bonchie

I'm not going through your post to carefully ensure I respond to every single thing you wrote. If you want to clarify something, do it. Your posts, in general, all seem to be pushing the idea that "we already have all this," and I'm saying, generally, that we do not and certainly not in a next-gen engine in a congruent package that's not patched together with 50 addons.

You are being obtuse. We know more than you are letting on here. The developers confirmed the weather is using real weather data. So you are wrong about that. There are also multiple scenes in the trailer not using areas with 3D scans that still look very good with autogen. So they've got solutions for that on some level. The world is not going to be flat outside of city centers. No sim except XP11 currently has anything close to the combination of PBR and dynamic reflections we saw in the scene of the A320 landing. The atmospherics we saw are only rivaled by DCS World in current tech. You can also hear ATC in the background of one clip and from the voice, it's some kind of AI, not a recording of real ATC. So again, you are wrong about that. They also specifically confirmed there is flight planning. There's a lot we don't know, but we know enough to start getting excited at this point.

Weather aside, that shot reminds me of XP11 with orthos, but with much better use of autogen on top outlining the buildings. But you can see it suffers some of the same issues, like getting the contrast of the trees right on top of the satellite imagery. Still a big leap forward for any base sim to produce those results.

US coverage must be a lot better. I just checked ABQ, a much more modest city, and the coverage still doesn't end for like 20 miles to the south. Amazingly, it goes 46 miles in another direction all the way to Jarales, NM. This is one reason I'm hoping this is actually a subscription service and not a one time buy. All this data is going to expand over the next 5 years and I'd love to be able to keep updating it. That may be MS's hook. You can buy the base game, but they make the lion's share of their money on recurring $5 a month subscriptions or something.

I mean 3D Satellite view in the app. Dubai is flat in it. That's why I'm speculating that the AI is producing the building shapes and heights in what you posted. If it was 3D scans, they'd be in the 3D satellite view in the app like Seattle, Miami, etc.

Sometimes, the plane never stops moving. Other times, it's smooth as glass. Just depends on the weather and time of day. I personally prefer the days when it's like flying on rails in real life 🙂

Map view, it's totally flat. I'm not sure how they are getting those heights in the non-satellite view. It has to be something different than real 3D scans like Houston, Seattle, Miami, etc. that show full fidelity in 3D map view. Otherwise, Dubai would be in both versions. If it's the AI that's able to produce that, it's pretty exciting stuff.

Phil Spencer interview says the trailer is using real weather data. Speculate from there I guess. I suspect it's real simply because if they were going to photoshop it, they could make it look a lot better than that. I mean, it looks good, but not incredibly good. There's clearly some cleaning up to do on the presentation.

Check my post above. Dubai is not in 3D at all in Bing, yet it was in the trailer in spectacular detail. They've got something figured out to fill in all the gaps in a plausible way.

Maybe someone has mentioned this? But Dubai is not modeled in 3D on Bing like the other cities we saw in the trailer. Yet, the Dubai scene in the trailer still looked incredibly good, with next-gen looking 3D rendering. Point is, contrary to some speculation, they've got a way to make cityscapes without having specific 3D scans like the 165 US cities in the database. I suspect that's where the AI comes in and that it'll judge building heights based on the angle of the original satellite photo measured against some kind of constant. There's also building height data in places like OSM.

My suspicion is that they started developing this shortly after DTG took the old code off their hands. Rumors are that they've been at this for years and that trailer doesn't look cobbled together. Take the city scenes for example. They are clearly much more polished in game than just raw streams from Bing (which you can go look at right now for comparison). That's the data source, but there's a lot more going on they've done with the atmospherics, lighting engine, autogen models, etc.

True, at least for some people. Personally, I went to XP for the ortho scenery and ability to fly RNAV approaches with the default GPS. I hate taking off and landing in it though.

Do you seriously think MS isn't going to surpass a bunch of blocky buildings from FS2002? There are already solutions to this stuff without having 3D scans. There's other data out there to place buildings, i.e. XP with orthos uses one method. There's also going to be landclass scenery in this game. You can see it in the trailer at certain points. I'm couching my speculation on most things, but I'll go ahead and put my neck out there for this one. There's a 0.0% chance that MS is going to release most of the world as flat orthos. Not going to happen. In fact, we know that's not going to happen because the interview mentions the AI will fill these areas in.

