Computermensch

Yep, exactly. That's the kind of skills you need. That's what I am talking about.But beginners (targeted with Flight) won't have that interest - for them Visual Flight does not interpretate into the Rules part as well (so local flying binds the fun air top experience and visual flight without needing to go more ambitious towards maps or really become a navigator rather than just a pilot operating the stick and the thrust lever (the consumer point of view and expectations towards the experience... i.e. Flight promising for all and easy ... most importantly fun and for all ... just be the pilot)So it's just for fun with consumers - no local, no fun. I.e. "Play Flight - become a navigator" ("Flight of the navigator LOL :)")Only pro's do VFR. I did some Prepar3D stuff for a commercial airline operator here in Europe - also taken up with precision flight and exact events."Loads of sceneries in Flight" ... head on, mate :)

Just saw this thread ... for more, see my post here: http://forum.avsim.n...up/page__st__50What makes a (flight) sim?For beginners and consumers Visual Flight makes a Flight Sim. Visual Flight is about being able to relate to the landscape (know your way around looking from the air) and being in control (i.e. being THE pilot)In case of i.e. UK citizens there are no UK airports, UK scenery, no europe and no popular British aircraft in Flight.No local stuff for most users in MS Flight, especially in terms of Visual Flight (except citizens of Hawaii and soon Alaska - if MS do other stuff those citizens will also be part of the Flight user base at the end of this year. If stuff is not more detailed than FSX then those users will have a better Visual Flight experience changing to FSX if they become interested in Flight Sims)... No local stuff for most users in MS Flight, especially in terms of Visual Flight means:In MS Flight - for most beginners - that will mean Instrumental Flight. To take out the hard part you get way points and voice telling you to fly towards them and giving direction.But that is still much like the Air Traffic Control being THE pilot - and not you.Take a free flight on Hawaii and see how well you will be able to read the landscape (remember to leave the airport space :) ).That is why local addons are so popular - it makes Visual Flight come up ...Instrument Flight is more fun at night or flying across the ocean real time :o) But that is probably boring for most except those with FSX and a home cockpit. May be MS should have started out with a carrier mission and night landing ... making sense of the Instrument Flight or Waypoints). I don't know hawaii so to me flying Flight is like flying a night mission (Instrument Flying). Who wants to go across the desert - might as well be Hawaii if you don't know how to read the landscape ... then you just focus on those HUD-like waypoints ... and look out ... theres a mountain, theres a mountain ... or there is the ocean, there is the ocean ... or there is the desert, there is the desert ... there is the night, there is the night ... indifference.Hopefully, when MS figures out the backbone experience is Visual Flight - thus based on local addons at the entry level and way into the middle ... stuff may get on.How many FSX hardcore simmers fly Instrumental all the time with particular notice to them flight data. Even there ... not many. That is for professional aviators - i.e. real training and thus probably potential Prepar 3D users.

>>That is your opinion and your assumption. Is there any evidence that back your claim up?Sure, there are no UK airports, UK scenery, no europe and no popular Birtish aircraft ...But one can pretend to be a local from Hawaii and then consume that ... Hawaii is just not of particular interest to UK citizens with respect to flight simulation.Other than that I have references to addons for FSX - so I have a pretty good idea about where buyers come from with respect to the quality of that addon - i.e. regional or national. Of course a few happens to come from abroad. But that is tiny ... and still just numbers - but for geographical stuff it's the way things are. Other people with reference sales or download statistics for sceneries can probably say something similar.But can not say more than that ...P.s. Local is also about Visual Flying - while Hawaii, non-local for most (new) simmers, will be about Instrument Flying (i.e. the waypoints):Hawaii is not a big broad match and I am not going to tell here what may be. I.e. if Hawaii was a big visual experience (remember Visual Flight experience and not Instrumental) - you would have seen a lot of people flying FSX there ... try flying in the desert, across the sea or in the dark ... indifference looking out. You need to be a fan of instrument flight ... i.e. not care about visual flight. Even pilots train visually in sims to be aquainted with approaches etc. If you fly visual then you want to be able to relate to the scenery ... or you may as well be driving your car somewhere complicated not only without a roadmap - but also not being able to read the landscape outside. Instrument Flight may be boring to some except if you're enthusiatic about all the switches ... i.e. FSX. Try flying the commercial Concorde addon. Comes with a manual too. Of course beginners without prior sim experience will setup the gps and autopilot or calibrate other instruments ... oh, that's not available in flight ... but they are going to love instrument flight on Hawaii without understanding or being able to read the landscape ...Oh, no problem in Flight? Those waypoints ... so Flight is about instrument flying ... Properly not that fun for beginners ... except if you are from Hawaii and can flly Visual ...

