Things I Would Like To See In The Next Fs

[seahawk09 0]

Hey all,

Here are some things i would like to see in the next FS

1) when it snows the snows really builds up on your plane

2) when iceing occurs turning on the piot heat really melts the ice and having de iceing trucks spray your plane down when it's cold.

3) having lighting be able to strike your plane in a thunderstorm.

4) being able to check your plane prior to take thing like a walk around checking the oil checking for water in your fuel tanks being able to fill your tanks yourself.

I hope they give the next FS a real feel just starting in a cockpit just isnt the same as really going through the steps.

Thats what i would like to see in the next FS

[WEA-JHD 1]

The biggest priority for me is that it can run at all settings tio the max on top of the range hardware that's available at the time of release

the second would be better physics and sloping runways

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

The biggest priority for me is that it can run at all settings tio the max on top of the range hardware that's available at the time of release

That has never happened and will most likely never happen. In fact, there is hardly any game that is expected to have a sale period if 20 months (like FSX has) that will do that. It's just economics, you let the hardware grow towards your game.

Besides, the settings of FSX lets you tune the sim to the kind of flight you do. When you fly across the ocean you like good weather, nice water effects but you really don't care about 1 meter mesh, 60 cm textures and detailed trees. When you are bush flying you like high dense mesh and detailed trees, but clouds that are 60 miles away become far less important. Not the same sim, not the same settings.

FSX allows you to save your settings. I would not even consider starting a flight in FSX without checking what setting was loaded as it just makes no sense.

[Vigilius 1]

Mathijs I'm totally agree with you but it seems that the people that thinks like me and you are really few

[WEA-JHD 1]

That has never happened and will most likely never happen. In fact, there is hardly any game that is expected to have a sale period if 20 months (like FSX has) that will do that. It's just economics, you let the hardware grow towards your game.

Unfortunately you're right, but i certainly hope the hardware will catch up much more quickly for FS11 than FSX, i mean 2 years is a very long time and even today there is no hardware that can run FSX on all settings to the max (maybe in a year or so we will start to see the hardware that can). sure it may not be all that important to you and other FSX users, but as i have said earlier (without dragging all that up again) i want to use a product at it's max potential and today that's not possible for the current FS version

[ManuelL 71]

Unfortunately you're right, but i certainly hope the hardware will catch up much more quickly for FS11 than FSX, i mean 2 years is a very long time and even today there is no hardware that can run FSX on all settings to the max (maybe in a year or so we will start to see the hardware that can). sure it may not be all that important to you and other FSX users, but as i have said earlier (without dragging all that up again) i want to use a product at it's max potential and today that's not possible for the current FS version

If the hardware available at time of release could play FS11 at full settings, there would be no room for further improvement until the next FS version 4 years later. People would be happy for half a year to one year after the release and then they would start complaining that the sim is outdated and doesn't make use of the improved hardware standard. If you want to have a sim that can be run at full settings by the time FS11 is released, you can still go for FSX, just like many people are still running FS9 now.

[WEA-JHD 1]

If the hardware available at time of release could play FS11 at full settings, there would be no room for further improvement until the next FS version 4 years later. People would be happy for half a year to one year after the release and then they would start complaining that the sim is outdated and doesn't make use of the improved hardware standard. If you want to have a sim that can be run at full settings by the time FS11 is released, you can still go for FSX, just like many people are still running FS9 now.

Of course there would be room for improvement, despite the fact that everyone could run it at max, the community would never be so divided as it is now, and that would not have been a bad thing. 3rd party addons would keep the sim updated and interesting, as long as the sim has potential and less limitations than the previous version it would hold more than enough until the next version of flightsim was released.

Remember FS2000? And how FS2002 was the sought after replacement and mostly brought the community back together again? Sure FS9 couldn't run on hardware that was available at the time either, but thankfully it caught up relatively fast.

Well, FSX is the new FS2000 all over again, at least that's how i see it

[ManuelL 71]

I would like to see something like this in the next FS:

Knights of the Sky - physics

But I guess a completely different approach would be required to achieve this.

[Snave 466]

There is no empirical evidence for the anecdotal notion that sales would be affected in any way, shape or form by being designed for `lesser` hardware.

