2 hours ago, Ricardo41 said:

There are currently 752 international and 930 regional freeware airports listed on flightsim.to

I Quoted a text down here from a MSFS topic here at avsim. 

Exactly what I thought as I saw how quick the freeware market got filled with very good scenery, airports and landmarks. 

I think the devs who just ONLY bet on MSFS will have to consider how to proceed. 

Aerosoft for instance has dropped us completely and very rude. They will get no single penny from me anymore. 

I do still buy  P3D add-ons and will support every dev who supports and provides me too! 

What this user down here wrote at MSFS is what could lead to income decrease for the payware market currently massively developing for MSFS. But the question is.....how long and how long exclusively they will do that? 

I bet it won't take long to see them coming back. 

Interesting isn't it?

Marcus

Quote from a user at MSFS;

I realized reading this thread how much more frequently I go to flightsim.to to look for airports or interesting scenery than I do to any online store. I also find a lot of the default airports pretty adequate, and some like the recent Lethbridge scenery to be basically the payware quality of P3D. I have purchased some scenery, but I am not on the lookout for it like I used to be. It has to be an airport that I will fly to a great deal -- for example, I picked up Buttonville because it is my home airport. 

I have been really impressed by how many people have taken up the task of developing a scenery and making it available. I have even been contemplating learning to do this myself and contributing some small airports to the pool. MSFS is extending or enriching the hobby for me and this is one of its primary contributions. In P3D scenery development seemed complex and difficult, and I just never thought I would have the time and energy to learn to do it so I never considered it. But now there are enough examples and tutorials and people to talk to that I think it is worth a try. Of course, maybe it is not so difficult in P3D and developers just conveyed a sense of mystique and hardship that it seemed that way. Regardless, MSFS is extending and enriching the hobby for me.

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by mpo910

I’ve certainly been impressed with some things I’ve seen in msfs. But I honestly can’t think of a single payware airport for it that has super impressed me compared to some of the top quality ones we’ve seen here I’ve bought. 

7 minutes ago, micstatic said:

.......compared to some of the top quality ones we’ve seen here I’ve bought. 

You mean here at P3D?

21 minutes ago, mpo910 said:

You mean here at P3D?

Right 

Most scenery at Flightsim.to are converted G..gle objects.

If you look in the texture folder most of them have lots of small textures, instead of larger textures with more objects on it.

Rotterdam Harbor has 32.000 small textures which causes an extra loading time of 12 minutes.

Also many of them have no or bad nightlighting.

And regarding airports : there are several very nice looking airports but some of the larger ones are too heavy on the system ( like : LTFM (Istanbul) so the scenery is not even loaded.

But I agree that if freeware is getting better the addon developers will have a hard time selling their products for MSFS.

Btw : Asobo/MS have an agreement with Orbx for developing scenery for MSFS....

Although the myriad of MSFS airports look far better than the stock MSFS versions, most of them utilize stock MSFS objects and do not have user-created objects. They are basically the equivalent of  P3d airports created with ADE.

Personally, I think that it's great to have so much freeware, as I have been using the ADE alpha and the MSFS SDK to update my airports and having someone do it saves me a lot of time.

As to the payware side of things, the Flightbeam and other airports look good, but they are not quite up to the quality of their siblings in P3d5, probably due to them being ports from P3d to MSFS. The graphics engine is so much better in MSFS though, that it makes up for the differences in detail.

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

And regarding airports : there are several very nice looking airports but some of the larger ones are too heavy on the system ( like : LTFM (Istanbul) so the scenery is not even loaded.

 

Try this one: https://flightsim.to/file/4345/ltfm-istanbul-airport-lite , the other main one has problems that preventing it from loading and hence that issue with the black screen (related to the ground textures). 

 

Meanwhile, I do agree that MSFS has like explosion of freeware due to the ease of development, however I do think payware scenery is still vital for all sims not only P3D or MSGS. However, the MSFS scenery landscape has raised bar for competition so yeah let's see.

6 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Not sure I understand the logic there?  If they look better in P3D V5 and they are ported to MSFS and MSFS has a better graphics engine, why would they look worse in MSFS?  I'll disagree that DX11 is a better graphics API than DX12.

Cheers, Rob.

 

I am really not a developer. But can it maybe be the case that those used textures from P3D times are looking worse, or not as good as developed from scratch, when used in MSFS? I looked also at the Qualitywings textures used in the screenshots about the 787 in MSFS and I was not really positive about the outcome. The default MSFS 787 looks better, much better. 

Maybe reusing old stuff is not the optimal thing to do?

Just assuming here....

Marcus

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by mpo910

2 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Textures don't "age".  99.9% of the time 3D modellers will downgrade source textures to conserve on memory/resources and compress to supported standards by the target platform.  The sources don't change as they are usually of MUCH higher quality regardless of the platform they get applied to.  MSFS supports BC7/6 compression (for HDR) which might oddly actually be a part of the problem.  MS/Asobo also are very clear about being conservative with UV/texture mapping (again for memory considerations).

Maybe Asobo can share how they accomplished that because the SDK and documentation is primitive.

Cheers, Rob.

Thanks for explaining. Understood. 

Interesting why some|many users are reporting they are not amused about some payware airports. Some because of lacking details and more about performance issues. 

Here shines P3D already. DX12 is really a big step forward. A little more finetuning and hopefully a big step forward regarding Truesky.......

Overall I am really positive about the performance an visuals in P3D. 

I did some testing with complete default P3D to get an idea about the default status of ground textures and vector data. And I was really impressed. What I missed is a much better road lighting (highway and secundary roads mainly).......this was the only reason why a activated ORBX LC again.  

And I noticed that even cities light scattering are illuminating the EA clouds also! Very nice. 