http://www.mcvuk.com...t-flight/091961Quote: “Instead of opening Flight up to everything, anywhere, by anybody, which frankly creates sort of a confusing mess for a new customer, we get to manage it more, we get to tell a story, we get to help it grow and get up on its feet. I completely believe that this ecosystem will come to be even larger than the existing product’s ecosystem. And that will be a point where I can’t possibly meet the appetite of a customer base, and I will invest to bring more people in. That’s the future, that’s what success looks like.”Let's translate that into some rational:"I completely believe that this ecosystem will come to be more usable (even larger) than the existing product’s ecosystem. And when more users use it demanding too much stuff that will be a point where I can’t possibly meet the appetite of a customer base (with nothing), and I will invest to produce it into something more usable (bring more people in). That’s the future, that’s what success looks likeSo how are you going to create demand with "nothing"? That's *BS*So that point in time about investing ”was” (is) now. Because it can't grow with no aircrafts, no airports. Where is Heathrow, where is F-16. where is F-35, where is ... hundreds of aircrafts? That’s the fun part – being able to use the product in a rich environment.Flight is a poor environment and can not grow anywhere (real demand beyond trying the demo) before more usable stuff is there for the experience.I.e. people in the UK fly in GB. People in the US fly their state. People in Europe fly their local environment too. A big miss.So it's like localization ... and with respect to aircrafts particalur interest in some special aircrafts.That's the hard part about making a new flight "for all". It needs the particular stuff - or it will fail.With the SDK if a local request is not there, then somebody can do a prototype almost instantly using the SDK. So that totally huge number of addons can be reproduced quickly with the SDK (guess the deals with scenery makers for FSX went up in the air - when they decided to do a new product and so on. So they need to recreate it all from scratch ... so let the 3rd parties get in to get it up to speed ... if Microsoft want's to do stuff themselves ... then speed up ... hire people and do a detail of every major airport in the world in a few months. Hire 300 developers or so just for that ... .or let the 3rd parties get on ... or kill your new product?)Not users will wait a year for MS … that's a lot of waiting for somebody to invest or believe in his own product.Who gonna watch a pilot for a TV series and then wait with promise to buy season 1, 2, 3 and so on ... while the producer is waiting to see, if viewers will sign up for years of viewing benchmarking on a 15 minute extension to the pilot and on a subject that does not interest you (i.e. not a "local" subject).Hopefully Microsoft will harvest some important lessons about recreating this game - but this kind of game will never grow larger first - and then you can decide to invest time and effoft afterwards. It's the other way around. Or we will have a demonstration of what failure will look like ...Good luck to MS but time is running out ... in 2-3 months Flight will be old news in the consumer market ...And right now flight does not have anything UK citizens can consume ...P.s.And too bad that the discussions was kind of killed on fsdeveloper i.e. during the SDK and "what's important for the experience" kind of discussions. If Microsoft has not been lobbying towards the community then at least a part of community has been "playing too nice" with Microsoft at the wrong time (or less and less skeptical towards the release of Flight and even after the release - now speculating Flight will eventually be good because of NDA contact and impression with MS - which is like BS (a black box promise)). Those discussions extended to quality issues could have shed more light on player experience issues with this game. We are the users and also connected to popular use. MS had no experience with this - i.e. they did not really develop addons for FS previously. That's why FSX and previous is so popular - local stuff. And the local stuff was there and created the broad reach ... Anyway for those who cared about Flight this may now have been a waste of time. No bounce for quality control. And for those who could have helped out it maybe became a "pad your pet on the head" job instead.It will take MS forever to rebuild the whole world now and every building in detail (and state of the art today is local and photorealistic). A similar experience to real local flying.So a miss - Microsoft have not caught up with the point of using addons ...But guess Flight will sell big in Hawaii and Alaska - if only those MS addons are better and more special to local interest than those available for FSX ...So get the point Microsoft. There is only so and so much time before the Flight window closes in the consumer market without local addon representation. So better speed up. No users will make Flight a no-go for addon developers later on.But in anycase you could have a rego at this and rebrand it FS11 and make the package more elaborate when time comes ... guess that is in the plans as well.

