Flightsim.to, Nexusmods, etc. There isn't the time in the world to appreciate all the great work that community addon developers are putting out on an almost hourly basis. 

If you wanted to, you could stuff your community folder like a New Orleans Terducken, and you would still have scratched only the surface. 

What's even more amazing is the speed and agility of this community. For example, an update breaks a feature in the CJ4, boom, within 24 hours Working Title has a fix ready. 

Secondly,  new (for flight simming) tools like Github and Discord Channels are used to accelerate development and feedback. 

Thirdly, we are not just seeing fixes but complete overhauls like the aforementioned work that Working Title is doing, or Robert Young's work on the Bonanza and the DA62, or the team that is working on the A320Neo.

Fourthly, respectful interaction with and responsiveness to customers. 

Fifthly, all this comes with a nightmarish pricetag of exactly 0.

Indeed, the future is bright. 

Fully agree / concur with your view, but will also welcome good payware developers to come to play, as soon as possible.

Also aware ASOBO is doing their best to bring the tools devs need to a more stable / complete state... MFS was released in a hurry IMO, not that I care, but that's a fact, and it shows... Thankfully there's all of those talented devs / users who are contributing to make it look a lot more like what it should have been from the beginning...

All true except for the price tag. 😀

Nothing is free my brother.

MSFS is a smashing success on so many fronts, including how many talented developers have jumped on the bandwagon. Can you imagine the MSFS ecosystem one or two years from now? This sim will be worse than the IRS. 

BTW, if i find value in a specific freeware add-on i donate to the developer, and the amount is based on what i believe it would sell for in the marketplace. 

Indeed, we need to admit that, MSFS has unleashed new landscape and ways of development. I think is because currently, open source in software development is becoming a norm whereby companies will hire people just to contribute to open source software that are important to the companies. With that, many of the folks simming in MSFS got inspired by that due to their professional experience and went with this approach, this proved to be a success for projects like FBW320. Also we shouldn't forget the fact, MSFS support HTML and Javascript which are commonly used by developers and hence, makes it easier for people to contribute. 

it is actual nice to see a increase in freeware developend for FS, over the last years the amount of freeware stuff was getting fewer and fewer.... I remeber the times in FS9 and FSX when we had daily a bunch of new addons here on AVSIM 🙂 I hope this will continue for a long time and ASOBo is fixing the stuff no freeware developer can at the moment xD

But a word of caution: Not just because stuff is free, getting regualr updates and is making MSFS better it is fully legal 😉 AIG has just found out that our offline flightplans have been used in some freeware addon without premission. So please keep an eye out and if you feel that something is odd (looks to familiar to an existing product you know from FSX or P3D) please inform the original developer so it can be checked for potential copyright violations. Because nothing is worse then seeing, while updating your stuff to work 100% with MSFS, some rushed freeware Addon that is more or less a bad copy of your old work (just to make it work in MSFS).....

Now about, "the median age of simmer has decreased, which is a great thing because it means there's new blood in the hobby, but we still have plenty of the old-guard too, and we should be a welcoming and helpful community to both?"

I'm stuck right between the old folks and the youngin's at 41, and both groups tend to talk past each other a lot in my experience.  Yes, our elders have age and experience on their side, and can be a wealth of knowledge that we would be poorer without.   But they can be a bit cranky and set in their ways.  We all have our foibles, they should still be treated with courtesy and admired for what the know and have done.

And, yes, the young crowd can be noisy and brash and annoying and not quite what you're used to in your little quiet gated community.  But they also bring energy and excitement and, if not driven away, secure the future of flight simming for another generation.  They could do with a little bit of tolerance, and acknowledgement from the Old Folks' Home that they, too, were once young and annoying.

Edited November 16, 20205 yr by kaosfere

The future is bright only as long as Microsoft keeps the Bing servers active.  I've played this sim in complete "offline mode" and it is pretty bad.   Not even the underlying base mesh is detailed enough to work with most payware or freeware software without serious issues (like floating buildings and scenery objects).

I love MSFS and my investment in it thus far is money well spent.  But I am not naive enough to believe that this product doesn't have an expiration date unlike any other we've experienced before.  

@Kaiii3

Kai- I'm eagerly awaiting AIG's entry in this arena!  Thanks for all you all do for us all.

 

@kaosfere

Rob- I'm hoping we will find there is room enough for us all.  You are already aware of my gratitude to WT. but thanks again to the Team! 🙂

C

4 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

I've played this sim in complete "offline mode" and it is pretty bad. 

I have too, when I didn't realize it had turned off the Bing data. I didn't notice for awhile because it pretty much looked like P3d with Orbx addons (and much better lighting). 

