11 hours ago, mSparks said:

I think its a bit disingenuous to imply wasting hours browsing flightsim.to downloading then deleting countless versions of airports is in anyway representitive of including it all by default, to at least if not higher quality than anything ms has to offer - default or otherwise.

But hey, if that's how you want to spend your time instead of in the cockpit then msfs definately is the best sim for you 🤷‍♂️

Not my point at all and I specifically said it would be nice to have that in MSFS as well. Also, sorry but saying all these airports for XP probably are better than anything MSFS has to offer is just overly biased nonsense again.

Apart from that it's not really an issue for me as I spent some 95% of my simming time actually flying rather than installing as installing an airport takes about a minute and I have pretty much all I need.

7 hours ago, kananesgi said:

Honestly, I think where you are getting hung up here is the idea that paid developers made the airports for MSFS while the XP scenery gateway are more like MODs or similar created by individuals for their own, and others', enjoyment. The thing here is, just because they paid a developer to "hand-craft" the airport doesn't mean it's done to any higher level than I could do sitting at my home computer. I am still hand-crafting the airport, I'm just not paid to do it. The fact that XP then includes a large number of those in the base sim means that the sim ships with a great many more "hand-crafted" airports (wish I could find and actual number here, but not sure where to look) as stock scenery than does MSFS. I don't care who created the airport. I don't have to go scouring file hosting sites looking for a decent representation of my local airport with XP, it's just there by default. Sure MSFS might have as many (though I doubt it myself) available for download somewhere, but you have to go digging through various repositories to find them. In XP, they are already there, and that makes them effectively "stock" airports to me.

What I'm getting hung up on is using fake numbers and disingenuous arguments in one direction yet again to favor one's favorite sim because it's virtually impossible to have a normal conversation this way.

I'm not talking about what level of quality developer and community airports are on. It's nice to see XP including some of the community airports, but comparing the number of airports created by a community of whatever thousand people with that of a bunch of developers while ignoring that you can get virtually the same content for MSFS if you wanted to doesn't logically work, whether stock included or not.

Edited December 18, 20223 yr by Nixoq

12 minutes ago, psolk said:

with your need to be right in every conversation on this forum.

Not really, you are just coming on to the forum where a lot of what I said here over the last 3 or so years turned out to be right.

Not everything, of course, like I suggested a few years ago MS could have competed with XP if they hired a CFD engineer, turns out I was wrong about that

Or

18 hours ago, mSparks said:

plus I was wrong, I'm getting all the eye candy at triple digit framerates, so no need to downgrade to XP11 visuals.

See also

 

 

3 hours ago, psolk said:

Yes, but most people are not SO obsessed with being right that they sit there and argue a redacted statement within 2 minutes of it being posted with baseless ridiculous commentary post after post after post after post until the thread eventually gets locked....  And 3 pages later you are still going.  

OF COURSE you have notifications turned on, you are a bit OTT with your need to be right in every conversation on this forum.  

Yes, even the conversations about X-Plane are more authentic.  Of course they are... 

You’re getting sucked in again 🙂. 

 

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

Not really, you are just coming on to the forum where a lot of what I said here over the last 3 or so years turned out to be right.

Everything, IMHO.

1 hour ago, rka said:

 

Everything, IMHO.

Well

and

seemed to have turned up pretty much spot on 3 years in. Especially as the only way MS has been able to keep any devs onboard now is to put them directly on salary.

But sure, you keep holding your breath for complex 3rd party airliners on XBOX, right alongside PMDG. Maybe the answer will have changed in another 3 years and you can finally celebrate alongside the few thousand other people that still care.

"Absolutely the best sim". OMG the comedy just got to me.

Edited December 18, 20223 yr by mSparks

6 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

It's the unintentional bias of a Professional/Expert speaking to amateurs. He operates in a completely different world than the vast majority of flight simmers, and while desktop flight sim is as close as most of us will ever get to PiC, it's the inverse for him: it's about as far away from his daily life as can be.

Yes, but I don't see why that would be a type of bias that makes his points skewed.

12 hours ago, kananesgi said:

 

Quote

just because they paid a developer to "hand-craft" the airport doesn't mean it's done to any higher level than I could do sitting at my home computer.

It's a matter of talent, though, as well as production at scale.

Quote

The fact that XP then includes a large number of those in the base sim means that the sim ships with a great many more "hand-crafted" airports

The Hand Crafted airports in MSFS are made to a payware standard by professionals using professional tools. The fact that there are ONLY 100 in sim should be a clue as to their generally higher level of fidelity.

There are MANY "hand made" (see what I did there?) airports in both sims that are at a very low standard. Even so, they're only being  released because they're better than what's already there (which is sometimes no airport at all).

