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Aerosoft Airbus future plans


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If Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 turns out to be our "No Man's Sky," I'll at least be entertained.

 

Its a shame that P3D4x didn't take us where we thought we were headed.  I remember the heady days of the 64-bit onset of P3Dv4 in 2017 and thought we'd finally have a settling in period.  Then XP11 took off.  The add-on market feels less settled as a result.  MFS2020 is being made out to be the second coming, I hope all eggs aren't going into a single basket. Microsoft is certainly going to deflate P3Dv5 and I can't see how folks will shell out to realize their sim dreams in Prepar3d, XP11/12, and MFS.  That'd  be like getting the same game for Playstation, Xbox, and Sega (or whatever).

 

The baby buses seem to be in good enough shape and provide more value than other alternatives.

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42 minutes ago, ahuimanu said:

If Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 turns out to be our "No Man's Sky," I'll at least be entertained.

 

Its a shame that P3D4x didn't take us where we thought we were headed.  I remember the heady days of the 64-bit onset of P3Dv4 in 2017 and thought we'd finally have a settling in period.  Then XP11 took off.  The add-on market feels less settled as a result.  MFS2020 is being made out to be the second coming, I hope all eggs aren't going into a single basket. Microsoft is certainly going to deflate P3Dv5 and I can't see how folks will shell out to realize their sim dreams in Prepar3d, XP11/12, and MFS.  That'd  be like getting the same game for Playstation, Xbox, and Sega (or whatever).

 

The baby buses seem to be in good enough shape and provide more value than other alternatives.

 

 

There are still quite a few of us 40 year flight sim veterans around, and we've seen this play out MANY times before. Its a good thing.

 

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19 hours ago, Detail50 said:

I'm looking forward to Navigraph being incorporated into the EFB.  Are you able to share some window of when we might see that?   TY  Ray

 

 

 

Last night at 02:07 that was send to our test teams!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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14 hours ago, FWAviation said:

@DaveCT2003 The assumption that it will take considerable time until we have a comparable range of add-ons for MSFS as we have it now for P3D is an assumption I share. But this assumption is actually also a very good rationale why it might be a good idea to develop additional A330 models and engine variants for the P3D version while P3D is still very much in use and MSFS hasn't caught up completely yet. 😉

 

It will indeed take some time to have a good line-up of add-ons for MSFS, but if we go on developing for P3d V4 (a platform that for sure will close down as it will be replaced presumably by V5) it will take even longer. Keep in mind that developing add-ons these days is hugely time consuming. At this moment we are planning products that will not be released before late 2021.  And adding new engines and models to the A330 is also not at all a trivial task. You are talking about easily 750 menhours and those will bring in very little new sales. And we have seen already a drop in sales now MSFS is getting closer.

 

Clearly it is logical for an A330 customer to think about the future of the A330, I however have to think beyond that.

 

 

8 hours ago, ahuimanu said:

If Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 turns out to be our "No Man's Sky," I'll at least be entertained.

 

We consider the chance of that to me close to zero. Of course NDA prevents us from sharing much, but oh boy..... It's really a whole new world out there.

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Vor 1 Stunde, Mathijs Kok sagte:

 

It will indeed take some time to have a good line-up of add-ons for MSFS, but if we go on developing for P3d V4 (a platform that for sure will close down as it will be replaced presumably by V5) it will take even longer. Keep in mind that developing add-ons these days is hugely time consuming. At this moment we are planning products that will not be released before late 2021.  And adding new engines and models to the A330 is also not at all a trivial task. You are talking about easily 750 menhours and those will bring in very little new sales. And we have seen already a drop in sales now MSFS is getting closer.

 

Clearly it is logical for an A330 customer to think about the future of the A330, I however have to think beyond that.

 

That is understandable. And of course it would make no sense to develop for P3Dv4 any longer if P3Dv5 is already out.  But I hope that at the very least, the development of further A330 models and/or engine variants is still an option at least for the future MSFS version of the A330. I mean, if such an expansion was generally unviable, PMDG would probably not develop -600/-700 expansions for every new 737 NG base pack and not currently hint on a potential -ER version of the 777-200. Or bear in mind QualityWings with their 787-10 expansion.

