I think something that is missing in current flight sims, is the feeling of a "living world".

Of course we already have air, ground and sea traffic, etc. But that is only part of it. MSFS also has animals in a few specific places, and that is another step toward a living world, albeit limited.

But I'm thinking something more comprehensive and organic. For example, the moving trees seen in the preview, add to the feeling of a living world (MS Flight had them, and they improved immersion).

Other things may be: dynamically changing seasons, environment reacting to weather (e.g. snow accumulation/melting, puddles after raining, etc.), ambient sounds, dynamic weather with smooth transitions, random forest fires or other natural phenomena, etc.

Based on what we officially and unofficially know, hopefully several of these things could find their way into XP12!

Completely agree with you. I have been advocating for these types of details for years. Many 'purists' will say it's a flight sim and not a walking sim but I think these kinds of details are really great and important for immersion and also for attracting new simmers.

100%, also I miss a lot of interaction with that living world, right now it doesnt feel like your plane is really part of the world it is flying in.

Im pretty much planning on adding PhysX support to xtlua for xp12

stuff like debris/fod, plus a host of other things on my wish list.

Actually, XP introduced several "living worlds" features way back: bird strikes, runway incursions by deers, random forest fires, aurora borealis, hot air balloons.

But all of them were way overdone by Austin 😆 So they've been quietly turned off by default, or entirely taken out in v11 or v10.

Reintroducing those features could also be a good idea, provided they're tuned down to be more realistic!

 

And the most important: we miss a real traffic online with realist repaints of real airlined. Something that was offered to us when we bought MSFS. 

Just give me AI and ATC on a FSX level (framerate friendly models, customizable schedules, customizable callsign and phraseology database) with SID/STAR support and minus the quirks (overly controlling, no true terrain avoidance vectoring, mandatory vectoring) in XP12 and I'll be happy. Maybe throw in some out of the box ground support stuff on airports and

The road and train traffic in XP11 is already a nice touch. Some more regionally varied objects for that out of the box and it'll be good for NextGen.

 

What would be really nice is an expanded terrain probing API, exposed object definitions and renderable markers. This can be used to find certain object or terrain classes in the vicinity of a coordinate-driven marker. So basically define a marker looking for the closest hospital object with a helipad and another marker looking for the closest intersection or building or tree next to a road and you have the basis for a plugin that generates random helicopter medevac missions based on such markers. Or plug a marker down in the closest forest or group of trees near the desired coordinates and start a fire that needs extinguishing. Stuff like that.

What I found in any civilian flight sim is that flying itself only gets you so far, but there's never really anything to give you an actual reason to fly. It'd be asked too much of Laminar to implement gameplay out of the box, but certain API capabilities would facilitate writing third party plugins that do so.