fta2017

The three main ones for the FS community are: FSExpo (Vegas, June 2020) Cosford (Wolverhampton UK, October 2020) Lelystad (Netherlands, Nov 2019) Then you have the major trade shows like Oshkosh, I/ITSEC, E3, XO19, and Gamescon.

I hope people getting the tech alpha realise that it will be an old build, likely a few months old, and all they will be doing is bug-fix validation from previous build cycles. This is how tech alphas from other games publishers tend to work. The main purpose is data gathering from user’s PCs to expand the performance database from a few hundred PCs to perhaps 3,000+ PCs. This will allow DX11 graphics driver tuning, bandwidth management tuning, and UI design optimisation based on mouse click/pointer/movement tracking. I would imagine that any alpha tester who spills the beans and even admits they have the build or shows screenshots or videos will likely have their Microsoft Account terminated and IP addresses black banned. This would probably extend to all uses of that Microsoft Account across MS-Office, Windows 10, XBOX and more. Certainly not worth breaching the NDA.

There are 65 million XBOX Live accounts now, growing at 10m a year, so business is booming. XBOX used to be a sick joke within MS but it accounts for about 15-20% of the company's revenue now. This is a AAA title, make no mistake about it. That usually means about US$200m+ in budget including marketing. The Microsoft booth at E3 alone would be a $20m investment across all platforms and titles. This would never have gotten sign-off by Phil Spencer or his boss if the numbers did not stack up. What it also means that their target audience is certainly not the AVSIM crowd or regular simmers, but the general global gaming community (1.8 billion people). The fact they are engaged with AVSIM and the sim community is just clever on the part of their marketing team who sees us as fervent evangelists for the platform. What it does mean is a resurgence of flight simulation as a more mainstream genre, which can only be good for us all.

There are 4,500 cities in the world with > 150,000 population. Bing won't have photogrammetry for even 20% of those in the next 10 years, given that it's taken them 10 years to make 385 of them. So I expect that it will be a long time before we have global coverage, if at all.

I know for a certainty via a via that no third party developers have the SDK yet.

Furthermore, the whole MS Flight Simulator 2020 initiative was born out of an internal MS VR project - https://theaircurrent.com/technology/exploring-the-big-sky-microsoft-is-creating-for-flight-simulator-2020/

Asobo is a Microsoft Hololens developer and have a VR team in-house. https://www.asobostudio.com/games/fragments So rest assured, the sky is not falling on our VR heads, support will be coming 🙂

Indeed you will. Don't get the logic of visiting the Orbx Direct site to look at their demos/freeware, then posting here on AVSIM with a technical question 🤔

You’re scared because you’re reading forums like this and are being swayed by the vocal minority who have seriously complex and questionable scenery library situations? I read on their forums that the majority of customers are on Orbx Central now. I installed it (and I have a LOT of P3D addons) and it works perfectly.

Too funny. People spend years and years asking Orbx to allow installation of their scenery outside the sim folder. When they deliver it there is a chorus of complaints from all sides, and even people demanding to allow products to be installed back inside the sim folder 🙂 I think the community is too quick to criticise a developer for delivering what they ask for and then causing a furore because weird esoteric permutations of scenery layers involving dozens if not hundreds of scenery vendors, or sorted by country (what the ...!?!) is potentially affected by Orbx Central. Orbx will sort this out, they always do. Just be patient, life goes on. Like many people here, if it wasn’t for Orbx I would have left this hobby a long time ago. They are the most prolific publisher of consistently high quality addons for multiple platforms and we can do better than try to cut the tall poppy down. As for MS2020 ... really?? You’re going to stop supporting the developers who have enhanced your FS experience since MS abandoned everyone, on the basis of some screenshots and videos? Have we forgotten their track record, or the FSX “Magic Screenshot” over a decade ago? I put it to anyone who has stopped buying addons because of this that you are short-sighted to the extreme. Hang your heads in shame...

Ok so he changed his mind about X-Plane twice and you say “a lot of what he says never materialises?”. They are perhaps now the most prolific producer of X-Plane products in the world so how is this a bad thing? JV has never promised Italy at all. It’s never been in a roadmap or announced. I know the post you are referring where he said ‘I’d love to do Italy one day’. I think he’s mentioned it a few times. That is not a promise to deliver a product though. So before you go shooting your mouth off and effectively accusing him of not delivering on what he says, actually have a think about facts before typing nonsense. You seem chummy with him over in the Orbx forums so I’m not sure he would be pleased to hear you slagging him off over here.

Or perhaps people are a bit peeved that Orbx has reduced the frequency of their sales? The last sale was in May and there was no summer one held at all. I would say conversely to what is being touted here, that Orbx is in better financial health than ever before if it can afford to limit the number of sales it has and try a few different marketing initiatives like contests etc. FWIW I have had zero issues with OC including having it continue to run in the background, have three sims supported (XP11, P3D4, AFS2), have multiple libraries for each sim, including the ability to have addons inside the sim folders, have backups saved for every install on a cheap 8GB HDD and also store my CC details with Stripe so I never have to visit their OrbxDirect website again. I could never go back to FTXCv3 - OC is orders of magnitude ahead in terms of functionality and pure demonic speed of downloading and installing.

A “lot” of what he says never materialises? Do you have examples of that? I’d say Orbx is the one company who consistently shares a roadmap each year where most of what is shared is eventually released. They may not do it within the year ahead but I can’t think of anything apart from openLC Africa/Asia and Cote d’zure that has suffered major delays.

