Gulfstream

XP12 won't have anywhere near the graphics fidelity of the engine that is driving MSFS2020. I'm in this field. Mark my words. And note I'm not happy about it, it means less competition. But unless LR can hire an extra 1,000+ engineers and find a favorable cloud streaming contract, it isn't possible. Edit: Note with this comment I am including everyone from Microsoft to Asobo, to Blackshark AI to Bing Maps, to Azure. There is a LOT of engineering behind this. LR is well aware of this. I'm not sure what happens now.

Correct. The question is how long LR as a company can remain profitable when faced with a herculean engineering effort. Given the two value propositions, why would I choose X-Plane? Yes we can get into the weeds with everything from blade element theory to sub-orbital flight but I am mostly speaking about the average consumer. And I don't want to rock the apple cart but "blade element theory" is actually one of these fancy-sounding things that has already been surpassed. And as crazy as this may sound, I am rooting for LR ... but I am realistic. I don't think this most recent push from MS can be ignored.

I might "win" if only because I have deep technical knowledge about all of this minutea. What isn't going to "win" in the long run is competition in the flight sim community, because it's becoming clear that the bar has been raised to drastically different heights. That is good for flight simulation as a whole, because this is an impressive feat. It may not be good for FS competition. And I'm a long time X-Plane user and still remember when I bought this at my local computer store. That was before the CPL/ATP.

This simply wrong. I could show you ray-traced graphics from 1995 showing how light reacted with a glass bottle that were impressive. That is the "lighting" engine. And I'm certainly not trying to do a "my credentials are better than your credentials" thing. This is more than a "lighting engine". Yes, while it involves light, the actual technical details to make something look like this is much more than the sum of its parts. Edit: The interesting thing about this discussion is I'd be happy to talk to anyone at LR about this. They'd know exactly what I'm talking about.

I mentioned I was a software engineer. I honestly can't go into the "nitty gritty" on why this is all wrong, but suffice it to say, it is. The platform that the new MSFS is built on is far, far more than a "lighting engine". You might be thinking of specific technologies like trueSKY, which can get you a realistic volumetric atmosphere. https://simul.co/ I really can't go into specifics about the deeper graphical pipelines, cloud technologies, etc. I don't work for anyone involved, but I can only say we're talking thousands of engineers who have worked on various parts of this. I don't know how many employees LR has. The last estimates I saw was ~10, and not all of these are working on the core of the desktop simulator. You can see why this is not favorable. Edit: For the record I'm also a US commercial pilot and graduated with a degree in Aeronautical Science in the 90s. I was already a heavy flight simulation enthusiast back then .. in fact, flight sims are what started me on that journey.

0 They can't go to XBox because they are not on a Microsoft game technology stack. X-Plane runs native on Linux, Mac and Windows. You'll note the recent graphics update was Vulkan, not DirectX 12.

By "like for like performance", what are you meaning? That X-Plane should have the same graphics as MSFS and run at equal or better performance? Or that X-Plane should focus on performance and not bother with eye candy? If you mean the former, in that X-Plane has to now compete with Microsoft/Asobo, that simply isn't possible. Look at the number of developers, the size of the companies, and the budget. If you mean something else by "performance", which could be anything from FPS to simulation fidelity, it's not clear. I'm a software engineer so I'd be happy to explain why, realistically, LR can't compete with MSFS on a manpower basis alone. It goes beyond even Asobo, where other contractors have been brought in (Blackshark AI, etc) that have some incredible technology in their own right. Add in Bing maps, Azure cloud, custom in-house modelers that have already brought 1,000+ custom modelled POIs as the World Updates continue. You can see how this is a scary time to be a competitor.

That video on the Visual Effects SDK is mind-blowing when you think about how advanced this simulator is just from the SDK tools alone. That node-graph editor running live inside the sim is just another example of how far ahead Asobo/Microsoft are with this. Stuff like this will help to create a vibrant 3rd party ecosystem. I would not want to be a competitor to this product at the moment. The engineering effort behind even the SDK tools is formidable.

This is true, it does require Game Pass, but you get 100 other games along with Flight Simulator, and you can pre-flight in a browser tab next to your email inbox, then when you're done, pick it back up on a PC with a monitor or your 4K TV with an XBox. It's all very interesting.

The XBox Game Pass with the streaming service is exactly that. Streaming. The simulator itself runs in the cloud on Microsoft hardware. The results are streamed back to your device (TV, phone, tablet, your web browser). Interactions on your side are sent to the server. That is how a phone can run MSFS2020. Think of it like YouTube, but with interaction. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming This is for all XBox titles, not just flight simulator.

