World update and continued need for regional scenery makers

[pmb 5,137]

30 minutes ago, CaribbeanCLANK said:

I do enjoy a quality add-on but if this new sim performs anything like promised at launch, I personally will not see the need for Orbx land classes. Airport add-ons is another story... I will certainly continue to support Orbx and other 3rd party developers who make great airport add-ons if they bring their products (old and new) to the new sim.

I am very curious to see what is possible in this new sim from the 3rd party dev community.

 

Given the MS/ASOBO team acting quite openly and meaningful so far, I can imagine they will show at least to the main devlopers where there will be a place for them, and give them tools in the form of a preliminary SDK to begin working. I read at least from a few well-known developers like Aerosoft's Mathijs Kok they are positively looking forward towards the new sim.

Kind regards, Michael

[PWJT8D 446]

If I remember correctly, early on when we first saw the announcement video and the entire flight sim world erupted, ORBX didn't seem much enthused and kinda turned their noses up at it.

Think about it, they have invested a lot of time and money into True Earth. That was going to be the next wave of terrain technology that everybody would want to fill their simulators (and hard drives) up with. Something they probably expected only to expand upon in the years to come. Not only that, they have people who do Cityscapes.

Now a new simulator is previewed that will render the entire world with satellite data, every city, every road. Kinda right there in an instant made a good chunk of ORBX's business plan irrelevant. But we don't know for sure just yet, there may always be room for improvements. 

[DaWu 779]

If you think i will be buying region limited scenery updates for 50$+ which will ruin my performance you are wrong. With the scenery I saw so far I will never need any more addon scenery but probably airports. 

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

4 hours ago, carbonbasedlifeform said:

This is definitely not a criticism of the default regions. Everything looks amazing.

I had no doubt OrbX could make better cities or airports than , but in the discovery series video, isn't it safe to say there's plenty of room for guys like OrbX in MSFS2020 for regions? For example, autogen for the Northern Rockies? The right kind of trees and objects for different regions, etc.
 

 

Rather than retype a reply to another question like this, I just quoted it below. 

Baiscally they’ve identified everything in the world and Azure will identity 1.5 trillion trees and other objects to create them. 

Based on the bullet points in my post below, I frankly don’t see addon scenery developers having a lot of work ahead of them considering what MS is pulling off in this new sim.

 

38 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

That’s not what they said in the video, all cities on earth, all airports on earth, all roads on earth and all mountains on earth. See the screen shots of the bullet points. Azure is going to generate and detect all tress in the world, etc, etc.

Based on the two screen shots of bullet points for what they have and what they will generate using Azure, I don’t think there will be a whole lot of scenery development needed by 3rd party, unless it’s for even more detailed airports or very specific scenery items.

 

 

[Taver 57]

I think Orbx will go back to it's roots. Developing high detailed smaller airports. 

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

My opinion is based on flying low and slow. Is Azure really going to model all the types of trees?

 

[CaribbeanCLANK 134]

3 hours ago, pmb said:

Given the MS/ASOBO team acting quite openly and meaningful so far, I can imagine they will show at least to the main devlopers where there will be a place for them, and give them tools in the form of a preliminary SDK to begin working. I read at least from a few well-known developers like Aerosoft's Mathijs Kok they are positively looking forward towards the new sim.

Kind regards, Michael

I have been pleasantly surprised at how open and transparent Microsoft has been so far. The team working on the new Age of Empires could learn a thing or two from the MSFS team when it comes to dev/community relations.  Also, they seem very keen on involving the community (simmers and developers). 

If all goes well, I am sure ORBX and many others can find a place to thrive moving forward.

 

1 hour ago, PWJT8D said:

If I remember correctly, early on when we first saw the announcement video and the entire flight sim world erupted, ORBX didn't seem much enthused and kinda turned their noses up at it.

Think about it, they have invested a lot of time and money into True Earth. That was going to be the next wave of terrain technology that everybody would want to fill their simulators (and hard drives) up with. Something they probably expected only to expand upon in the years to come. Not only that, they have people who do Cityscapes.

Now a new simulator is previewed that will render the entire world with satellite data, every city, every road. Kinda right there in an instant made a good chunk of ORBX's business plan irrelevant. But we don't know for sure just yet, there may always be room for improvements. 

I thought about it a bit more and maybe things might not be so grim for ORBX and some of it's products. 