The new Orbx Central is an absolute breeze to use and also allows you to create as many libraries locations as you want for your Orbx XP11 scenery. It does all the heavy lifting for you including the symlinks and you can even move libraries between different locations and drives. It also uses a much much improved download system and decompression for TE regions. LOWI literally came down the pipe in about 5 minutes for me (but I have a big pipe here at work, lucky me!). I stored my CC details inside Central (encrypted) and it was a single click to buy and install LOWI. I did not bother with scenery_pack.ini at all and just loaded a flight at LOWI and everything was A-OK. If only other vendors made delivery systems like this. Just brilliant.

TrueEarth UK isn't heavy on FPS 🙂 Especially with XP11. I'd hate to know what PC spec you have if you can't get TE GB running smoothly, even in London.

The definitive version IMHO. https://orbxdirect.com/product/lowi-xp11 I think this is their last XP11 port to get a cross-platform discount, and only for two weeks I believe.

As far as I know, Orbx was the only scenery (not aircraft) developer in the industry to offer cross-platform discounts. They weren’t obliged to do it, nor was there competitive pressure to do it. I think their thinking was they would subsidise the cost of tempting customers to try new sims. But XP users who don’t use other sims won’t be affected at all. But which scenery/airport vendor has a huge catalog like Orbx with nearly 300 products? FlightBeam, FlyTampa, FSDT, DD - all have around 5-15 products in total each. So trying to port 300 products to XP11 is no small feat or investment. Also from the pace of their ports it’s not a simple case of running fsx2xp and pressing a button. Most of the XP ported airports have a lot of enhancements and new library objects added, and the dreaded XP mesh problems must give them headaches as well.

Absolutely not true. REX, FlightBeam, Orbx etc were all born in the FS9-to-FSX transition era around 2006-2007 when Aces was alive and kicking and releasing patches, new content and service packs. They actually thrived well before FSX-SP2 and the closure of ACES. In fact, they thrived even more despite Microsoft’s announcement of Flight and it’s subsequent failure. If you think that MS are just going to wipe the floor with a sim so full of content that no third party content is needed, then you are gravely mistaken. Why would they open the sim up to third parties and user made content if it is indeed a burger with the lot that needs no extra mayo?

The Porsche 911 is the best selling luxury sports car in the world, and considered an icon. It reached those heights through constant evolution, not revolution.

How on Earth do you draw that conclusion on the basis of what was said? JV saying they are hiring new devs for landclass regions speaks more about their continued focus on P3D. Stop joining dots on lines that aren’t there.

Remember they have a HD pack coming which upgrades all the Seattle airports

Like I said it's conjecture but if this topic survives, let's revisit it in 18 months when the sim is released and see how close I got to the real picture. I honestly really doubt that MS has been working on a new flight simulator for five years, that sounds more nonsensical that all the other wild theories going around.

65 international (non-USA) 165 USA These are not all large cities, there are regional towns in the list also.

Note this is purely speculation based on joining the dots from watching the trailer and observing the industry over the past few years. How did Microsoft stun the world with this trailer? Here's how: 1. License the FSX code to Dovetail Games (DTG). Add a clause that anything DTG adds to the code becomes Microsoft IP when the license is ended 2. DTG converts FSX to 64-bit, licenses TrueSky (https://simul.co/truesky-pro/ - note Microsoft Games Studios are listed as a user) and adds PBR. Flight Sim World (FSW) is released. FSW fails to sell enough copies, so DTG shuts the project down and spends the last year negotiating terms with MS on giving back their enhancements 3. Microsoft grabs the FSW code and adds SimulWater (also from TrueSky) 4. They add code for Bing 3D to stream 3D cities in real time, probably with local HDD caching - see my post here for proof of the source data: 5. They use Azure AI learning to create synthetic FSX landclass textures for outside the 3D cites (you can see landclass used in the trailer) 6. They license some aircraft and airports from Aerosoft, who were almost absent at FSExpo (No Winfried or Mathijs) probably because they have this new MS gig now 7. They license procedural moving grass and trees from SpeedTree (https://store.speedtree.com/) 8. They hire a killer video editor to very cleverly cobble together glamour shots from some of the 3D cities 9. They time the video to drop within an hour of FSExpo in Orlando closing Now they have 18-24 months to actually build out this tech demo into a real working simulator, and will probably reach out to the FS developer community to actually fill in the content to make a plausible world with nice cities and airports and more aircraft. A very shrewd and clever plan to inject FUD into the FS community and create hysteria based on a tech demo. /end_speculation

If you want to see the tech being used in MS2020 it is based on Bing and Azure, the exact same technology used to drive the Windows 10 Store App called Earth View - Map 3D. When visiting the locations shown the trailer in this app, they are pixel-for-pixel identical. The app streams data to your PC in the exact same way as Google Earth 3D does. I expect that the simulator will likely allow users to set a local disk cache size so when revisiting a city the data does not have to be re-streamed. /end_speculation 😉 To download this free app: 1. Windows 10 - Microsoft Store 2. Search for "Earth View" 3. Install the app Run the app, click on the (3D) icon at the top to the right of the plus symbol (which shows all 3D locations worldwide) and visit Houston, TX. Now use your mouse to move to Minute Maid Park baseball stadium. You can rotate using Right-Mouse hold and drag. Position to view to recreate the image in the trailer. You can see that everything is pixel identical, including the parked cars! The closer you zoom in, the more detail is loaded. Notice though, how many objects have skewed shapes and textures, especially the trees. Now if you want to see how many cities around the world have this in 3D, you can use the (3D) menu to see the full list. What is surprising is the omissions like London, Manchester in the UK and Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne in Oz etc. So while those quick city flyovers in the trailer looked pretty, the reality is that it won't be the same as fully modelled cities like we have in other sims, and certainly won't include effects like PBR etc. /end_speculation