Of note is that these aren't just city centers. I just went about 15 miles away from Seattle's needle and the houses are still in 3D. Same for Miami. Didn't try any others.

I'm an XP supporter (or was when I still played sims regularly), but the same could be said about Austin finally making ground physics a priority. All these sims have issues.

Exactly. The very fact that they have to "figure out how to do it" says that there's going to be some serious work coming to simplify features for the Xbox mode. If it was going to be a "lite" simulator from the start, there'd be nothing to figure out later. This game is clearly, 100% being designed for the PC and they don't even appear to have the full plan for the Xbox yet. The Xbox will be the changed, ported version based on what they are saying, not the other way around.

I'm sorry but we don't "have that already" in a next-generation package. If you want to ignore the difference in visual fidelity and performance, fine. But those are major, major advancements for a lot of people, including people like me that just don't play the old generation simulators anymore after putting years and years into them. DCS World, an incredibly realistic simulator, has an arcade mode. It's really not difficult at all to incorporate and the interview makes it clear that they'll figure that out later. That says their initial focus is on a full fidelity simulator with work on beginner modes coming later. It doesn't even sound like the full scope of the Xbox version has been decided yet, which is a good thing because that means it's all about the PC right now.

In regards to 3rd party developers and SDKs, they did say in the press release that they are going to work with the flight sim community and "industry partners." I'm not sure what other industry partners there are besides 3rd party developers. They obviously don't mean Playstation or some other studio. Now, that may mean a partnership is required, but frankly, I'm not against that if it means increased quality control and proper integration into the sim. Part of the reason I'm not playing flight simulators anymore is the amount of work it takes to keep the hodgepodge of addons and plugins going, most of which don't even use the proper structure in the sim to install.

I mean, I don't like it either but announcement trailers followed by a lull are pretty much standard fare with AAA developers. I wouldn't expect real information dumps until 3-4 months before early access (or whatever they are calling it in their insider program). At that point, they have to have a roadmap and full transparency.

They've basically got until public early access to get that out. Secrecy is fine as long as the product isn't in our hands yet. But like I said repeatedly with DTG, you can't go public beta and not tell your customers what you have planned down the road.

It's highly unlikely for several reasons. One, their press release speaks specifically to meeting community demands and working with industry partners. They confirm it's a full earth simulator, that they'll be flight planning, and that authenticity is a goal. But even if we assume that's all PR fluff, lite simulators just operating as scenery stream showcases don't need AI traffic, redone GPS systems, FMCs, weather engines, ATC (you can hear it on one clip), the entire earth modeled, sloping runways, etc. There's enough in that new trailer that pretty strongly points to this being at least as high fidelity as FSX. I'm also skeptical that MS would put the Flight Simulator name on anything that wasn't a true sequel. That brand holds a serious level of sacredness in Microsoft's history. There's a reason they dubbed the limited in scope Flight something different.

I read that comment (there's another line you omitted) and it reads like a bad translation from someone who doesn't speak English very well, i.e. they don't actually know jack asked MS to let them develop but haven't heard anything. I highly, highly doubt MS called up a few 3rd party developers and said "oh yeah, there will be no SDK." They kept this thing top secret until three days ago. There's no incentive to tell anything to 3rd parties at this point. As to it being a dead end, meh. Depends on what is there at launch. If the base game is really good, you won't need a constant stream of $25-100 addons. All I know is that I hadn't played a flight simulator in over a year until a few days ago (needed to practice some procedures for an commercial checkride) because I'm just done with the current ones we have. I've sunk too much time and money (thousands and thousands of hours) into games I don't enjoy anymore. So if this new Flight Simulator sucks, then there's not much that changes for me. I'll just keep not playing flight sims.

MS aren't stupid. I'd be very surprised if they repeated the exact same mistakes as Flight, especially when it appears they are trying to roll this into some kind of subscription service via Xbox Pass. They have every incentive to keep material flowing into the game from as many places as possible.

Absolutely no one knows.

It's not going to be a monthly subscription just for MSFS. It's likely to be rolled in as part of MS's broader Xbox Pass. And trust me, millions of people pay for stuff like that. As to whether someone should or shouldn't be willing to do that, it'll be dependent on the final product. A lot of people saying they wouldn't pay for more than a base game will if it's good enough and truly next-gen.