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Cruachan

Be careful what you wish for: a cautionary note

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If I made add-ons for P3D I’d be more angry at LM for letting the sim stagnate. Two lame patches this year. No innovation. When new features are added, they’re bugged or perform horribly. P3D is in a coma.  No wonder a new development has caught people’s attention so easily.

Edited by Chapstick

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As someone also stated, it's not quite so simple as announcement prior to release date, but also they're trying to generate interest for the community to participate in alpha testing. 

Edited by Kevin_28

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33 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

- It is great that the simmers can to a certain degree take part in the development of the new sim because MS / Asobo are actively listening to the simmers feedback.

Agreed. We are given to understand that MS/ASOBO are monitoring these forums and are keen to interact with their prospective user base. That being so, should we not expect that something is said to allay all the genuine, heart-felt concerns expressed in this thread? It is within their power to make or break their product and currently their silence is accomplishing nothing that could be interpreted as being positive. All it does is raise suspicions as to their true motives.

I want this project to succeed as much as the next person. All it would take is a few moments to explain what is happening regarding the MSFS2020 SDK. Is it too much to ask that, as a gesture of goodwill, they reassure existing 3rd Party Developers that they still have a fighting chance to survive through this turbulent period?

Regards,

Mike

 

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I will be one of the first to purchase MSFS , but ....

my current P3D looks great and I already use PR scenery only + custom AG. And as I use 2 pc’s in a WidevieW network, I will not be able to use that same setup at MSFS release. And perhaps it will never be possible ...

Surely the sky/Clouds look better in MSFS , but LM will also improve P3D.

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9 minutes ago, Chapstick said:

If I made add-ons for P3D I’d be more angry at LM for letting the sim stagnate. Two lame patches this year. No innovation. When new features are added, they’re bugged or perform horribly. P3D is in a coma.  No wonder a new development has caught people’s attention so easily.

Actually LM developers listened to all my suggestions and request since P3D 4.1 via public forums and  since P3D 4.4 via their private Beta forums. I can reach them directly at any time I need to, report any issues I have and interact with them without any issues, no intermediaries, no politics, nothing.. pure "work ethic". Same applies for customers (users) which can interact and receive a response directly from a LM developer from their forums.. can you say the same from any MS Developer for any product they do????

More over they show their faces on each FSExpo shows to meet and listen to users like yourself, but also to meet face to face 3rd party developers. If only MS would do the same, we wouldn't have wasted 11 pages of AVSIM resources here.

So I am very grateful by all the support provided by Lockheed Martin, they are an amazing team which has keep this hobby alive when FSX ceased operations..

Regards,
Simbol 

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On 11/13/2019 at 3:26 PM, Cruachan said:

Despite what we have been told there are absolutely no guarantees we can trust MS to encourage ongoing 3rd Party Support and Development by producing an SDK for the new simulator. Indeed, can we trust MS to do anything when their modus operandi is, as always, driven by commercial considerations?

Huh. They've talked in depth about the legacy mode that enables easy ports of a lot of current addons into the MSFS ecosystem, whilst developers also work on native applications. What on earth would be the point of such a system if they wouldn't offer up an SDK?


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I said the exact same thing 20 years ago, "DOOM's growth has exploded, but here you are comparing a "real" product that exists today DOOM, armed with ONLY screenshots and videos from future Half Life product?

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22 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

The level of interest would not have changed if it were 18 months, 8 months, 8 weeks, or 8 days before release.  

Cheers, Rob.

 

We're not talking about release, we're talking about alpha which likely includes people selected from all over the flight sim community and quite possibly newcomers as well. Not to mention that they had to take on the baggage left by Flight, and build up trust again, which lead to the whole Seattle event. Regardless, even though they were able to convince many of the more established critics, it is quite obvious here that many are still not convinced.

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On 11/15/2019 at 11:16 AM, Alan_A said:

Among the herd of elephants in the room is this one - developers may not be playing on a level field.  It's possible that PMDG's announcement of the NG3 for MSFS is a marketing ploy to generate present income.  It's also possible that, even in the absence of an SDK, they're having informal back-door conversations with the MSFS development team about what, in broad terms, might be required to bring a product to market.  PMDG is big enough and influential enough that Microsoft and Asobo might have a commercial interest in getting them out of the gate fast.  Such informal conversations happen from time to time.  I recall A2A reporting on a discussion they had with Laminar in which, by their account, they explained to Laminar what kind of hooks they'd need into the X-Plane engine in order to make Accu-Sim viable in X-Plane.  Not an exact analogy since there is in fact an X-Plane SDK.  But it's comparable to the extent that it represents an informal discussion between a major developer and a sim development team.

It's also possible that big developers are having these discussions even though the majority of developers are not.  That would be patently unfair to the majority of developers, but such things do happen in business.

The usual big caveat here - this is all speculative on my part.  I have no information about any of this and there's a good chance I'm wrong.  All I want to do is point out that we really don't have any idea what's in play in the MSFS development effort, and the absence of an SDK doesn't necessarily rule out some fast-track add-on efforts along the "first among equals" lines I've described.

