Orbx

To make a point (and I hope Tom lets me share this, it was made by a customer, not Orbx), here's a video of one of our airports. What we strive to do always is to create a living breathing world, an airport with 'life' and activity, one that makes you want to explore beyond the apron. Back in 2007 at Devcon in Seattle, I sat down with the core of the ACES team and told them the fundamentally, their new demographic was shifting away from the FMC/airliner crowd, to the explorer VFR crowd, and that Orbx's mission was to appeal to the low and slow explorer market. I did not get any arguments from them and I think they probably seeded that same intent with Flight, although in doing so they have shrunk the whole world into an island.What I am disappointed in is the lost opportunity for Orbx to take their tech and make some very special micro-worlds. These are now things we are doing on older platforms, and we will succeed because there are always ways to make things work ....

Flight is not backward compatible with FSX so even if it was jailbroken or hacked, good luck getting any FSX addons to run with it.

<cough> ... Back on topic.I understand that my original post possibly creates more questions than it answers, but I only gave you a "glimpse" of what occured. There was an ongoing engagement with MS over two years which at one time included bi-weekly telephone conference calls with MS devs, which were positive and enthusiastic. But much of what was communicated between Orbx and MS was commercial-in-confidence and I am not going to risk beng a tiny minnow company being obliterated by the MS legal department.What I can say is that the developers on the MS team I spoke to were really nice guys. They believed in their work, and at the start really did want to adopt many of our ideas and really offer up a true simulator. So please, don't tar the development team with an evil brush, since the impression I got was that they wanted to create something special, and early in the project I was excited by the potential, based on what code we were given and the direction our discussions were heading.However, at some point the suits got hold of the project, and decisions were made at management level. At that point we and other developers were frozen out. I don't think the core developers wanted this to happen, but they are not the ones paying the bills or the salaries. You can likely blame the fact that the studio is part of a division run by the VP of XBox that has ultimately influenced the outcomes.To those who say I got it "wrong" with respect to Flight, I can only offer my insight into what happened, and what every other developer faced as well. We were given a promise of a new sim, but were frozen out 2/3 into the dev cycle after working with their team for quite some time. This then is less of a case of me beng wrong, than being betrayed by MS. I use that word in a politically correct way, because I cannot repeat what other Orbx team members thought of MS after the lock-out.Indeed, MS probably does not realise that the FSX developer community talks to each other quite regularly. There is a lot of sharing of ideas, communication and even cross licensing of tech. I recently had dinner in London with another large scenery developer, and we recently licensed tech from other scenery developer. This happens all the time, and MS probably did not realise that we shared opinions between developers on how we had been treated by them with Flight. So I can assure you that the consensus amongst the major FSX developers out there is one of rage, and that there is no love lost towards MS right now.It is for good reason then, that the developer community has long been looking at other ongoing viable parallel platforms to FSX,in addition to continuing to develop for FSX for the long term future.Platform wars are always fun to debate and get passionate about, but in this instance I don't see it being relevant to the discussion in this topic. I was asked about X-P and gave a superficial answer, so please don't start a flame war about it. We are an FSX/P3D shop and will remain so for the forseeable future, regardless ofthe pros/cons of other platforms.

To quote someone famous, it's "a big bag of hurt".We're not interested in X-P. It has too many warts for us to justify the time and effort, and far too small a user base. We can make FSX/P3D look and perform better than X-P even with current engine limitations, soon to be solved.As for MS 'tightening the screws' on an already-executed agreement with LM, there is nothing to prevent LM from marketing their version to the developer / academic / aerospace community. John Nichol (LM's P3D program manager) has already commented on this a number of times, even here at AVSIM.

Outerra gave me a build of their engine some years ago, about the same time Aerosoft were looking at it I believe. I wasn't impressed at all, to say the least. It's using a procedural texture generation system which does not lend itself to landclass-based large scale scenery at all. I am sure they will keep plugging away at it but I have to wonder who is funding their work.I would love to license FrostByte2 from DICE, but EA know how good that tech is and won't license it to anyone, and if they did you'd be looking at $1million plus royalties before you got the SDK. We aren't that rich, or stupid.See my previous comments above about R&D costs. To rephrase, it's too costly to build a new sim, so why do it? Use existing proven tech, remove the warts, and build on it.