Given that the barrier to entry appears to be that hardware, one could make quite a case from a marketing perspective to have a product that is far less resource-intensive, as greater sales would result. Fewer would be put off. And that's not anecdotal, that's fact based on the number of returned copies of FSX on first release, when it was suddenly discovered it wouldn't run on ANY hardware a reasonable enthusiast or hobbyist would have their hands on at the time...

However, you forget who makes FS, and why. Nominally, FSX was supposed to be the entry product for DX10, a `season opener` from the DirectX developer themselves designed to open the door on DX10 gaming via the new API, and encourage switching to the then-new Vista. Of course, it didn't turn out that way, and along that way several mistakes about future hardware were made - and are accepted as having been made - by the developers.

Given that the rate of progress in computing hasn't changed, what guarantees can any developer offer that their next-generation product will actually be suitable for the generation-after-that hardware..? I would say next to none if MS ACES can't get it right when they're just down the corridor from the DX team, and a couple of floors away from the Windows boys, what hope would there be for ANY developer..? So basically they take a shot in the dark, and WE pay the price...

Now this litany of mistakes could give pause to think for ACES. If they designed for the EXISTING top end hardware no day of release, then the system overheads this provides would, I suggest, easily see the sim through to the next iteration, by way of the aftermarket. That is after all, the main reason that FS9 continues to be the sim of choice for many:

So I suspect there is a serious argument to re-write the next sim from ACES to be far more compliant with the technology that will be around at time of release, but what we will probably see is integration of 64-bit computing, full DX11 compatibility (which will probably mean the sim will not run on Windows XP which will be at the end of its life by then anyway) much better integration of shader modelling, which is fundamentally the thing holding the graphics back today, and possibly integration of of physics rendering onto the graphic card. Now to achieve that one can support SLI/Crossfire natively, and have scaleable architecture that simply allows the GPU (or GPU's) the spare capacity to do the job effectively, and that might mean the next gen sim offers pretty much the same level of graphics as now, but with double the fps. I can't really see the point of going to more than 1m texture resolution unless you also bump-map the ground with a mesh of such detail as to allow a fence to display as a fence, not a painted texture on the ground.

So unless there is emergent technology that ACES want to risk pinning their hats on, it would be foolish to repeat the mistakes of FSX with FSXI.

What is actually needed is open architecture modelling that will allow for more detailed, more complex plug-in modules to be added as time goes by and emergent hardware and software reveals its true nature and becomes the established mainstream. Physx modelling is giving rise to CUDA, and this is surely the kind of development that ACES MUST look at for the next gen sim, given that CPU speeds are unlikely to continue at the exponential rate of today unless/until emergent technology allows it to happen with new materials, so for the time being multi-core CPU's are set to become the de facto standard. Two and four cores are already normal mainstream market fare, so it would make sense to have a computing model in the sim that adds complexity according to the number and speed of cores. FSX makes very little use of this facet, apart from the added-on nod of passing off some of the processes to the second, third or fourth core. Passing more of the physical modelling in the sim world to the GPU - which also suuports multiple cores, natively and with measurable scaleability, would remove some of the CPU burden of the sim.

Guesswork is simply not the way to take advantage of this technology, and ACES knows it. But given that the speed of the cores will progress more linearly, does it make sense to develop a simulator that is actually designed for technology two years after release? Of course not, one would reasonably expect the scaleable architecture to be built-in from the start, not the result of some punt by a ACES backroom boy of what will be `hot` half a decade from now... they tried that with FSX and got it so very badly wrong.

If it were my project, I would recommend internal modularity, with a 20% uplift margin built into the core engine, as shipped. That would cope with the range of hardware improvements in the short term, and the modules could be removed/updated/replaced to provide better scaleability with the technology as it matures and develops, and becomes mainstream e.g: At shipment, your sim includes physics module 1.0.0 that allows some of the rendering of the invisible dynamic world to be offloaded to the GPU, depending on the speed, power and number of GPU's fitted. However, say emergent technology sees that physics rendering being moved back to the Mobo, by virtue of an onboard module that integrates the `spare capacity` of the multiple cores of the CPU in a dynamic and fluctuating way and then allows the graphic processing of the result to be rendered by the GPU, then module 2.0.0 is made available as a plug-in to those whose hardware permits such a complex interractive function.