BTW My point was not to do a FS vs. X-Plane here ... I am not interested in that but rather interested in Microsoft also managing more than the technical side of the next FS (new software infrastructure). I have not read about any upgrade to the application business quality yet (flying). Only about changing the technical quality.So I went into some more specific details about the applications quality itself in the previous post. That FS could be enhanced like going into space as well as in flying - since a new release also should bring something new to the application. That would be nice.So I just happened to think about flying some aircrafts or vehicles out of the atmosphere and so happended I was researching whether to just try X-Plane out because of the aerodynamics. But except for those features FSX and ESP is a strong platform. I have developed for ESP and would not be able to use X-Plane just a cheaply to configure the software.Yesterday I just happened to take a look at X-Plane and noticed that the virtual physics could allow you to go into space and something about the aerodynamics. However, except for that X-Plane lacks almost any other feature ... traffic, AI, VC's and so on. So it is rather far from FS and I did not want to buy it. But I think the two features are important to bring to FS, especially that you can leave the atmosphere which would require some new simulated physics anyway. Anyway, that's why I just added the part about X-Plane in the post. In the long term, the business of flying will be more important than technical upgrades. So the problem for Microsoft can be if they never decide to bring that quality into FS. Meanwhile if any simulation gets there people will start switching. Looking for nice aircrafts yesterday as well I also stumbled across this post. I offers another view on the XBox side presenting visuals from different recent flying games:http://indiafoxtecho.blogspot.com/search/label/Xbox%20360So it is really not a matter of FS vs. X-Plane ... but there are coming more and more flying games (simulations). So it is about positioning FS. If FS is still supposed to be the have-it-all solution ... it really has ... I just pointed out that the only important flying features that is not there at all to my best of kowledge is the possiblity to switch aerodynamics for the world and flying into space. Both lacks have been pointed out through the years so it is not about X-Plane suddenly got a great idea. So finally bringning those 2 flying features in will make it super complete.Then everything can be migrated into that enironment - and the application infrastructure could even be used to wrap up more games - i.e. release a configured FS gameengine for a simple war game with 2-3 fighters, a second world war scenery and different algorithms for the aerodynamics. Possibly FSX already have it but may be used as an internal feature to reuse the platform for game creation like the example just above.Lets see ...

Finally, since this is flight simulation Microsoft should add more realism to the aerodynamics allthough they may intend otherwise considering "flight simulation for all". Anyway with a little software factory and some design patterns those algoritms can be switched in the game to satisfy anybody. I.e. you could pratically switch algorimths.In fact may be Microsoft should buy some of the physics from Lamar Research and breed the two. X-Plane also goes beyond the Earth but they probably do not have the money to make everything in FS available in a shorter term. It will take Lamar Research many releases while users keep waiting for X-Plane to become FS in terms of most features except for the realism and out-of-Earth thing.Let's see how fast Lamar Research can go ...In a new FS you will be able to fly out of the Earth - so will FS get more realistic aerodynamics? Doubt it but hope it. It could be done with a compositional software design for the algorithms controlling the aerodynamics.

Yep, you can speculate or wait for any announcements allthough professional announcements are rarely made before you are good to go.So I prefer to speculate to understand what to expect :) It is also interesting to see if those features will be there or left out. Software products must at least be state of the art in terms of features and technology just to enter the competition for market and cost. So I hope for something exciting taking all of those legacy software infrastructure features beyond the flight simulation application itself to modern technology.Must of the stuff I have read about including the job postings mostly dealt with new stuff for the software infrastructure and probably HD content. But hopefully we will also get cutting edge features for the application itself bringing something new like machine based vision to help "touch" the controls in the aircraft. Microsoft has that technology around for cutting edge user interaction (touch screens is an old thing mates) so they should use it. You could also have voice recognition with ATC - and this time you should definitely be able to fly anywhere in space. Then the models from Orbiter can go into that environment as well. So even more immersive hopefully making it more interesting for everybody beyond flight simmers. Now Microsoft is concerned with the potential for this kind of game - the software services and new game infrastructure is just the "simple" upgrade and secondary features (technicalities). The complex upgrade and primary features should still be to expand the possibilities and potential of the game itself i.e. vision, speech and the most important enhancement: vehicles leaving the ground should now be able to go beyond Earths environment. So hopefully Microsoft also understands the competition and will do more than just a migration to a new software infrastructure and a resolution switch for the content.BTW I also forgot to mention that the scenery feature will probably (logically) be organized into something like the domain of Virtual Earth - for space we will need something a bit more major than just the Earth environment. It would make sense for models to be deployed in that kind of environment and used for other simulations as well. FS is just one application of the World - but it could become the one that transforms a model environment like Virtual Earth into something fun as the scenery stuff has done for all of us here. Virtual Earth or Google Earth integration is not a new cutting edge feature though but just state-of-the-art by now thus a must have automation feature for the product. I already know of modellers who locate those models in Google Earth and Virtual Earth.For interests in Cascade Game Foundry started by some former ACES employees they are looking for a new kind of market according to themselves. No announcements made yet. They have made an interview around december though presenting a little more about where they may be going for game titles concerned with simulation.http://www.incgamers.com/Interviews/228/ca...undry-interview