I currently live on a small island in the Caribbean... the Commonwealth of Dominica... heard of it? Most haven't and many think it is the Dominican Republic. Anyways, all these petabytes of data still may not benefit certain parts of the Caribbean like it will a city like London or a region like southern California. Some regions will be represented with stunning accuracy while others will not be as detailed simply because of the amount of data available. Just looking at bing maps I can see that the imagery is from before the events of hurricane Maria in 2017. 

After a natural disaster of that magnitude, it is not just man made landmarks that have changed, natural ones like rivers and sections of coastlines have also been altered. And trees.... a lot less trees. 

Just some fuel for thought. I can't complain because if this sim works the way they say it will, the default scenery of the Caribbean in the new MSFS will be light years better than default scenery (even some add-ons) on the market now, but maybe certain parts of the world (like Dominica) might need that special touch that the talented folks at various 3rd party dev teams can provide. 

We will just have to wait and see 

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

6 hours ago, cepact said:

Why are you worried about not having to buy addons ?

I’m not.

[PWJT8D 446]

Just now, CaribbeanCLANK said:

....After a natural disaster of that magnitude, it is not just man made landmarks that have changed, natural ones like rivers and sections of coastlines have also been altered. And trees.... a lot less trees.

As flight simmers we are used to having the weigh the pros and cons. Your point falls into the cons category. Having satellite terrain data for sure is the best thing to happen for us but than also going that route there will be a delay on how updated that data is. Google Maps hasn't updated the imagery of my house in 3 or so years.

But the good news is the developers said that our world will be changing and evolving as the satellite imagery is updated. So there is hope that in such cases of a natural disaster that at some point we should see it reflected in the sim.

[Greazer 1,320]

The Orbx prices just for one region or state are totally exorbitant.  I hope the developers are listening.  They need to get why XP was successful getting about 15,000 3d airports into the sim. It's because they built the tools and process for the community to build the airports out for them. It's totally brilliant. Once uploaded the airports are reviewed and become part of the sim.  This should happen with FS2020. Make the tool to tweak and override the default autogen and a process for them to be reviewed.  You will see before long everywhere will have detailed and more accurate autogen and we will not have to pay crazy ridiculous prices for it.

Greazer.

[ZKOKQ 984]

3 hours ago, PWJT8D said:

ORBX didn't seem much enthused and kinda turned their noses up at it.

Yes, they turned their noses up at X Plane too, now they are pumping out X Plane addons at a faster rate than P3D/FSX. If I was Orbx, I would be worried.

[be1a1 25]

Orbx terrain products will become irrelevant for sure and I am happy because now they can focus all their time and resources on developing airports which translates into airports being developed and released quickly! 

I am also wondering since microsoft already had the photo scenery in place all the developers need to work on is improving the airport ground textures and also add the 3d models would that result in faster production times because I have read it takes longer to get the ground stuff done

 

[Dominique_K 10,146]

3 hours ago, Greazer said:

The Orbx prices just for one region or state are totally exorbitant.  I hope the developers are listening.  They need to get why XP was successful getting about 15,000 3d airports into the sim. It's because they built the tools and process for the community to build the airports out for them. It's totally brilliant. Once uploaded the airports are reviewed and become part of the sim.  This should happen with FS2020. Make the tool to tweak and override the default autogen and a process for them to be reviewed.  You will see before long everywhere will have detailed and more accurate autogen and we will not have to pay crazy ridiculous prices for it.

Greazer.

Just not true. The price of a region with tens if not hundreds of enhanced airports is 37 USD that you can have for half the price in most of their sales.

[HighTowers 1,434]

Oh man. I can see the feedback logs filling up about trees. 

 'Um your satellite data has a Maple tree 20m from my house but its actually a Sycamore tree. Please update!.'

[OSJJ1985 134]

34 minutes ago, domkle said:

Just not true. The price of a region with tens if not hundreds of enhanced airports is 37 USD that you can have for half the price in most of their sales.

Even at $18 per region.... you have to translate that on a global scale. How many region would you need to fill Africa? Africa has more than 50 countries. So let's say they did a region for each country (some of them probably needing 2-3). But let's stick with 50... 50*18 = 900. $900 for Africa alone. I am going to be very conservative and just multiply that by 4 for the rest of the world... makes $3,600. Let's say you had to subscribe for online services (not the "musthaves" like software updates or hotfixes, but the "wannahave" stuff like the best scenery definition) and let's say that were $20/month (which might as well be less). That makes it 15 years to get even with just P3D + Orbx regions worldwide on sale(!!) (and that estimate was very consevative, judging by the region sizes they have). So yeah subscription, while obviously not favorable, is certainly not that pure evil thing that many people make it out to be.