59 minutes ago, Purr said:

Okay, in 30 pages of this, no one has yet uttered it, so I will...lol 

WHEN IS THE RELEASE DATE??

[smh]

someone had to say it...

I’m guessing 2024…

58 minutes ago, FrankSalo said:

I think many of the folks who responded to the announcement of MSFS 2024 as too short a gap probably started flight simming with FSX and never used Prepar3d. 2-3 year gap between releases that maintained backwards compatibility while implementing new features was the norm. Heck, I had sceneries released for FSX that still worked in Prepar3d V5 that at most required a 2 minute edit in Airport Design Editor or a quick bgl convert in Model Converter X.  I'm just happy that they've established backwards compatibility going forward. It will be interesting to see what new features they will add to the sim that scenery and aircraft developers can utilize in their projects. I'm excited. 

Side note, it reminds of back when it was Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE , 2000, ME, XP and then this 5 year gap until 7 and we got back into the rhythm with 8, 8.1, 10 and a 5-6 year gap again until Windows 11 in 2021 and 12 coming up according to schedule around 2024 as well. Seems like a Microsoft thing. 

Lol, you’re probably right, we’ve created a generation of simmers who think 14 years is the right interval between sim releases and get stressed when it’s less than this. 🙂

Personally, whilst yearly releases like EA does would be stupid, I’d say 4 years between major releases is spot on.

 

7 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Nope. Bad news as it means they won’t focus fs24 on improving much the sim core which would then require updates to addons  e.g. water physics, ground traction, air dynamics, etc.

The water was reacting to the helicopter landing scenes. That alone proves there is more going on with the water in 2024 than we have now.

9 hours ago, Maxis said:

 Server access for 10 years is not cheap.

Server and bandwidth access for Microsoft is cheap, because Microsoft owns Azure. Neilhewitt explains it quite well here:

Quote

@abrams_tank has it right. Bandwidth is super cheap right now. There is a boatload of unused fibre out there. Even with 2 million users all hitting the CDN for MSFS at the same time with 100Mbps+ connections, I doubt it's more than a blip on the Azure traffic radar. Server hardware is a fairly small % of the cost of building and maintaining the cloud, too (networking gear is much more expensive); the scale that Azure and AWS (and even GCP) work at is so mind-bogglingly big that having even a few thousand VMs dedicated to running the MSFS back-end is not a top-10 workload for Azure. Nowhere near. If you or I were doing it it would cost a few million a year, but for Microsoft it's much much less than that. 

As another proxy, Google has not blocked the data it serves to MSFS for almost 2 years now.  As you may know, the add-on that allows MSFS to stream Google earth/map data has been released for almost 2 years now. If MSFS were crippling Google's server and bandwidth and costing Google a lot of money, Google would have blocked MSFS a long time ago.

The bulk of MSFS's costs is probably the salaries for the MSFS team (developers, marketing team, customer service, etc)  and paying Asobo, plus any costs that go towards 3rd party companies whose services MSFS are using like Meteoblue, Blackshark AI, etc.

Edited June 12, 20233 yr by abrams_tank

2 hours ago, B777ER said:

i really don't get what the end game is for MS to be doing this? If they keep Asobo as the studio for both, the updates will grow ever longer and bug fixes will take even longer than they do now unless they grow their staffing. I am confused as to why they will continue to support MSFS2020 when they release the new sim. It's good that it sounds like everything in MSFS2020 will work in MS2024 so why continue with both as separate platforms / products? Very odd. And what will dev's do now? Say PMDG releases a plane, do they release on the MS2020 platform and make you buy a separate copy for MS2024? I for one have no plans on keeping up with two separate platforms. If all my stuff will work in MS2024 and it has all the bells and whistles then that is the obvious choice. Is MS/Asobo only going to put long requested items just in the new MS2024, ala, seasons? Their trailer shows it working in that title but we have yet to see a date for when it will be in MS2020. What a confusing time..... 

MSFS 2020 will be “supported” meaning that you’ll still be able to access the cloud and use your program. You’d get security fixes if needed. You may get some other minor updates.

What you won’t expect to get is new innovation. That will be targeted to 2024. After all, you need to give people a solid reason to upgrade.

Over time, 2024 will evolve away from 2020 and addon compatibility may become an issue. I think most users will upgrade, so there will be a time in the future when some or many addons are MSFS2024-only.

1 minute ago, Funky D said:

The water was reacting to the helicopter landing scenes. That alone proves there is more going on with the water in 2024 than we have now.

A good point but can we have new water physics without a need to update floatplanes ? I am not interesting by showy effect only.

26 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

MSFS 2020 will be “supported” meaning that you’ll still be able to access the cloud and use your program. You’d get security fixes if needed. You may get some other minor updates.

What you won’t expect to get is new innovation. That will be targeted to 2024. After all, you need to give people a solid reason to upgrade.

Over time, 2024 will evolve away from 2020 and addon compatibility may become an issue. I think most users will upgrade, so there will be a time in the future when some or many addons are MSFS2024-only.

I think this is what will happen too. MSFS 2020 will keep running on the servers and people can still use it.  But they will allocate new Azure servers for MSFS 2024.  You will be able to keep using MSFS 2020, but of course you'll be so tempted to upgrade to 2024, because that's where the community has left to.

Edit: Yup, it's just as we guessed, the MSFS team has confirmed this now: https://www.flightsimulator.com/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-faq/

Edited June 12, 20233 yr by abrams_tank

2 hours ago, nikolajz1 said:

To make money. The server costs for this game are substantial

The server costs are probably not expensive for MSFS. Read my post here.

This video looks to me like its going to be aimed at the commercial market as a certified training product.... whilst I'm still trying to figure out why my MSFS20 keeps crashing at startup.. as do lots of others.

The servers already struggle, what are they gonna be like running two Sims concurrently!? Yet another area they need improvement.

2 minutes ago, MarcG said:

The servers already struggle, what are they gonna be like running two Sims concurrently!? Yet another area they need improvement.

Yes, they just allocate separate cloud space and usage on Azure for MSFS 2024.

That's how Azure, Amazon AWS, and other cloud services work. They can scale up or scale down usage as needed.

Edited June 12, 20233 yr by abrams_tank

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

For me it is only interesting if I get improved scenery and weather. I am not into missions. I plan my own flights….

I thiiiiiiink I can see signs of better scenery in the A10 canyon scene (although don’t know where exactly it is to compare to current), the Alps, and Kilimanjaro. Resolution and colour certainly seem to have had a boost. Perhaps AI enhanced?

Also pretty sure the sea and sky / atmospheric lighting look nicer in the first oil rig frames…

 

All of the close-up scenery looks custom. But what if it's procedurally generated? What if we get those new trees everywhere instead of photogrammetry blobs?

10 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

I thiiiiiiink I can see signs of better scenery in the A10 canyon scene (although don’t know where exactly it is to compare to current), the Alps, and Kilimanjaro. Resolution and colour certainly seem to have had a boost. Perhaps AI enhanced?

Also pretty sure the sea and sky / atmospheric lighting look nicer in the first oil rig frames…

 

You are right I guess.
 

Hopefully there will be upgrade prices but looking in the past it probably is purchasing for the full price. In my case 2x …

But if we’ll get improved scenery, weather, water and environment than let it come.

If MS does it like with the older versions release might be just after summer ..,

 

42 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Edit: Yup, it's just as we guessed, the MSFS team has confirmed this now: https://www.flightsimulator.com/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-faq/

It also confirms that this is a marketing cock-up, 😂.

”Hey guys, have you seen this? Our customer base is melting with anger.”