All the freeware that's coming out is going to put the likes of Orbx out of business. No way their developers can compete with an army of hobbyists with time on their hands. 

How do Microsoft and Asobo look upon freeware versions of airports and planes that are in the deluxe and premium deluxe versions? I thought the asking price of those two versions looked pretty steep in respect of the return you get. But it seems to me that MS and Asobo wouldn't like if you could just make freeware versions of the extra content as many users would not bother with paying extra and just wait until the freeware is released. 

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by Briany

10 minutes ago, Briany said:

All the freeware that's coming out is going to put the likes of Orbx out of business. No way their developers can compete with an army of hobbyists with time on their hands. 

How do Microsoft and Asobo look upon freeware versions of airports and planes that are in the deluxe and premium deluxe versions? I thought the asking price of those two versions looked pretty steep in respect of the return you get. But it seems to me that MS and Asobo wouldn't like if you could just make freeware versions of the extra content as many users would not bother with paying extra and just wait until the freeware is released. 

Tbh I’ve not seen anything on the freeware that matches what Orbx do best, small to medium size airfields/airports. Some of there regional work is also very good when you look at their True Earth series, what they did with the London landmarks if they do that across the U.K. I think it would sell.
 

The issue with the freeware so far for me is I don’t want individual landmarks I want large areas covered without the performance hit and several different installed files. I think Orbx are probably the best in the business at doing this. If they price it right and don’t replace anything default that’s better than their modelling they will do well in that area.

We need a TV, Radio and water tower package - payware or free 🙂

22 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

We need a TV, Radio and water tower package - payware or free 🙂

Plus

Churches/mosque's etc, Farms, stadia, boats, ships, trains and squirrels!

14 hours ago, dobee51 said:

Monaco is lovely, but it brought my computer to its knees. I took off out of Nice and felt the frames go down immediately like I had turned into a strong wind. It was smooth when I flew back the other way.

When I see a report like that I'm always interested in knowing what the system specs are, especially when they experience is so much different than my own.

46 minutes ago, Carts85 said:

Tbh I’ve not seen anything on the freeware that matches what Orbx do best, small to medium size airfields/airports. Some of there regional work is also very good when you look at their True Earth series, what they did with the London landmarks if they do that across the U.K. I think it would sell.
 

The issue with the freeware so far for me is I don’t want individual landmarks I want large areas covered without the performance hit and several different installed files. I think Orbx are probably the best in the business at doing this. If they price it right and don’t replace anything default that’s better than their modelling they will do well in that area.

The next work for the freeware community after a huge glut of content has been created will be to arrange it into central databases with a filesystem-like hierarchy for different places and objects. After that, making large files which installs a lot of different objects or scenery at once. After that, tweaking for minimum performance impact. 

So long as the community can coalesce around one or two central places to share and organise all this stuff, I think there's a very bright future for free addons to the game. 

1 hour ago, Briany said:

All the freeware that's coming out is going to put the likes of Orbx out of business. No way their developers can compete with an army of hobbyists with time on their hands.

Nah. You invariably need to get airside to accurately model an airport, or know someone who already has that clearance and knows what it looks like in the bits people don't normally see. Joe Blow is not gonna be able to do that off going to the viewing park and looking at Google Earth. Same with modeling an aeroplane accurately, you need to get in the real thing and get your tape measure out, quiz engineers and the manufacturers about systems etc, and that's before all of the licensing etc starts making it hard as well.

It's conceivable that people who work in the industry could make stuff they get to work on for real, but for most people, that stuff is off limits and even more so at the moment what with Covid, even Asobo and MS had difficulty with some airline stuff because of that.

In addition to all that, what professional developers bring to the table is experience in making things which balance realism with performance over many years of doing that. Saying anyone can do that easily is a bit like saying that just because someone knows how to type, they could write a techno-thriller novel as well as Tom Clancy, with all his espionage contacts and experience in that field, could manage, i.e. theoretically it is not impossible someone could do it, but it is pretty unlikely.

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by Chock

4 minutes ago, Briany said:

The next work for the freeware community after a huge glut of content has been created will be to arrange it into central databases with a filesystem-like hierarchy for different places and objects. After that, making large files which installs a lot of different objects or scenery at once. After that, tweaking for minimum performance impact. 