I'd actually prefer to be wrong about things like this.  But in business, stuff happens.

 

According to the interview with FSelite with the Flight Simulator devs, they have already confirmed that they have contacted 60+ developers and will be providing the necessary tools for the addons to work.  Everyone here is also delusional if they do not think that the entire community will shift over to MSFS 2020.  Why would you stick with a platform that is aged and has reach most of its limitations (referring to Xplane and P3d). Sure you can say X-plane will EVENTUALLY support vulkan, great. That still does not provide volumetric clouds, a vastly improved lighting engine, or global satellite scenery. As a software developer and someone who has been actively following the development and policies from Microsoft's Xbox platform, which btw will include MSFS 2020 I do not see Microsoft abandoning this project at all.  It is a first party title, and all of Microsoft's current first party titles are included with their Xbox Game Pass, which is their main focus moving forward.  They are very actively buying studios to grow this content and MSFS will be one of their crown jewels.

On a side note, i think consumers would be wise to save their money and wait to find out more about what is to come.  I, personally have spent close to $4000 in flight sim addons and could easily live for a couple months without spending more money on legacy platforms.  

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On ‎11‎/‎15‎/‎2019 at 4:55 AM, fta2017 said:

EGt04.png

I wrote essentially the same thing several months ago. It is simply a clever marketing ploy to ensure continuing sales during the interim... :laugh:

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1 hour ago, Sethos said:

They've talked in depth about the legacy mode that enables easy ports of a lot of current addons into the MSFS ecosystem, whilst developers also work on native applications.

The "legacy mode" which you're talking about is only to support still .air files for addon planes which can't be implemented easy into the surface modeling system MSFS2020 has. Nothing more and nothing less.

There was no talk about "legacy mode" for scenery addons etc.

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Truth be told, I purchase products for the simulation platform I have right now, not the simulation platform of tomorrow.  I continue to support third-party developers for P3Dv4 for the time being, as long as they produce products I am interested in.

I fully expect that whenever MSFS has been released, not all of my favorite aircraft models are going to be available for it on Day 1.  Therefore, there is going to be some overlap in sim time for me between P3Dv4 and MSFS, until enough aircraft models are available in the latter to consider switching to it full time.

It seems to me that a lot of assumptions are being made about a lot of unknowns right now.  MSFS has shown off a 747-8i that they claim is study-level and will be available as a built-in aircraft from Day 1 when MSFS is released.  We know that PMDG has already announced their commitment to MSFS as a platform, via their NG3 announcement.  It makes me wonder, then, where did ADOBO get this 747-8i from - did they develop it from the ground up in-house?  Or is it possible that they sourced it as a new development for MSFS from PMDG, and PMDG hasn't yet gone public with that announcement yet?

Similarly, how do we know that some of the other third-party add-on developers for weather, AI traffic, ATC, etc. aren't actually also being contracted to contribute to the MSFS default platform, out of the box?

I say just sit back and wait for everything to be revealed in due time.  And keep on keeping on with what we already have in the meantime.  There is enough smoke from enough developers that I trust (PMDG, Aerosoft, FSL among others) that I think MSFS will have legs.

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29 minutes ago, cparrott73 said:

It makes me wonder, then, where did ADOBO get this 747-8i from - did they develop it from the ground up in-house?

In the latest interview, they stated unequivocally that the aircraft currently seen are 100% in-house developed.


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3 hours ago, simbol said:

More over they show their faces on each FSExpo shows to meet and listen to users like yourself, but also to meet face to face 3rd party developers. If only MS would do the same, we wouldn't have wasted 11 pages of AVSIM resources here.

For starters, they said they want to attend as much shows as possible, and second, MSFS wasn't announced yet when FSExpo was happening. So I'm not sure how you can already accuse them of not attending any events (see XO19 for example).

Reading through this thread it feels like people are inventing stuff so they can bash on MS/Asobo. What do you prefer then? That we keep using 13 year old software until the end of times?

3 hours ago, simbol said:

can you say the same from any MS Developer for any product they do?

Yes I can actually, the devs that worked on Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition carefully listened to feedback during the Beta.

3 hours ago, simbol said:

Actually LM developers listened to all my suggestions and request since P3D 4.1 via public forums

Great for you but did they improve performance? Fix the time shift bug? Timezone bugs? 

 

Anyway, this thread is sad to read and I'm not sure what the purpose is of this discussion.

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18 minutes ago, cparrott73 said:

Similarly, how do we know that some of the other third-party add-on developers for weather, AI traffic, ATC, etc. aren't actually also being contracted to contribute to the MSFS default platform, out of the box?

We don’t. However, what we do know is that there may be significant numbers of well known and respected Developers who are being kept out of the loop and are taking a hit as a direct result of this marketing campaign. 

If Microsoft/ASOBO are really serious about engaging with the flight simming community then, in my opinion, they should be demonstrating a willingness to be more transparent about their objectives.

Mike

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