Since they are only showing slow moving aircraft, and not the F16 let alone a jet airliner, I am suspicious of their reason. Is it  to cover the tendency of your CPU to get overloaded if speed is in the equation. I have seen this approach in advertising for earlier pre-releases, and is a good marketing scheme, get them hooked before  showing the real life problems

Now don't drop the "k" in skeptic to describe my cautious stand on this new candy, which BTW might become a new addiction for some. ( for example...... ME )

Edited October 5, 20196 yr by peppy197

There are way more tools available to the programmer and technologies have come a long way in the last 10-15 years. We could still be a year away from release so  maybe they just don't have any advanced faster moving jets to show yet. Fighters they've already mentioned will come at a later time. There won't be any "marketing schemes". Do you really think that Microsoft will work all these years to give us the best flight simulator that has ever been offered that will just crumble if you go too fast? Have faith in them that they will work out all performance issues they come across.

We're in good hands here.

I've seen all the big, bold statements as people get excited but I am firmly in the "wait and see" camp. It simply prevents disappointment.

Last time I've checked the A320 was classified as an "airliner". I am not trying to be a smartypants here, but if they showed us everything in that preview event there ain't much more to show off during the feature preview series. There are a lot of open ends that's for sure. But airliners is not one of them as they featured the A320 in the trailer and a brief clip in the insider home

Edited October 5, 20196 yr by OSJJ1985

As only a prealpha was presented, the ploy would fizzle out long before release. Also the 940 cruising at a speed in excess of 300 knots is no Cub.

Performance is still a thing that could make this sim fail. It's not only your hardware, there's your internet connection, MS's server park size, your distance to it and Azure AI performance (at least for the weather it must be used on the fly). All this game-streaming technology is rather unproven. We have seen performance with 15 simultaneous users, not tens of thousands yet.

They are working on planes with jet engines too, they said so in one of the interviews.
Besides that they already showed jets in the E3 trailer (at least the Airbus) so it's pretty fair to assume they will be coming. Still in the interviews they also mentioned they want to cover every main type of aircraft.

As for performance, all calculations are done on your client. From internet what is going to be taken is weather, orthos and other things. But we know there is an offline mode with probably more standard landclass so even without internet you can do anything you want, just with less detail. So it's not a game streaming technology like Google Stadia where all calculations are done server side.

Edited October 6, 20196 yr by france89

Also I understand the weather is a dynamic ecosystem with everything being affected by each other. So an offline weather may not be real weather data, but it will "evolve" on its own according to physical laws. At least that's how I interpret it. You do make a good point about real live weather second by second though. It will be interesting to see how this pans out on a multiplayer basis like Vatsim when people with different connection get slightly different weather patterns, due to the in-game engine reacting a little differently to everyone's connection capabilities. 

Are they calling this a VFR sim? Then likely little ATC and few irons.

I like VFR if the scenery is awesome, which is certainly the case with 2020, so I would still be a buyer

Edited October 6, 20196 yr by peppy197

On 10/6/2019 at 4:26 AM, peppy197 said:

Since they are only showing slow moving aircraft, and not the F16 let alone a jet airliner, I am suspicious of their reason. Is it  to cover the tendency of your CPU to get overloaded if speed is in the equation. I have seen this approach in advertising for earlier pre-releases, and is a good marketing scheme, get them hooked before  showing the real life problems

Now don't drop the "k" in skeptic to describe my cautious stand on this new candy, which BTW might become a new addiction for some. ( for example...... ME )

Which is why I want the ability to pre-cache scenery based on a flight plan, that I submit days in advance, so the scenery can be downloaded and cached in preparation for a weekend flight.

12 hours ago, MatthewS said:

Which is why I want the ability to pre-cache scenery based on a flight plan, that I submit days in advance, so the scenery can be downloaded and cached in preparation for a weekend flight.

Even though my download was clocked at 877 Mbps I doubt that willl always be the mean average for it , what about latency effects, so if we need 60G for a scenery area of 900 sq miles, which is still only 30 by 30 miles, and say my real  effective speed is 120 Mbps, that would take at least half an hour to download the first 60G, and at the speed of an airliner the reloading of new scenery.......you do the math

I guess we'll have to live and see.

We don't know if they managed to develop something that is able to compress the data sent/received for example. Maybe they did and we don't know yet.

15 minutes ago, peppy197 said:

Even though my download was clocked at 877 Mbps I doubt that willl always be the mean average for it , what about latency effects, so if we need 60G for a scenery area of 900 sq miles, which is still only 30 by 30 miles, and say my real  effective speed is 120 Mbps, that would take at least half an hour to download the first 60G, and at the speed of an airliner the reloading of new scenery.......you do the math

If they are offering an offline mode you already have data to start off with. So you are essentially downloading the difference between offline mode and the full scale package. Furthermore the higher you are the less accurate the scenery needs to be the smaller the downloadles (if any as I guess offline mode is sufficient for 10,000ft and above). Just my thoughts