Not a fan of the insider alpha testing scheme

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

4 hours ago, nickhod said:

Early access to a game, gadget, movie does tend to be fair though. Pay more money, get in a line, first come, first served, only top tier members etc.

OK, but this isn't early access, is it? It is a closed group friendly user test. There is no rule anywhere that you have to do it either way.

You can't convince me either that any top rated MMO title is released without a couple of those large scale tests, even if they don't do early access. An early access game involves that they ramp up all sales, distribution and support channels too, infrastructure and staff. Microsoft just decided not to do that until the product is ready. I'm not sure, isn't the release tied anyway, to the next installment of the XBox gaming platform as a whole? I thought that MSFS was one of the launch titles for that?

I still don't get it why you think that the current system is unfair (other than not being chosen). The alpha participants have most likely been selected by a random number generator, using specific sets of criteria. You can't honestly believe that the development team sat down and went through the tens of thousands of applications manually, picking who they think is up for a "reward"?
From my point of view it is utterly pointless to fret about RAM size or anything. Rough estimate says that we had less than a 0.1% chance of getting into the alpha. Which isn't that bad for a lottery btw.. It doesn't really matter what system specs we have - thousands of others will have the same, evening the odds again.

IMHO the point of the alpha is not gameplay or flying skills. It is about the basics, scaleability, general look and feel, system performance on a broader selection of hardware, general usability, compatibility with a variety of controllers, stability of the various online mechanisms involved etc. They don't need specialists for this, or pilots. They have those through their partnerships, and they have their paid testers too. The (tech) alpha just requires a good number of people simming away.

Best regards 

Edited February 24, 2020 by Lorby_SI

[nickhod 425]

2 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Yes flight simulators are way more complex than other games no matter how fancy or sophisticated or cutting edge the games graphics and details are...

People keep saying that but can offer no real technical justification.

Why did it take 1000 people to make GTA V and "only" 100 to make MSFS? Surely head count on a team is a reasonable indicator of the complexity of a project.

Of course the flight model is complicated, but if you think AAA games don't have any similarly complicated elements, I think you're incorrect.

[b737800 470]

18 minutes ago, nickhod said:

People keep saying that but can offer no real technical justification.

Why did it take 1000 people to make GTA V and "only" 100 to make MSFS? Surely head count on a team is a reasonable indicator of the complexity of a project.

Of course the flight model is complicated, but if you think AAA games don't have any similarly complicated elements, I think you're incorrect.

Simulating quite a number of autopilot systems that all control an object in fluid 3D space is itself quite a task.

If making planes is as easy as making cars then I'm off to buy a Chevy Turboprop IROC-Z, with alloy wheels too.

[Kopteeni 819]

23 minutes ago, nickhod said:

 

Of course the flight model is complicated, but if you think AAA games don't have any similarly complicated elements, I think you're incorrect.

I would have to agree with this. There's a bunch of complicated features that you don't need to worry about when you're developing a flight sim. Character animation system being the first thing that comes to my mind.

[nickhod 425]

Just now, b737800 said:

If making planes is as easy as making cars then I'm off to buy a Chevy Turboprop IROC-Z, with alloy wheels too.

Aside from GTA not being a driving sim, you should have told the developers creating GTA V how easy this all is and they could have reduced their headcount by 900+.

[b737800 470]

1 minute ago, nickhod said:

Aside from GTA not being a driving sim, you should have told the developers creating GTA V how easy this all is and they could have reduced their headcount by 900+.

I only "played" the franchise once and didn't much care for it, and I was in a car.

You keep relying on headcount as being the only measure of complexity and I really should have heeded my own words when I wrote it's pointless to discuss it with you.

For that reason... I'm out.

[HiFlyer 9,358]

3 hours ago, nickhod said:

When people say "oh flight sims are so much more complicated than other games", I tend to tune out tbh.

