Superdelphinus

I love the Wikipedia idea up there. One of the main reasons I really enjoy playing the assassins creed games is that I love history, and the way they give you loads of historical information in a natural way - the guided tour mode in the last one was genius.

As others have said, it’s worth updating the gpu. If you are patient it might make sense to wait until the next gpu cycle to happen so that you can pick up one of the current RTX cards cheaper (so you can use ray tracing, if that appears in future flight Sims). If you can’t afford it don’t bother, none of this is important. The other thing is the price of prepar3d in the first place - it’s a couple of hundred dollars unless you are a student.

I’m pretty sure there will be a way to buy and manage add-ons within the game. It’s basically an industry standard now, and has been for several years. I hope there’s a way that they can give the properly good developers (particularly the aeroplane developers) a bit of a safety net of some sort to allow them to manage their risks and develop something really good with the new technology over time without going bust. Maybe some sort of advance on sales or something - I’m sure they have a few quid behind the sofa. Companies like a2a who quietly develop amazing software that you can buy and still have the majority of your major organs in situ, let’s make sure they prosper in this brave new world. I agree with the above too, I really hope that the sort of apps that cost money to do really basic things, or the extremely high prices for the same sort of content that would be free or much cheaper in any other genre, have to disappear or adapt. I do get that there are real people involved in these things, but the current ‘eco-system’ has been heavily influenced by a small customer base, heavily populated by quite a specific demographic that may not get much exposure to what value looks like in the rest of the gaming environment. And I for one hope, that will change. All my opinion and I have drank half a bottle of wine.

I agree, but devil’s Advocate - what if that caused some of them to go bust?

What you said and what I said don’t compete with each other.

Wasn’t it also taken out of service because it lost money hand over fist for every flight it did? That plus the Paris crash. I love Concorde as much as any other self-respecting Brit, but I don’t think it was purely a “political” reason.

Look at this list of companies that it is rumoured Microsoft have either acquired or are in the process of acquiring.

I’m hoping they mean customer concerns rather than concerns of 3rd parties. Or at least both. I don’t really care if (some of the) 3rd parties are worried that the uncontested gravy train might come to an end.

- career mode - absolutely no reason to tinker with .cfg files - would also make sense to make it easy to stream on things like YouTube and twitch etc - busy airports - drama

I do think some sort of career mode is viable. Something a bit like project cars where you start off in something slow and simple and gradually move into faster and more complex aircraft as you progress. There could also be several choices throughout that journey where you can branch out in different directions.

I agree, though there is a chance it’s a translation issue. There are various other jobs in that list that require experience with azure so it seems a pretty safe bet that these guys are involved, when you put it all together.

Check out the first bullet point on a ‘vehicle artist’ job they’re advertising.. http://www.asobostudio.com/careers/vehicle-artists-84

Superimpose a plane on to this video and you’ve got something that looks a lot like parts of The Trailer

Also I’m not sure to what extent bing maps is updated, but there could be another 18 months of map additions planned too.

Apropos to nothing, I was looking at other games that were released in 2006. Call of duty 3 was one of them. That game was cutting edge at the time, but looks horribly dated now. The ESP code is basically the same. You could add a few modern bells and whistles to cod3 to make it look better, but it still isn’t going to look as good as a bona fide, modern game - this is essentially what p3d is. The difference between fsx and msfs20 could be comparable to cod3 and red dead redemption 2, or even the new call of duty modern warfare game. I’m not sure some people grasp how much better this sim could be than fsx if they’ve built it from the ground up. Night and day.

I would like something like iracing in terms of how you can buy more content, but allow 3rd parties behind the curtain. If I was Microsoft I’d implement a set of rules that have to be met before anything is allowed in, such as performance and bug testing, impacts on the rest of the sim and overall quality. I’d probably leave developers to set prices, I think exposure to larger markets will cause a general decrease in prices anyway. I definitely don’t have the time or patience to have something similar to what we have now, and I think there should be much less of a gap in value add that you get between dlc for aaa games (or other sim genres) and add-ons for flight sims. Actually the way Forza horizon 4 does it might work - I.e. you have a hanger in which to see the planes you have, and see what else you could buy etc.

Is there a list anywhere of which developers have said anything about the new sim? So far I think we know that pmdg and orbx definitely weren’t, and that Aerosoft probably were, but what about everyone else. I just noticed there’s no comment either way on the a2a forum, and they are trying to recruit extra programmers and PBR experts at the moment....

I don’t agree with “never” above. Do you remember the DiD games like ef2000 and f22 - they were huge games. They just don’t make that sort of combat sim anymore.

I would imagine only those closely involved in the project know. I’d be amazed if it doesn’t though. Even rdr2 has volumetric clouds and there’s literally zero flying in that game!

It looks like they’ve engaged with a select number of developers already, who knows which ones and why - perhaps companies they trust, or those who Lockheed have recommended etc, but will start the process up with some of the other players now. I still think orbx are carrying the biggest risk, especially as they’ve been out in the cold so far.

Yes I got it within 5 minutes of finding out it had football manager on it 🙂 I also downloaded Forza horizon 4 and yes it’s playable as long as you have a relatively decent pc. The graphics scaling tech works extremely well. I play at 4k with that switched on and it never drops from 60 fps

Bit of a love letter to the flight sim community

It’s frame timing I think, and is one of the big advantages consoles have if games have been developed specifically for that hardware combination. the other reason is that we tend to play consoles sitting relatively far away from the screen.

I think something approaching whatever specs project Scarlett will have. No idea about cpu power, but probably gpu power at whatever the rtx 3080/ 3080 ti will have. If there does end up being a heavy streaming element to this then maybe cpu power and ram amount/ speed will be more important than it is usually for games.

Funnily enough I see x plane as the least potentially affected. They have always plowed their own furrow, seemingly ambivalent to the wants and needs of anyone else. I predict that their flight model will still offer something different, which p3d won’t. DCS I think will be fine too because it caters for a specific subsection of the scene. if anything they could benefit from more general exposure of flight simulation. P3d will be the big loser I think, and anyone who solely relies on it. I think the chickens will come home to roost for all of those people who have pretended to be students for the last few years so they didn’t have to pay full whack for it. I could be biased though because that has always completely annoyed me for some reason!