Spit40

I’ve never had the slightest interest in doing long haul. Until now. Just leaving the PC on for 7 hours seemed silly and a waste of electricity IMHO. This is an interesting idea though.

Oops

I get the same feeling, yet the opportunities beyond flight sim aren’t too hard to imagine. Just like we thought google was mad at first giving us amazing free maps and then sending cars out to 360 photograph every road, now Microsoft wants to beat them to the next level. Surely there are lots of commercial opportunities for a fully modelled *living* 3D planet with authentic weather, water, vegetation and traffic? When boeing design a new jet engine they build a digital twin. Is this not the earth’s digital twin?

There must be a subscription element. Azure computing isn’t free. There may be a non subscriber option but it won’t come with everything... unless the unpaid world is plastered with adverts. Once you introduce subscription the base price becomes irrelevant/nominal.

Its beyond comprehension how all this can be computed real time. There are some super talented people at Asobo - lots of them too. When this is released it will capture the world’s attention and there will be ‘The making of...’ documentaries about the incredible effects.

A bit like http://www.fscloudport.com for Aerofly FS2 but with lots more functionality. Being cloud based is the key i think, so its live, multiple versions can be prioritised, people can add on to an existing version and ‘fork’ a new version like Github. The inspiration for FsCloudPort was Wikipedia.

Assuming track IR? OK, that gives you pseudo 180, but unless you build a wrap around cockpit you’d struggle to have more than 90 degrees true FOV. As for GA, saitek gear matches a C172 nicely, and stretches to some twin props with varying degrees of success but is a pretty poor match for a Cub or anything esoteric.

I agree that if you’ve built an exact replica of a C172 or a 737 then why compromise and take the lesser experience of VR. So that’s about 0.1% of flight simmers at a guess. Hopefully too, those people would never want to switch from their aircraft of choice to something different like a Spitfire MkIX.

Well done Nick, you did create quite a monster with this thread.

Gumball rally? Do any driving games so far take place over long distances with authentic scenery. Paris Dakar? I agree, i think this will morph into more than a flight simulator. You could synchronise a flight to observe a real time rally.

I agree. This looks so good and so authentic that i see it drawing in a whole new wave of users. Virtual reality sight seeing flights- why not? VR arcades might add this and anyone can ask to step into the cockpit and take the controls. i agree with HIFlyer that MS are spending so big on this they will be looking to widen their catchment as much as possible, even though they want the simmers on board for the kudos and base revenue stream. VR is essential for this next gen sim and personally I’d love VR from day one, but they need to ship a stable successful product in the near future now the cat is out of the bag.

http://inspire.eaa.org/2019/09/30/an-inside-look-at-microsofts-newest-flight-simulator/?fbclid=IwAR0dYUMkYaBXH04K2Ua8OopuxV5Ru-SHWBewVEzcqfCKBeLpxdy-hHgXxoc Also Wikipedia says Asobo was 140+ people in 2018

OK, so they have 200 guys on this. I'm sure 210 wouldn't break the budget and they can put 10 guys on VR. 10 guys would be a massive development team compared to what x-plane and IPACS have available and as VR is a pretty distinctive skillset they're not going to impact all that other good stuff like seasons and ATC. Next video, let's see an HP Reverb lurking in the corner Microsoft! Even just as a nod that you're hearing this.

I think all this debate is very healthy. It just makes the thread longer and keeps VR high up the Avsim active threads list 😉

8 pages of comment in 23 hours. Not bad going for a feature no one is interested in. Personally I'm also devastated. Flying in 2D just doesn't do it for me either. Perhaps if I could afford a monster wrap around curved screen like Austin Meyer's I'd feel differently. For those who haven't tried it yet, VR flight sim in a high frame rate well performing simulator like AFS2 is viscerally authentic. Its not just visually different, but your brain is convinced you are in this thing. Fly an open cockpit plane at night and you feel a sense of exposure and height as you look over the side of the aircraft at the world below you. And if a handful of guys in Germany can do it then 200 MS Devs can do it too and include the functionality that IPACS lack the manpower to develop quickly. 2D flight sim is just like watching TV for me and I watch very little TV. Just my twopenn'orth

I'm seriously looking at this myself. It has much higher resolution than the Rift S as well as better refresh rate and includes IPD adjustment in case your eyes aren't the standard 65mm or so apart. Are you not thinking about the Reverb if you consider this though? https://www.aerofly.com/community/forum/index.php?thread/14966-hp-has-solved-the-flickering-issue-of-reverb/&postID=83864#post83864

Whilst i love what i’m seeing, its so good that i’m starting to doubt it will be VR ready with current GPU technology unless they’re leveraging the cloud in some clever ways. Aerofly FS2 is super smooth in VR but if i load up some TrueEarth scenery and max the settings i get stutters with my 1080ti. Maybe we need next year’s Nvidia offering. if you’re including VR in the first release MS drop us a tiny hint please, even a cryptic one.

Indeed. Yes i’ve seen some of that with ortho i have made. It also requires a fine elevation mesh. With rolling hills you can get away with a coarser mesh but steep drops over smaller distances (this isn’t the Alps) can be softened a lot unless the mesh is 5 or 10 metres.

Take a westerly route and I’ll take off from Cartmel (private airfield but i know the owner) and join you over Windermere and Thirlmere.

We need some sort of fractal thing, where the ortho is analysed and the patterns identified so its as good as the real image but when you zoom in it creates extra detail. Way back in time when I converted Spitfire 40 from the BBC Micro to Amstrad 64 I also worked on a LucasFilms game called Koronis Rift - you could fly into a landscape and increasing levels of detail would be generated using a crude fractal algorithm. It was a sequel to Rescue on Fractalus - I concede the landscape was a bit more barren and simplistic than our lovely planet.

Thanks. So I can see that cities and interesting areas justify LiDAR and lots of processing. I'm wondering about a bunch of fields say in somewhere fairly boring, but perhaps near my house. With ortho I can imagine I'm looking at the real thing. From what we've seen so far, I wonder if this is more landclass / tiled generic texture or something that looks more like the real thing?

I wonder if someone would be kind enough to explain the scenery (specifically the terrain, rather than buildings) rendering technology that we believe is going on here. I have been googling photogrammetry but there seem to be different implementation options. Is it the same as ortho/satellite scenery or is it some sort of hybrid using dimensions extracted from images and used to define areas which are then filled in with artificially tiled texture? Or is it a mixture of the two? I have been flying Aerofly FS2 for a couple of years so I’m used to ortho but haven’t spent much time in the other sims.

I keep hitting refresh but last week it was very late in the day before anything appeared. Gamescom is still on today though isn't it? They may sync with that.

Exactly that's my feeling. I don't have RTX either so it will have no choice but to fallback to older tech for the majority of us. It does make me much more interested in RTX but I think I'll wait for Nvidia's new card due 2020 using Ampere/7nm tech. These things are too expensive to upgrade with every generation.

This is one of the things I'm most excited about. My understanding is that you need to be a big budget studio to invest in ray tracing and until MS get back in the game I doubt anyone else has those kind of $$. Thanks for pointing out the prop spinner - the reflections are indeed impressive