2 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

Thanks for the info, interesting. Yup, and there is a lot of foreign people getting into it which is driving the labor costs of development down so they can just flood the market with $10 airports. I have nothing against any of the other devs, but this business feels a bit "too sharky" for me. I'm definitely releasing stuff as we've got combined over 1000 hours of labor into 3 products now, but whether or not I continue is another story entirely, we'll see...

 

Sub $10 airports may be where the money is if you can get on the marketplace.  Five sales at $10 is far better than just one at $30 .

To be honest if I had $50 in my pocket and the choice was between a $50 airport, a batch of $5 to $10 airports of high quality or just going out for coffee I would opt for several $10 airports and if there were none around go and do coffee.  Regularly spending $30 to $50 on a single airport is not something I would be doing.

3 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Sub $10 airports may be where the money is if you can get on the marketplace.  Five sales at $10 is far better than just one at $30 .

To be honest if I had $50 in my pocket and the choice was between a $50 airport, a batch of $5 to $10 airports of high quality or just going out for coffee I would opt for several $10 airports and if there were none around go and do coffee.  Regularly spending $30 to $50 on a single airport is not something I would be doing.

That is fine, but trying to make a business on fresh renders when others have 100+ airports they are porting all at once comes at a major and stark disadvantage. The fact that the business does have a long sales cycle could be beneficial, but never in history have so many airports been released so fast. I mean I am not even counting all the freeware airports, there are over 1500 airports now in total I believe already if you count everything. I don't have exact numbers, but in Xplane it felt more like 5-10 per month, maybe a bit more than that. Now it seems like 5 per day.

Right now the sales for airports is at its peak, and it will go down drastically in the future. My backend business sense has warning flags going off in all directions, but hopefully my market testing will prove me wrong.

Edited November 26, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

1 minute ago, Maxis said:

Or they can sell themselves to Google and try to come up with a rival product. If this was to come to pass and the the product is demonstratively superior i have no hesitation to jump ship. This instance of MSFS has completely broken any feeling of loyalty to the brand. Anything better and im all ears.

Competition is good.  If XPlane had the same graphics as MSFS, and streamed the world to your PC at no extra cost, and the price of XPlane was comparable to MSFS, I would consider XPlane too.

Sadly, that’s not the case.  XPlane and P3D got complacent over the last 10 years.  I’ve said it before but MSFS being released was like the IPhone release back in 2007. When IPhone was released back in 2007, it shook up up the mobile phone market and some phone makers like Blackberry eventually succumbed within a few years.

SHOCKER...

Xplane will never fetch msfs. Both are in different leagues and the manpower and money that was put into msfs is probably 10x the amount xp made in total since its release. All msfs needs now is a decent payware ac. 
 

of course msfs is the future. It is already the present for many. 

 

The hate on P3D here is hillarious.
Yes, out of the box MSFS is visually stunning. It also has better weather depiction, has 'live' AI traffic and most importantly of all, has a lot of development time (Asobo, payware 3PDs and freeware devs) being thrown at it. That should make it the primary sim of choice for nearly everyone (me included) at some point.

That said, P3D has finally(!) received an update that makes it perform extremely well on a lot of PCs, the clouds are finally(!) reproduced in 3D, Ortho4XP_P3D edition makes most of the world available in photo scenery for free, there's a *huge* back catalogue of airport scenery to choose from and most importantly, there are some outstanding payware aircraft that no developer is anywhere near replicating in MSFS for the foreseeable future.

I really like seeing the developments MSFS is making. Some of the freeware is truly outstanding, the scope of the project is broad and the sim is bursting with new tech everywhere. And yet, I just don't enjoy MSFS right now. For every fix or new feature added, there's something broken. Most importantly, the flying still feels off with transitioning the aircraft between ground and air, plus flight controls effectiveness (especially rudder) is still overdone. I'm just going to have to wait longer until I can love the sim.

Aerosoft can state imply that the future is MSFS, but for the next several months there is more than enough to be happy with P3D. It certainly doesn't deserve all the bashing it's getting on this forum.

