Superdelphinus

Does p3d (etc) really model the whole globe at once? I find that a bit unbelievable. Havent read all of this thread but I don’t think there can be any argument that simply developing a game specifically for modern hardware and using all of the knowledge and expertise built up over the last 13 years is going to have a massive impact in how the new game runs. Sorry, sim. Apart from anything else, I’d imagine optimising the entire thing from the ground up to work better with modern GPUs is going to have a huge impact, and may free up a lot of cpu resources for more complicated simulations? If iracing tried to run in the same way as fsx it’d be a disaster.

I’m minded to agree - ignoring any replies that don’t line up with the original contention is usually a sure sign.

Again, there is nothing particularly strange in that, per se. You are licensing something that you own, if someone makes improvements to it you want an option to be able to keep those changes. I can see why companies wouldn’t be particularly pleased that this is the case, but it’s not unusual. However, I have no idea on which terms pmdg thought they were negotiating or exactly what they thought they were getting.

Played games? It’s all standard stuff.

Microsoft entered into a licensing arrangement with Lockheed Martin for ms esp, they didn’t “sell off the rights”. No idea what the deal with dovetail games was, but presuming something similar. Companies very rarely actually sell intellectual property, unless that’s their whole reason for existing.

Funnily enough though, of all the buckets of flight-sim add-ons, planes are the ones I least have a problem with.

I wrote a long post that got lost when my router decided to reset itself, so you owe my router a drink. The bit I remember is that I think the flight sim add on buying market us very important in this too. It’s full of middle aged/ retired men with relatively large amounts of disposable cash and time, who don’t have much exposure at all to what value looks like in the rest of the gaming ‘eco system’. Generalising for sure, but it’s a bit of a dream demographic for people who want to charge a lot for things. In iracing I can buy about 5 ‘study’ level racing cars and 8 laser scanned racing tracks for the same price as a pmdg 777. Or I could buy project cars 2 and all of its dlc, twice. It’s really difficult for me to work out whether it’s good value or not.

I agree that what value you derive from it is one part of it, but not all. If I get huge amounts of value out of a £100 add on, but find it out it only takes £5 to produce, my perception on whether it is good value or not is obviously going to be affected. My point is that I think we frequently don’t get what we pay for in the flight sim world, compared to other genres so even if I get something out of them, I still think many of them are very expensive for what they are and wouldn’t be the same price if the customer base was different.

Yep. None of us know (I doubt) how much money it takes to make something like the pmdg 777, or how much profit they make on each one sold either. So it’s difficult to say whether it’s good value or not. My sense though, when compared to other genres in the gaming world, is that flight sim add-ons are very expensive for what you get. In iracing, which I presume is similarly niche, the fully systems modelled mclaren mp4 (one of the most complicated machines in existence) is $11.95. Actually with the plane section I have less of a problem because there is a fair amount of competition in that segment which should mean there is some level of market force in play. There are some areas where there are de facto monopolies though, like scenery, where you don’t have much choice other than spending around £100 just to make one country look better (in x-plane you used to do about 80% of the same job for free, maybe you still can - although i I suppose you don’t get the hand counted 2 million trees with that. Imagine counting 2 million trees with your hands). This looks like the main area that will get disrupted by msfs.

$14.99 is for the ultimate one that includes the libraries for both Xbox and PC - most people here won’t need that. And there is nothing that says it’s a requirement?

I wouldn’t surprised if they have a continuous optimisation feature like the Forza games have - works pretty much flawlessly to keep at 60fps

Yeah I have a gtx 1070 an an i7 9700k (slightly unbalanced as I have just upgraded everything other than the gpu) and it will will run most things at 4k/60. Obviously on more demanding aaa games I have to turn down settings (though usually only anti aliasing, and maybe shadows) but it’s still pretty. Originally I had planned to buy one of the second generation rtx cards next year but I might just hold off for a bit and see what happens with the way the industry seems to be going, and what the new consoles are offering. I feel less comfortable dropping that much money on graphics cards these days, even though paradoxically I have a lot more disposable cash now than when I first got into pc gaming (as an adult at least). £800 or whatever I spend on this sort of stuff is £800 I don’t spend on my daughter, and there’s people within 15 minutes of where I live that can’t even afford food, let alone silicon that makes graphics shinier and update the screen more times in a second.

