I just want to give Microsoft a high five here.  I expressed some doubt awhile back if the airports would live up to expectations.  I gave an example of my home airport (3MY, Peoria, IL), and sure enough they included a screen shot of this in their latest episode.  The airport looks great, and I'm now convinced this will be the dominant platform for many years to come.  Thanks MS for listening and responding to our posts, and putting my specific doubt to rest.😀      

23 minutes ago, curt1 said:

I just want to give Microsoft a high five here.  I expressed some doubt awhile back if the airports would live up to expectations.  I gave an example of my home airport (3MY, Peoria, IL), and sure enough they included a screen shot of this in their latest episode.  The airport looks great, and I'm now convinced this will be the dominant platform for many years to come.  Thanks MS for listening and responding to our posts, and putting my specific doubt to rest.😀      

it's looking quite well

I'm over in Urbana and I hoping Frasca Field (C16) is well done on it!

5 minutes ago, loubar said:

it's looking quite well

I'm over in Urbana and I hoping Frasca Field (C16) is well done on it!

The imagery in Bing maps looks quite good there, so I'm optimistic it will be done well also.  

Makes wonder what role many of todays 3rd party addon creators are going to have when MS20 is released, from what I can see many are being made almost obsolete or they'll have to vastly change their business model atleast. The likes of Orbx and the many scenery creators are going to have a hard time selling to us when the base product in the game is already of very good quality.

 

Hell, they could even put highly experienced teams on creating aircraft and sell them as DLC that could even rival the best current 3rd party creators. 

39 minutes ago, Litmoose said:

Makes wonder what role many of todays 3rd party addon creators are going to have when MS20 is released, from what I can see many are being made almost obsolete or they'll have to vastly change their business model atleast.

I think that is reflected in the massive discounts being offered for many FSX products that even a year ago (before the announcement of the new sim) would still be selling at full price (and possibly at much higher volumes). Mind you, I have bought a whole lot of current FSX products in the last few months owing to the "new sim effect" of this discount frenzy. The ones I paid full price for such as A2A are still superbly supported. The others that I have bought at admittedly very good discounts....no one is home. With one product I was actually given a refund because I was told a bug I found will likely not be fixed and with others emails have not been responded to. Not that I am complaining - I did not necessarily expect a free lunch here - it is more just an observation of where some existing third party developers are standing at the moment. So I honestly have to speculate whether there has already been changes behind the scenes.

Perhaps not a topic to explore any further here given this is the "new sim forum", but the more I see I have to agree. I honestly wonder what sort of role scenery developers in particular will have. I can see, however, there will still be a big market for airfields that cannot possibly be done well in the new sim, owing to the lack of any sort of decent quality imaging at all (take a look at my home airfield YBLA and the surrounding region for that matter). I think it is those sorts of things that might be lucrative. And of course I don't necessarily see a huge change in aircraft add-ons. There are after all so many aircraft out there and by sheer numbers the vast majority of them will not be in the sim.

Edited February 21, 20206 yr by JonP01

46 minutes ago, Litmoose said:

Makes wonder what role many of todays 3rd party addon creators are going to have when MS20 is released, from what I can see many are being made almost obsolete or they'll have to vastly change their business model atleast. The likes of Orbx and the many scenery creators are going to have a hard time selling to us when the base product in the game is already of very good quality.

 

Hell, they could even put highly experienced teams on creating aircraft and sell them as DLC that could even rival the best current 3rd party creators. 

Good.  Imagine not having to pay $100 just so the ground textures look kinda real.  Or $50 for an airport.  
 

I'm hoping that the base game is just perfectly usable.   Maybe the days of weather and big sweeping terrain add-ons are done. 

I'm inclined to bear in mind that what we see in previews, are most likely to be the things which will wow us. Which creates an impression that there is little which can be improved upon, and that is unlikely to be the case when we start getting off the beaten track. You will see add-ons being made, but what they will be might differ.

For example, we can see that there is one of the towbarless pushback tugs in use in the sim, where the nosewheel is gripped and lifted by the tug. These are fairly common, but they are far less common than the more traditional tug and towbar set ups, so there's a potential add-on straight away. Similarly, you might want to see the exact Menzies, Swissport, Stobart etc ground service equipment at your favourite airport, or the exact Sky Chef catering truck. You might not like seeing a big American truck fueling your aeroplane at Stuttgart when it would more probably be a Mercedes with Shell logos on it, or some such. The trees are procedurally generated, which looks okay, but you might prefer some more actual scenery in places. And so on.

The world is a big place, and as impressive as all the screenshots and videos are, I doubt many people's own favourite airport will necessarily be one which looks like a carbon-copy of the real thing. There's always going to be ways that we can improve things, and you know flight simmers - they love their realism add-ons.

I was sceptical as well. All we knew till yesterday was that automated processes rebuild the world based on BING map data.

With 37K being manually edited however, this gives an adequate representation to almost as many airports as there were in whole FSX!

Another big plus are the ingame editors. This is a new level in addon development as well. I hope they implement something like the Community Gateway in X-Plane. Would be awesome.

Edited February 21, 20206 yr by tweekz

I think a lot is feasible in the area of night textures. That is the only "negative" point that I can note so far.It's okay, but it would be much better. 

1 hour ago, tweekz said:

I was sceptical as well. All we knew till yesterday was that automated processes rebuild the world based on BING map data.

With 37K being manually edited however, this gives an adequate representation to almost as many airports as there were in whole FSX!

Another big plus are the ingame editors. This is a new level in addon development as well. I hope they implement something like the Community Gateway in X-Plane. Would be awesome.

As much as I love what I'm seeing so far in MSFS, I'll not get too excited about the other 37,000 airports until I see how they compare to real life, if 37,000 default airports are inaccurate in any major way, certain local/holiday or major hub airports I'll certainly buy as addons.

2 hours ago, FishermanIvan said:

Good.  Imagine not having to pay $100 just so the ground textures look kinda real.  Or $50 for an airport.  
 

I'm hoping that the base game is just perfectly usable.   Maybe the days of weather and big sweeping terrain add-ons are done. 

I've never bought an airport. Not just to go there once. (In my case) 

3 hours ago, Litmoose said:

The likes of Orbx and the many scenery creators are going to have a hard time selling to us when the base product in the game is already of very good quality.

Orbx is probably, justifiably, nervous yeah. Others though, like Flightbeam I don't think are going to be all that sidelined. There's simply no way that MS/Asobo can possibly fully detail every airport that people might want to fly into. They're not even gonna be able to get all of the major airports. That's where the 3rd party guys step in.

 

6 minutes ago, eslader said:

Orbx is probably, justifiably, nervous yeah. Others though, like Flightbeam I don't think are going to be all that sidelined. There's simply no way that MS/Asobo can possibly fully detail every airport that people might want to fly into. They're not even gonna be able to get all of the major airports. That's where the 3rd party guys step in.

 

The "MSFS" project is expected to around 10 years. More and more airports are probably being built. 

Edited February 21, 20206 yr by Deleted

1 minute ago, Deleted said:

 

Ups

Edited February 21, 20206 yr by Deleted

Sure, and if Flightbeam comes out with a 2020 re-release of their KMSP before Microsoft (which I find fairly likely), they'll have my business. 😉