I have written something about the new product here based on those posting since februar 2009http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthrea...0485#post120485It is about what to expect - in part about some of the technicalities (first posts) and the usability (the last post) ...The name of the new product seems to circle around immersive flying experiences and will probably be Flight Live (the team name)BTW ESP and commercial use of the flight simulator code base has been handed over to mostly Lockheed who also got the IP rights while Microsoft gets paid if Lockheed creates a business for ESP.For reading my post about technical expectations ... please see here: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthrea...0485#post120485But I think the usuability issues would be important for the most people.Below I repeat the last post ... enjoyHere is a "back track" to the "flight live" phrase. Apparently, somebody stated flight live to be or become the name of the new team already around februar 2009. That is one year ago.http://bruceairllc.spaces.live.com/b...477!1725.entryExcept for that I do not agree with his mix of options in fs software and product changes in a new flying product. And I do hope Microsoft does not mix that up too. I think it should only be a matter of product packaging. I.e. how the software is configured out-of-the-box for different audiences. If just one configuration that will probably be for the wider audience but thats not the same as the flexibility of the software.It would not make sense according to decades of investments to talk about lowering the software quality. It is rather a matter of packaging when concerned with product management. So software quality is a different thing which actually maintains the flexibility in the software that product management needs to take decisions continuously on how to package or configure an application for some role out there. I.e. this time an out-of-the-box flying experience for Mr and Mrs Smith. At least what I presented here is something similar on how use and configuration of software flexibility is supposed to be. Concerned with software factories the whole idea is that you can virtually switch the software configuration for any application. I.e. you can have the Mr. and Mrs. Smith immersive experience if you want. That is actually something FSX has done pretty well so far. So product changes is really not something that needs software development if the software quality is all good and free of important problems. Software quality is rather a matter of decisions made about the out-of-the-box software configurations at the product management level. So I think FS must have a rather good state-of-the-art software quality - except now it also needs to run on xbox which will require some technical changes. Important for product management.Taking FS on to cutting edge must include cloud computing. FS already supported parallel computing. So the really new thing under the hood will be software services which I recon in the game experience case now a days is mostly for new deployment features - again improving the out-of-the-box experience. Important for product management.It will be interesting though to see how the software services will compose the collaboration between delegates in the software. What I really mean here is Microsoft will probably not allow anyone to disturb the game experience for Mr. and Mrs. Smith? They want certified 3rd party collaboration and only deployment from flight.live.com? Or will they just allow 3rd party collaboration? The great thing Microsoft has on FS is a huge community of 3rd party developers. So I hope product management wont ruin that for Microsoft if they only delegate the responsibility for the actual software configuration to themselves.I think that responsibility should be delegated to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But out-of-the-box they can just choose to use the software configuration that experts already decided was best for them. Today users can already download gadgets, widgets that may or may not work. More people - especially the younger Mr and Mrs Smith are becoming experienced software users. So product management needs to change as well to understand that users over time become more advanced when compared to their former state as a group. They learn to use software ... so perspective on what is simple or basic also changes ... i.e. driving a car, tying your laces or use software is just trivial and not a real product management issue but an idiom hard thing until widespread use. Eventually bad software product management can make a product less effective for users and obscure the product. I.e. you only get an automated gear on your car and no options beyond that.What would be fun in using Flight Live - the replacement for Flight Simulator if its purpose is not to be a flight simulator - more or less independent of how you configure the software application?The Flight Live name may signal that product management has a hard time understanding that ... why not just be straight about the brand (even internally) and call it Flight Simulator Live. As an experiment product management could also do Flight Live ... a mix of up of all kinds of flying experences that is not about using flight on the personal level. I.e. you can just be a passenger looking out one of the left windows in the cabin. Microsoft could even offer an immersive experience with eighteen LEDs in somebodies hallway so when you pass through it would be walking through an aircrafts cabin seeing the scenery go by. It would only require a huge graphics expansion module ... rather an application for commercial flight in terms of investment interest ...The point here is that personal flight is about the use of flying being in the pilots seat thus why the heck is it not Flight Simulator Live? So I am a little worried ...May be it is about time the world gets project management (read: risk management) for product management (which are also "developers") ... So hopefully, Microsoft will keep Flight Live organized around flight simulation (again Flight Simulator Live). Perhaps the word "simulator" is scaring the wider audience ... that must be why the word is scraped now? At the end of the day all the most popular games are simulations today (3D or simulation of natural physics thus "simulation"). So no need to keep the simulator word from the 80'ties in here any more as if it was something special.Since simulation is standard for games today a new name will just be Flight and then Live for the service orientation. Thus Flight Live.So MS product managers and developers keep the simulation project going and as always concerned mainly with the pilots seat please to keep the value and effetiveness of the software (which has always been very good and cutting edge for its time) ...