Interesting new tidbits from FSL (Flight Sim Labs)

[NovemberUniform]

7 hours ago, ATRguy said:

I mean, what else can they innovate that Fenix hasn’t?

Their A320 had visual icing. Something that I genuinely loved, because it affected winter ops considerably. You could deice with GSX. That was brilliant.

What also comes to mind is weather radar. MAYBE they figured something out that nobody else has.

They were also very good at supporting hardware for cockpit builders.

Whatever they come up with, they need to improve their modeling and texturing big time. That was weak even in P3D times, IMHO.

[andy1252]

I'd buy an A-318 on day one, for certain. But that's probably as likely as a B-58 (which would be my first choice)

[Sethos]

40 minutes ago, NovemberUniform said:

What also comes to mind is weather radar. MAYBE they figured something out that nobody else has.

That's not happening. There's no magical solution to this, just a locked down API.

[UrgentSiesta]

9 hours ago, AGuther said:

But nothing perfect, and their planes fly way too much like they're on rails, and some reactions are even demonstrably wrong - and they don't even admit it when you tell them.

So what I don't miss is the eternal wait for an update due to all the workarounds they always use, the snootiness with which the developers have always appeared - and the prices.

The "on rails" flight model is a symptom of Prepar3D, and afflicts the majority of the add-ons there.

Most devs don't openly respond to flight model critiques for a number of reasons, either (and a lot of that is that most critics aren't speaking from a credible position).

Insofar as their stratospheric pricing, there's quite a few conditions that will both entice and force them down to far more palatable levels.

The primary one is simply competition. With the plethora of Hi Fi A32x available, they simply can't succeed with an addon priced at $150(!), twice what other direct competitors like Fenix are charging.

We've seen this already in that their Concorde is priced at $80. Likely because the competition (though far lower fidelity) there is priced at $45.

The same situation already exists in MSFS, as well.

Further, they've seen the other Hi Fi p3D devs drastically alter/lower pricing for MSFS.

Not to mention the likelihood that if they price themselves in line with their peers, they stand to reap substantially greater revenue than their old school pricing.

If their new features are truly new/"unique", AND desirable, they might put themselves at the Leonardo end of the pricing spectrum. But even then, I only think Leonardo can get away with it because there's no other Md-80 available.

Too bad they don't do a PMDG-style "buy 1 for P3D, get 1 for MSFS" deal for Concorde as I'd surely take them up on it.

[Stearmandriver]

This is the dev that knowingly bundled malware into every legitimate copy of their aircraft for p3d, right?  And then threatened legal action against the users who exposed them - with evidence - right? 

Why are they still in business?  Who would consider purchasing a product of theirs?

[Nyxx]

14 minutes ago, Stearmandriver said:

This is the dev that knowingly bundled malware into every legitimate copy of their aircraft for p3d, right?  And then threatened legal action against the users who exposed them - with evidence - right? 

Why are they still in business?  Who would consider purchasing a product of theirs?

you need to learn some facts before opening your mouth.  There still in business because a lot of people have more than 1 brain sell.

Edited August 18 by Nyxx

[ATRguy]

1 minute ago, Nyxx said:

you need to learn some facts before opening your month.  They’re still in business because a lot of people have more than 1 brain sell.

The irony here…

[UrgentSiesta]

1 hour ago, Stearmandriver said:

This is the dev that knowingly bundled malware into every legitimate copy of their aircraft for p3d, right?  And then threatened legal action against the users who exposed them - with evidence - right? 

Why are they still in business?  Who would consider purchasing a product of theirs?

A good, though biased article:

https://fsnews.eu/simcident-report-that-time-fslabs-shipped-actual-malware-to-paying-customers/

Looks more like a ham-fisted, misguided, and probably "cheap" way to protect themselves.

Given the amount of PII harvested and mis-used by various other organizations, I'd say this is hardly the worst thing that's done with our information.

[Scottoest]

Maybe they'll throw us a curveball and it'll be the Wright Flyer.

Anyway, my money is on Concorde - especially if they plan to make it compatible with Xbox.  The Concorde is a very well known and legendary aircraft, and will probably get a lot of curiosity purchases if it doesn't price out the larger MSFS audience.

Regarding FSL in general, they absolutely have played the last several years all wrong.  Yeah PMDG, Aerosoft etc. dealt with teething issues that are now solved for them, but they were huge commercial winners because of it.  It was riskier to just sit back and essentially give the entire product generation a miss, with 2024 now coming out in a few months.  They must be burning cash big time the last few years, which means a lot will be riding on the success of whatever they're making.

