Dovetail Games FS 2016 or exchanging thoughts about the future of flightsim

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Indeed, and even in the newest high end game the animation of human movement still looks robotlike.

 

For the A320 we experimented with an animated cop-pilot that even responded to voice commands. So when you would say 'gear up' you would see the animation of the human dragging the lever. But even connecting the hand to the lever turned out to be a huge issue.  We'll get there one day because flying an airliner on your own just is wrong. It's why I was so happy when Joshua surprised us all with his Connected Flight Deck. For me that doubles the realism of flying a big aircraft.

[flemon 4]

The development of a new flight simulator by Dovetail, for me, has mixed reactions.

 

As a positive, this new flight-sim will offer a fresh start to the flight-sim world and potentially allow developers to reshape their add-on structure and quality to fit with this new sim. They can develop new styles according to how the sim will be programmed whilst retaining their knowledge of programming and creating scenery for FSX. I think the way Dovetail have based the sim on FSX is a good idea because it means that developers don't have to take ages to learn the tricks and trade of this brand new sim. It's quite like X-Plane in a way. FSX started out very popular and XP slipped in and has since been gaining much wider support. FSX has retained some dignity but ever since Dovetail took ownership of it, simmers started to notice that FSX was beginning to tire out and that the community needed a change. Then you have P3D which is doing remarkable things inside a 32-bit platform which I applaud Lockheed-Martin for. They've taken a battered and wounded beast that was abandoned by MS and since made performance amazing and have guaranteed it as a sim to be taken note of. I think this new Dovetail sim will obviously take some time to get going as new and old simmers alike start to transfer over (obviously many will stick with their current sim) and addon developers understand how this program works. Dovetail are in touch with many devs, especially ORBX, so I think things are happening, but not obviously. 

 

A release from 32-bit would be good but bad at the same time. The good thing about now, being in 32-bit, is that devs can seriously look at what their options are and how far they can go until performance is just a nightmare. Nowadays, how well the scenery/aircraft/utility etc. performs is one of the biggest factors towards whether a customer will buy it or not. When I think about whether to get a scenery, I would usually search it on YT and see how it performs on normal PC's then make the decision. The problem with going to 64-bit is that developers will now have very little knowledge of how their addon will perform because extending the sim to 64-bit means that all the PC's out there will have varied results depending on their system. This will mean that we will possibly see a slight reduction of quality in addons because devs are afraid to release a product that will have awful performance with one type of system and brilliant with another system that is similar to the first. Obviously, this exists as well currently, because people can sim on high-end PC's and achieve brilliant frames and VAS levels etc. whilst others will sim with an awful laptop and have many problems. But I think that this move to 64-bit will make this problem more common. If this does happen, we CANNOT be annoyed with the devs. MOST of them are brilliant people who put hours and days of effort into their product, and the last thing they want to do is release a product that they are not certain will achieve what they want it to.

 

Also, current simmers have invested hundreds, maybe thousands, into their system and sim to achieve the best performance ACCORDING to THEIR needs. We all have different standards (I can't bear <10fps but am fine with 20-30fps as long as their is something reasonable to compromise with it) and I think simmers will just dread moving to a completely new sim and thinking about reinvesting. You can obviously go back to your other sim if you dislike the new sim, but people usually make a change for a reason, and switching back and forth isn't ideal!

 

Personally, I won't go anywhere near this new sim as I've invested too much money into P3D and wish to continue investing to help my flight-training etc. Whilst Dovetail are trying to help, I don't think the sim will cause a huge change in the community. It may be successful and it may not. I just think that we should stick to XP and P3D and advance those to a standard above the high-level we have now, continually looking for improvements rather than expecting devs to cover 3 different sims which vary quite a lot.

 

Well that's my opinion, I'm interested to see others!

[boogie 8]

Well, I'm not a software developer so I can only guess but I don't think that it would be a big problem to create a good looking and smoothly running flight simulator these days.

If you look at racing simulations for example, Assetto Corsa or Project Cars, you can see what is possible and I don't think there are less calculations made in these simulations.

