Hi all,

I am starting this thread to try and get some feedback, opinions, and thoughts about a new flight simulator platform. There is a method to my madness so your cooperation is appreciated.

 

***A Current platform is in development that has potential to support a flight/combined simulator*** your opinions are needed.

 

I am in an information gathering stage. Please answer maturely and honestly from the perspective of a general simmer, enthusiast simmer, and potential simmer;


1) Would you support a kick starter project for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

2) What would your expectations be for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

3) What would convince you to switch to a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?



Please think about your current experience(s) either with FSX or X-Plane and other simulator packages you use (including combat sim i.e DCS) and answer as clearly as possible. The more (genuine) responses this thread gets the more reliable the information gathered is.

Feel free to add anything else you think that relates to you (hypothetically) supporting a kick starter project and (hypothetically) switching to another simulator platform.



Yours seriously,

Kelvin.


 

(disclaimer - this is my personal thoughts as a community member, not any sort of statement from PMDG)

 

I don't think anyone fully realizes what a massively huge undertaking doing this correctly would be. The top games that have been funded on Kickstarter like Torment, Project Eternity, Star Citizen etc are up in the $4-6 million dollar range and all have much bigger potential sales audiences than serious flightsimming does. Most of these games are also at least somewhat completed already and they're being done by teams who have proven track records as game developers and producers over a decade or more.

Flat out, I don't think $4-6 million is anywhere near enough to develop the next generation sim we'd all actually want to buy. Licensing costs alone on things like navdata, all the world data (terrain, airports, buildings etc), weather downloads and so on that we take for granted in FSX would be huge. To attract programmers, modelers and artists who are talented enough to create a robust engine and environment that does all the things a current generation game should do is going to require paying competitive rates to what these types of talented people make at companies like DICE, Crytek, Valve etc. A project like this could easily take 3-5 years to complete even with everything going perfectly and you have to pay all those salaries during that time and hope that you get the product released and up for sale before the seed money that's paying the development team runs out. To be frank, I don't think Kickstarter funding is capable of fully supporting a project of this scale - you'd need real full blown venture capital startup money at the very least supplementing it.

At the very minimum for a new sim to be attractive it would have to have FSX's base capabilities contained within an extremely modern graphics engine that takes advantage of GPUs and performs at levels similar to that of other high detail games out there (ie Battlefield, Crysis, Planetside 2 etc), even with orders of magnitude higher detail than FSX is capable of. This is certainly doable, but again I think it's going to cost a lot more than what the community could put up on Kickstarter. There is also the side issue of who exactly would be leading this effort - are people really going to turn millions of dollars over to random people on a forum?  I think it would have to be run by recognized and trusted names in the sim industry for this to ever work out.

 

I strongly suspect we're better off supporting a platform like X Plane that's already a lot of the way there. DCS World has the potential too if they ever do get to the point of modelling the entire planet in the sim. It's an amazing sim engine right now but the limited flying area present in it kills any chance of being able to use it as an FSX replacement.

Thanks for your input Ryan. If I may, I would like to point out that there is some serious talent behind what is in development in terms of providing solutions to simulating real world processes to match and even supersede what we know inside our current platform(s) such as FS 2004, FSX, and even X-Plane.

 

yes, $$$ is what it is all about in the case where this would be a business venture. However, funding aside, from your knowledge of current platform(s) how would you see such a new platform succeed in terms of the micro details of the simulator i.e system flow, schematics, interconnectedness between different systems or environmental variables etc...?

1) Would you support a kick starter project for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

Yes, but I wouldn't risk it by putting in a huge amount of money.. maybe $20.

 

2) What would your expectations be for a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

 

-Next-gen graphics taking advantage of the GPU, like this:

http://www.outerra.com/wgallery.html

http://unigine.com/products/valley/

 

-Updated physics engine using real physics rather than lookup tables, with realistic winds, turbulence etc.

 

-Flexible scenery engine that can interpret data from many different sources and file formats

 

-Flexible, modular systems modelling that can simulate anything from a Cub to a 777

 

3) What would convince you to switch to a new flight simulator or combined simulator platform?

