Microsoft Flight Simulator Preview - 30th September

[Gulfstream 416]

5 hours ago, dal330200 said:

I made the switch a few months ago for the same reasons, leaving behind more than a thousand dollars in addons for P3D that have since been deleted and forgotten.  X-plane blew me out of the water because of orthos, consistent dynamic lighting and a development team that was fun to watch.  However, X-plane has failed to deliver just as P3D has in terms of decent weather, environment and realism, and consequently, have ignored the desires of the community for years about these issues.  On the other hand, developers have been slow to bring bug-free, realistic and fully-functional alternatives to the table too.  So, believe me, as long as this has the main features I want out of the box, I will be ditching both sims in a heartbeat.  Of course, there's still time for them to catch up and produce something good, but it's doubtful.  

I feel like a lot of this stagnation across the sim market over WAY too long of a period was simply because they didn't have to.

Once Microsoft left the market, there were essentially two simulators and neither one was necessarily a competitor to the other.

So they stuck with 10-year old weather engines and lighting systems, because why not?

[MatthewS 761]

Amazing!

[Gulfstream 416]

3 hours ago, n4gix said:

Asobo is the company that have created what appears to be a silk purse from a sow's ear. They are a very active French company who're on the cutting edge of both graphics assets and systems coding. They have apparently used FSX as a "template" to guide them as to what needs to be developed, but are writing much (most?) of the code from scratch.

They are the company that have ditched both table lookup and blade-element and come up with a fresh approach that can calculate in real time >1,000 data points to simulate much more accurate aerodynamics.

MS may be paying the bills, but Asobo are doing the work! With >200 members of their team, I'm fairly certain that they have the means to complete the task...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio

I am thanking both Asobo and Microsoft.  Whoever at Microsoft originally had the thought of "we can do this again" lit the spark.

Handing it to Asobo, clearly a group of insanely talented developers, was the fire. 

And they are stoking those flames by clearly paying attention to what the community is saying.  They know the flaws of the past and seemed to plan from day-1 to include every possible thing we've always wanted.

Things like already planning low-level integration for external cockpit hardware.  They know how technical the flight simulation community can get.  So you can use this on XBox One with a gamepad, or hook it up to your triple-monitor home cockpit setup with real switches.

My mind is blown at the moment from today's news.

[Gulfstream 416]

3 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I did find their website, but I see a lot of younger kids (very young kids) cartoon like games ... nothing wrong with that, but I didn't see a wealth of knowledge about flight?  https://www.asobostudio.com/games  I must admit, I've never used/played/exposed to any of their products/games and I love "Garfield" 🙂

It does look like great company to work for with internships for the younger generation of 3D modelers and programmers, but I say that about most entertainment companies.

Cheers, Rob.

Asobo produced "A Plague Tale: Innocence" in 2019 which was a fantastic game with a great, custom 3D engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Plague_Tale:_Innocence

[Krakin 5,726]

3 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

The MFS development team was asked and they said they don't know yet.  I don't think this is a big deal, most XBOX Live gamers are used to subscriptions so long as it brings them value ... serving world geo data is the value. 

Cheers, Rob.

Yeah as long as they're playing for multiplayer. Not for paying extra for a game that uses the cloud to augment a mostly single player experience. This would not go down well with the Xbox crowd AT ALL

[188AHC 2,138]

Multiplayer is a possibility

 It may appear on release or during beta is my guess. At any rate I believe it will be included sooner than later. 

[Mengy 814]

I just spent hours watching the pre-alpha footage released today, and I'm shocked in amazement.  This sim is such a generational leap over anything I've ever seen or experienced before.  If it flies as good as it looks I'll literally pay anything to own this.  And I'm not kidding.

[Emerson67 248]

Interview with developers!

World and Weather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDTT3oxArLI

Aerodynamics and cockpit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfmYfXOI1w   (to be uploaded)

Edited October 1, 2019 by Emerson67

[Krakin 5,726]

18 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

You lost me there, both are server based activities ... multiplayer is paying for the server expense and bandwidth ... global streaming data is paying for the server expense, rendering and bandwidth.  There is actually more work being done on a server for MFS geo data streaming than there is for existing Multiplayer games.

Cheers, Rob.

You really don't understand how things work in the console space and I don't think you know enough about what MS is doing to say there's more work being done on MSFS. Xbox Live caters to every single game that is capable of multiplayer. It has to track and store stats, cater very twitchy games etc. In any case I'd love to see you convince console gamers that they'd have to pay extra money a month to play a game that isn't a MMO.

[Paraffin 2,197]

33 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

You lost me there, both are server based activities ... multiplayer is paying for the server expense and bandwidth ... global streaming data is paying for the server expense, rendering and bandwidth.  There is actually more work being done on a server for MFS geo data streaming than there is for existing Multiplayer games.

I'm not sure this has been floated before, so here goes. Since this looks to be a huge bandwidth cost for MS streaming scenery at this resolution, what are the chances they might set this up as a P2P network like BitTorrent, to take some or most of the load off their servers? 

For example, if I have parts of WA state stashed locally on my drive because I fly there frequently, and you want to fly in WA, then my computer starts serving you the data while I have MSFS loaded, along with everyone else who has it on their drives. Anyone with a fast enough connection might not even notice the outgoing traffic. 

It wouldn't be the first "game" done that way. As just one example, the Elite Dangerous space game uses P2P connections between player computers to minimize load on their servers for the multiplayer part of the game. That's a tiny amount of data compared to what MS is showing for the scenery, but the model would still work for those with fast connections.

To be clear, I don't see any evidence that this is the plan. But it would answer the question of "How could MS serve that much data without a subscription."

Edit to add: Oooh, I just realized this would also help with latency issues for those far from the MS servers. If I'm in South Africa I could connect P2P to another South African simmer and have possibly faster uploads/downloads than reaching a distant MS server.

Edited October 1, 2019 by Paraffin

[Krakin 5,726]

2 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

But it would answer the question of "How could MS serve that much data without a subscription."

I can point to projects like Stadia that are already streaming tons of data for just the cost of the game. We can't make too many assumptions about what streaming is costing the companies. I've heard Phil Spencer say that they're managing to utilize Azure cheaply. That's mainly because Azure is not primarily a gaming platform.

[Paraffin 2,197]

@Krakin True, they might just piggyback onto the Azure business and Xbox cloud servers and maybe never care about the cost. 

[Krakin 5,726]

1 minute ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I don't need to know "how things work in the console space", no company is going to operate their product at a loss ... serving data to MFS users has real costs associated with it ...

How on earth do you know they'd be operating at a loss?? Did someone from MS tell you this or are you just passing your assumptions off as fact?

[mikeymike 356]

This is amazing!!! Wow...

so I guess addons won’t be needed???

or maybe just perhaps a payware aircraft 

and asp4??? 

And no more Ssd ???

just fast internet???

 

Edited October 1, 2019 by mikeymike

[jbcallender 53]

It is beautiful and I was initially a skeptic.  It is becoming increasingly apparent that it will be a subscription based model and not a software purchase.  Petabytes of scenery will be stored on an Azure server, the Xbox integration, etc.  New features and aircraft available for a monthly add-on subscription, no doubt.  That is how you defeat piracy and maintain a constant predictable revenue stream.

 

Jeff Callender