I agree to a point. I would say instead that Flightsim users are the most hard to please of any gaming genre. Even in the huge open world, multimillion-user games you mentioned like GTA, its very very unlikely that somebody in the back row is going to stand up in a huff and write a 20 page treatise on the top speed of an unladend Swallow (or the number of passenger (pigeons) said bird could carry in the Alps vs at a lower altitude........

Decades into the enterprise, after the efforts of one of the richest companies on the planet, and with follow up by dozens of third parties, these and other forums are still overflowing with conversations resembling the video below. Microsoft would be insane to release a product without having some of these people "have at it" for a bit, and even so.....

There will absolutely still be 20 page articles on bird speeds (and other minutia) laden or unladen for years after release.

Its...... what we do.

 

Edited February 24, 2020 by HiFlyer

[Claviateur 789]

55 minutes ago, nickhod said:

People keep saying that but can offer no real technical justification.

Why did it take 1000 people to make GTA V and "only" 100 to make MSFS? Surely head count on a team is a reasonable indicator of the complexity of a project.

Of course the flight model is complicated, but if you think AAA games don't have any similarly complicated elements, I think you're incorrect.

Games like GTA or any other so called AAA game have a solid graphic engine but not a simulator world engine. People work on content development. So yes you need a big league of people for that.

For flight simulators, you need to simulate everything you can immagine on planet earth (ground and skies) on a world scale, interact with a flight model and refresh all this at any given angle, altitude, and speed... The amount of simulated elements in a flight sim world engine is not just the flight model.

The competitor of MSFS, XP is developed by a very small team, Flight Gear as well... 

This is why you need highly skilled developers and engineers to work on a flight sim. 

31 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

I would have to agree with this. There's a bunch of complicated features that you don't need to worry about when you're developing a flight sim. Character animation system being the first thing that comes to my mind.

Sorry if this commment was meant to be sarcastic but if it isn't then character animation system is the most basic and primitive thing to do/have in a game engine today. 

If you download EPIC Unreal engine, you get ready made character animated templates or you can grab some for free or spend a small amount of money to buy from the library such animations.

You can record live motion with motion captures.

We saw in the latest video from Asobo, ground crew on the tarmac of the airports with what it seems being clearly character animations... 

This is way below simulating a living planet and flying objects in the atmosphere of this planet.

Edited February 24, 2020 by Claviateur

[nickhod 425]

1 minute ago, HiFlyer said:

I agree to a point. I would say instead that Flightsim users are the most hard to please of any gaming genre. Even in the huge open world of multimillion-user games you mentioned like GTA, its very very unlikely that somebody in the back row is going to stand up in a huff and write a 20 page treatise on the top speed of an unladen Swallow (or the number of passengers (pigeons) said bird could carry in the Alps vs at a lower altitude........

Haha, yep, that's very true.

+10 for the Python video.

[Kopteeni 819]

1 minute ago, Claviateur said:

Sorry if this commment was meant to be sarcastic but if it isn't then character animation system is the most basic and primitive thing to do/have in a game engine today. 

If you download EPIC Unreal engine, you get ready made character animated templates or you can grab some for free or spend a small amount of money on buy from the library such animations.

You can record live motion with motion captures.

We saw in the latest video from Asobo, ground crew on the tarmac of the airports with what it seems being clearly character animations... 

This is way below simulating a living planet a flying objects in the atmosphere of this planet.

It wasn't sarcasm, perhaps the term I used was too vague. By animation system I mean all the necessary components to create a living character that is in deep interaction with its environment and the player. That's when you need to get your mocapped animations to string together fluidly. I'm not sure what you can get out of the 3d engines but the animations required by different games tend to be so unique that it'd be challenging to pull everything out of the existing libraries.

[Jazz 1,046]

57 minutes ago, nickhod said:

People keep saying that but can offer no real technical justification.

Why did it take 1000 people to make GTA V and "only" 100 to make MSFS? Surely head count on a team is a reasonable indicator of the complexity of a project.

Of course the flight model is complicated, but if you think AAA games don't have any similarly complicated elements, I think you're incorrect.

