Jump to content

fta2017

Frozen-Inactivity
  • Content Count

    97
  • Donations

    $0.00 
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Community Reputation

160 Excellent

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male

Flight Sim Profile

  • Commercial Member
    No
  • Online Flight Organization Membership
    none
  • Virtual Airlines
    Yes

Recent Profile Visitors

1,150 profile views
  1. Also, he did not say work has stopped on Asia, only that it is not greenlit. If he said Holger had started work on it back in July then he may still be working on it. Projects need to hit certain milestones before they are given the green light.
  2. Probably because they don't think a lot of people will stick with P3D, maybe?
  3. You know this how? And where is the proof of this 'new data' in their promo videos? AFAIK there source is Bing only and believe me, there are parts of the world where Bing ortho looks much worse than landclass scenery. Too much word not allowed stuff about MSFS here, let's wait until they run out of pretty photogrammetry cities to show us. What then?
  4. What a nonsense! Orbx is perhaps the most prolific publisher of addons in the FS industry with what, 300 products on their store? Show me a full list of projects they have announced then not delivered and you will have more credibility to your claim.
  5. Welcome to the games software business. Happens all the time, orbx is no different to EA, Ubisoft, MS, Dovetail and hundreds of other companies. Heck, so many announcements never end up as released products. And MS canceled Flight and shut its servers down, Dovetailed cancelled FSW. Life goes on..
  6. More info: https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/183096-openlc-africa-status/
  7. Andy, you make a valid point and the FS community thrives and needs freeware developers. Long may it continue! However what MS have done is effectively ruin the FS payware economy in a few short months, and they seem to forget that a whole industry has sprung up around their long absence, with thousands of jobs created in the past 15 years. These jobs are now at risk and the impression we're getting is that MS don't give a $&^& about it.
  8. There is a simple reason why developers are not talking. They have been muzzled by Microsoft by being asked to sign an NDA which was the precursor to any level of ‘engagement’ or access to an SDK. Except there has been little to no engagement, nor an SDK. In fact they don’t even have a dedicated third party development manager on the MS team. Even Dovetail had TWO of those guys actively working with developers! There is no need for conspiracy theories because those are the facts. And now, nearly six months after E3, developers are getting annoyed with MS and are beginning to talk between each other. It’s a small community and now it has become clear that MS are pretty disorganised internally and don’t really have a third party focus at all but instead are just giving lip service via glib media interviews and lots of promises being made in emails and conference calls, none of which are trusted by the developer community now. Meantime developer income has effectively been destroyed and this problem gets worse with every new set of sexy videos that MS releases, all the while ignoring the developer community and failing even to deliver the promised tech alpha 1 to anyone. Expect to see more announcements from developers in the next weeks as they desperately try to avoid turning off the lights for good. In a nutshell, all the goodwill that the third party developer community has built over the last 15 years has been destroyed by MS since E3, and there will be very few pieces to pick up by early next year. Alarmist? Nope, this is the reality of the situation and it won’t be long before developers say ‘nda be dammed, we’re speaking out!’
  9. Again, so shortsighted. Without 3rd party devs over the past 15 years there would be no FS community, nor would the hobby have progressed to the stage it has now with the rich depth and variety or addons which have extended FS2004/FSX/P3D/XP11 well beyond their original designs. Releasing a developer-crushing sim and then expecting “the strongest to survive” just smacks of ignorance and a lack of understanding about trust and building a loyal audience. If you truly believe that MS are properly engaged with “60/200 developers” then you’ve definitely drunk their Cool-Aid.
  10. Microsoft has shown and continue to show absolute contempt for the developer community, and it’s inexcusable. Furthermore we have seen the emergence of a vile breed of trolls who gleefully announce the death of the current simulators and seem to desperately want FS development companies to fail. What folly! I guess once the novelty of MSFS has worn off and the reality sets in that most of the world is not photogrammetry or has poor Bing source orthos, and that there are only a dozen aircraft at best, then these same people will be wanting the development community to bring fresh new content to them. Problem is, it may just be too late - because Microsoft’s shortsightedness and lack of 3PD engagement probably killed off third party content because some marketing team decided they should show off a pre-alpha 18 months ahead of release since it made for lots of ‘ooh ah’ moments and gave Phil Spencer something else to show rather than the lacklustre list of titles at E3 and XO19. It seems despite their protestations Microsoft really have not learnt from their bumbling of the MS-Flight debacle.
  11. It's not a PMDG 747-8. Confirmed by Callum Martin over at FSElite who spoke to Jorg Neumann at XO19 last night, apparently:
  12. Yes agreed, it would be wasted effort. I doubt they will do custom 3D models for cities at all if there is a Bing pipeline. But it has taken Bing 15 years to do 388 cities which is less than 1% of the world, so I think there is a lot of scope for 3rd party companies to make cityscapes in the meantime.
