SamSam

Sorry, I missed your thread. I read your posts and this is indeed interesting. I do believe, like you, that the comparison is relevant. History on repeat ?

SimCity is an other simulation franchise that is going to be rebooted next year, the last version being a least as old as FSX. It's not flight sim, but let's see if any parallel can be made between Maxis and Flight studios strategies. Most of you have Joshua Howard interview in mind, so I will be quoting only Simcity spokepersons here :About the simulation engine :"Over the years, we knew what the game needed to be, and that's when we started to build Glassbox, a simulation engine that can deliver the type of city-building game that we wanted to build", said Kip Katsarelis.About targeted audience :"We're trying to build a game that satisfies a wide audience and different play styles as well", said Kip Katsarelis.About multiplayer :"This SimCity is multiplayer, and that is what this game is built for. But we understand that some people don't always play games online, and especially with SimCity, you're used to playing by yourself for long periods of time", said Kip Katsarelis.About mods/third parties :The game won't support mod tools at launch, but Maxis acknowledges the value of adding that functionality. "The data set in Glassbox is modable," said artistic director/creative director Ocean Quigley. "The mod community re-created [simCity]. We recognize it. We're not idiots."About DRM :"The game will use the contentious always-online DRM method, even during private, single-player games", noted Steve Watts.About DLC :SimCity is set for a 2013 release date, and surprisingly enough won't be a social or free-to-play game. It's an old-fashioned packaged product, and it'll be strictly for Windows, at least as first.There are some similarities. The quote about mods/third parties is especially juicy...Sources : shakenews.com and 1up.com

Right, but I was hoping that John, who is the primary author of this thread, or any spokesperson of major editors admit it or give us their opinion why actual third parties get locked out. It's propably all about money but there may be other reasons...

Any clue why the 3rd party devs where locked out ? Where you asking to much or is just the largest part of the cake in additional content (which I believe) ? In one hand, I think it was not fair from Microsoft since you made some great effort to give them positiv feedback, in the other hand the (crazy) price of additional scenery and aircraft should have made them drool over...

Flight home page, see the ESRB notice at the bottom left.

Thanks for the links, seems that I don't have the little brain you do !Sounds is important for a good immersion. I hope that Jason did its recording with spatial audio in mind... The samples sound a bit flat to me.I wonder if the sound system will have a good multi-channel feature (think dolby digital, used in Battelfied 3) and support head tracking devices (to synch the sound with the head position).

Seems that the URL to the audio is invalid. It says :http://mediadlstaging/mediadl/www/g/games/flight/soft_landing.wmaDid they forgot to add the javascript that should rewrite it ? No chance with IE neither.

Well, BMP extension does not mean that they are not DXT encoded. See my draft on fsdevelloper Wiki about FS BMP format. For instance, most of the files in the Texture folder are DXT3/5 encoded depending on their content and have MIPS.And DXT is an algorithm that does not give the best compression rates. Some games package their textures in JPEG2000 and compress them to DXT on the fly.

Right, probably not the full globe in 7cm orthopotho. But why not a descent set of textures, dem, land use ? I always wondered if Flight would stream data on demand from MS servers... But that would be inconstistent with the requirement of playing offline. Unless you are restricted to the zone where you have been before (cached locally)...Funny pussy by the way.

The way both products store their global sceneries is entirely different :X plane stores a precomputed mesh as a triangular irregular network (topography) constrained with all kind of geographical features (roads, rivers...) from OSM ; FSX builds the mesh on the fly or at load time. It stores the global DEM/land used as a raster with wavelet compression (think JPEG2000) and that allows huge compression rates. IMHO, 70 GB of data does not mean anything about the quality of a product. The fact that LR uses this as a marketing advantage is taking us for idiots. I hate to get 8 DVDs when 4 would be enough.

Yep, I agree. The best part is that everyone can contribute and contributions are taken into account in "real time". So you can easly add your neighboroud and see it in the next round of the scenery.In the other hand, OSM is nothing close to the official/payware databases yet (i.e. you don't have every houses and sparse trees depicted). Hopefully it will improve to the point that free databases match their payware counterpart ! That is an excellent news! Github ?

How should we know about the financial balance ? Here the main cost is probably the developpement of the tools to generate the sceneries. People are used to pay for additional content in their games (especially in the flight sim genre) and Microsoft probably knows that they could sell region of detailed scenery in its Flight market for a good price (say 30$). It's like drugs "the first dose is free" (think Hawaii) but once your are addicted, you can spend a lot of cash in addons and hardware...

I believe the way to go is to use/include more and more geographical data when available and default to procedural stuff otherwise.To illustrate this, see the work of France VFR around their "3D Automation" that is discussed here (in french). Basically, they are using high resolution orthophoto and DEM as a basis. The vector layer is the classic road and hydro network databases (think UTX). But they are also using the land register (and other undisclosed sources) to put every houses with their correct high and roof style. The cherry on the cake : their tool generate custom 3d building (when not rectangular). Reagarding trees and vegetation in general, most countries have good land use databases. IMHO, the result is nothing short of brillant! Plausible... and actually real !Is Microsoft able to do that at the global scale ? I believe they have most of the ingredients with their GIS project and the data they are already licensing for things like Bing map. How many GB on my HD ? Well, why Flight could not stream its data from a Live server (think Google Earth) ? AFAIK, LIDAR is a method to get high resolution DEM. For flight sim, the current NEXTMap products have a good enough resolution.

Thank you for the elaborate answer. So if I understand well, moving to a larger screen with better resolution to get a wider field of view is not a good option. I could zoom out a little but then I would loose the correct perspective (the one that let appreciate the distances correctly). The best option is to use multiple monitor assigned with different views. You may have save me a great deal of money !