The difference is simply the sims are made with actual technology engines like CryEngine or Unreal 4 Engine (don't know which engine is really used, just as an example) and regarding

Project Cars by a big studio with a lot of experience. But as the flightsim market is a small one with a much smaller user community it's not interesting enough for the bigger companys so

the likes of companys like Dovetail have to take over which I doubt have the possibilities to make a real great simulation.

But if we think of what is possible...I just bought Aerofly FS 2...I know it's just a "light" simulation but if you look at the performance it looks much better out of the box than FSX/P3D/X-Plane and

it's running smoothly with 90 fps and triple screen.

[Griffin78 116]

Way too much negativity and "saltiness" in this thread. Imo the DTG is welcome addition to the flight sim market. So 64-bit will make you add-ons non functional?

The step will have to be taken sooner or later anyway so what good will it do to keep postpone the inevitable?

 

The DTG FS2016 will be available on steam so I think it will be reach a much wider range of potential customers.

Sure some of you have lots of expensive add-ons for FSX and or P3D, but what will you do when P3D also goes 64-bit?  You add-ons will be just as unusable then as with FS2016.
 

I see the FS2016 as stop on the way to a completely new DTG flight simulator if FS2016 is reasonable successful.

[Emi 5161]

8 hours ago, boogie said:

Well, I'm not a software developer so I can only guess but I don't think that it would be a big problem to create a good looking and smoothly running flight simulator these days.

If you look at racing simulations for example, Assetto Corsa or Project Cars, you can see what is possible and I don't think there are less calculations made in these simulations.

The difference is simply the sims are made with actual technology engines like CryEngine or Unreal 4 Engine (don't know which engine is really used, just as an example) and regarding

Project Cars by a big studio with a lot of experience. But as the flightsim market is a small one with a much smaller user community it's not interesting enough for the bigger companys so

the likes of companys like Dovetail have to take over which I doubt have the possibilities to make a real great simulation.

But if we think of what is possible...I just bought Aerofly FS 2...I know it's just a "light" simulation but if you look at the performance it looks much better out of the box than FSX/P3D/X-Plane and

it's running smoothly with 90 fps and triple screen.

 

Again, read up a little. Such games, even the big players like GTA, simulate just a tiny small area.

Sure you could go for such detail in a flight sim, but the moment you lift off things would look utterly strange if the scenery ends two miles from your position (and due to the structure of a cockpit and its windows you could not even see the "HD" scenery below you anylonger).

[Emi 5161]

29 minutes ago, Griffin78 said:

Way too much negativity and "saltiness" in this thread. Imo the DTG is welcome addition to the flight sim market. So 64-bit will make you add-ons non functional?

The step will have to be taken sooner or later anyway so what good will it do to keep postpone the inevitable?

 

The DTG FS2016 will be available on steam so I think it will be reach a much wider range of potential customers.

Sure some of you have lots of expensive add-ons for FSX and or P3D, but what will you do when P3D also goes 64-bit?  You add-ons will be just as unusable then as with FS2016.
 

I see the FS2016 as stop on the way to a completely new DTG flight simulator if FS2016 is reasonable successful.

 

I can well understand why some people are not looing forward to it.

Ultimately it means developers will have to invest more resources to support one more simulator.
This means:

 - more work required from devs

 - higher costs of addons to pay for the above work

 - OR fewer actual productfeatures to support one more sim without greater investment.

 - more compability issues between simulators

 - splitting the community even further with fewer people on each sim.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

37 minutes ago, Griffin78 said:

I see the FS2016 as stop on the way to a completely new DTG flight simulator if FS2016 is reasonable successful.

 

Well that's not how Dovetails sees things. They are are putting all efforts on the new platform and I very very seriously doubt they are even thinking about a complete new sim. As you might know Aerosoft was also in the running for the FSX license, so we have a pretty good idea on the contracts with MS.  If Dovetails sees  FS2016 as a step towards something totally new they must have a very very deep bank account and willing to piss aways very serious money. 