  13. What lot of other places? London was shown almost at night time (late dusk) but even then it was clear the whole Canary Wharf area buildings were missing and at the incorrect height and nothing along the Thames resembled reality except the Shard. Paris was top-down and one shot showing the Eifel Tower in the distance (probably ported from FSX). Everywhere else is nice and close up photogrammetry. 100% agree. Major cities representing huge population centers and major airline hubs are not being shown at all. Vancouver, Honolulu, Wellington, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, KL, Auckland, Mexico City, Rio, Manchester, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo - I could go on. MS will face a huge backlash when millions of simmers load up their home city and find it looks like that Gothenburg Sweden shot with lego brick buildings. I am not trying to be a downer here (I think it is absolutely amazing so far!), but we should be shown more of the world as the sim will portray it, not just the glamour photogrammetry locations.
  14. I'd like to see some of the "1.5 million cities" (to quote Jorg Neumann is his IGN interview yesterday) that don't have photogrammetry. After all, those 1.5 million cities probably cover 95% of the world's population yet MS is only showing us the photogrammetry stuff. I am not taking anything away from how amazing they look but please MS, can you reset expectations a little bit and show how most MOST of the world is going to really look like??
  15. You have hit the nail on the head with this. I know several people from some of the larger developers in this FS community and MS have not given them anything at all, not even a hint as to when an SDK will come, no early access to any tech alpha, no clarity on how they can sell their addons for the new MSFS or what margins MS will take - nothing at all. Meantime MS's marketing team are doing a (admittedly superb) job of releasing a constant flow of information to the simming community, blowing us away with incredible trailers and screenshots and causing rivers of salivation all over the world. But they are actually going to give a build to the community before any developers get to use it!!! That is such a shortsighted and harmful thing to do the the developer community who has basically carried this hobby for the past decade. So this has the effect of creating a lot of hype and demand for the new sim whilst at the same time leaving both small and large developers out in the cold without giving them the 12-24 months lead time to learn a new SDK, help debug the ineviatable problems with the SDK and tools and build a product pipeline so they have content ready for the release window. This is what Cruachan's OP was all about. This is a difficult period for 3rd party developers because their very existence is under threat. And don't think it will not affect the big companies like PMDG, A2A, ORBX, Aerosoft etc. Just because they are big does not mean they can just continue to pay their 30/50/80/100 staff they have all over the world. In fact, the bigger a developer is, the more I suspect their business is threatened in a major way right now. Small independant developers will actually be more resilient because in most cases making FS addons is not their day job so they have a plan B to fall back onto. Now think about companies like REX and HiFi Simulations whose businesses have effectively been shut down overnight by all these incredible weather and environment videos MS has released. What hope do they have of selling cloud and weather engine addons for MSFS now? Unless they completely reinvent themselves by moving into other types of addons or just redeploying their staff to work on different non-FS software, they are in real danger of disappearing very quickly. This is a vexxing question too. Why would PMDG make such announcements about a commitment to MSFS without even seeing an early build or having access to an SDK, or know if Simconnect works or if there is even an API they can hook into for their custom FM and systems code? I can bet that Randazzo is a bit red-faced today after seeing MS announce a partnership with Boeing and showing an amazing 747-8 aircraft in the new sim. He's likely quite furious at the situation because yet again MS are undermining a long establish developer who is probably still completely in the dark about the new sim. PMDG have forged a partnership with Boeing over many decades yet MS just walks down the road, shakes their hands and have Boeing endorsed aircraft now. Finally, we should think about what is being shown by MS in their videos. They are being very selective in terms of only showing photogrammetry cities, of which Jorg Neumann today told IGN there are only "400 or so". He then also said there are "1.5 million cities globally" but conveniently none of them have been shown without the nice photogrammetry (I think only London has been but they cleverly only showed it at near-dusk without revealing the lack of 3D data). Meantime there is a wave of euphoria worldwide from simmers who are being mis-led by MS into thinking the whole world is going to look like these photogrammetry cities when in fact it will be a much less compelling experience for 99.5% of the planet. So this selective marketing is harming companies like Drezweicki Design, FlyTampa, Orbx etc who have built a catalog of products which specifically build out realistic 3D fully modeled cities. By only showing the photogrammetry cities MS is creating a false expectation whilst at the same time creating doubt in the current FS community buying market that such products are now redundant and those companies won't be able to add such content to the new sim. Yes we all appreciate and recognise that MS created the flight simulator genre in the first place, but be wary of this giant 1trillion dollar company they have become .. they are making all the right noises the community wants to hear and see, but are leaving the developers completely in the dark. And that is NOT a good thing for anyone. Except maybe MS.
×
×
  • Create New...