Same goes for the complexity of the modelling IN the sim: As Mathijs notes, it makes no sense to display every tree on the ground when you are at thirty thousand feet in the the Airways, but currently the sim does a very poor job of actually providing a shifting emphasis of resources. Yes I can move sliders and reduce the display of autogen, or mesh, or texture resolution, but if I'm in a Jumbo, do I really need every grass field between here and Timbuktoo, or the complex modeling of weather dynamics at 1,000 ft? Conversely, If I'm low and slow in a Maule, cruising just above the treetops, do I really need all the major airports in the region with AI and moving vehicles if I'm not flying to them, or clouds visible sixty miles away?

What I would like to see is simply a better core model for the sim, capable of being scaled UP as time goes by (and therefore by implication designed for the technology of the day of release, not years later) but more importantly, scaleability at the point of loading to make the sim concentrate on the things that are important for me on that sim session - and allow for plug-in modularity that can be exploited by either the developer or the aftermarket to enhance areas of the sim on an optional basis so that one can upgrade as time goes by, and hardware improvements are made to the individual rig. The most complex modelling in the sim is not anything you actually see - it's the weather. Computing power increases, whether by Moores law, Boyles law, Murphys law or Sods law, so why can the engine of flight sim not be adjusted to take advantage of these improvements AFTER initial release, to ensure that the changes are actually in keeping with developments in the marketplace. It's exactly the same as patching, but a delivered, ordered arrangement rather than a haphazard strapon that breaks as many things as it fixes...

[_Dre_ 0]

I'm sure we all would like a better performing FS, but the two things I need to see in the next version are much more realistic ATC and a much more realistic weather engine. Whether you fly recreational aircraft, heavy iron, or anything else in between; ATC and weather are the two most important things we all have to interact with and it's currently the two most sub-standard of all the features of Flight Simulator.

I'm sure if MSoft were to ask all simmers if they would rather have an encounter with severe icing where you have to perform an emergency descent (or face the consequences), or to be able to watch dolphins swimming and elephants walking then 99% would prefer the icing scenario. These are fundamental aspects of aviation (ATC and weather) and I think they should pay way more attention to these areas when developing the next sim.

[Marc W. 0]

I'm sure if MSoft were to ask all simmers if they would rather have an encounter with severe icing where you have to perform an emergency descent (or face the consequences), or to be able to watch dolphins swimming and elephants walking then 99% would prefer the icing scenario. These are fundamental aspects of aviation (ATC and weather) and I think they should pay way more attention to these areas when developing the next sim.

I completely disagree. You are talking about the minority of "hard-core" simmers ... I believe the VAST majority of customers buys pretty boxes with pretty scenery. I guess there's where the real buck lies.

[Snave 466]

...and therein lies the dichotomy...

[Silverbird 15]

I would have to say they should advance the weather engine even more. and of course upgrade and update the atc system. and if possible remake the auto-gen.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

If it were my project, I would recommend internal modularity, with a 20% uplift margin built into the core engine, as shipped. That would cope with the range of hardware improvements in the short term, and the modules could be removed/updated/replaced to provide better scaleability with the technology as it matures and develops, and becomes mainstream e.g: At shipment, your sim includes physics module 1.0.0 that allows some of the rendering of the invisible dynamic world to be offloaded to the GPU, depending on the speed, power and number of GPU's fitted. However, say emergent technology sees that physics rendering being moved back to the Mobo, by virtue of an onboard module that integrates the `spare capacity` of the multiple cores of the CPU in a dynamic and fluctuating way and then allows the graphic processing of the result to be rendered by the GPU, then module 2.0.0 is made available as a plug-in to those whose hardware permits such a complex interractive function.

Same goes for the complexity of the modelling IN the sim: As Mathijs notes, it makes no sense to display every tree on the ground when you are at thirty thousand feet in the the Airways, but currently the sim does a very poor job of actually providing a shifting emphasis of resources. Yes I can move sliders and reduce the display of autogen, or mesh, or texture resolution, but if I'm in a Jumbo, do I really need every grass field between here and Timbuktoo, or the complex modeling of weather dynamics at 1,000 ft? Conversely, If I'm low and slow in a Maule, cruising just above the treetops, do I really need all the major airports in the region with AI and moving vehicles if I'm not flying to them, or clouds visible sixty miles away?