I meant more all of the subscriptions I’ve got on the go

Didn’t know that, thanks.

Quite an exciting time to be a gamer. Also quite expensive.

I don’t think anyone sensible who has commented on this thread expects that ms are reading through it thinking, “blimey, we better make sure we have all these things implemented or we’ll have a riot on our hands”. It’s just fun. As an aside, I think the next major step for computer graphics will be stepping beyond photo realism. “Photo realistic” is often used as the highest accolade that one can give to graphics, but if you look at a scene with your eyes and then take a photo of it, the photo usually looks quite different. I don’t think we’ll be able to make things look properly realistic rather than photo realistic, until we have computers that can model the entire atmosphere of a scene. The other side is degrading scenes so they look like they are on TV. If you compare what f1 2019 the game looks like with sky f1, the game is too colourful, sharp and precise. Rambling now, more coffee.

Interestingly they’ve been talking about the parity issue in relation to their own systems, so I don’t think they will lock in one version just so it runs the same everywhere. This is about games that are released that will work on Xbox 1, 1 x and Scarlett. “No one is left behind” but Scarlett will continue to give the best experience. I can imagine something like this with msfs too. Initially you could get the best experience with very top end PCs and Scarlett - 12-18 months later, top end PCs are clearly ahead of Scarlett in terms of raw gfloppage and so everything will run better and potentially new graphical tricks are added or refined into the PC version. Until Xbox Scarlett x is released which introduces some of these additions too. So maybe they design some core elements of the game to be quite scalable purely for this reason, and because it allows 3pds to not have to future proof their software too much (although cynically I’d imagine they’d rather like to be able to repeatedly charge for essentially the same product...) i hope this is coherent.

No doubt, but in the ‘old’ days, new consoles were much more at the bleeding edge when they were released, than they have been recently. The signs are that Scarlett is going to be a bit of a beast. If I can get an Xbox Two that’s as fast or faster than my pc with an upgrade gpu (say an rtx 3080 or something) but half the price, and runs the same or better version of msfs, that’s the scenario where I’d consider it. I am more comfortable with thinking of myself as a gamer than others though 🙂

I’d be interested in the new Xbox if the two versions have parity. Doesn’t make much emotional difference to me what the name of the square box is that’s supplying me with flight simulator.

Just buy DCS?

For me it would be worth it, yes. I play £120 a year for photoshop and lightroom and id get a lot more use out of this. not saying it’s right for everyone, and I did write in another thread somewhere that one thing I’m concerned about is that subscription models potentially exclude large groups of people from the community, which is almost never a good thing to happen in any walk of life. But purely for me, I think it would be worth it.

Im not concerned in general and I subscribe to lots of things where I feel the value is fair. For the same or less money than skypark I get lightroom and photoshop, or Spotify, or Netflix, or amazon prime, or the origin vault, or ms game pass. Skypark is abysmal value for money in comparison to any of those.

I’m not so sure this will be a streaming/ subscription proposition - I think there are hints both ways. On one hand you have that booty guy talking about how streaming is the future of gaming (though he wasn’t specifically talking about msfs, and was also including ultra fast SSDs in his definition of streaming), but on the other if it is going to be available on game pass then it would seem quite strange to add a subscription price on top of that. Who knows. Either way I think I would find something between £10-15 a month pretty palatable for something like this, given I pay about £10 to adobe for photoshop and lightroom, £10 to Spotify for basically every bit of music ever, and £10 or so to each of amazon and Netflix for masses of tv and film content. Anymore than that and it starts to get into taking the Micky territory, although I noticed that skypark thing (not sure who is developing it) I think works out at about £10 a month for what basically looks like a £5 iPad app, so the flight sim world obviously exists in its own weird world.

Eeeee its the massive bank of steam gauges. I’d be fine getting it up and running and taking off (after many hours) but if anything went wrong...

I for one would love concord on the new sim. When I look at the cockpit I do find it quite intimidating though!