5 minutes ago, DaWu said:

Xplane will never fetch msfs. Both are in different leagues and the manpower and money that was put into msfs is probably 10x the amount xp made in total since its release. All msfs needs now is a decent payware ac. 
 

of course msfs is the future. It is already the present for many. 

 

This is partially true but think about this, sometimes technical leaps in development methods as well as just having a better team (even if smaller) can supersede this fact.

For instance, rendering is already slowly getting replaced by scanning and automated rendering methods. This could open up a lot of issues for larger companies and allow smaller teams to compete better, across all these markets. Right now, a lot of the problem is as you note the sheer man hours of the entire thing.

Also, a true expert in AI (and they are rare) can do amazing things with statistics like decision trees based on learning algorithms, but the problem is the marketing folks want to brainwash everyone that everything is superb AI, when true really advanced AI is still very difficult to get working correctly. One AI savant can sometimes do the work of 20 people, I've seen it before in my own job, it's scary but it's also VERY rare. As most AI is broken and full of issues right now. Trying to deal with AI algorithms is a nightmare even for seasoned programmers, unless you just love that sort of thing and have a passion for it. It's really tricky to get working correctly without bugs.

Edited November 26, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

4 minutes ago, F737NG said:

The hate on P3D here is hillarious.

The hate is from both sides. This is the MSFS forum where you mainly read the hate on P3D. Go to the P3D forum where you find the hate on MSFS.

It makes me really sad.

Kind regards, Michael

7 minutes ago, F737NG said:

The hate on P3D here is hillarious.
Yes, out of the box MSFS is visually stunning. It also has better weather depiction, has 'live' AI traffic and most importantly of all, has a lot of development time (Asobo, payware 3PDs and freeware devs) being thrown at it. That should make it the primary sim of choice for nearly everyone (me included) at some point.

That said, P3D has finally(!) received an update that makes it perform extremely well on a lot of PCs, the clouds are finally(!) reproduced in 3D, Ortho4XP_P3D edition makes most of the world available in photo scenery for free, there's a *huge* back catalogue of airport scenery to choose from and most importantly, there are some outstanding payware aircraft that no developer is anywhere near replicating in MSFS for the foreseeable future.
 

I really miss the Majestic Software MJC8 Q400.

I don't have any dislike for P3D, but I only owned version 4 and to me it loaded the 60cm stuff OK but still too choppy. Xplane loaded it very smoothly, though I was on a much slower PC back then.

I don't really know about version 5, but the issue with it was the water and trees looked horrible, and I know both P3D and Xplane can look ok if you put enough manpower into it. Xplane's problem was the lighting and sometimes the clouds, been a while since i've seen graphics in P3D and never used version 5, so I cannot say what issues it now has or does not have.

Maybe one day I will give it another shot, but I am not sure it interests me to be honest, for some reason Xplane was more interesting, not sure why. 

I do really miss some of the planes from P3D and even FSX.

8 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

This is partially true but think about this, sometimes technical leaps in development methods as well as just having a better team (even if smaller) can supersede this fact.

For instance, rendering is already slowly getting replaced by scanning and automated rendering methods. This could open up a lot of issues for larger companies and allow smaller teams to compete better, across all these markets. Right now, a lot of the problem is as you note the sheer man hours of the entire thing.

Also, a true expert in AI (and they are rare) can do amazing things with statistics like decision trees based on learning algorithms, but the problem is the marketing folks want to brainwash everyone that everything is superb AI, when true really advanced AI is still very difficult to get working correctly. One AI savant can sometimes do the work of 20 people, I've seen it before in my own job, it's scary but it's also VERY rare. As most AI is broken and full of issues right now. Trying to deal with AI algorithms is a nightmare even for seasoned programmers, unless you just love that sort of thing and have a passion for it. It's really tricky to get working correctly without bugs.

Well I don’t see that ever happening. The investment needed is just too big. XP might survive and fit in a small niche of some hardcore fans but I wouldn’t expect many 3rd party addons down the road. 

 The only thing that can stop MS is MS themselfs. A good start for MS would be to stop breaking stuff with every update. Their QA seem rather useless. Hopefully the beta program will help in this matter.

