Aerosoft implying that MSFS is the future

[DaWu 779]

16 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

But it is already happening in other parts of the market, the thing is Flight Sim's aren't as advanced and difficult for the graphics as other games are, most things are motionless not animated. The hard part about a Flight Sim is all the physics, avionics, and complicated coordinates and Geodetic junk you have to code in (and OSM data), and color correction.

Xplane is already 90% there, they are just trying too hard to improve the 90% instead of working on the 10% that matters.

The problem is Flight Sims like Xplane have typically bad hiring practices, they are hiring for sims and engineers and they need to dive into the rendering market. Also it was based in South Carolina I think, and they should have moved it somewhere where there are more rendering and graphics experts (west coast, even Portland is getting big into that now).

I don't think it is an issue for Xplane to get investors even or get extra capital and they could probably get a big chunk of financing if they tried hard enough (there are some very rich pilots out there that might do it just for the heck of it), maybe contact Tom or John...

I strongly disagree. The vast majority does not care for the accuracy of the flight model, me included. I was fine with the fsx flight model and so are most. 
what made msfs sell big time is the graphics and the landscapes. The real representation of the whole world. And that is something they could achieve because they have the date in-house with Bing and the millions to spend on experts like blsckshark.ai to brig the data to life. they also have the server capacity that allows them to stream all those petabytes to millions of people flying. That alone costs millions a month probably.

nobody can recreate that except of companies like maybe google or apple or others in the same size. 

xp can update and tune their flightmodel as much as they want. That will not sell them any more copies. What is needed is a graphical improvement in graphics and world landscaping that they won’t be able to ever achieve.

msfs without the graphics is a pretty bad sim in its current state. But the visual experience is enough to make up for that. And I have faith in them to turn the sim in a better state in 2021. the rest will the 3rd parties do

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

You misunderstand everything I am saying, I completely agree with you that Xplane's problem is the graphics, not sure how I came off sounding otherwise (my mistake if so).

That is what I mean by Xplane is already 90% finished, was that EVERYTHING works but the graphics. My point wasn't that graphics don't matter, it's that a giant and huge portion of the labor actually isn't just the graphics (sure Asobo's 90,000 unique models are a big part of it), but what I mean is that Xplane doesn't need that many models to compete.

I guarantee you Asobo has spent a ton of development money outside the graphics, and they have a ways to go yet.

Xplane just needs to improve the base graphics and be friendly to 3PD's to get them to build addons.

 

 

Edited November 27, 2020 by SceneryFX

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

6 minutes ago, DaWu said:

nobody can recreate that except of companies like maybe google or apple or others in the same size. 

xp can update and tune their flightmodel as much as they want. That will not sell them any more copies. What is needed is a graphical improvement in graphics and world landscaping that they won’t be able to ever achieve.

msfs without the graphics is a pretty bad sim in its current state. But the visual experience is enough to make up for that. And I have faith in them to turn the sim in a better state in 2021. the rest will the 3rd parties do

Asobo is not a big company, they had Microsoft's help.

Excluding the plane models and SOME (very few) of the building Asobo did, I've seen graphics better than FS 2020 in games by companies with as few as 20 people.

The graphics are just images of the world pasted over a badly coded elevation model, I can buy trees right now that as good or better than FS 2020's trees on Turbosquid or CG Trader.

You are thinking in terms of Flight Sims which typically have bad graphics compared to other games, and I will say FS 2020 looks better from the AIR than any other game (I will say that), for sure when talking long distance (excluding the clouds at times)...

But that is also more about them coding the game in a way that requires VERY fast hardware, which most games cannot shoot for those same base requirements (even on Ultra).

Even RDR2 is much more optimized at this point than FS 2020.

 

[DaWu 779]

5 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

You misunderstand everything I am saying, I completely agree with you that Xplane's problem is the graphics, not sure how I came off sounding otherwise (my mistake if so).

