Tim_A
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Posts posted by Tim_A
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I don't know anything about USB dongles, but provided it can plug into a hub, it'll be the lesser of two evils, I guess.
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I really hope they aren't using that brain-dead disc in the drive "protection". It has to be the worst scheme ever invented - all it does is inconvenience legitimate users; it certainly doesn't slow down or stop the pirates one bit, and probably encourages legitimate owners to find a cracked version in order to save their precious disc1 (which is exactly what 99% of FS9 users did...).
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Why because it has PC on it? Mac are also Personal Computers!
LOL! Nice try
The vast majority will interpret "PC" as "Windows PC", and anybody with a Mac will tell you it's "definitely not a PC". I think you will have to answer "where is the Mac/Linux" version?" a lot more times...
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I asked a few days ago, and Mathijs said it was both. But that box art sure looks PC-only...?
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Will there be separate Mac and PC versions, or will they both be part of the same distro? (and if so, how will the licensing work, i.e. can you install to both Mac and PC?)
Thanks
Tim (home to a confusion of computers of different OS flavours)
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There are many planes I don't use (airliners, jet fighters...) and I'd like the ability to turn them off from the UI (while keeping them available for AI/MP etc) Obviously an addon airliner I simply wouldn't buy, but 15 kinds of default Boeings/Airbi? <shudder> I'd rather not have. And others will doubtless say the same about my favourite Moth/Cub etc.
I did use the Learning Centre, but not in many years. It's one of those things that's very useful while you are learning (but now I have a RW PPL and many books on my shelf....) (Oh, and can we have an English English language UI option, as well as American...)
The logbook I do use, although it could be so much better, as with the rewards/trophies scheme. I'm a big fan of Paul's (BASys) Rewards addon, which gives you postcards for different places and countries you visit -- it really appeals to the collector in me, so I'd love to see a similar thing continue in 2012.
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Don't forget many panels have a glow strip under the glare shield, as well as instrument backlights, illuminated switches etc. and yes the lights should be dimmable.
While on the topic of lights, although not necessarily aircraft, please consider:
* Pilot-controlled runway lighting
* 'Tower' controlled lighting, with separate dimmable controls for:
Runway
Taxiways
Approach
VASI/PAPI
Also the lights should be directional (RW, very few runways are highly visible from the side...)
In RW training, especially at night, it's common to fly circuits with one or more sets of lights switched off for each pass. You could request this through the ATC calls...
Also consider allowing Tower signal gun lighting, viz: http://pad39a.com/gene/lg.html
Also consider allowing more kinds of lights. For example, a WWII-era airfield might use goose-neck flare lights (you would not have to simulate the bloke pedalling down the runway on his bicycle, lighting them...
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Will the open format database be accessible both ways? For example, as a writer of a third party flight planning software, would I be able to utilise the sim database within my addon? If so, would this access be open, by licence, or undecided?
Also, will the data updates include airspace? Here in England, the airspace in parts of the country is already WAAY different to how FSX portrays it, and there are more changes in the pipeline, not to mention whatever EASA foists upon us!
Finally, there are important classifications of airspace for VFR pilots here that MS chose not to bother with -- MATZ, ATZ -- will these be included?
Cheers
Tim
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Club/VA Parked Traffic, AKA "Where did you leave my plane?"
Primarily for MP flying clubs and VAs, but it could work in single player too. It would be nice if there was a system to remember where you parked the plane last time. Say for example, I flew the SF260 into Shoreham. Next time I start at Shoreham in a Cessna, but if I look around... there's the 260 parked on the apron. Similarly my chums fly in on an MP session, and next time their planes are parked up too. You would only need a small file to say an AI thingamyjig needs to be parked at such & such airport. Traffic could be done by registration, and planes subscribed/unsubscribed. A simple report could be used to track subscribed planes. There would need to be a server mechanism of some sort to cater for planes moved offline or on Vatsim etc (AS wouldn't need to provide a server -- it could all be hosted by the individual VAs, with suitable hooks in the sim)
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It would be really cool if the default sim was released with one full feature International Airport
You'd be welcome to my EGTN Enstone (flightsim.com: enstonex.zip) as an example of what the small GA fields that MS included only as a runway could really look like.
(Don't much care for big international airports!
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For a light twin, I'd love to see a DA42 Diamond TwinStar.
For a light single, I don't think you can escape the normal spamcan - C172, PA28 etc, but it'd be nice to see something modern, such as one of the plastic tadpoles (Katana etc), or something with European flavour (Jodel, Robin...)
For LSA/microlight, how about the new SkyCatcher?
Whatever you choose, Please, Please, PLEASE don't mirror the main textures. Carenado insist on doing this even now, and it's really infuriating -- just ask anyone who's ever tried to paint a European/South American etc rego...
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Fs9 only too
Shame
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Seemingly half the population of America claims to be descended from Irish stock. If that's not a *huge* marketing opportunity, I don't know what is...