 

What Dovetails will release not to far in the future will be their platform for a long time. And it will have stiff competition in X-Plane 11 (that's a beauty there, I tell you), P3D and FSX. I do not believe 64 bits is the solution to many of our problems. Sure it is needed, but if you look at X-Plane that made that step two years ago you see that while memory might not be the bottleneck, performance is. With all that new memory available you only see a bit more detail appear in products because the brute horsepower in CPU needed (GPU will never be as important in flightsim) simply is not there. Developers just have to get along and make sure their products do not hog all memory.

 

My guess is that Dovetails will produce a rather basic simulator, a great platform but not with many 'deep' features. I even think it will very much be aimed at VFR flying a lot like MS Flight and their Flight School product. Now those did not well (Steamspy claims a measly 15k users of Flight School, compared to a whoppin 660k for FSX:Steam) so we can only hope things are what we want them to be. But any new sim has a massive task in front of it, because who is going to invest serious money in making addons for an unproven sim? These days even a not all too complex airport scenery can easily costs a fortune as it close to a man year in labor and up to $5000 for the sat imagery. 

[Flaps 38]

IMO the new sim isnt a good deal for devs or people who sell fs addons, at least during this months.

 

In my case, I wont buy any addon until the new sim will be released and see what is the future for the community. We´ll see if pmdg, aerosoft, flytampa, flightbeam, fsdreamteam make stuff for the new sim, stay in fsx/p3d or support both sims.

 

Only when the future be clear like water, I´ll invest in addons. And I suppose many people think like myself.

 

Sorry for my poor english.

[DaveCT2003 2553]

Just a small note.

 

Stephen Hood from Dovetail Games will be a guest on our upcoming Flight Simulation Web Conference, and will be there to answer questions about the new DoveTail Games Flight Simulator. 

 

This Live Web Conference (Mathijs will also be a guest) will be held on September 24th at 1900 GMT.  More information is available on the OVPA Website.  Other guests include REX Simulations, FSFX Packages and Airline2Sim.  We'll be holding 40 drawings for free, top rate flight sim software!

 

Also, please help us get the word out about the Web Conference!

 

Best wishes.

[LMAA 28]

Dovetail, mmmmh,

[boogie 8]

vor 13 Stunden , Emanuel Hagen sagte:

 

Again, read up a little. Such games, even the big players like GTA, simulate just a tiny small area.

Sure you could go for such detail in a flight sim, but the moment you lift off things would look utterly strange if the scenery ends two miles from your position (and due to the structure of a cockpit and its windows you could not even see the "HD" scenery below you anylonger).

 

I'm pretty sure that it's possible to reduce the details with increasing distance.

If the London Eye is 50 miles in front of you don't need to see if somebody's in there.

 

But anyway, no matter what the new FS will look like I think it's important to be released because there should be some kind of development.

Technology development will not wait until we are ready for it.

[Christopher Low 41]

The problem I have with DTG Flight Simulator is that it is based on the FSX engine. That being the case, just how different is it going to be to FSX itself, or P3D? Yes, we all know that it will be 64bit, but that will not impress me if the base graphics and features are nothing more than enhanced and optimised versions of those that we have seen for the past ten years. I personally feel that DTG FS needs to be a true next generation flight simulator, but I seriously doubt that will be the case. DTG Flight School did not impress me one bit. It may have been aimed at flightsim "newbies" rather than the existing hardcore community, but (IMO) the graphics are no better than FSX or P3D. I would like to think that Dovetail will surprise me when the new flight simulator is revealed, but I just can't see it being anything worth bothering about when I have invested so much time and money in P3D to date.

[KLM737 128]

64-bit is not the holy grail and will probably cause more problems than it solves. Right now, the 32-bit address space (4GB) forces developers to optimize and streamline their addons in order to work within the limitations. 

 

This incentive to manage resources efficiently will be removed once the memory limitation is lifted. After that, developers will be a lot less inclined to spend enormous efforts on making their products lean & optimized. 

 

 

I would imagine that Aerosoft would not have spent so many development resources on reducing the memory footprint of their Airbus X product line. The fact that is performs so well it mainly due to the limitations imposed on the platform.