I personally am very relaxed. Have purchased the sim in the first day but haven’t started it for weeks. This will change radically on xmas with the VR update and the near release of the Crj. Until then I am very busy with my new PS5 and the incoming Cyberpunk game. 

9 minutes ago, DaWu said:

Well I don’t see that ever happening. The investment needed is just too big. XP might survive and fit in a small niche of some hardcore fans but I wouldn’t expect many 3rd party addons down the road. 

 The only thing that can stop MS is MS themselfs. A good start for MS would be to stop breaking stuff with every update. Their QA seem rather useless. Hopefully the beta program will help in this matter.

I personally am very relaxed. Have purchased the sim in the first day but haven’t started it for weeks. This will change radically on xmas with the VR update and the near release of the Crj. Until then I am very busy with my new PS5 and the incoming Cyberpunk game. 

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...

Edited November 27, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

36 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

If XPlane had the same graphics as MSFS, and streamed the world to your PC at no extra cost, and the price of XPlane was comparable to MSFS, I would consider XPlane too.

Mate,

If this was the case, XPlane would be my first choice of all the sim platforms.

The same applies to P3D.

Assuming that the streamed graphics are similar or even better than MSFS, depending on use of Bing or Google Maps, the range of 3PD aircraft, utilities and sceneries, in P3D and XPlane is vastly superior to MSFS by the simple virtue that they exist, (at the moment) in my opinion.

I think (hope) that some people are ruling out both these platforms a little early because, in reality, the most significant difference between all three of these platforms is the scenery and graphics. It is my fervent hope that XPlane and P3d are at least looking at further development of this aspect.

Expectations and hope may well be vastly separated and different, but that does not stop me imagining either of these platforms with streaming sceneries.  I do not know how hard this will be to implement though.

Regards

Tony

I Alpha tested from the start. MSFS will be the future, however a few things must get a lot better still:

• Proper feeling of inertia / weight
• Correct the bobbing up and down with some aircraft
• Fix the bouncing on good landings
• Elimination of micro stutters with good hardware 
• Rock solid and reliable weather

And as good as the graphics are in MSFS, it also has weaknesses in the graphics that could be exploited by the competition.

Xplane is already 90% developed, so people are pointing out that Xplane doesn't have the budget that Microsoft has, but Xplane doesn't need the budget Microsoft has. Xplane just needs graphics mods, do you know how cheaply starving rendering artists are willing to work.

I don't think the question is whether or not Microsoft will shoot themselves in the foot as much as the problem is Austin Meyer is too personally connected to the company, he needs to divest, get financing, and they need to hire an independent CEO from a gaming company that has nothing to do with Flight Sims. Xplane already has all the avionics stuff it needs for the most part, so no reason to keep adding to that, nothing major anyhow.

As far as the lighting and engine goes, a lot of the stuff you think Asobo did came directly from the DirectX game engine sitting behind the thing, like most of that lighting. Yes, someone has to choose how the DirectX libraries are utilized and what will be included, and the reason ASOBO is killing everyone else in this aspect is because the game engine came from a sub-division of Microsoft, who designed DirectX.

Asobo didn't even make the game engine, Microsoft did. Asobo is a graphics company trying to figure out how to build a flight sim, Laminar is a Flight Sim company trying to figure out how to make a game.

Perhaps, they should just merge and let's get it over with already.

Edited November 27, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

Assuming MS don't drop the ball, either intentionally or unintentionally, MSFS clearly has the capability to 'be the future' of mainstream GA/civil aviation flight sims, but as ever, there is no law which says there only has to be one flight sim, or that you can only use one of them.

Obviously a good deal of the notion that MSFS is the future rests on the SDK reaching a point where developers can have the confidence to know it will do what they want and won't alter significantly when they are halfway through a massive investment in making something over a period of a few years, but really, that's on those developers to ensure this happens, so it is entirely understandable that Aerosoft are doing what they are doing. I daresay they are not alone in doing that either, they just appear to be the ones who are a bit more vocal about it.