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It would certainly be fun - there are many hundreds of airshows around the world, as well as the major exhibitions -- RIAT, Farnborough, Paris, Friedrichshafen, Oshkosh, Avalon, to name a few. I don't think this is the province of the core sim though, but it would be nice if there were enabling technologies to make it easy to set up. Same with firework parties displays - 4th July in the US, Guy Fawkes night across the Commonwealth, New Year's Eve etc.
These things are far from essential, but a little fun now and then goes down a treat!
BTW, Visual Flight did RIAT and Farnborough for FS9, although I don't think there was ever an FSX version.
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Mayday! Mayday! Trousers are brown!
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Of course this a bit chicken and egg but we don't have a lot of Irish customers and we got serious problems getting good distribution there.
How many customers do you have in Tahiti? or Mali? Or Antarctica even? And how's your Antarctic distribution network?
;-)
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Not just the airports. The Irish landscape is simply stunning, whether it's the lush greenery (not for nothing is is called the Emerald Isle, even though MS would have us believe emeralds are brown!), or the bleak, rugged coast, it's a VFR pilot's wet dream! It only takes a few seconds on google to see what a gorgeous place it would really be.
And, being an island, it's relatively compact.
It would make an excellent "VFR Ireland" scenery, either photo (GetMapping et al are finally starting to trickle through decent Irish photos), or FTX/Austria Pro landclass style, or a mixture. If we lived our lives entirely by the bean counters, much of what we have and take for granted simply wouldn't exist. Please give it consideration...
I'd buy one! I'd buy two!! (okay I wouldn't, but I'll say anything if it works LOL)
Tim
(Half Scottish, half Welsh - not even remotely Irish!)
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I spend 95% of my sim time inside the VC: It's what I spend most of my time seeing, and so I naturally want it to be of the highest quality. It seems to me that the VC is often added as an afterthought, and is of a significantly lower quality than the rest of the aircraft. And yet many tens of hours attention will be spent making a super-high-definition wheel arch for the undercarriage, which may get a two seconds glance if it's lucky.
This is completely the wrong way round IMHO.
I don't much care how it is achieved - several small textures or one big one, or whatever. When I'm sitting in the plane flying it on my 4000 pixel wide TH2Go rig, my lasting impression of the quality of the WHOLE aircraft is what I can see from the pilot's seat. ie, the VC. The devil is in the detail.
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Better support for Very Wide screens (e.g TripleHead2Go). At present things like rain effects only show in the centre portion of the display (ie they don't reach the edges). Also popups appear very distorted and stretched, as does the 2D panel. Maybe the display could be "mixed" from multiple camera positions, to eliminate the fisheye distortion you get in FS from zooming out far enough to fill the display.
Also an "out of the window" cockpit display would be useful, where there are no internal panel elements, but the external model can still be seen -- ideal for hardware cockpit builders.
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Use a model whereby vector features -- lakes, rivers -- can be anchored to the terrain. There's nothing worse than installing some super-duper accurate addon mesh, only to discover all the rivers are now 200ft in the air!
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I sure see the point you make and it is very valid at this moment. But how about in 7 years time? When have you last loaded FS2002?
FS2002 was before my time, in simming terms, but there are still people I know who are using it. But my point still stands: There is a perceived substantive improvement between running FS2002 on a 7 year old box and running FSX on a current i7. Assuming that whatever you produce leverages (I hate that word with a vengeance!) current and emerging PC technologies from both a performance and visual perspective, you're already along way down the road towards that "substantive improvement" over FSX.
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I'd like to see a persistent aircraft state system for damage, wear and tear etc. By which I mean the system will recognise that a plane is due for its 50 hour check, and require it to be "maintained". Too many hard landings will eventually cause the nose wheel to collapse (not today, or tomorrow, but sometime soon...). The same with flap retractions above Vfe... one day the flap motor burns out. and so on.
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Three months ago, when I was exploring Africa, I would have been very interested in the 'African Adventures' product (I may still consider it for a return trip though). My trip started at Tangier (actually it Started in England, but that's a different story) and finished in Cape Town, with at least one landing in every country in between (plus a side trip to the Seychelles and Madagascar). You can see from this that my style of simming is to make long rambling tours. And yes you're right, each flight is an average of two hours. Always in GA aircraft.
I tend to stay away from the "popular" places - I rarely fly in North America - I just don't find them appealing.
I have low expectations for scenery in the places where I do fly, and that expectation is rarely disappointed (ie the scenery ranges from merely bad, to downright awful). Most of the freeware that does exist in the libraries for FSX was ported from earlier versions and doesn't work with SP2 (even if it claims to).
MS did quite a nice job with the Pyramids, and your first reaction after seeing them (well, mine was) is to continue up the Nile and search out the Valley of the Kings, Thebes, the Aswan Dam and so on. But of course they are not there.