A billion dollars is not far off the mark, hehe!MS don't know what they have in the FSX engine source code, or they would not have licensed it to LM. It is by far the most capable and impressive 3D far-horizon engine ever coded - bar none. Nothing, even in 2012 comes close to the number of pixels and terrain the FSX engine can push at a locked 60Hz. Problem is, the code needs a little loving and MS won't fund that. So good thing we have a dev team at LM who are doing just that. Can't wait for that engine to be running close to the metal and off the CPU and onto the GPU. Yes, that's coming and it will rock.As for making our own engine? Been there, done that, talked to a bunch of suppliers. Again, nothing comes close to the FSX core code, it's that good. There is a reason why code from 26 years ago was retained. It would cost us about $30 million to start from scratch, maybe more. Better to just make content for an engine that is working and being developed forward.

We've had Flight alpha code running in-house for well over a year; about 25 of our team installed a few builds. We've been talking to MS for over two years about Flight.I have to apologise to this whole forum because I sent Alain Needle a PM about a year ago since he was pestering me so much. And I let him know a little too much info. Oops, you guys have suffered for that lapse, sorry.Long story short, we spent a lot of time working with MS on white papers and looked at the code, gave them copies of all our products, told them how to do it right. They even used screenshots of our 1S2 Darrington in their mission dialog boxes, so they must have installed our scenery into Flight at some point, LOL!About March 2010 everything went quiet despite promises of new builds. Later in 2010 we were told to go away, no SDK will be shipped.Thanks MS, for all the fish.I've been a good NDA citizen and kept my lip zipped as best I can, although I saw there were some leaks last year from other disgruntled devs.Bottom line for us is that a closed environment with an in-game app store does not appeal to us since we cannot generate income from such a proprietary arrangement. I doubt that a belated SDK will arrive quickly enough for us to hold any interest now. The studio IMHO should not have stopped talking to third party developers but a decision at VP level must have been made to internalize the project.As for Orbx FSX will remain our core platform for at least 5-10 years and we will run Prepar3D as a parallel platform. We're porting all our stuff to P3D over the coming months. P3D V2.0 looks crazy cool, although I am under NDA with LM. We will release about 30+ products for FSX/P3D this year alone, including about 5-6 new regions including some in Europe. We're doubling our regions team and investing in FSX/P3D R&D as quickly as we can. We see no reason why anyone would walk away from 5 years of FSX addons investment to a new simulator. The future from our perspective is very bright.

I wish anyone who attempts YSSY good luck and deep pockets. We actually have digital pristine 7cm ground imagery and the airport management want us to make it so they have given us access-all-areas to the airport for photos. However, it is one of the most complex and ambitious heavy airports any company could tackle, and I am afraid there would be very little profit in it for Orbx, or most likely, we'll make a loss. The amount of modelling and geometry involved is immense, probably eighteen months or more of work. It's also in a really poorly performing area in FSX so downtown Sydney and Darling Harbour would need an overhaul to replace default models as well. We will not dilute our standards and make a "lite" version, so it's on the back burner for now.

Yes it has a warmer tone used in the shaders. I like it too.

If you use the same flight across both sims and default FSX/P3D clouds (which use identical textures), then of course they will be in a similar location. I am amused people are suggesting Bert has photoshopped the images, hehe! And yes, P3D does use a much warmer slightly sepia base color tone in its shaders, which I like as well.

This is a kown issue which the LM devs are aware of and hope to patch soon, although of course I will defer to John Nichol for the official comment on this. The workaround for now is to force a scenery refresh after changing season (you can map a scenery refresh command to the TAB key, for instance.)

I'll third that. P3D v1.2 requires no tweaking, unless you want crisper textures towards the horizon in which case you set the LOD Radius to 6.5 or higher (which unlike FSX, does not get reset back to the default value of 4.5 each time you adjust a slider).I don't tweak FSX at all, and P3D is no different - apart from the bonus of LOD Radius now working :)

We closed the Flight forum because we are sick and tired of the speculation, rants and nonsense associated with Flight (Alain being a prime example).Here's another reason. We are a business which makes money from selling addons for open platforms such as FSX. Until Flight becomes a known entity and there is an SDK published, we would be fools to commit any resources to it. I think every other developer in the FSX world feels exactly the same way.Of course, we remain enthused about what we see from their screenshots and videos of Hawaii.We have been talking openly to Lockheed Martin for eighteen months and we embrace their open, community facing communication and transparency, and their ongong development of the engine and SDK. So for us it is a no-brainer to embrace P3D as another platform to allow us to achieve incremental revenues from the commercial and academic markets. We will be announcing cross-grade licensing very soon.My advice is to simply enjoy viewing the Flight screenshots and videos which MS release at their own pace, without reading between every single line of every press release. Flight will be what it will be. It really does look superb and I am sure it will be a lovely flight experience for everyone when it is finally released.Now please, don't *speculate* on my words I've just posted. There are no conspiracy theories and I said it in black and white: until we can make money from Flight we're focusng on platforms where we can. Simple as that :)