Snave you take the price for the best post of the week. Most likely a lot of people will skip it because it is not the usual one liner statement (a skill you also master btw, both in good and bad) and because it is complex. But you found the nail and you got the hammer.

FSX tries to be a king of all trades and with increasing complexity that makes less and less sense from a hardcore point of view. In FSX and in FS2004 VFR flying became more important. While the default 747 remained the same useless whale (for simmers who want realism) while the Maule is actually surprisingly good and the gliders with missions are superb fun. So a move towards small aviation. No serious updates for ATC were a logical step in that.

• FS2004 was a logical step from FS2002, trying to cash in on the 100 year of aviation theme (a bad idea in my mind as nobody gave a sh*t about the old aircraft)
• FSX is about moving to a new platform, multi core, more DX related and building the platform for the future with moving all development to game independant platforms. This did not work out perfectly because we got code that runs slower on the same hardware (a problem solved by time) and we got a lot of new bugs and problems.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I would have to say they should advance the weather engine even more. and of course upgrade and update the atc system. and if possible remake the auto-gen.

Autogen is actually very strong, very fast and very easy to make in FSX. If we can make project that have hundred of thousands really well placed buildings it should be seen as one of the highlights.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I would like to see something like this in the next FS:

Knights of the Sky - physics

But I guess a completely different approach would be required to achieve this.

Nice demo, but it means nothing for how you experience flight on your desk chair. it only starts to make real sense if you get to the ragged edge of the flight model. Something modern aircraft simply will not allow. Who cares about how realistic a stall model is when the airbus you fly is designed to be impossible to get to a stall?

Even worse, why would you give a flying hoot about how air particles 10 feet BEHIND your aircraft are simulated?

[_Dre_ 0]

I completely disagree. You are talking about the minority of "hard-core" simmers ... I believe the VAST majority of customers buys pretty boxes with pretty scenery. I guess there's where the real buck lies.

I completely disagree with your disagreement . I am not just talking about hardcore simmers, I'm referring to all simmers.

I think it would be thrilling to be a bush pilot and have a fast moving (realistic) cold front catch you off guard on a "cargo run"; having you pushing your poor old twotter to the max as the rapidly dropping ceiling is getting closer and closer to the tree tops. Another scenario; you are in your brand new Carenado Mooney or in your awesome Aerosoft glider being mesmerized by the beauty of Lord Howe Island when you encounter a typical summer "popcorn" thunderstorm and all of a sudden that perfect glider or the Mooney is becoming a handfull as the realistic turbulence which is coming from that developing thunderstorm puts your flying skills to the test (just imagine the massive wings of the glider flexing in a scary fashion).

Or even better yet, heading to Aspen or Lukla on a funky day will be like nothing you have ever encountered before because of a much more realistic weather engine. All those examples are for the GA flyers, and even a "heavy iron" guy like myself would venture more into the GA world if these scenarios were much more realistic. Now all those scenarios are bad wx related but it would be nice to also see in what appears to be a beautifull summer day a realistic representation of Haze as I'm on approach into a big city. Even if you don't fly at all; think of the beauty and realism, if you are a screenshot artist, being in northern Italy and capturing a breathtaking screenshot of a fog bank rolling down the Alps and descending upon Milan.

My point is that these features are beneficial to all, not just to a certain crowd or type of flyer. If MS is going to stick with saying "as real as it gets", then I would appreciate a true effort to make it so.

[ManuelL 71]

Nice demo, but it means nothing for how you experience flight on your desk chair. it only starts to make real sense if you get to the ragged edge of the flight model. Something modern aircraft simply will not allow. Who cares about how realistic a stall model is when the airbus you fly is designed to be impossible to get to a stall?

Even worse, why would you give a flying hoot about how air particles 10 feet BEHIND your aircraft are simulated?

I agree that for an airbus or most other airliners it does make little sense to improve the the physical flight model. However, it would in my opinion make sense for small aircraft. When it comes to small aircraft (and more so for bushplanes, which seem to be quite popular in FS) and I could chose between a model that flies the exact numbers at 18.000 feet and one that has a realistic side slip behaviour, I would always go for the latter. I am not speaking about the ragged edge of the flight model, but some more realism in basic uncoordinated flight would be something I apreciated.

[Marc W. 0]

I completely disagree with your disagreement . I am not just talking about hardcore simmers, I'm referring to all simmers.

with respect, you probably haven't read all of my post ...

