siggy

I understood it as "voice cognitive services"

In mild turbulence one might be able to keep his fingers on a knob, so this could perhaps be implemented in the sim too. But even if not, the mouse pointer could perhaps be made to stay relative to elements in the cockpit unless the mouse was moved. So in turbulence the mouse pointer, with the mouse resting, would move around with the turbulence. Of course, I have no idea how difficult it could be to implement something like this.

I will miss this one as it is often used for transatlantic ferry flights (e.g. "Premier1Driver" on YT used that one to take his Premier 1 from Berlin/Germany to the US).

In the "Feature Discovery Series - Episode 6" they showed how they derived the data for runways and taxiways, aprons etc. using Bing imagery and their tool to trace the various polygons. And somewhere else it was mentioned recently that a lot of that work was outsourced to two companies, one of them being ORBX, the other was not named. This other company probably simply had to skip what was blurred out in Bing maps. It is strange that the airport is blurred out as the airport company even publishes nice aerial photography of the airport, but who knows, there might be a secret dog shed behind one of the hangars that cannot be seen on these aerial photos, but Bing maps would reveal it :-). Here is a link to one such photo that they publish. I simply hope that this area is not permanently disabled for any scenery that could be built on it. The default buildings are probably unsatisfactory anyway and we need a 3rd party product. I haven't bought a license for the sim yet but because my former home airport is not there at all I am in no rush now. Cheers Siggy

This would suffice for me, at least for a while.

Jeff Favignano has broken down the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4f8-Dxaeho He has pointed out things that I have overlooked.

I wonder, how could they get so many aircraft developed? Could some of them perhaps come from partners? The product description page mentions, besides Aerosoft and SimMarket, also Carenado and JustFlight. Were these partners perhaps allowed to contribute a few "light" aircraft from their repertoire for in-sim advertising in return for advertising the simulator on their web sites by linking to Microsoft's order pages?

For me it is the extra high-quality airports and maybe the extra aircraft (where we don't know yet whether they are Carenado level etc.). Even the extra airports for an extra US$30 is worth it and we also support their future work to enhance/improve the sim into the future.

When it became possible I uploaded a dxdiag file from a Windows 10 machine, so dxdiag-wise it should be ok. It's probably the other part that you fill in at the beginning. Back then I had a monthly data limit of 200GB an I was honest. But now I cannot amend this. It doesn't matter, no work for me, and it is only a few more months to release, we hope.

Good luck getting into the alpha or beta, Dominique. In contrast I will click that button that cancels interest into participation. The process of applying for the alphas was a bit flawed. You could update your dxdiag from time to time, but you could not update your answers to the questionnaire. I applied when they said the sim is based on DX11, so I thought maybe with my Windows 7 machine I may have a chance. Later I updated the dxdiag on the Windows 10 machine, but I could not update the questionnaire, which showed that my monthly download limit was maybe a bit low. Even though it is no longer, I cannot change this and I am sure they have removed me from the from the pool. I am not sour :-), and by not participating I still keep the "Christmas gift" effect for when it is released and I see it running for the first time. In the meantime I might try learning a music instrument instead of testing software. It's probably enough that I have to test my own software every day :-). Good luck!

Not everyone seems to like seeing moving trains in a flight sim (won't quote anyone), instead people seem to prefer seeing passengers walking into their aircraft, luggage being loaded, catering being loaded. Some may feel that moving boats on a lake are a must, others may want to see birds flying around, and perhaps even to try recreate the 'going down in the Hudson'. IMHO, but of course your mileage (or kilometrage, if you live in a metric country 🙂) may wary, for instance, the trains in the Inn-Valley in Aerosoft's or ORBX' Innsbruck scenery, add to the liveliness of the place. They run often enough so you can see them from the airport. Ideally, the sim would have options that allow you to turn on/off certain scenery features. E.g., I would not want environmental sounds such a birds tweeting, if I wanted this, I just would go outside where they tweet all year. But the bush flyers may want this, not sure. Besides options for AI air traffic, there could be options for the following categories to turn on/off: Highway traffic Street traffic Trains Boats (none/static/moving) Stars (none/pseudo/correct) Moon (none/correct) Roaming animals (with or without their sounds) Flying animals (with or without their sounds) At the airport: Luggage vehicles Catering Vehicles Freight vehicles and freight loading Buses Monorails (e.g. at SFO or SIN) Passengers Outdoor furniture, e.g. at visitors terraces at airports With these and possibly more options, everyone could tailor their simulator world and their frame rate to their heart's content. I would certainly turn a number of them off, but not the trains, for me, they add to the liveliness.

Just saw an article here (in German) that is about someone reporting that the "Ingame-Shop" would be called "Flight Marketplace", which allegedly would have freeware and payware content and the currency for payments would be called "Flight Coins". The article also says that last night the "Flight Simulator Partner Program" web site had been online but has been taken down again.

You are right, I remember now, we have seen this, e.g here: (this is from the May 7th update)

Thank you Dominique for your investigation! It is good that they are not shy showing us non-perfect screenshots, so we know that we will not, at least not straight away, maybe never really, have a sim where everything looks close to being perfect. Wonder whether the shadows are also removed by the AI and then the scenery render engine adds them back dynamically according to lighting conditions, or whether they are baked into the landscape? As long as we can also choose a winter landscape, it will be fine 🙂 .

In the above mentioned screenshot, the snow-capped ridge on the right hand side that goes down to the "HUD meters" on the bottom right corner, its snow cover ends all of a sudden on its left hand side. It looks as if some generic texture is overlaid there. Anyway, probably not much to worry about 🙂 as things will improve in the future.