We find most of our commercial customers are helicopter operators/trainers, who very much care what they see from 0-500AGL

P3D and FSX are seperate, side-by-side installations on your PC. The only thing you need to do with regard to our FTX Central shortcut if it is still on your Windows Desktop, is to rename it to "FTX Central for FSX" before installing our P3D PNW Demo. That will avoid the FTX Central shortcut being overwritten with the new one for P3D.

Thank you Tom and David.

Orbx Addons will work fine once we port them across. We will be porting all our products to P3D and offering crossgrade licenses. In the meantime, check our website to download a free demo of our Pacific Northwest region plus KHQM Bowerman Airport. I posted more info in the compatibility section here - http://forum.avsim.net/topic/349665-fsxp3d-sceneries-compatibility-questions-and-issues/page__view__findpost__p__2120055

Orbx scenery, airports and aircraft released for FSX cannot be used for Prepar3D as our EULA prohibits this and many of our supporting files and apps require recoding for P3D and won't work properly outside the FSX folder structure.We will be releasing demo areas for P3D through the next month, then progressively our FSX addons will be recompiled for P3D and made available on the followng basis:A. Full commercial license with provision for on-selling to customers or for-profit useB. Academic/developer license for personal education/development use onlyC. A cross-grade licensee fee (under $9) to convert your FSX license to a P3D Academic/Developer licenseUntil such license options are in place Orbx does not condone any attempts to use, port, tweak or share information on the use of our FSX addons within P3D. In the meantime we have a free PNW Demo available with KHQM Bowerman Airport included should you wish to determine relative performance of Orbx addons under P3D.I hope this clarifies our position :)

OK this will be my last post here on these forums for a while. This whole episode has left a bitter taste in my mouth and as a company we pride ourselves on our integrity, quality and reputation and care very little for speculation, accusations and in-fighting. Right now we are busy with a bunch of imminent new releases for FSX, a platform we love and admire and will continue to develop for over many years to come. FSX is now a stable and mature platform which is in its golden age, and as simmers you are perhaps enjoying some of the best addons ever released by many quality developers all around the world. At Orbx we are in awe over the addons like the PMDG NGX, and other airports and sceneries which many talented developers are now releasing. We are all simmers at Orbx and we purchase almost everything that other companies release, because we love to fly ourselves. Isn't that why we are here in the first place? We are fans of other developers just as much as you guys are. We cannot do it all ourselves, so it's good for everyone to have a choice when it comes to aircraft, enhancements and scenery. We are not about to abandon FSX or wholesale migrate to P3D. P3D is another viable alternative which by the way, allows us to legitimately aspire to selling our products to commercial customers, which is a good thing IMHO. The side benefit is that enthusiasts can also enjoy P3D for a reasonable cost as well. When our free PNW demo is released for it you can spend $10 on P3D and have a play for yourself. Easy decision really. As for Flight, I committed from the day of its announcement that we were first and foremost a Microsoft shop and will release products for it when it was released. Go and check our forums to confirm my thoughts at the time. Nothing has changed for us, we're awaiting its release and an SDK just like every other developer is, and I am sure than in time, there may be lots of addons for it. We cannot emphatically say here and now if/when we will release addons for Flight because there is just too many unknowns about the new sim, but as I said, in good time all will be revealed to the community and we can make logical business decision about what we develop and for which platforms we develop for. I hope the discussion here can return to some normality and that less conspiracy theories are bandied about.

If you persist in this line Frank I will contact the AVSIM mods and have them take action. This is not acceptable to us. This is my last warning.