That is what I mean by Xplane is already 90% finished, was that EVERYTHING works but the graphics. My point wasn't that graphics don't matter, it's that a giant and huge portion of the labor actually isn't just the graphics (sure Asobo's 90,000 unique models are a big part of it), but what I mean is that Xplane doesn't need that many models to compete.

I guarantee you Asobo has spent a ton of development money outside the graphics, and they have a ways to go yet.

Xplane just needs to improve the base graphics and be friendly to 3PD's to get them to build addons.

 

 

Maybe I misunderstood it. But improving the graphics alone will not be enough. The can have the best looking cities, houses, oceans and roads ever made. If they will not match the accuracy that msfs brings in terms of layout precision and realistisch representation it won’t be enough. I rather fly over my hometown in msfs where every road and house is where it is in real than over an imaginary better looking city that is nothing like the real thing. 
 

yeah I know xp has this ortho stuff but that’s not possible for the whole world without streaming.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

1 minute ago, DaWu said:

Maybe I misunderstood it. But improving the graphics alone will not be enough. The can have the best looking cities, houses, oceans and roads ever made. If they will not match the accuracy that msfs brings in terms of layout precision and realistisch representation it won’t be enough. I rather fly over my hometown in msfs where every road and house is where it is in real than over an imaginary better looking city that is nothing like the real thing. 
 

yeah I know xp has this ortho stuff but that’s not possible for the whole world without streaming.

I see, you mean the Photogrammetry. To me the Photogrammetry is interesting looking sometimes, but i am pretty certain it is not the core issue that would determine the success of a Flight Sim if another Flight Sim could match or beat the other in every other manner in graphics, except the Photogrammetry.

I don't know to be honest, but that is just my personal feelings.

[DaWu 779]

2 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

Asobo is not a big company, they had Microsoft's help.

Excluding the plane models and SOME (very few) of the building Asobo did, I've seen graphics better than FS 2020 in games by companies with as few as 20 people.

The graphics are just images of the world pasted over a badly coded elevation model, I can buy trees right now that as good or better than FS 2020's trees on Turbosquid or CG Trader.

You are thinking in terms of Flight Sims which typically have bad graphics compared to other games, and I will say FS 2020 looks better from the AIR than any other game (I will say that), for sure when talking long distance (excluding the clouds at times)...

But that is also more about them coding the game in a way that requires VERY fast hardware, which most games cannot shoot for those same base requirements (even on Ultra).

Even RDR2 is much more optimized at this point than FS 2020.

 

I never talked about Asobo. Asobo alone would not have been able to create anything of size and complexity what we have now. It’s MS everywhere. 
 

ofc a battlefield or rdr2 looks better. But one is a 5x5Km map and the other the whole world 

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

I don't know, the only roadblock I see is the imagery licensing, not a technical roadblock but a control issue.

The Azure cloud thing is marketing baloney, anyone can set that up and it's not nearly as expensive as people would guess.

It comes down to licensing the imagery and bad decision by Xplane, as I doubt Austin Meyer has even tried to contact Google. This isn't about technical issues or big hurdles that are unsurmountable, this is about someone running Xplane that doesn't care and even said he doesn't care about Orthoimagery, but the lack of caring could end up being the downfall of his entire company.

If someone wants to make graphics look like FS 2020, they can do the same thing, there are plenty of game engines out there that can do it already, and Xplane can pretty much do it with a few tweaks from what I've seen anyhow. They just arent even trying (maybe a tiny last minute push but it probably wont be enough).

I actually agree that Xplane probably won't be able to compete, but i just dont think it's for the same reasons that other people think it is.

 

Edited November 27, 2020 by SceneryFX

[DaWu 779]

12 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

I don't know, the only roadblock I see is the imagery licensing, not a technical roadblock but a control issue.

The Azure cloud thing is marketing baloney, anyone can set that up and it's not nearly as expensive as people would guess.

It comes down to licensing the imagery and bad decision by Xplane, as I doubt Austin Meyer has even tried to contact Google. This isn't about technical issues or big hurdles that are unsurmountable, this is about someone running Xplane that doesn't care and even said he doesn't care about Orthoimagery, but the lack of caring could end up being the downfall of his entire company.