Already out there. www.freewarescenery.com. Just have to convince them to start including MSFS2020

24 minutes ago, Briany said:

The next work for the freeware community after a huge glut of content has been created will be to arrange it into central databases with a filesystem-like hierarchy for different places and objects. After that, making large files which installs a lot of different objects or scenery at once. After that, tweaking for minimum performance impact. 

So long as the community can coalesce around one or two central places to share and organise all this stuff, I think there's a very bright future for free addons to the game. 

I agree with you, it’s great for this hobby of ours to have a thriving freeware community. I do feel we can have both though great freeware and payware. Like Chock says there is somethings freeware won’t be able to match hence the prices we have to pay. But overall very exciting times.

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

When I see a report like that I'm always interested in knowing what the system specs are, especially when they experience is so much different than my own.

I have what I would call an entry level gaming laptop that I bought at Costco two Christmas-es ago. At the time they were selling for $1500 everywhere else, but Costco got a load of them in for the holiday and sold them for $995. I was pretty lucky to get it, actually. I had shopped around a lot and it was the only one that I could find that had an NVIDIA graphics card.

I could probably tweak it for a little better performance if I knew what I was doing, and I could remember what all the different terms like FXAA and TXAA stood for. I have owned many computers over the years since my first Commodore 64; I realize my little laptop does not stack up with the current line of gaming machines, but it's probably the nicest computer I will ever own, and I've owned a bunch of 'em. I've quite a few flight simulators over all those years too, and MSFS 2020 is the most promising one that's ever been. 

Here's my specs from DxDiag:

 System Information
------------------
      Time of this report: 9/6/2020, 08:38:12
      Machine name: LAPTOP-26KKC0LR
      Machine Id: 
      Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 18363) (18362.19h1_release.190318-1202)
      Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
      System Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
      System Model: Strix 17 GL703GE
      BIOS: GL703GE.318 (type: UEFI)
      Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz (12 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
      Memory: 16384MB RAM
      Available OS Memory: 16238MB RAM
      Page File: 7121MB used, 18332MB available
              
Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Supported
 DirectX Database Version: 1.1.5
 DxDiag Version: 10.00.18362.0387 64bit Unicode

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
Card name: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630
Manufacturer: Intel Corporation
Chip type: Intel(R) UHD Graphics Family
DAC type: Internal
Device Type: Full Device (POST)
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3E9B&SUBSYS_10411043&REV_00
Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER] 
Display Memory: 8247 MB
Dedicated Memory: 128 MB
Shared Memory: 8119 MB
Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (120Hz)
HDR Support: Not Supported
Display Topology: Internal
Display Color Space: DXGI_COLOR_SPACE_RGB_FULL_G22_NONE_P709
Color Primaries: Red(0.677734,0.308594), Green(0.263672,0.677734), Blue(0.151367,0.059570), White Point(0.313477,0.329102)
Display Luminance: Min Luminance = 0.500000, Max Luminance = 270.000000, MaxFullFrameLuminance = 270.000000
Monitor Name: Generic PnP Monitor
Monitor Model: unknown
Monitor Id: CMN1747
Native Mode: 1920 x 1080(p) (120.000Hz)
Output Type: Internal
Monitor Capabilities: HDR Not Supported
Display Pixel Format: DISPLAYCONFIG_PIXELFORMAT_32BPP
Advanced Color: Not Supported
         

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Device Type: Render-Only Device
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1C8C&SUBSYS_10411043&REV_A1
Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER] 
Display Memory: 12140 MB
Dedicated Memory: 4021 MB
Shared Memory: 8119 MB
Current Mode: Unknown
 HDR Support: Unknown
 Display Topology: Unknown
 Display Color Space: Unknown
 Color Primaries: Unknown
 Display Luminance: Unknown

My specs are probably not too different from the baseline XBox specs that Microsoft plans to support in the future.
         
 

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by dobee51

1 hour ago, Chock said:

Nah. You invariably need to get airside to accurately model an airport, or know someone who already has that clearance and knows what it looks like in the bits people don't normally see. Joe Blow is not gonna be able to do that off going to the viewing park and looking at Google Earth. Same with modeling an aeroplane accurately, you need to get in the real thing and get your tape measure out, quiz engineers and the manufacturers about systems etc, and that's before all of the licensing etc starts making it hard as well.

