Love the new screenshots, and finally a couple videos.  

Since when did this become all about tree simulator?   You want all the birds and insects simulated within the trees too?  How about re-evaulate  when its in beta or a RC.  Pretty sure there are much higher priorities to look after than trees. They look quite good actually. Size of trees will not be glaring when you are doing 100+ knots. If you hit them, you shouldnt be flying that low anyhow.   Im confident it will get looked at more closely in time, but seriously, there are much better things to fix, optimize, incorporate.  

Although people have focused on the closed Beta I find it interesting that they're mentioning Alpha 3 (1.3.x.x), Alpha 4 and Alpha 5 with roughly 3 weeks between each one. Since the 747 appears in Alpha 3 then I wonder if a business jet will appear in Alpha 4.

9 minutes ago, Matt Barraud said:

For anyone who is interested in the ATC captions from the video... Might help us understand how detailed the ATC is.

Now obviously that video is sped up but ATC does seem to be rather wordy.

1/ Some lovely shots which are a good omen for the future convincing sim environment. At least one seems out of Mars though (never saw such a red sky) and the depth of field effect is obviously going to be the scourge of any screenshot forum for the next 10 years <sigh>.  

2/ At last we see the Terrain/DEM coming up in the top alpha issues. I hope this is about the mesh resolution which looks on the weak side in some areas.

3/ The ATC sounds exactly like the old one. Not unexpected if I remember well what Asobo said few months ago.

4/ But the big issue and this is not new but it becomes more and more apparent with each update is to know whether the sim sun does shadows according to its elevation and position in the sky ? The only shadows we see are again baked in the imagery (eg Vatican or the Swartberg mountains). Also look at the first video the aircraft nor the cone project any shadow. Was it disabled for the present alpha as I remember to have seen a double shadow case early on ?

"Stay away from negative people.
They have a problem for every solution!"

--Albert Einstein

59 minutes ago, canadiantree said:

Exciting news indeed. So what's a closed Beta exactly? And what does that mean for a future release date? I'mm assuming the beta timeline is shorter than that of the Alpha? What's after Beta? Gold?

I think beta means, that developers will close list of functionalities what are they want on release and start intensive phase for optimization and solving maximum of found issues before public release. So I think, that it's confirmation release for this year, maybe not so far 🙂 I expect, that date od release can be in autumn.

12 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

1/ Some lovely shots which are a good omen for the future convincing sim environment. At least one seems out of Mars though (never saw such a red sky) and the depth of field effect is obviously going to be the scourge of any screenshot forum for the next 10 years <sigh>.  

2/ At last we see the Terrain/DEM coming up in the top alpha issues. I hope this is about the mesh resolution which looks on the weak side in some areas.

3/ The ATC sounds exactly like the old one. Not unexpected if I remember well what Asobo said few months ago.

4/ But the big issue and this is not new but it becomes more and more apparent with each update is to know whether the sim sun does shadows according to its elevation and position in the sky ? The only shadows we see are again baked in the imagery (eg Vatican or the Swartberg mountains). Also look at the first video the aircraft nor the cone project any shadow. Was it disabled for the present alpha as I remember to have seen a double shadow case early on ?

Yes, the ATC does read very similar to the old FSX one; although I can't remmember it giving us transitions?? Generic 702 is possibly not following instructions which is always going to be a true test of how the ATC responds.

I seem to remember the old version just gave up and said resume own navigation (subtext: I am having no more to do with you!)

🙂

 

 

17 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

2/ At last we see the Terrain/DEM coming up in the top alpha issues. I hope this is about the mesh resolution which looks on the weak side in some areas.

Nice catch. It is to be hoped!

18 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

But the big issue and this is not new but it becomes more and more apparent with each update is to know whether the sim sun does shadows according to its elevation and position in the sky ?

I somehow doubt that we won‘t have baked in shadows (at least on first release). If I remember correctly we could see double shadows in one of the Madrid screenshots (baked in + sim), so I‘m pretty sure we‘ll get simulated shadows. They also said it in the discovery series. 

17 minutes ago, Matt Barraud said:

can't remmember it giving us transitions?? 

🙂

It does with the « select another approach » in the ATC menu

Edited May 8, 20206 yr by Dominique_K

23 minutes ago, Matt Barraud said:

Yes, the ATC does read very similar to the old FSX one; although I can't remmember it giving us transitions?? Generic 702 is possibly not following instructions which is always going to be a true test of how the ATC responds.

I seem to remember the old version just gave up and said resume own navigation (subtext: I am having no more to do with you!)

🙂

 

 

That's indeed right. It's heavily FSX-inspired but there are still good things in it. In FSX it could only give vectors or make you select an approach to a certain runway but that's it. It didn't give transitions, sids and stars which i assume this one does instead.

 And to be honest, a FSX style atc is perfectly enough for a stock simulator. Third parties can work on additions for it no doubt.

Edited May 8, 20206 yr by Pastaiolo

23 minutes ago, Pastaiolo said:

That's indeed right. It's heavily FSX-inspired but there are still good things in it. In FSX it could only give vectors or make you select an approach to a certain runway but that's it. It didn't give transitions, sids and stars which i assume this one does instead.

 And to be honest, a FSX style atc is perfectly enough for a stock simulator. Third parties can work on additions for it no doubt.

I agree that it doesn't need to be super detailed. It's just that since they're introducing live traffic it's going to put quite a lot of pressure on the AI ATC to handle the traffic. It will need to be able to maintain traffic separation and leverage holding points.

Has anyone tried slowing down the audio from that first video to see what the ATC sounds like? I’m curious if they’re reusing the FSX audio (which would be fine with me — it was excellent in terms of the voices and avoiding sounding robotic).

James

1 hour ago, anden145 said:

"Stay away from negative people.
They have a problem for every solution!"

--Albert Einstein

Apocryphal. How could a scientist say such a thing  ! Sounds to me more like a flower child of the 70’s 😁.

The mist layer in screenshot 4 by Tomlaut1980. Oh my.

 

Please remember the ignore function in the forums. So many electrons are wasted when really a professional therapist should be used.

29 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

I agree that it doesn't need to be super detailed. It's just that since they're introducing live traffic it's going to put quite a lot of pressure on the AI ATC to handle the traffic. It will need to be able to maintain traffic separation and leverage holding points.

Well, we don't know how it's going to handle that. Live ATC traffic have real atc taking care of it. But we know Ai traffic will take over but when? Before landing? After landing when the receivers are turned off? From that moment AI only has to take care of parking to gate.

I don't think the AI will take care of traffic separation besides what it was doing in FSX already with high traffic.. and no idea about holding points. I guess we'll see and it's likely we'll know more with the episode about IFR, however that has been postponed to the end of May so we gotta wait a bit more 🙂

57 minutes ago, Pastaiolo said:

 And to be honest, a FSX style atc is perfectly enough for a stock simulator. Third parties can work on additions for it no doubt.

I really hope this is a very early version, as I was expecting a lot better, considering the amazing improvements in most other aspects of the sim.