Quote

(wish I could find and actual number here, but not sure where to look) as stock scenery than does MSFS. I don't care who created the airport. I don't have to go scouring file hosting sites

Both developers report approximately 37,000 airports present in each sim, and claiming they have "all the world's airports" represented.

In reality, we know there are quite a number of airfields that are outright missing from the sims, but I think it's pretty safe to say both sims have the vast majority of the most active ones represented.

Quote

looking for a decent representation of my local airport with XP, it's just there by default. Sure MSFS might have as many (though I doubt it myself) available for download somewhere, but you have to go digging through various repositories to find them. In XP, they are already there, and that makes them effectively "stock" airports to me.

In XP v11 (which was the Official Release until just a couple days ago), MANY of the airfields were not "decent representations" of local airports other that for pure flight training (length, orientation, surface, taxiways, numbers, etc). Buildings, textures, off-tarmac scenery, etc. were bare approximations.

Asobo, OTOH, used satellite imagery to assist in the re-creation of those 37,000 airfields, and they "hand made" all of them other than autogen buildings and such. They even went to the trouble of color correcting grass/dirt/ground textures that XP traditionally ignored.

Truly an impressive project and result: 

Now the GOOD thing about Asobo's efforts here are simply that over the last 2 years, Laminar realized how word not allowed their default airports really were. v11's airports were head and shoulders above P3D's, but not up to the new, MUCH HIGHER bar set by MSFS 2020.

As a result of the actual competition, the XP v12 default airports have gotten a MASSIVE upgrade in all regards, and in the tiny sample of the default airports I visited recently are at least as good as Asobo's, and in some cases quite a bit better.

But again, MSFS has a 2 year lead in this regard. The at-par improvements really only manifested with v12 in the very recent past.

6 hours ago, psolk said:

Yes, but most people are not SO obsessed with being right that they sit there and argue a redacted statement within 2 minutes of it being posted with baseless ridiculous commentary post after post after post after post until the thread eventually gets locked....  And 3 pages later you are still going.  

OF COURSE you have notifications turned on, you are a bit OTT with your need to be right in every conversation on this forum.  

Yes, even the conversations about X-Plane are more authentic.  Of course they are... 

Don't waste your time like me. I'm kind of kicking myself for getting involved in this again after last time and after his misinformation campaign back when MSFS came out. I'm sorry to be this harsh about another forum member but the poster's last two posts are completely delusional in the way he manufactures his own reality. Like someone said in the previous thread, it's best to ignore that and concentrate on the XP people you can have a normal conversation with. Otherwise it's just polluting the thread.

10 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

by professionals using professional tools.

All xplane airports are made using WED

https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/

https://developer.x-plane.com/manuals/wed/

If you know anyone that ever liked trainsets or sim city, Xplane 12 and a link to that would make a great Christmas present. The reason (imho) LR got so many 3rd parties on board is they turned building airports and scenery into a game all on its own. Pleasure to use, and even someone like me without an ounce of artistic talent in their body can get better results than you can get in any other sim using tools either not designed specifically for the task, or little more than a tech demo.

Edited December 18, 20223 yr by mSparks

6 hours ago, mSparks said:

Dragging that back on topic by the skin of its teeth, those numbers, how authentic each sim is, who has "the best" - are very much what will determine how COTC flightsim will change over the next decades.

Quote

However CD Projekt Red and Asobo are pretty much identical sized studios, Asobo possibly larger, and bean counters only care about one genre - Profit Margin.

"Margin" being the key word, which you're ironically mis-using in reverse. You're conflating "Gross Margin" with "Gross Profit", and the two are entirely different.

Margin is a percentage, and IS in fact, what business people care most about. MSFS is, from all outward appearances, delivering a healthy margin - i.e., they have plenty of money left over after the bills have been paid. (hence all the ongoing high-quality free content that has never before been included by any previous sim).

Gross Profit, by contrast, is a number. And the key difference is that you can have a very low Gross Margin/percentage (which is bad) while still having a very high number of Gross Profit/dollars - because the relative Return on Investment remains low no matter how many dollars spent.

I've personally worked with some of the execs at Microsoft HQ, and they are generally incredibly sharp and intelligent people (and I can personally vouch the same for most of the folks at Apple). I have a very hard time believing they didn't have a pretty good idea of the results MSFS would bring. I.e., it wouldn't have the same revenue as a huge AAA title because flight sim is a relatively unpopular product niche, but that they had enough disruptively innovative features to make it far more broadly popular than the competitors (THIS time!). 

Quote

Most if not virtually all of MFS's tauted 10 million numbers come from gamepass users, and I would bet a fairly large portion of those gamepass users on last gen consoles.. 