 

It would have to be backed by one or several well-known FSX publishers/developers (OrbX, Flight1, Carenado or similar). A new flight sim without the support of the community would be dead on arrival.

 

 

***A Current platform is in development that has potential to support a flight/combined simulator*** your opinions are needed.

 

How can anyone have any sort of opinion based on such sparse information?

Hi MGH,

 

This thread is purely here to gather information about what would convince you to switch to another platform rather than try to sell you something right now. This thread is not intended to market something rather try to ascertain what variables would be attributed to gather support for a kick starter project.

 

Putting it simply, this thread is to receive your subjective opinions in relation to the questions that I have posted and any other opinion about what would drive community support for an undertaking that would essentially develop a flight or combined simulation platform.

 

I would be interested, MGH, to hear your comments about what sort of specific information you are expecting and perhaps I could elaborate further for you.

 

I'm not here to injure or insult just to gather opinions and comments and I am happy to elaborate on any confusion that I may have inadvertently created :blush: as this is not my intent to confuse.

 

Cheers,

 

Kelvin

 

-Updated physics engine using real physics rather than lookup tables, with realistic winds, turbulence etc.

 

Be careful with phrases like "real physics" - by definition, any physics you can run on a computer simulation is a just a model that is an approximation of the real world. As long as computing power remains finite there always has to be a balance and tradeoff between accuracy and performance with respect to modelling.

 

Here's an extreme example that illustrates what I mean:

 

You can model the drop of a projectile like a bullet over distance accurately enough for just about any actual use by using basic Newtonian parabolic motion equations. Given known wind conditions etc, it's accurate enough to hit virtually anything at any distance you could reasonably need on earth. This isn't "real physics" however - we're not taking into account the effects of special and general relativity, which are real and do exist in reality. We can do that by using Einstein's field equations but we've now increased the processing load on the simulation by a huge amount for very little change in accuracy for this particular application of physics. Imagine a game like Battlefield 3 trying to calculate every bullet fired in a multiplayer game using that level of "real physics" - it would be a .0001 FPS slideshow.

 

Things like lookup tables or simplified forms of equations are used because they provide the best tradeoff between accuracy and performance, not because developers don't know about the "real physics" or arbitrarily don't want to use them. You would probably be very surprised at the amount of lookup table use that exists in real aircraft systems and real training simulators.This is what performance data in an FMC is in the real world - the little box is not sitting there running complex kinematics or fluid dynamics equations to simulate what the aircraft is going to do. Boeing and Airbus gather a ton of datasets during flight test that are used to create tables and tune the system.

 

It's true that there's certain things that would probably benefit from being simulated in a more accurate way than they currently are in FSX but any developer is going to have to pick and choose very specific things or risk utterly bogging down the performance of their engine.

I would be interested, MGH, to hear your comments about what sort of specific information you are expecting and perhaps I could elaborate further for you.

 

 

How about

 

• what features & capabilities will it have?
• when will it be released?
• what will be its price point  - $5, $50, $500...?
• how compatible will it be with existing flight simulators?
• what support will it have from 3rd party developers?
• what operating system will it use - which version of Windows or Linux, or both? 
• what graphics system will it use -which version of DirectX or OpenGL, or both
• etc

 

 

Without at least some of that information it really isn't possible to give meaningful  opinion about switching.  I still use FSX and am waiting to see what direction P3D is heading with V2.0 before making any decision about changing to that.

The future probably is something like X Plane. It's not in the mainstream yet but the breakthrough will come and when it does it'll probably be when PMDG start releasing stuff for it. Despite John Venema's verdict on X Plane thus far he will soon change his tune if and when the big switch comes.

 

Remember FSX only appeared in 2006 and really only got into its stride a couple of years later in terms of aircraft and sceneries. Once the rush for the exit comes to take advantage of being able to fly the 777X or the FSL A320 in X Plane with Orbx sceneries and 64bit support, FSX's demise will come quickly.