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But PMDG and QW are companies with a very limited amount of products and certainly PMDG is in the same price range and the new versions of the NG will not be free.  We are not big fans of charging for expansion packs. Just different kinds of products from a different company. 

 

 

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vor 32 Minuten, Mathijs Kok sagte:

But PMDG and QW are companies with a very limited amount of products and certainly PMDG is in the same price range and the new versions of the NG will not be free.  We are not big fans of charging for expansion packs. Just different kinds of products from a different company.

 

If it took a lot of work and especially the files are not the same as in the initial version (and with a shortened fuselage for the -200 and different engine shapes and data for the GE and PW engines, there would certainly be quite many new files), I for my part would be perfectly fine with a reasonable upgrade price for new models or engine variants.

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On 1/27/2020 at 3:30 PM, Mathijs Kok said:

If you like to tell me that we are bonkers and P3D will remain the platform of choice, feel free to do so in reply!

Hi Mathijs,

 

quite the reverse! Personally, I feel any P3D v5 will have to be pretty special to warrant an upgrade in the light of the current state of XP11 and the anticipated state of MS FS. I've spent a fortune over the years on add-ons for P3D (all the Orbx stuff, most of your stuff and countless others) and in most areas it now feels well behind XP in terms of pure joy when flying, and I can only drool at what I've seen of MS FS. So - go for it! All I'd add is that I'd love to see a good A318 for X-Plane11, but as you didn't mention that I guess I'll wait for FS.

 

Thanks for the post,

 

cheers,

 

Andy

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4 hours ago, FWAviation said:

If it took a lot of work and especially the files are not the same as in the initial version (and with a shortened fuselage for the -200 and different engine shapes and data for the GE and PW engines, there would certainly be quite many new files), I for my part would be perfectly fine with a reasonable upgrade price for new models or engine variants.

 

I know. And I got to be a bit careful here because I can't share too much of our plans and I have seen on FSelite that some folks read the most strange things already in what I posted, lol.

 

Aerosoft has been in business for close to 30 years. We have been through the change to a new MSFS simplatform 5 (6?) times.  It's always a bit traumatic, when the new sim is announced a lot of people are reluctant to buy more add-ons for a platform that is going to be replaced. We have to make sure we get new add-ons ready for a new platform that does not have a lot of users. It's above anything a very expensive transition for us and for many developers. You got nothing new to sell and the old stuff sells badly. These are the moments when you see shops, developers and publishers go bankrupt (or avoid that by closing shop).  It is the main reason we decided around 6 years ago to support ANY new platform. That's why we are now the biggest publisher of X-Plane add-ons and why we make AFS2 add-ons. We needed to diversify to create some stability. Look up 'pig cycle' on Google, it describes perfectly the issue we had to solve. 

 

Aerosoft did manage to handle the transitions. We are larger than ever, we have grown every single year of our existence. We now have more staff than ever. We now cover more product ranges than ever. And one of the main reasons is that we learned the hard way to work on what customers want in 10 months time. That's where the sales are. And we need a whopping lot of sales to keep doing what we do. Our overhead costs is not the what a company like PMDG has. We got warehouses, marketing departments, legal staff, people who only do server maintenance, we got offices in three countries. That's why we can't aim for the focussed markets that other can aim for. We need to sell a lot more of each product and you only can do so when you aim for a larger audience. And those are not in the over $100 market. They are in the $30 market. That's where you sell the real numbers.

 

Back to MSFS... We do market research every few months to see how our customers demands change. And even at this moment we still know there is a massive amount of FSX users. I am not spilling beans to help other companies but it is big, huge, substantial. But commercially it means very little because they are not willing to buy add-ons. I do not blame them, compared to what we can do in P3D at this moment a high end FSX product will look seriously outdated most of the time. We just do not have the memory, CPU cores and GPU power to make it look modern.  If we would do a FSX version of our A330 we would need to lose 50% of textures and 65% of the polygons. It would look like ..... uhhhhh.... a 2012 product. And does not sell and that is the trap we need to avoid by all means. We have to take some risk and look at what will sell around Christmas this year. 