 

Besides, they're not going to turn the Bing servers off - they use them for a lot more than just MSFS. And even if they do turn them off, a 3pd will step in, just like 3pds stepped in when they turned the live weather servers off in FSX.

And by the time they turn off the servers, it's not inconcievable that we'll just be able to download the scenery. Yeah, it's a couple of petabytes, and that's huge, but there was a time not so long ago when the idea of having a terabyte worth of storage in your home computer was inconceivable. Heck, I remember when you had major bragging rights if you had a 20 *megabyte* hard drive. (actually I remember when you had bragging rights if you had a 5.25" floppy drive instead of a drive that used audio cassette tapes 😉 )

In short, that's just not an area that we should be worrying about at this point.

 

4 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

Old Folks' Home that they, too, were once young and annoying.

Young once....check.   Annoying....NEVER! 🤣

I've never been so impressed with some of the kids I've met in this hobby.

The conference held in Orlando a few years back, I had this young 12-year-old gentleman sit next to me and a few pals I met up with during the opening ceremonies.  His eyes were big as saucers, as if he could not open them wide enough to take in all the FS goodness, which up to that point in his short life...was only from within his room on his computer monitor.  His Mom was very nice and seemed shocked that this many "Old" people were involved in her young son's hobby. 🙂

Anyway....we stuck up a conversation and I was immediately impressed with not only his vast knowledge of aviation and simming in general, but how incredibly well-mannered and "adult-like" he was when discussing the few things he was really passionate about within the hobby.  

So long story short....I had won a very nice throttle quadrant in a raffle at the conference that Froogle held...giving away a ton of freebies he'd gotten over the years doing what he does.  Being old and decrepit, I knew that this prized item would be a waste on an old geezer like me.  So I sought out my young simmer friend on the vendor floor, and asked him if he'd like to have it instead.  The pixel blur hides and ear-to-ear smile on his face. 🙂 

I think this hobby can both bring out the worst and best in people, regardless of age...I choose to gravitate to the one's who have a positive outlook on where its going in the future. 😉

7 hours ago, Kaiii3 said:

remeber the times in FS9 and FSX when we had daily a bunch of new addons here on AVSIM

Yeah true, until LM "enterprised" the whole thing by having third party developers as first class citizens which was pretty much turn off to me and pushed me away to XP. Actually talking about XP, I think many of the explosion of the freewares for MSFS inspired by the community mentality in XP, which is a reason why I appreciated XP the first time I got to know it (zibo, the massive amount of quality freeware in X-Plane download section) and I am happy the see MSFS community also heading to the same direction as XP community. Very bright future ahead! 

All this points out is that the trend continues of a big freeware rush  when a new mass market sim first hits the streets. It happened with FSX, XP and now MSFS. What also happens is that the flood of payware ebbs as all but the diehard modders continue to work for free. It's already happening with MSFS despite the rosy picture painted in this thread. The first wave of freeware was a gigantic pile of POIs ripped from Google Maps. Then there were the inevitable countless livery mods, some good and some inaccurate. That subsided and now we are seeing both some nice small airports and tweaks to the guts of MSFS, like Bijan's spectacular Fall season mod, the Garmin guage mods and the various aircraft mods. Eventually payware will win out just like it has for all other flightsims.

It's not that it will win out. I was still downloading fsx/p3d freeware as recently as 5 months ago. And some of it was still good. That freeware Osprey was *amazing.*  For freeware.

Payware eventually eclipses the quality of the freeware in most cases. (Yes, I know, Zibo, but as has been said before that's awesome but it can't beat PMDG.)  But despite the quality bump (if you're willing to pay), there's still a place for freeware in the ecosystem.

 

And yes, a lot of freeware is low quality. But so is a lot of payware. Most things at any price in any genre fail to achieve top-tier status, which is why it's called "top-tier" and not "equal to everything else tier."

15 hours ago, kaosfere said:

Now about, "the median age of simmer has decreased, which is a great thing because it means there's new blood in the hobby, but we still have plenty of the old-guard too, and we should be a welcoming and helpful community to both?"

I'm stuck right between the old folks and the youngin's at 41, and both groups tend to talk past each other a lot in my experience.  Yes, our elders have age and experience on their side, and can be a wealth of knowledge that we would be poorer without.   But they can be a bit cranky and set in their ways.  We all have our foibles, they should still be treated with courtesy and admired for what the know and have done.

And, yes, the young crowd can be noisy and brash and annoying and not quite what you're used to in your little quiet gated community.  But they also bring energy and excitement and, if not driven away, secure the future of flight simming for another generation.  They could do with a little bit of tolerance, and acknowledgement from the Old Folks' Home that they, too, were once young and annoying.

Great post!