HughesMDflyer4

A second comparison set is now live - his time, the San Fransisco Bay area. Check the first page of this topic for the full set of images.

I've got a comparison of the first screenshot (https://cdn.shoutlet.com/file/18677/5200637.jpg) in progress currently as we know that it is in the San Fransisco Bay area. I'll post it probably today or tomorrow. The other two from the Rock, Paper, Shotgun article are going to be a bit more difficult to do, as there are no real landmarks in them. Not to mention, they are rather small. I'll have to skip them unless someone recognizes the locations.

In case anyone wants to know where the Outerra screenshot came from, you can find it and a couple other variations here: http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=2109.msg40136#msg40136

The scenery formats haven't changed much, if at all in Prepar3D. It might not be too difficult to get the conversion process working with it. The sun position is actually the same in all shots. The FSX shot is particularly helpful for determining this, as the lens flare lines up near perfectly with the DFS shot.

This thread will be updated with future comparisons as more screenshots are released (assuming I can find the locations). All screenshots are using stock scenery and aircraft with max graphics settings. San Fransisco Bay Dovetail Games Flight School (DFS) Lockheed Martin Prepar3D v3 (P3Dv3) Microsoft Flight (Flight) Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition (FSX: SE) GIF version Innsbruck Dovetail Games Flight School (DFS) Lockheed Martin Prepar3D v3 (P3Dv3) Microsoft Flight (Flight) Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition (FSX: SE) GIF version

No, that's not quite right. 64 bit lets developers do more without having such a small margin of error (more detail, higher resolution textures, etc). This on top of the utilization of modern hardware to give us better performance, it should be quite a fun platform to develop for, one would think. I strongly suggest you go read the press release and some of the Q&A answers, as lots of your worries have been proven false many times already.

I don't think they're going to get sued for updating their own product.

These are the only three they have currently of Flight School: http://i.imgur.com/gHQ2eVV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/cE6NoJ6.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RQklDMo.jpg Wow, that's pretty cool. Wish we could experience that.

We will never move forward if backwards compatibility is maintained. 64 bit alone will break nearly all current aircraft (and potentially scenery).

No, it will be on Steam too. Win32 applications can be hosted on the Windows Store as of some time in the first half of last year. I'm not sure Steam can even host UWP apps. http://steamcommunity.com/app/314160/discussions/16/412446890550990408/#c412446890554935643 It has not been confirmed that it's Windows 10 exclusive. http://steamcommunity.com/app/314160/discussions/16/412446890550990408/#c412446890553928094 Just because Microsoft is a business and they do what they think is in their best interest doesn't mean they instantly poison everything they touch. You know, it takes time. Personally, my group (won't say who unless asked to avoid advertising) will support DTG Flight Simulator the day the SDK is released. It's exciting to have a simulator coming that will not only take advantage of modern hardware, but let us do more as developers. The FSX SDK is dated and can make development significantly more time consuming than it should be in some cases. For us, we already keep our code and related assets quite modular so that we can essentially plug-and-play into any new platforms that get released. Both Prepar3D and the knowledge that DTG was working on a new sim for the past couple years has been our motivation for developing the way we do.

This is literally no different than it already is. We have tons of DLC choices for FSX/P3D and a complete world of default scenery. It's already been confirmed that Flight School will have have the entire world as well. So as far as default content, we should be good minus aircraft choices (initially).

Unfortunately, due to the lack of pause/slew in Flight, getting one even remotely close would be pretty difficult.

I find it unlikely that the actual game is that oversaturated/off color. Microsoft would Photoshopped a bit of effects into Flight screenshots and did so less and less as development wrapped up. It's likely the same case here. Tesselation doesn't affect color. It's a method of efficient rendering.

Well, back before Microsoft Flight came out, I did lots of comparison screenshots between it and FSX. I suppose it's only fitting that I do it again with Flight School: Flight Simulator X DTG Flight School My FSX is mostly default besides DX10 Fixer and a tweak to the size of the airport lights. My camera angle/aircraft position isn't perfect, but it's pretty close. I suspect they applied some sort of color correction in Photoshop. Really would look better without it IMO.

I suppose that might just be one of those things that they've named wrong. The term "bump map" is incorrectly used in FSX. The correct name is actually "normal map."