 

Now it is no secret that the relation between Microsoft/Asobo and Aerosoft is pretty good. We have the experience of 5 (6?) new versions of the MSFS sim and 2 new versions of X-Plane (as you know we are deeply involved with X-Plane as well, handling it on Steam etc. We think we know what we are doing.  We love what MS is doing, we love the fact they are so open and responsive, we love the fact they see it as a platform and not a product. It is a far cry from the Microsoft of a few years back. Working with them is  pleasure. 

 

And that trust, above anything else, is why we are betting so heavy on the new platform. There are some very nice things to come for P3D and  we hope that Lockheed will bring new goodies in P3D V5 (if the choose to to a new version) we can use so we can do new cool stuff. At Aerosoft we love all sims. We always have. We still love FS2004. But we need to make sure we have products to sell and sometimes that means making choices that are not easy to explain. 

Will not stop me from trying to do so. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, azc60 said:

(all the Orbx stuff, most of your stuff and countless others)

 

But could it not be that a lot of that investment will be replaced by a sim that has a lot of what you now need to buy as add-on comes as standard? I mean, not a bad word about OrbX but if you compare what MS has shared from the new sim with P3D with all OrbX add-ons I think MSFS will win hands down. They just have far more databases and servers to prepare the regions.  Without a joke, I seen my own house in the new sim and it even has the bloody trees around it correct. In P3D, no matter what add-on I buy, the house simply does not exist, let alone individual trees.

 

What room is there for a weather tool when MS is able to get seriously good real time weather input and a weather engine that is not limited as the one on P3D or X-plane? What AI Traffic tool do you need if MSFS is using real time, real traffic? 

 

 

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Thanks for the transparency, Mathijs.

I love your baby Airbuses and will fly them until MSFS will completely replace my P3D, which means, until i have some good Airbusses, Twin Otters, Cessnas (all my old friends) and so on at MSFS. Just a matter of time that all Flightsim lovers will switch sooner or later.

Looking forward to new Aerosoft addons there....

 

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I'm extremely disappointed to hear that you aren't doing any other A330-300 variants. This means we are stuck with one engine type, what's the use in that?????

 

I admit you don't charge as much as PMDG & QW..........but you get all the engine variants for the relevant aircraft.

 

At the end of the day you have the base model for the A330-300 why can't you just adapt any changes needed. Even if it mean't we had to wait, I'd be more than happy waiting. I would happily pay for them.

 

Had I off knew this first hand I wouldn't of wasted my money. I just feel like we have been Shafted !!. I appreciate your a business and your time & effort is pain staking long plus you need to make money.

 

As for P3Dv5 who knows if half the scenery shall work for it! 

 

Thanks

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1 hour ago, jay907uk said:

I'm extremely disappointed to hear that you aren't doing any other A330-300 variants. This means we are stuck with one engine type, what's the use in that?????

 

I admit you don't charge as much as PMDG & QW..........but you get all the engine variants for the relevant aircraft.

 

At the end of the day you have the base model for the A330-300 why can't you just adapt any changes needed. Even if it mean't we had to wait, I'd be more than happy waiting. I would happily pay for them.

 

Had I off knew this first hand I wouldn't of wasted my money. I just feel like we have been Shafted !!. I appreciate your a business and your time & effort is pain staking long plus you need to make money.

 

As for P3Dv5 who knows if half the scenery shall work for it! 

 

Thanks

 

We (Mathijs and the entire staff) have always been crystal clear that we were only developing the -343, and always said that we would evaluate the possibility of other models later, but that we had no current plans to develop them.

 

Me thinks you doth protest too much my friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I hope that A320/330 promised features as new ND system, pop up displays and a final version of CFD (it's in "very alpha stage" yet) will be accomplished in P3d version and not abandoned with the excuse of the upcoming new MSFS

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Technology like CFD is absolutely not 'very early alpha'. we found one parameter that was not linked last week but hundreds of people use it every week to good success. 

 

We also do not abandon the project because at this very moment 5 people are working on it full time. The only thing that is important is that we make sure to have products to sell in the future. One of those products will be our A330, most likely in more versions, just for the simulators that will be dominant. We believe that will be MSFS at the end of this year. If Lockheed surprises us with a version that is not as problematic as the V4.5 is and it still has enough users we'll gladly work for that platform as well. If we kept on doing FSX add-ons when P3D became the dominant platform we would not be in business anymore. 