And this is bad while millions on X-Plane mobile is good...how, again?

Quote

The point I was making is, MFS and Xplane are pretty much on par right now in terms of userbase size, and that userbase size looks nothing like what the bean counters want and expect from a AAA title.

"Market Adoption" is another metric with which you need to become more familiar. MSFS has achieved the "pretty much on par" user base in about 10% of the time it took X-Plane/ESP to do the same. And now that we mention P3D/ESP, how's their numbers doing these days?

Again, "Margin" > "Profit", every time. Otherwise MS wouldn't even have bothered with 2020...

1 hour ago, Nixoq said:

Yes, but I don't see why that would be a type of bias that makes his points skewed.

Perhaps a little closer to home: it's like deciding which family vehicle you're going to buy based on a race car driver's advice.

3 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

from all outward appearances, delivering a healthy margin

Probably a different thread if you do want to talk about this. But no, spending AAA budget on a game that returns "indie" level results is not a healthy margin, of any description.

Very rough guestimate, but MSFS probably doesn't even turn a profit until it hits 30 million users..... All that product placement for several years wasn't cheap, pretty much everyone everywhere got to hear about MSFS, even my aunt who can barely turn a computer on was asking about it....

30 minutes ago, mSparks said:

All xplane airports are made using WED

https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/

https://developer.x-plane.com/manuals/wed/

If you know anyone that ever liked trainsets or sim city, Xplane 12 and a link to that would make a great Christmas present. The reason (imho) LR got so many 3rd parties on board is they turned building airports and scenery into a game all on its own. Pleasure to use, and even someone like me without an ounce of artistic talent in their body can get better results than you can get in any other sim using tools either not designed specifically for the task, or little more than a tech demo.

Yes, I'm aware. Unlike many folks, I actually have & use both sims (plus others), and I dabble in scenery mods myself.

So I, unlike those other folks, realize that a similar quality tool is, in fact, available with MSFS. And hence the utter explosion of community content for the sim (just compare xp.org & xp.to to flightsim.to)

I'm responding to the comment of the guy who said, "same as I can do here at my house". I.e., just because any one of us can buy Photoshop doesn't mean we're ever gonna get famous for our work using it.

WED obviously can deliver good/great results, but there's no guarantee. There are other production tools at Asobo (mentioned in the linked video) that allow those results at scale. Now, perhaps LR has something similar, but I don't recall it being mentioned in their recent vids, or FSElite's, either.

Undeniable point is that great freeware is being generated using tools provided by both dev teams. And extremely low quality the same...

26 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Probably a different thread if you do want to talk about this. But no, spending AAA budget on a game that returns "indie" level results is not a healthy margin, of any description.

Very rough guestimate, but MSFS probably doesn't even turn a profit until it hits 30 million users..... All that product placement for several years wasn't cheap, pretty much everyone everywhere got to hear about MSFS, even my aunt who can barely turn a computer on was asking about it....

Why? YOU'RE the one who brought it into THIS thread.

And I've already explained the difference, and you've already ignored the facts. Again.

Don't "guesstimate", please. Use real-world numbers and proper words to describe the situation.

"Product Placement" is generally a drop in the bucket vs Product Development. And from what I've seen, the overwhelming amount of the buzz about MSFS has been quite organic rather than paid.

If it was all just marketing dollars with no truly disruptive features, P3D/FSX wouldn't have just evaporated like they did.

No, MSFS, despite the issues it's had and still has, is truly revolutionary. and THAT is why your aunt knows about it...

Edited December 18, 20223 yr by UrgentSiesta
clarification

9 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Surely, you must be joking...?

Not at all, if you stick to the context in which I was speaking. To be clear, I was responding to another poster concerning "steam" stats that I posted.

And the fact remains...on steam. That XP12 is clearly behind its predecessor and a sim released "16" years ago...and that's a bad thing for LR. Now quote me right, stay within the context...and then try to refute the facts I presented...

 

9 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

It's clear that XP v12 is a HUGE upgrade from v11 and has "fixed" all the issues I had with its predecessor (sky/clouds, water, weather) and even the already excellent v11 flight model is significantly improved, along with lighting and all the other 1st Principles stuff. Even the ground textures in the General Release version I flew just today have been substantially improved.

Indeed, that is clear. But again it has nothing to do with the premise / context of my statement that you quoted...

9 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

If visual immersion is your thing, then yes, XP is in second place.

Not on steam it isn't...it's last place out of the 4 shown...FACT.

9 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

But if flying similar to IRL is your thing, then MSFS is in second place.

Not on steam it isn't...it's first place out of the 4 shown...FACT.

 

Edited December 18, 20223 yr by OverTheEDJ