Greetings fellow South Walian! I must ask, have you seen the appalling and insulting state that most AAA games are released in these days? Half-baked, broken, buggy, cynical word not allowed designed only to leverage more monies out of you through microtransactions and gambling mechanics. Honestly, my last few experiences with the AAA gaming industry have been exactly that, my last. Rockstar is an exception but you can't compare what they do to anyone else just like you can't compare flight sim to anything else. They are modelling the ENTIRE world as it is. This has always been ambitious but this iteration, well, this has never been done before so let's give them a little credit here.

I must say I have found Microsoft's approach to this sim encouraging. I may not have been selected for the Alpha but that is fine. It would be difficult because I never entered 😉 but I appreciate why they are doing it and frankly, they don't owe us anything. Well, except perhaps a decent final product after dumping us 14 years ago 😁 However, their actions and communications are telling me that they know what this sim means to many of us and that they are listening and trying to get it right and from what I have been seeing, they have been getting an awful lot right. I could be being conned but right now I must take them at their word and compare that word to what I am seeing and what I am seeing is superb. Having these testers will help that they get some insights into optimisation and bug fixing. It's all valuable information for them I'm sure.

If I'm honest, I am not really understanding these complaints about the Alpha and they tend to sound a little like sour grapes and well, as I said, they don't owe us anything. You like it? You buy it. Simples. The Alpha is necessary and how they go about it is entirely up to them and the fact they are involving any of us is a positive as far as I'm concerned.

[nickhod 425]

4 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Games like GTA or any other so called AAA game have a solid graphic engine but not a simulator world engine. People work on content development. So yes you need a big league of people for that.

For flight simulatrs, you need to simulate everything you can immagine on planet earth (ground and skies) on a world scale, interact with a flight model and refresh all this at any given angle, altitude, and speed... The amount of simulated elements in a flight sim world engine is not just the flight model.

When you break down this "simulator game engine", it's just tried to tested game development techniques.

The volumetric clouds are a noise distribution and a clever vertex shader
Cloud shadows by ray marching
The ground is a satellite image on subdivided surfaces
The buildings are 3D models that someone or AI created
The grass is a shader
Airports are content creation work

There's no magic going on here.

The flight model is a complicated bit of software, no doubt, but so is the AI or world environment physics in a FPS.

[Claviateur 789]

2 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

It wasn't sarcasm, perhaps the term I used was too vague. By animation system I mean all the necessary components to create a living character that is in deep interaction with its environment and the player. That's when you need to get your mocapped animations to string together fluidly. I'm not sure what you can get out of the 3d engines but the animations required by different games tend to be so unique that it'd be challenging to pull everything out of the existing libraries.

All this is done with motion captures and triggers for specific events. Even in the most sophisticated sport games, character animations are done this way...

Character animation is mostly pre-recorded motion and not a simulation of a human body... 

Or can you give me the example of one game with the character being a simulation of an organic/biological being interacting with the forces of the environment around it and these environment elements are themselves a simulation of the real world environement?.

 

[b737800 470]

Just now, Claviateur said:

Or can you give me the example of one game with the character being a simulation of an organic/biological being interacting with the forces of the environment around it and these environment elements are themselves a simulation of the real world environement?.

Debbie Does Dallas? Perhaps I'm confusing one organic/biological being with another though.

[Claviateur 789]

2 minutes ago, nickhod said:

When you break down this "simulator game engine", it's just tried to tested game development techniques.

The volumetric clouds are a noise distribution and a clever vertex shader
Cloud shadows by ray marching
The ground is a satellite image on subdivided surfaces
The buildings are 3D models that someone or AI created
The grass is a shader
Airports are content creation work

There's no magic going on here.

The flight model is a complicated bit of software, no doubt, but so is the AI or world environment physics in a FPS.

I do not agree 🙂 you are mentioning the rendering of these components but not the simulation of the behavior and interaction with other simulated events in the world engine...