 

Can I kindly ask you to read what I wrote?

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Regarding Connected Flight Deck, we are pushing an update (hopefully this week) which brings A330 CFD into the Final Beta status.  I took the A330 up last week with one of our testers and everything worked just fine.  We are looking to relocate the CFD server in the somewhat near future to allow better PINGs for those outside of Europe.

 

So as Mathijs said, we are working on CFD and several other things!

 

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5 hours ago, Mathijs Kok said:

Technology like CFD is absolutely not 'very early alpha'.

 

Well it's what is written on mcdu CFD Page. I'm glad it's going to beta

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Hi Aerosoft

I heard on the grape vine about ref to P3D v5, will I need to buy that when it comes out to keep the Airbus updated (always need the latest version to update) ? Or is (hopefully) the current  Airbus going to be for P3D v4? With maybe a new port to V5?

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2 hours ago, Mathijs Kok said:

We have no information on P3D V5 but normally we always default to the very latest version. As P3d V4 has some rather serious issues we would most certainly like to try out a new version.

Is there a way to find out what sort of serious issues. Just out of curiosity. 

 

Thank you

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3 minutes ago, Love_Aviation said:

Is there a way to find out what sort of serious issues. Just out of curiosity. 

 

Thank you

 

This is all development stuff, and we don't share that publically unless there is a major bug that affects users.  What we do is find work arounds for the issues that Mathijs is talking about so that they don't affect customers, but such works arounds are also problematic for our programmers and force us to do a lot more changes to allow them to work.

 

In order to share these we'd have to stop developing to write them all up, re-verifiy them, and then 99.9% of those who read it simply won't understand what we write and they'll then ask for explanations, which pulls us back off of writing code again to answer, people still don't understand and aren't satisfied so they then complain, and the cycle starts itself over again.


So in short... no, until we go completely insane we aren't going to engage in this!  LOL!!!

 

What customers should take away from this is that P3Dv4.5 has a lot of unfinished  thigns which cause developers a ton of grief and cost us more money to work around rather than our relying on the proper code.  This by the way is a VERY, VERY, VERY old conversation that I remember having back before the FS9 (FS2004) days and FSX days, so it's really nothing new.

 

 

Best wishes my friend.

 

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13 hours ago, DaveCT2003 said:

 

This is all development stuff, and we don't share that publically unless there is a major bug that affects users.  What we do is find work arounds for the issues that Mathijs is talking about so that they don't affect customers, but such works arounds are also problematic for our programmers and force us to do a lot more changes to allow them to work.

 

In order to share these we'd have to stop developing to write them all up, re-verifiy them, and then 99.9% of those who read it simply won't understand what we write and they'll then ask for explanations, which pulls us back off of writing code again to answer, people still don't understand and aren't satisfied so they then complain, and the cycle starts itself over again.


So in short... no, until we go completely insane we aren't going to engage in this!  LOL!!!

 

What customers should take away from this is that P3Dv4.5 has a lot of unfinished  thigns which cause developers a ton of grief and cost us more money to work around rather than our relying on the proper code.  This by the way is a VERY, VERY, VERY old conversation that I remember having back before the FS9 (FS2004) days and FSX days, so it's really nothing new.

 

 

Best wishes my friend.

 

Oh wow. Hopefully FS 2020 will fix all of those annoying things and by the looks of it I think it will. Just hopefully you don't need a supercomputer to run it😁

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I expect to fly P3d long after I bought MSFS2020 so hopefully they support that one too. For one, there will be at least 2 years before all my fave airports are converted. Not to mention all Q400/AS/PMDG/QW stuff. FS2Crew is a must too nowadays :).

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34 minutes ago, marcusjm said:

I expect to fly P3d long after I bought MSFS2020 so hopefully they support that one too. For one, there will be at least 2 years before all my fave airports are converted. Not to mention all Q400/AS/PMDG/QW stuff. FS2Crew is a must too nowadays :).

 

You don't know how much I agree with you!  Anyone who removes their existing flight sim software when the new sim is released... well, I think they'll regret doing so.  I'm still buying an enjoying P3D addons.

 

Best wishes.

 

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