I agree with one of the posters in that thread, who said they can't imagine what the new "unique selling points" would be unless they're making a nuclear submarine or something.

[Ray Proudfoot]

1 minute ago, Scottoest said:

Anyway, my money is on Concorde - especially if they plan to make it compatible with Xbox. 

Absolutely no chance of that. It has extremely complex systems including a full Flight Engineer’s panel. In P3D over 24Gb of RAM is used when systems are started. No way can it work with XBox.

[DD_Arthur]

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

A good, though biased article:

https://fsnews.eu/simcident-report-that-time-fslabs-shipped-actual-malware-to-paying-customers/

Looks more like a ham-fisted, misguided, and probably "cheap" way to protect themselves.

I’m not sure why it's ‘biased’?

It seems a straight forward account of the events. 
I do agree it was a ham fisted attempt to fight piracy.

I think it worth reflecting on the extent of software piracy on small development houses in any industry. It’s the elephant in the room that for obvious reasons we’re not encouraged to discuss on forums and therefore we’re hardly aware of the extent of it.

It must be enormously frustrating to see hundreds, often thousands of man-hours of development posted up on one of these sites with an invitation to grab it for free.

There’s no two ways about it; it’s straight forward theft. If you’re a one man band developer then it must be akin to a burglary on your own home. 

We spend a lot of time here speculating on what Asobo will be doing or won’t be doing with the considerable resources at their disposal when it comes to MSFS.  We never reflect on what third party developers might be able to do when it comes to innovation or time constraints if they were able to reinvest the profits lost to piracy.
 

[lwt1971]

54 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Absolutely no chance of that. It has extremely complex systems including a full Flight Engineer’s panel. In P3D over 24Gb of RAM is used when systems are started. No way can it work with XBox.

Can't really say that with absolute certainty. Firstly, the memory requirements of an aircraft in P3D pretty much say nothing about what the memory requirements in MSFS will be. Secondly, the XBox OS is just a variant of Windows essentially, running on hardware that is equivalent to many PCs that simmers still use.. i.e. XBox X is roughly equal to Nvidia 3060 Ti or 3070 and has 16GB shared ram/vram (MS targets it for 4K) ... XBox S is roughly equal to an Nvidia 3050 and has 10GB shared ram/vram (MS targets it for 1080p).

If an aircraft with the complexity of a PMDG 777 can be run on an XBox, I don't see why a Concorde cannot. Of course they likely will run slower on XB than on beefier PCs. The only thing that might prevent FSL from making their aircraft available on XBox would be the software architecture they're using, i.e. if they have parts of the aircraft that need to run as separate/external processes to the sim, etc.
 

Edited August 18 by lwt1971

[Tuskin38]

4 hours ago, Nyxx said:

There still in business because a lot of people have more than 1 brain sell.

It's spelled 'cell' 😁

[Stearmandriver]

3 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

A good, though biased article:

https://fsnews.eu/simcident-report-that-time-fslabs-shipped-actual-malware-to-paying-customers/

Looks more like a ham-fisted, misguided, and probably "cheap" way to protect themselves.

Given the amount of PII harvested and mis-used by various other organizations, I'd say this is hardly the worst thing that's done with our information.

Yup I've read that.  I agree with you that it was clearly an attempt to fight piracy - and I have a pretty low opinion of piracy, I do agree that it's theft.  The problem is, it was genuinely illegal.  They knowingly installed password scraping software onto customer computers.  I do believe them when they were forced to admit it and they said it was to fight piracy, I don't believe they were intending to do anything else with the data that their software was monitoring and collecting... But they still did it. 

I mean, that's not accidental.  They never even really owned it as a screw-up.

Difficult to imagine what kind of product they could put out that would entice me, personally, to do business with them.  But the market will speak... We'll see what they've got, and who buys it.

[Stearmandriver]

4 hours ago, Nyxx said:

you need to learn some facts before opening your mouth.  There still in business because a lot of people have more than 1 brain sell.

1. Capital Y

2.  *They're

3.  *Cell

4.  Not all my sells is does firing all times... But, I do remember the truth of this incident.  Urgent posted a good article about it.  For the most part it uses grammar, punctuation, and spelling though, so it might not be up your alley.  😁