It's conceivable that people who work in the industry could make stuff they get to work on for real, but for most people, that stuff is off limits and even more so at the moment what with Covid, even Asobo and MS had difficulty with some airline stuff because of that.

In addition to all that, what professional developers bring to the table is experience in making things which balance realism with performance over many years of doing that. Saying anyone can do that easily is a bit like saying that just because someone knows how to type, they could write a techno-thriller novel as well as Tom Clancy, with all his espionage contacts and experience in that field, could manage, i.e. theoretically it is not impossible someone could do it, but it is pretty unlikely.

Not so sure about some of that. For one, many of our current developers started out creating freeware, and for some, it wasn't even that long ago.

Heck, some of them would probably prefer to be still doing freeware! (easier on the nerves?)

Two is that an awful lot of 3D software is out there nowadays, and due at least partially to the gaming add-on scene, there are tons of people with very good modeling skills. Skills I would consider fully competitive with the current level of flightsim graphics, and maybe a bit beyond, since many of these people have been working of stuff for cutting edge modern games for (in some cases) literally years.

Those people creating content in Steam workshops are not the slouches some with no interest in that scene might expect!

The real issue, as you have pointed out, might be access to data on airports, but I can think of a few possible workarounds for that just off the top of my head, so..... We'll see.

The bottom line for me is that while its too soon to say developers should watch their backs...... Microsoft are not fools, and if they are creating something like the X-plane portal for approved scenery and etc to be distributed and maybe even eventually be monetized.....

(Did somebody say Steam workshop?)

Well then, if I was a current developer, maybe I would indeed start watching my back.

For instance: What might hypothetically happen if the legions of sleepless, sugar and pizza fueled freeware creators for something like Cities Skylines (for instance) started transporting assets over En Masse, and set about filling out the MSFS world........? 🙀

Something to think about.

 

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by HiFlyer

1 hour ago, Briany said:

The next work for the freeware community after a huge glut of content has been created will be to arrange it into central databases with a filesystem-like hierarchy for different places and objects. After that, making large files which installs a lot of different objects or scenery at once. After that, tweaking for minimum performance impact. 

So long as the community can coalesce around one or two central places to share and organise all this stuff, I think there's a very bright future for free addons to the game. 

If only there was a well-known site that had a file library where freeware creators could upload their work, and simmers could easily search for and download the files.😏

1 hour ago, Chock said:

In addition to all that, what professional developers bring to the table is experience in making things which balance realism with performance over many years of doing that. Saying anyone can do that easily is a bit like saying that just because someone knows how to type, they could write a techno-thriller novel as well as Tom Clancy, with all his espionage contacts and experience in that field, could manage, i.e. theoretically it is not impossible someone could do it, but it is pretty unlikely.

Completely agree with this. If non-pro developers can do all this, Orbx wouldn't have existed in relation to any of the previous simulators.

There are some areas where they can really help, though. SimHeaven, for example, made a terrific addition to European XP scenery, adding churches, power lines, etc - and I hope they weigh in soon on this new sim.

I do wonder if, before releasing the gob-smacking videos showing what was being done, and inviting various influencers from inside and outside of the community o kick off the proceedings, Microsoft had announced reentering the world of flight simulation via a games company, whose possibly most well known endeavor was The Crew 2 .(racing game)

I suspect many are going to be surprised by what (essentially) the rest of the world can do.

2 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Not so sure about some of that. For one, many of our current developers started out creating freeware, and for some, it wasn't even that long ago.

I do not intend to insult any freeware developer - they have skills that I don't have and I truly appreciate their efforts. I really do mean this.

The idea, however, that an army of new developers is somehow going to completely disrupt this ecosystem is probably a little far fetched. I've downloaded a lot of the City Skylines content when I was playing it, and the level of detail needed in that game is nowhere near what the enthusiast community is accustomed to - freeware or payware. An example - everyone is gushing over the repaint megapack. I certainly appreciate the effort and the fact that the individual who packaged everything provided a great service to the community. Still, when looking at a number of the paints, I think there were clearly created by those who are new to painting or they were created very quickly. For now, at least, it is quantity over quality. Reading another thread, it sounds like the default aircraft are tough to work with, so that may be part of the issue.

 

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by n4gix
Removed unnecessary long quote!