’s just a literal translation then I’m even more lost.

who is Connor?!

[ErichB 3,647]

Are we getting previews of other aspects of the sim, as noted in the preview schedule?   I thought they might cover all 4 aspects?

[Superdelphinus 718]

39 minutes ago, DaWu said:

Whoever expects there to be no popups does have zero knowledge how games work and what modern hardware is capable of. This whole discussion is beyond ridiculous.

The flight sim community is a bit like the Galápagos Islands, evolutionary speaking.