At the end of the day, they are a business and they have to keep the lights on. That means following the money, whether they want to or not. Since we don't know the other revenue streams (such as from FAA-approved X-Plane professional setups), mobile is clearly paying the bills. The difference between Microsoft's approach to mobile flight simulator, and X-Plane's, is that with Microsoft you are streaming the video of the simulator to the platform. With X-Plane you are actually running the simulator on the device. Unfortunately for X-Plane, this means that you can easily get a high-res, high-FPS version of MSFS on your phone as if it was running on an expensive desktop. This is not the case for the native mobile X-Plane app.

I feel for LR in this case, especially Austin, Ben and others are extremely talented developers and aviation geeks. But when you look at this realistically, you have a small company with a lot of technical debt going against a company with infinite money and who was able to start "clean sheet". Unless X-Plane goes completely back to the drawing board and rebuilds a modern graphics engine, it simply won't be able to compete in visuals. And taking a step like that would require many years of work, with a very small team. And it requires a lot of experts in cutting-edge computer graphics techniques, who all likely work for companies like Asobo or other AAA gaming companies. Vulkan was a step, but that alone does not get you the graphics pipeline you need for something like MSFS2020. At the end of the day, it looks like they have to look towards the numbers. And that would be mobile, and whatever contracts/sales have coming in for official FAA simulator bases. I am not sure if they can fight MSFS on graphics going forward.

Interesting. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/blog/microsoft-flight-simulator-the-future-of-game-development/

Microsoft is going to sell paid updates to Flight Simulator. It's likely that a portion of the profit on these will cover bandwidth costs, but that would just be a guess. A cloud business the sheer size of Microsoft's Azure is difficult to comprehend. The amount of bandwidth they are using to send flight sim addicts some tiles is nothing compared to what business demand from Azure. I am a software engineer who deals with Azure frequently, and the amount of ingress/egress from these platforms puts tile streaming to shame.

This distinction between "PC" and "XBox" is a little strange, since they are both computers. The XBox is a special-built PC. That's how they can offer the new "cloud" gaming services, where they will run your XBox games on their side and stream the results to you. They don't accomplish this with a warehouse of XBoxes sitting next to each other. They have racks of servers that happen to run equivalent XBox hardware. The XBox supports hooking up your flight yoke and throttle via a USB. You can hook up a keyboard and a mouse. So what is the difference between an XBox with a keyboard, mouse, and flight hardware, versus a PC with the same? There is none. The XBox may be more powerful and in a smaller form factor than your PC, all for less money. They lose money on the hardware, unlike PC manufacturers. So you're getting a quality PC and prices you wouldn't be able to get otherwise.

It looks like the reason REX went with the black rubber marks further down that the painted approach numbers is because it doesn't look realistic in EAG at all. Perhaps there is no way to decal on top of these "painted on" runway items? Obviously, black rubber marks should not be "under" the white paint.

You're correct, that does look about right. I was seeing these obviously-HDR examples in this thread and skewing my memory of what I just watched. That being said, there are some examples that seem "too strong". The tulip fields can, of course, stand out like this in real life. But I've never seen anything like this intensity of purple trees. This is all nitpicking though ... it's not for me, but if it makes others happy, go for it! It seems like a great product overall.

A lot of photos on the internet showcasing things like cherry blossoms or tulip fields are overblown with HDR. The constructive criticisms here are correct. In the air they often look more like this ... somewhat muted due to atmospheric effects.

As a software engineer, I noticed step 1 was "Please make sure to set the UAC (User Account Control) to “never notify”." This is instructing users to permanently disable an important Windows security feature. I do not see anywhere in the instructions to turn this back on. Experienced Windows users don't need UAC and I have mine turned off, so for most on here this is likely a non-issue. But for inexperienced users this is a "big ask".

We're starting to see a convergence here. Microsoft recently announced that any game you own via XBox GamePass will be able to be streamed at up to 4K to any device you are on, anywhere. They are planning on shipping the XBox "app" with major TV manufacturers. You would only need a controller. You don't even need to own an XBox or a PC in this future. Yes, for something like our hobby with Flight Simulator, where we demand the highest fidelity and have a lot of hardware peripherals, we aren't going to stream it to a TV. But we could, in the near future.

This could be interesting. https://www.adaptnetwork.com/gaming/boeing-next-level-racing-flight-sim-cockpit/

Interesting video posted yesterday on DirectX 12 / DirectStorage.

It looks like UWP apps may not be supported. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/how-can-i-launch-uwp-app/124060

It has won a bunch of awards already. A lot of them for technical excellence. It won a SXSW award: PC Gamer gave it GOTY for innovation, etc. https://www.pcgamer.com/game-of-the-year-awards-2020/

You can read all you want about the physics straight from Microsoft. https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Additional_Information/Flight_Model_Physics.htm It looks like the (I'm assuming) LaTeX markup isn't rendering correctly but the information is all there.