No offence to the Original Poster, but these threads are becomming more frequent; it seems a number of people are claiming to be planning the new FSX replacement.     Not to intend to be negative or dismissive but it's just hard to take these 'promises' with any credibility....     The OP tends to reign in a lot of naiive people who really then think that the new FSX will now be ready next year, hundreds of 'preferences' are listed, and then the thread dies......

 

I appreciate everything has to start somewhere; every plant starts as a tiny seed; and maybe it's just me being a mean, disillushioned old fart, but with these threads I tend to think "come back and show me something real and you'll have my attention". These threads instead tend to be falsely opitmistic lists of features that the OP claims will be part of their new platform.  

 

Also, Ryan is absolutely right; despite the claims made by people like Laminar, there is no such thing as 'real physics' or 'superior flight modelling' .......... literally no such thing.     Flight is not analogous to a PC screen, so everything is an 'interpretation', an 'opinion' .... eg this is what we believe is the most realistic flight sim experience.    

 

Or This is how we think the movement of an aircraft through the air, translates to movements on a two dimentional flat screen.

 

Real aviation is a science.

 

Creating convincing immersion in a flight sim, is an art.

 

(IMO of course :lol:). 

I personally wouldn't donate money, at least not a substancial amount of money to a FS project of this magnitude with no guaranty of it ever getting done. Not to say that its not possible but like Ryan mentioned it would be a huge undertaking.

 

Another thing to consider is that if a big company like Aerosoft who once considered it, or Orbx who has a big developement team has never publically mentioned the idea of doing it, tells me that it would be such a monumental task that they dont want to do it.

 

Personally I am hoping that X-Plane gets there at some point or Outerra becomes an option as well. Both of these programs have taken years to get to the point that they are now, so starting from scratch seems like it would take at least 10 years to develope and mature.

 

Btw, wasn't there another 12 page thread not long ago with another fellow who said he was working on a new platform.

 

 

Btw, wasn't there another 12 page thread not long ago with another fellow who said he was working on a new platform.

 

There was here - but it's gone dead.

I'm sorry to say this, but I can't imagine to spend a large amount either, maximum would be about 20€! This might be where the main problem is - the community isn't large enough to donate a sufficient amount of money, and I trust Ryan's calculations on the costs. Besides, even a company as large as Aerosoft cancelled their plans on developping a new sim.

Another major problem is that - unless full compatibility with the current FSX addons - there won't be many who can be motivated to move on, simply because of the amount of money spent on addons already. So, regardless of how much I like all those refreshing ideas of an up-to-date new flight sim, I hardly believe that any of them will become reality.

Another major problem is that - unless full compatibility with the current FSX addons - there won't be many who can be motivated to move on, simply because of the amount of money spent on addons already.

 

Aerosoft discounted the possibility of compatibility when it was considering developing a new simulator a couple of years ago.

 

- There is NO way we can offer out of the box compatibility with FSX addons (FS2004 addons are even harder as they sometimes use non standard stuff). Not only because it would be wrong to drag in old 16 bit code, but mainly because it would create massive legal issues

.

http://forum.aerosof...r-2012-worries/

Hi guys,

 

I'm one of the Outerra developers and the question Kelvin posted here was the result of our private discussion about whether there's a potential in the flight sim community to support development of a combined simulation platform via the crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter). It's actually not just about the flight sim comunity, but all the simulator areas since we were discussing what could be ultimately possible to do with Outerra.

 

During the discussion I expressed doubts whether it would gain sufficient support, given the amount of work and $$$ it would require (I think Ryan summed up the obstacles nicely), but to be honest also because of some inertia I'm perceiving among the simulation fans, but Kelvin didn't let it at that and went to get some feedback here (and elsewhere). Perhaps to prove me wrong, but I guess mainly to find out what conditions would have to be met for something like this to be feasible at all.

 

Since Outerra has been mentioned a couple of times here, for the sake this research let me refine Kelvin's question:

What would convince you to support the development of an Outerra-backed and -based flight or combined simulation platform?

 

Of course, the very next question is - will there be enough convinced simmers willing to crowdfund such a project, given the expected amount of funds it would require (which depends on the answers to #1)?