If someone wants to make graphics look like FS 2020, they can do the same thing, there are plenty of game engines out there that can do it already, and Xplane can pretty much do it with a few tweaks from what I've seen anyhow. They just arent even trying (maybe a tiny last minute push but it probably wont be enough).

I actually agree that Xplane probably won't be able to compete, but i just dont think it's for the same reasons that other people think it is.

 

Licensing is one thing. Delivering them to the users the other. You can’t install the whole world into people’s hdd. You can only stream the data. XP doesn’t have the servers nor the funds to realize that. 
 

what they could do I some Small selected regions maybe. But how well that worked was perfectly demonstrated by MS flight 8 years ago.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

31 minutes ago, DaWu said:

 The real representation of the whole world. And that is something they could achieve because they have the date in-house with Bing and the millions to spend on experts like blsckshark.ai to brig the data to life. they also have the server capacity that allows them to stream all those petabytes to millions of people flying. That alone costs millions a month probably.

Millions per month, no, it's not even close to that, they have their own backbone agreements and already own their own data centers being Azure, the bandwidth is basically free for Microsoft, it isn't totally free, but it's about as close to free as you could imagine. The bandwidth a person would use in an entire year isn't even costing them $1 believe it or not. It may be more than that with the servers, but storage is fairly cheap because you are only storing it once for everyone.

Even if you were to set something equivalent up in a custom data center, it wouldn't even cost $100,000 month, until your client base already brought you millions of revenue. You don't have to launch with maximum capacity unless you are Microsoft, because anyone else launching a new product would probably not need to make the launch that big anyhow. I can finance an entire small data center built from scratch for under $15,000 month with multiple Gig-E's, to say this would cost millions per month is not even true even at maximum capacity.

 

 

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

2 minutes ago, DaWu said:

Licensing is one thing. Delivering them to the users the other. You can’t install the whole world into people’s hdd. You can only stream the data. XP doesn’t have the servers nor the funds to realize that. 
 

what they could do I some Small selected regions maybe. But how well that worked was perfectly demonstrated by MS flight 8 years ago.

I was in that business, and I can assure you that XP does have enough funds to offer streaming, it's nothing. This isn't even using a significant amount of data, the data is incredibly compressed.

I don't even think I've used 1TB of data this month, at the wholesale level, you are talking pesos, not even pennies.

 

[B777ER 2,486]

Mathijs' capacity for self-promotion wrapped in a blanket narcissism knows no bounds.

[B777ER 2,486]

3 hours ago, marsman2020 said:

Microsoft has given them a sweetheart deal that no other developer got and the chance to make sure the SDK meets their needs (while possibly not meetings the needs of other developers).

Of course they will have nothing but gushing praise for Microsobo.

I love how he complains that "Lockheed can't make up their mind" in the like yearly or every 6 months updates to P3D.....but Asobo is breaking MSFS every 2 weeks.  What a cognitive dissonance.

All this post does is make sure I will never buy any Aerosoft products.

Lefteris at FSL I imagine is rightfully not pleased vis-a-vis the Airbus products. FSL is a far superior product.

Edited November 27, 2020 by B777ER

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

English please?

I am not sure what that even means, just having a discussion and maybe we are getting carried away, but I didn't get any Turkey today so whatever 😛

 

[Ricardo41 5,949]

MSFS 2020 is like Mike Tyson in his early days: delivering a knockout punch before your opponent even knows what's going on.

P3D is like poor Frank Bruno, who got pummeled into the ropes like a wet potato sack.

[Ricardo41 5,949]

8 hours ago, marsman2020 said:

Microsoft has given them a sweetheart deal that no other developer got and the chance to make sure the SDK meets their needs (while possibly not meetings the needs of other developers).

 

I'm not a particularly great fan of Aerosoft, but this is a comically bizarre statement.