... the average non-hardcore simmer doesn't even know what ATC ist ... ^^

[mk83 7]

Nice demo, but it means nothing for how you experience flight on your desk chair. it only starts to make real sense if you get to the ragged edge of the flight model. Something modern aircraft simply will not allow. Who cares about how realistic a stall model is when the airbus you fly is designed to be impossible to get to a stall?

Even worse, why would you give a flying hoot about how air particles 10 feet BEHIND your aircraft are simulated?

I strongly disagree. It might be uninteresting for you how air particles behind your aircraft are simulated, but certainly not for the guy flying in your wake. Wake turbulences caused by airliners can stretch for many miles behind the plane and caused more than one crash.

Such a feature could make operations at busy airports much more interesting, making it necessary to keep the right safety distance, not to mention formation flying, aerial refueling or simply being towed in your glider.

As already mentioned maybe 95 % and more of all airplanes in FS can be stalled and don't have computers that prevent the pilot from getting to he ragged edge of the flight model. If you want to do some aerobatics or just land your plane with minimum ground run a correctly modeled stall behavior suddenly becomes very important.

I hope that Aces will focus exactly on such things as a better weather engine, flight model or damaging your flaps when you extend them at airspeeds beyond their limits. Making a state of the art flight not a sight seeing simulator.

FS2004 was a logical step from FS2002, trying to cash in on the 100 year of aviation theme (a bad idea in my mind as nobody gave a sh*t about the old aircraft)

I am a bit surprised to see such an statement from a company's representative that developed the excellent Hughes H1 and has a Catalina in it's pipeline. Surely the great number of classic piston engine aircraft add ons or Golden Wings and other vintage scenery shows that actually a lot of people care for old planes.

[_Dre_ 0]

with respect, you probably haven't read all of my post ...

... the average non-hardcore simmer doesn't even know what ATC ist ... ^^

I did read your entire post, but let's just agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Another thing I'd like to see is the ATC's ability to control AI aircraft so that even if M$ doesn't make any other improvements addons like Radar Contact and PFE or even the default ATC can now easily implement changeable SIDs and STARs as the weather itself changes.

[Marc W. 0]

What I'd like to see is realistic sizes for buildings and trees. To be more precise : The size should go with the area. Like the landclass textures.

I'd also love to see the autogen better fitting the ground textures (add-on scenery already does that very well in FSX!)

[FSXaddict 18]

I would like to see Microsoft program it where we could see other pilot's repaints/textures regardless if you have it installed in your planes or not. Just like IL2, if you're flying online there you can see anyone's paint scheme. The game automatically downloads it and installs it into your system files making it visible to you without having to download that particular repaint and install it into your aircraft cfg/folders.

[WEA-JHD 1]

I strongly disagree. It might be uninteresting for you how air particles behind your aircraft are simulated, but certainly not for the guy flying in your wake. Wake turbulences caused by airliners can stretch for many miles behind the plane and caused more than one crash.

Such a feature could make operations at busy airports much more interesting, making it necessary to keep the right safety distance, not to mention formation flying, aerial refueling or simply being towed in your glider.

As already mentioned maybe 95 % and more of all airplanes in FS can be stalled and don't have computers that prevent the pilot from getting to he ragged edge of the flight model. If you want to do some aerobatics or just land your plane with minimum ground run a correctly modeled stall behavior suddenly becomes very important.

I hope that Aces will focus exactly on such things as a better weather engine, flight model or damaging your flaps when you extend them at airspeeds beyond their limits. Making a state of the art flight not a sight seeing simulator.

I am a bit surprised to see such an statement from a company's representative that developed the excellent Hughes H1 and has a Catalina in it's pipeline. Surely the great number of classic piston engine aircraft add ons or Golden Wings and other vintage scenery shows that actually a lot of people care for old planes.

Very well said, you hit the nail on the head right there

A flight simulator should be focusing on one thing: Simulation! nothing else. Simulating the physics should be the number one priority in a simulator, but FSX has taken most of the focus on visuals and completely unneccesary missions instead, it's very unfortunate.

In my opinion they should be revoked the right to use the word "simulator" in the game's title.

[Mithrin 0]

All I ask for is a fully optimized game, focussed on providing smooth gameplay. That and dynamic waves. It's rather boring flying floatplanes right now.