This could probably be solved. Assuming the exceptions are a small percentage, the program could look up identifiers such as these in a list of exceptions that would then say "JSTRM=Jetsream" or similar (don't want to be too technical). All other ones are given to the TTS as they are. The ATC text could then still display JSTRM but say Jetstream.

Regarding ATC pronouncing waypoint names, go to translate.google.com , select "English" as the language, type in a few of the waypoint names, one per line, and click on the play button. Even bing translator can produce something similar.

As we have the intelligence to try pronounce these 5-letter 'words', maybe they find a way in the future to have the 'artificial intelligence' (AI) work out how to pronounce them too. Don't know whether the TTS only allows one to use regular letters as input, if it also allowed the International Phonetic Alphabet (that you find in dictionaries), the TTS system could then also pronounce these somehow.

This episode's video was so fast-paced, I had to watch it a few times, and I am sure I still missed things. Amazing, what we will get, almost everything has been improved so much compared to our current sims. Even if ATC has not made a quantum leap, what will they be doing in the next ten years as they mentioned that the plans are to keep developing this product for the next ten years? If that one are has not yet improved, I would expect that in the next few years it will, even though we all want it now :-). Should seasons not be included initially, I am confident that they will follow. They have shown us already that winter landscapes are possible. Anyway here are a few observations from watching the video: On the world map: Airports with the black star in a yellow circle, do they indicate that these are detailed airports? At 2:25, the altitude profile goes from 39000ft at HSTIN to 36850ft at ZZIPR over a distance of 111NM, this looks a bit weird, one would assume that the 39000ft are left shortly before ZZIPR. From 2:52 on and later, the mouse pointer seems to be an inch or two to the left of where the user clicks or rotates the knob. At 4:16 the user clicks on the "CDI" button but the mouse pointer is to the left of it. From 4:28-4:33 the internal shadows across the standby instruments are jagged and flickering as what I have seen in P3D and also XP videos, but then the shadows seems to get out of focus and hence become smoother. Nice that you can remove the Yoke for full visibility of the instruments. What are those 4 orange/brown things on the taxiway opposite the runway at 5:51? At 7:49, for a fraction of a second, we can see the top-level menu icons. From left to right we see: - Camera Symbol - Tick Symbol - Yoke Symbol - Pilot's Head Symbol - Something that looks like a weight - Compass Symbol - List/Menu Symbol - POI Symbol (?) - Map/Document Symbol - Cloud Symbol - Cogwheel Symbol (Settings I guess)

This is regarding key assignments. As I am not an alpha tester, I don't know what might be there or not. A very long time ago, there was a sim by SubLogic called "Flight Assignment A.T.P.". It had very useful key mappings. The keys were sub-divided into categories and categories used one of the shift-modifiers like Shift/Ctrl/Alt/None. Their categories were: Aircraft Controls (no modifier): e.g. pitch/roll/yaw, thrust, flaps, gear, etc. Aircraft Simulation Controls (no modifier): e.g. pause,etc. Navigation Controls (Shift modifier): e.g. NAV1/2, setting their frequencies and OBS etc. View Controls (also Shift modifier), e.g.: Shift-<NumPad> to control view direction Communication Controls (Ctrl modifier): e.g. tuning the COM radios Simulation Controls (Alt modifier): e.g. quiet, slew modes, etc. This used only the basic modifier keys. However, we could now distinguish between left Ctrl/Alt/Shift, the not so useful CapsLock key could be used for a purpose, The Windows key and the Menu Key could also be used as a modifier and maybe combos like ctrl-shift too. With a system like this, for those who want to use this instead of hitting small mouse rectangles in the VC, one would have much easier control over everything. I guess the sim will have a well-known keyboard map, but I hope one can create a 2nd map with fresh more logic assignments.

What the SDK will provide (this would be very late, close to release I guess) What the "In-Game" editors will provide What the file/directory/folder structure is Repainting of aircraft

If they are willing to do more "Feature Discovery" videos, the user interface, including the flight planning part, has not been covered yet. For instance, in one of the screenshots I saw a separate map window been shown. And we saw snippets only of where you can define your flight origin and destination only, where a cloud covered globe was visible. Then the questions arise, can this be shown without clouds, can airways be displayed on that map, can that map window mentioned above be drawn out to a 2nd monitor, etc.

I was a bit short and too technical with this, sorry. What this could do is, someone posts a screenshot, and you would like going there in the sim, so in the menus you would go to something like World/Location/GoTo and open that screenshot. The image would not be shown, but the position would be taken from the extra data in the screenshot and then the simulator would position your plane at the same location, possible with the same pitch/roll/heading, but definitely at the same altitude. It could be an easy way to pass on the location etc. via screenshots. What type of GPS data this can include (some don't make sense for a flight simulator) can be seen here: https://exiftool.org/TagNames/GPS.html GPSLatitude GPSLongitude GPSAltitude GPSSpeed GPSTrack I have seen GPSPitch and GPSRoll mentioned, but they are not in the list at the link above, so they might be non-standard fields.

It would perhaps be useful, should the simulator create the screenshots, and not via 'Print Screen'/Clip Board, that it could save the location/GPS coordinates in EXIF meta data inside the .jpg files. But maybe only in the released version, otherwise we would lose the fun in the "In-game VS Satellite" thread :-).

An A380 will be added to the fleet and to test it there will be an open beta.