Hi there,I'm wondering what is the relation between the display size, resolution and the resulting field of view in FSX (given a zoom factor). In concrete terms, from 20" (1600 x 900) to 27" (2560 x 1440) does it improve the field of view (by allowing a zoom factor that remains readable) ? Or is the image just stretched ? Could someone that has played with multi-monitor and single large monitor give me a feedback ?Samuel

I assume you are talking about the UI that comes before the sim starts (i.e. before the scenery loading progress bar). If it's not asking to much, I would really like several UIs for various use cases, pretty much like my scanner have "easy", "expert" and "professional" UIs : A quick flight UI that would let me pick an aicraft, choose an airport or a mission and go. This one would be not to intimidating for the casual user and efficient for a quick flight. It's a bit offtopic but it would be great if it could even suggest/generate a flight plan, weather scenario (something in between a mission and a custom flight) depending on a choosen aircarft and available time. This is something I miss when I have little lime to fly and that it is not enough to plan a flight, gather the charts, basically do the paper work. Eventually this would link to the market and suggest addons to embellish the flight. An expert UI that would let me configure things in details and manage the addons/market. This one would respect the user experience of the OS (no fancy transparent fixed-size windows). The configuration of the simulator, hid, sceneries (including texture sets, something missing in FSX) would be done here. It would let me associate configuration presets with use cases (i.e. practicing for , fying heavies...). A training UI with revisited lessons from Rod for the beginner mixed with a simple instructor station for the advanced user (i.e. to practice procedures, approaches). Additionally there could be a preflight UI that would help doing the paper work seamlessy. Something that would be a mix of nDac, FSBuild, EFB, topcat (if applicable) ect... I'm not saying that this service should be for free, but I would kill for having it all integrated in a simple workflow within the sim. What do you think ?

The correct statement is "64-bit addressing will enable working data set > 4GB". This is a common mistake to believe that "the more data/memory used, the better perfomance". Actually it is quite the contrary : "the less data the better chance they are in the processor cache".Let's play Process Explorer (rather than flying) :My scenario is a PMDG MD-11 flight with a little bit of traffic, and standard sceneries :Peak virtual Bytes : 1.8 GBVirtual size : 2.026 GBPage Faults : 11 486 041So the plane seems to matter which is confirmed by the fact that OOM usually appears only with hardcore aircraft.Since I have been using a 64 bits OS, I don't get OOM. So FSX never get to the 4GB limits (which is standard for a 6 years programm).

Not sure for Microsoft, but 64 bits games are definitely out there for a few years. An interesting read :http://www.tomshardw...aming,2250.html

IMHO, if the code base is clean (i.e. has been written with 64 bits in mind / does not reuse incompatible legacy code), it's only a question of compiling for both address models. So we could have both versions. Actually it could be a good indicator of how much the code has been rewritten (with modern coding practices). While a 64 bits version would be nice as it would permanently fix the infamous OOM that some power users encounter, a 64 bit OS solves the problem most of the time since it let the game use a full 32 bit address space (ie 4 GB). I don't see it at a priority as it doesn't have much effects on the performance.Morevoer the SDK states that "The recommended method of writing an add-on is to build it out-of-process, as an application (an .exe file) rather than in-process, as a library (a .dll file).". That way the addons should not "eat" the address space of the game leaving a full 4GB for the simulator.Mark, what were your motivations for 64 bits ?

Jim, call me naive, but I really believe that people at MS could be reading our posts if the forum was less about bashing a few screenshots and full of constructive/realizable suggestions. Moreover, even for the casual gamers, texture products are often the first product to be considered since they improve the whole sim dramatically.As a commercial dev, if it is not under NDA, could you tell us about the way the ACES team used to share ideas with the 3rd party devs ? Were you (or other company) involved in the FSX SDK specifications ? This is slightly off topic and yet very interesting.

You are wrong with the end of the dialog here. It would be something along :7.5% of their sales for the market service.or150K€ to licence the SDK for payware with developper support for one year.In other words, MS will definitely be interested somehow in the addon sales. In my opinion, the addons business should share a (small) part of its income with MS to maintain a better sim. This is probably highly controversial, but to me, it is fair. How do you explain that FSX is less than 50$ and represents a global scenery with multiple aircrafts, ATC, weather (etc...) and you pay more for a single airport/aircraft ? You will probably answer that they don't have the same user base and that is correct. But the cost of both developpments are not on the same order of magnitude neither. Would you mind to share with us then ? I restate that we should not refrain us, casual developpers and hardcore simmers, from suggesting improvements that will make our FS life easier and let MS decide on their priorities. Or is this forum the wrong place to discuss this ?

Given the very likely Addon Market integrated within Flight, all addons will have a much better visibility.And shall we let Microsoft decide on their targets and priorities, OK ? We should not refrain us, casual developpers and hardcore users, from suggesting improvements that will make our FS life easier. Remember that flight sim beginners are potential hardcore users (and addicted customers) in progress...

Could you give me a pointer to FS requirements for global textures installation please ? I have not seen anything like that in the SDK.

Thanks for trying to understand me ! What about a single call API :SimConnect_RegisterGrammar(LPCWSTR pszCommandAndControlFileName, ISpNotifyCallback* pCallback, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)where the implementation of ISpNotifyCallback is your core business.Flight would be in charge of the RecoContext (one by addon) and the audio settings. A command key could be assigned to an addon (think multiple push to talk buttons), and the audio dispatched to the context/addon accordingly.Would that be to restrictive ?

I agree 100%. But FS don't give them any other choice than replacing the global textures. That's where Flight could improve things.