Careful Frank, or you may find yourself getting a letter from our legal counsel for slander. At no time have we ever stated we are under NDA with MS. Even if we were, we could not confirm nor deny it. You refer to my recent interview at a blog site where I share my opinion about Flight being very different to FSX. If you stop for a moment and have a deep think about that, there is enough information which has been publicly released on the official Flight website to determine some simple things: 1. They are clearly developing a very beautiful and attractive sim, which appears to build on FSX and add a lot of nice shader code and then some. This is something that we as developers can easily establish using our eyes. We're actually really excited by what they are producing and we hope that we can develop addons for it some day, once we get our hands on an SDK. This is no different to FS2004 and FSX. First comes the sim, then the SDK, then third party addons. 2. They have only shown screenshots and video from what appears to be Hawaii, and as far as we can tell, only smaller aircraft. We hope to see screenshots from other parts of the world, but so far these are not forthcoming. This leads us to conclude the initial release may be localised to one area. Again, this is simply a matter of logical deduction, not any breach of some supposed NDA. 3. They have publicly stated that there will be a strong tie-in to Games For Windows Live, which as we all know is now known as XBOX Live. Again, this probably means that their release model may be different to FSX and FS2004 before it. We have zero clue as to how Flight is going to be distributed or released. Once again, this is just using pure logic. So please understand, based on the above public information, I was able to say in the interview that I think Flight is a different proposition to FSX, purely based on what we know. If you would like to continue to imply that somehow we are behaving in an improper manner then I suggest to think long and hard about doing so. We take a very dim view of any NDA breach, since we have Orbx NDAs in place with many companies and we expect them to respect our paperwork too. We are a developer, and we deal in facts. I have simply offered my opinion on known facts. Please leave it at that and not embark on accusations or wild speculation.

Actually all the Orbx developers using 3DStudio Max (the majority of them) are using the Prepar3D SDK tools to compile MDLs for FSX, because they fixed the API hooks for 3DStudioMax so that we're not locked into superceded versions. We now can use the latest 3DSMax code to compile for both FSX and P3D. Another example of how ongoing, active SDK development helps developers.

Just some info on P3D. Right now you can get a 12 month sub for $10 a month. That's about the cost of a quality airliner addon for FSX. Included in the sub is access to V1.1 today, and soon V1.2, plus any new major releases in the next 12 months. It is hardly a barrier to entry IMHO :) John Nichol from LM has already posted on the AVSIM forums to say that DirectX11 support is being added, and should be in a future release. You can of course imagine just how amazingly well optimized-debugged FSX code will run when it offloads all shader and geometry functions to a DX11-enabled GPU, and takes advantage of multi-threading across cores. I can say I am under NDA with Lockheed Martin. We have been in conversation with them for about 18 months. They are big fans of Orbx and we are excited to work with such an impressive global aerospace company. I know about a lot of really exciting stuff coming soon but of course I have to leave it to the official LM announcement channels. As for Orbx scenery; we are about to release a free PNW demo which includes KHQM Bowerman, for P3D. We are just debugging the final installer so it won't be long now. We have already ported all our Orbx custom apps to run under P3D, so it's a seamless install. Watch for the joint LM-Orbx press release very soon. We will be offering a "cross-grade" pricing for all Orbx products that we port to P3D. It will be very afforable, as long as you provide proof of having purchased the FSX version already. I also concur that we need a dedicated Prepar3D forum here at AVSIM, since there is a groundswell happening. If David Roch reads this perhaps you can see what can be done mate?

Can I also further echo Alan's comments by saying that Microsoft does not owe anything to developers with regards to Flight. It is their IP to develop and market to whatever demographic they deem fit. They don't owe us any favors; indeed it is their generosity in releasing SDKs for previous versions of Flight Simulator which have allowed Orbx and other developers to prosper, and for that we are grateful. Indeed we see a long and prosperous road ahead for us with FSX, and hopefully one day that may extend to Flight. But we don't control that timeline nor can we demand them to include us until they are good and ready to open the platform to third parties if at all.I think we are enjoying a good period for flight simulation on the Intel platform. FSX, Prepar3D now available, and XP-10 and Flight on the way. There is room for all these platforms to co-exist and thrive, since it allows simmers to choose what suits their hobby the best.Goodness me, I am really beginning to sound like a politician now, haha!

Alan has hit the nail on its head :)Orbx is developing for Prepar3D because there is a published freely available SDK for it, just like FSX. The word on the street is that there will be new pricing models for Prepar3D which will remove the barrier to entry for hardcore simmers. And our stuff runs on it with only some minor changes. So guess what? We'd be fools not to port our stuff to it, especially when you have very talented ex-ACES devs working on an assured, stable code line which will be getting closer to the CPU/GPU metal. No brainer really.So now the Flight situation. When the SDK is available to developers we can make a call on whether we port to it. It may not be worth our while doing so. We won't know until we see the beast, won't we? Until then, all we have are some screenshots and a few videos, a rampart conjecture machine here at AVSIM, and what appears to be some seriously peeved developers.