Actually, the programmer who originally designed and wrote the cloud system for FS2004 referred to them as "sprites." Here's a PDF that explains the entire system, as well as a video that demonstrates the system.

I stated why in my original post, but I suppose I can elaborate some more on my main point. You're right. It has been 10 years since FSX was released - since the SDK was released. In the world of technology, this is an eternity. There have been so many advancements in all aspects of games, technology, and development techniques in the past 10 years. Take Microsoft Flight for example, which is now 4 years old. Very few actually know about this, but it has been stated by one of the former team members that the tools were light years ahead of what FSX had. You could make a change in your modeling software, save your changes, and the content in Flight would be near instantly refreshed. This alone, in a modern SDK/development environment for a flight simulator, would alleviate hours upon hours of stressful restarting of the sim to see tiny changes. It allows development sessions to be much smoother and lets the developer better focus on the content that they are creating. It lets the developer focus more time into innovating and creating new features. All in all, the multiple platforms developers have had to support these days has better prepared them for the future than ever before. Modular code design is a rather foreign concept to those who learned software development specifically for flight simulation - in the real world, it's just something you think about from the beginning of development. Hopefully the last few years have given developers a little peak at what's to come in the event that Dovetail's future platform and SDK are completely different to FSX/P3D.

This won't necessarily be the case if we have better tools. Part of the lack of content for so long was the not so wonderful FSX SDK that we developers had to learn. PC abilities also played a role. When FSX came out, PCs that could run it well didn't really exist (or were REALLY expensive). This limited what features developers could implement, as performance was a major concern. Also, developers who are up to date on modern development standards make their code very modular/independent of the platform. This allows it to be easily ported to other platforms - and in some cases, almost be plug-and-play. Unfortunately, this style of development isn't so common among flight sim developers, as many in our hobby have learned their skills solely for aircraft development. There are a lot of modern development techniques that developers can utilize not only to decrease production time, but also increase performance. Half of it is having the base platform that provides us with the means of doing so, the other half is just software/asset development knowledge.

Licensing of brands apparently played a major role in deciding what trucks they included - there should be more eventually: http://blog.scssoft.com/2016/01/truck-licensing-situation-update.html

For you, it might be less attractive. For majority of other users out there, Windows is the mainstream/go-to OS and 10 is slowly growing in popularity. I don't think OSX support is going to be something very high on their agenda - at least, not based on these statistics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp Not to mention, they are utilizing FSX/Flight code, which is DirectX-based. It would require a significant rewrite to switch over to OpenGL, I'm sure.

Wow, I'm impressed. Good job finding that! Flight actually had VORs, NDBs, and DMEs in its scenery and they were shown on the map (I believe all of the world's navaids that FSX had were still there). You could even navigate using them. Flight also has a round earth, minus the actually scenery/terrain, you just can't go anywhere besides Hawaii and Alaska unless you use Stonelance's Flight Toolkit to convert your FSX scenery over to it. For example, here's a screenshot in southern California.

I'm not sure I understand your point. They don't force anyone to buy their DLC, just like you're not forced to buy the thousands of dollars worth of FSX/P3D addons out there (yet people do anyway). I also don't see what's wrong with them giving users a variety of options. Not to mention, they have to support their development team somehow. Releasing a base product and not selling any additional content won't fund further development very well. They're a business with full sets of teams and offices. They have to make money somehow.

My guess would be a hybrid, perhaps using Flight as a base and building FSX features on top. I remember asking them a similar question and was told that their deal includes both FSX and Flight. I'd look for the comment, but it's buried deep in one of their Facebook posts from many months back.

Unlike LM, Dovetail does have access to the Flight engine, which Microsoft had significantly overhauled from ESP (even uses some stuff from the never released MS Train Simulator 2). Even further than LM has gone with P3D in some ways (Flight had a different model format, new autogen system, in-cloud effects, new content loading system, and much more). Hopefully Dovetail has taken this even further. Now, that said, I still very much appreciate and enjoy what the P3D team has done. They've simply been taking P3D in a different direction than the tech improvements that were made to ESP/TS2 for Flight - and there's nothing wrong with that. P3D is a great platform.

Just like every single addon developer you've ever bought a product from.