Marcus

8 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Interesting ... I honestly had not notice that ... I'll have to go check.  Learn something new everyday.

Cheers, Rob.

Also flying above 6/8 to 7/8 cloud coverage and above water with full moon, which lights up the water surface (to much because of the clouds ...but so be it for now) does lighten the clouds up from below. They look brighter on the downside and darker topside, watched from above the clouds. So definitely clouds are receiving light and reflecting it. 

It can be done way better, but the beginning is there. 

I don't like the low frequently updated light effect when clouds are moving....it is like they getting updated 2x a second. 

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by mpo910

Making basic airport scenery is not that hard to do, especially using default objects, and even making custom buildings in Blender or some and textures for these models in Photoshop or Paint.net isn't exactly rocket science if you practice a bit, but what is often problematic, is access to the data to make things complete.

Top down views from satellite images and such can give you a very accurate idea of where things are located, and you can analyse shadow lengths to determine heights by comparing them to the known height of other objects and such, and there are often quite a lot of photographs online of such places. But what you generally cannot do, is get airside at airports to see the areas the public cannot access, nor easily photograph them from the areas the public can get to, and this limits what you can do in terms of the accurate modeling of the other side of that building or warehouse or whatever.

In a very real sense, the security of airports mean much of the ramp areas of such places are a secret world if you cannot actually get onto the ramp to get a good look at stuff. This is where professional companies which make sceneries have a better shot at things. But if you watch the recent Orbx-Asobo partnership video, you will note that even they state that they will visit the airport they are modeling 'if possible', so it's not always an option even for these people.

When I worked at EGCC, most of us would, if we saw something cool or interesting, take a snap of it on our phones, and occasionally I would wear a camera and film a pushback or something; I had already worked out that if someone pulled me up about this, I would say - and genuinely mean it - that I was doing so in large part so that I could look at it and see if I could work a little bit better in terms of what I was actually doing, and I think it would probably have been accepted as a reasonable explanation, since it genuinely was one of the reasons why I was doing it, but even then I was never that blatant in doing that sort of stuff.

We would also tend to photograph anything untoward as a matter of record, such as if we found a plane coming in which didn't have all the stop locks up in the cargo hold or some such, so there genuinely were good reasons for having a camera on you. But this is very different from wandering around taking tons of snaps of stuff; if you did that, I can guarantee it wouldn't be long before an airfield operations vehicle (basically the airfield security people) would be driving over to you and its driver enquiring as to what you were doing, and not least because you were at work and supposed to be working rather than making a photographic survey.

In saying this I'm not wishing to put you off having a stab at making scenery - it's good fun and I say go for it - but be aware that it's not quite as easy as you might suppose to make a really accurate model of an airport unless you can look at all of it or have someone who can advise you one what it looks like in the bits you generally cannot see.

To add a different perspective...while I certainly enjoy the plethora of good freeware available in MSFS, I do still buy my share of payware airports.  Most often it’s because there’s no freeware alternative available, sometimes it’s because the payware option just looks too good (and too cheap) to pass up.  

I would never buy an airport for MSFS when Asobo are updating the sim over the next few years there are 5 coming with the UK update next, and some of the US ones are as good as or better than the payware.

And when DX12 comes the inbuilt will not have a problem Asobo will see to that.

3 hours ago, mpo910 said:

What I missed is a much better road lighting (highway and secundary roads mainly).......this was the only reason why a activated ORBX LC again.  

This is probably my biggest pet peeve with P3D, the horrible night lighting. LM needs to completely overhaul the night time textures and lighting, hopefully for 5.2. I can't imagine at least someone at LM has not noticed this.

Personally - MSFS is only used infrequently by me - for a number of reasons - mainly because I only have what might be termed a Mid Range PC that wont drive MSFS to what I consider one of its main attributes -I.E. the potential for a 4K/8K picture.  

My computer runs P3D 5 quite well and a good picture on HD - (50" TV)and fully uses my huge investment in Aircraft and Orbyx scenery.

At the same time - I also use an X Box One X for gaming on a 43" 4K HDR10 screen - picture perfect with games made for 4K - as is MFSF - and awaiting the day when the Sim finally comes out in July next for the new X Box Series X - complete in DX 12 - 4/8K - HDR capability.

This discussion on the explosion of add-on software for MSFS  - payware and freeware - makes me ask - (not only why did we worry about the futures of developer software companies - way back in June 2019 when the first teaser video of MSFS came out ? - but) -  what will be the effect  - when the sim is released to an X Box with that sort of power for $500 - and the gaming Market - ( already showing in the effect - on non simmers - of the PC version) released 12 months before ( Beta testing ??)

Assuming that - technically -  the X Box will be such - that addons can still be purchased  - downloaded and Installed - will there be a change in the volume as we see it now. i.e. - a more difficult "SDK"??0 - nothing currently that will fit?? - Ported?? 

We are watching Microsoft - via Asobo - slowly improving the sim with constant Updates to the Quality of the base Sim Content - working with Orbyx (see Partner video) - on this and scenery such as airports and Cityscapes - an Orbyx speciality.

Does this mean that the X Box sim will be "out of the Box" - perfect so that millions of gamers - who hate fiddling or tweaking -will beat a path to be simmers - and will have no need for install problems - or to purchase $$$$$s of addons. They - won't be interested in top level aircraft models such as PDMG etc - but a Carenado 4K PBR build that will fall into what we have seen in the MSFS hangar to date.

Should we be back to the June 2019 question re the life of developers - or making sure our version of Orbyx Central is up to date and another load of credit card  bashing that we can afford after paying out $500 for a console power that would cost us $x000s for an equivalent PC - 4K120/8K 60 hertz of GRUNT - always assuming that we can get our hands on an X Box Series X by then - and not get killed in the rush by PC simmers - like me - who cant afford a new PC😉