In FS9, there was a very nice freeware of the Victoria Falls (made by Holger Sandmann so you can imagine the quality even if you haven't seen it), complete with the surrounding gorges and bridges. In FSX, MS added the falls to the default scenery, but it was a very poor job compared to Holger's: The gorges were mere hills and valleys, and the bridge... well you can imagine. (imagine they'd made the Grand Canyon as a series of shallow valleys). Still, at least it was there.
I've often heard the argument "we don't make scenery for <wherever> because people don't fly there", and it's also true that people don't fly there because there's no scenery (well, except me, maybe
) which ends up being a circular argument: nobody's doing anything because nobody's doing anything. -
It's a brave and ambitious undertaking, and I wish you the best of luck.
I was bitten by the initial rush to buy FSX, as many were, and vowed at that time not to rush out and buy another sim without very careful consideration. Which means you have an uphill task persuading people like me to buy it. I'm now comfortable with FSX, with the kit to run it fairly well. Any new sim is going to need to give me something substantively more than what I already have, or I'm simply going to stay with FSX (just as many still are staying with FS9 since they don't see FSX as giving them substantively more). Which means I think that you've got a long, hard and expensive task ahead.
But all that won't stop me from throwing my ideas into the pool!
Extensible Frameworks and Interfaces. Rather than hard coding systems, define a framework or interface for it. This will give the developers the ability to extend the sim and build areas outside of the core that are either specialist, or that Aerosoft simply don't have the time/budget/whatever to complete. It wouldn't be so important then if (say) bird strike damage isn't implemented -- if there's an interface for it, it can be added by 3PDs
ATC. If you want in-game AI, I don't think its feasible not to have some means of controlling it, and separating it. By and large, the existing ATC system doesn't do a bad job, but has some glaring flaws.
* Separation and sequencing, including holds etc.
* SIDs and STARs
* Route tolerances & corrections (zig-zagging)
* Handoffs (backwards and forwards between lots of controllers)
* Refusals and emergencies, including ATC refusing zone transits etc
* Regionalisation:
- Local procedures for ATSOCAS (ie no universal flight following, but support for FIS, RIS, RAS etc)
- Better support for QNH/millibars (FSX has a strange requirement that to get millibars you must also have kilometres!)
- regional transition levels
- Extensible support for more ground station types including AFIS, Air/Ground, and the annoying little French airfield that closes for two hours over lunch, grudgingly uses English while it's open but insists that you speak in French out of hours, etc.
- Regional accents. Here's where that interface really works, since you don't need to supply all the accents, but just the interface for others to do it!
Interaction with the environment.
* Hitting things should have consequences, whether that's a bird strike / cow /cute bunny-wunny, or a plank of wood placed on the ground to be used as a chock. I guess I'm talking about some sort of mass/weight/physics engine. Right now, if I run off the end of the runway into a hedge/ fence / trees / grass berm etc. I'll just pass through it or trigger a bizarre 2000ft bounce up into the air. But it should create a prop strike, dented wing, gear failure etc. (or other effect defined by its interface...)
* Planes should be chockable, both with "chocks" and scenery objects that can be used as chocks.
* Surface friction for runways & other ground surfaces. In FS9/X, planes skate across the runway as if they are on ice
* Turning circles. Probably linked to the friction issue, but lots of planes can be seen going almost straight ahead with the nose wheel at nearly 90 degrees, regardless of how slowly they are going.
Scenery
While I'm a big fan of a decent photo scenery, I'm not sure that massive areas covered via Google Earth etc are a good idea. Why?
* High resolution coverage is limited to North America, parts of Europe, and small 'keyhole' areas in other places. There are vast areas of the planet where no decent satellite (yet alone high res aerial) imagery exists at all, and won't for decades to come (Africa, Asia, South America...). By adopting photo scenery as a base, you will effectively limit the places to which you can fly, and I certainly won't buy into a sim that isn't global in scope from the outset.
* Colour matching and gradation. Photos as supplied by Google etc are not colour graded, and matching them is a huge task that current dedicated scenery producers are still only achieving partial success with.
* Seasons. Photo reconnaissance typically only happens during the "nice" months, with no seasonal consistency within that band between consecutive tiles, yet alone producing five distinct season sets.
While I'm talking about seasons, the current five seasons in FS could be seen as too coarse. If you fly RW around any area a lot, you will notice that the scenery can change dramatically from week to week. There's the progression of crops from ploughing, growth, flowering, harvest, two may be three times a year, or possibly fallow over the winter. Even general scenery is markedly different from early Spring to late spring, to early Summer etc.
Anyway I could go on, but it's getting late, and you're probably getting bored, so I'll shut up!
Antarctica X - Your Highlights?
in Aerosoft Scenery
Posted
I've been flying out of Rothera lately, mostly up and down the peninsula (South Shetland Islands, Sky Blu etc). Rothera itself is highly detailed, and somewhat reminiscent of Gibraltar. Marimbio and King George Island are quite detailed, but there are also 'landing grounds' that are little more than sticks in the snow (and can be quite a challenge to find...)