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A New Simulator (June edition)


Staffan

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Hello to all, esp. Aerosoft,

my second post to this great topic... but after sitting another weekend (and still in progress <_< ) with FSX' configuration of hardware issues and graphics for testing and tweaking for Windows 7 I recongnized ones more these most uncomfortable things with that actual Sim...

-> maybe it could be a good idea to implmenet some kind of (open) database with common configurations for certain hardware, e.g. special settings when using dual core intel/amd system with nvidia/amd graphics and 5.1 surround sound plus some standard resolutions and depth of simulation depending on something like a "power index" of the users system... just as an idea... I am not a coder and maybe it's very complex to deal with power consumpting add-ons / plug-ins...but I tthink there should be a complete new attempt to get the simmer (even the advanced ones) where they want to be: flying instead of wasting time with endless configuration, testing and tweaking...

best wishes for your project - may it combine the best of all what we have so far and make it better

Michael

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Some things which are essential in my opinion:

- Real looking water with layers and hopefully 3D-waves. (like in REX addon but much better if possible)

- Rain on the windscreen. It can be made with motionblur, to give better effect. Check this photo for better idea: http://www.airliners.net/photo/Federal-Exp...#46;/0412477/L/

- Forest and trees like in IL-2 but hopefully little improoved

- Ground maintenance, where you can walk around the plane, tank fuel by yourseld, check oil, etc.

- 3D smooth gauges on all planes in VC.

- Finally, my dream is to have 3D-virtual instructor inside the virtual cockpit, who will teach you how to fly an airplane from cold and dark cockpit through the flight. Or for example you can fly as a co-pilot and watch how he is flying. He can fly airplane by himself and give you orders. You should responce in time to make a succesful flight with him.

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I started with a much longer list and tried to shorten it but I am still left with something rather longer than what you may have had in mind. I apologize but I think the following really should be considered:

1. The primary thing that makes flying challenging is the weather so I think this should be a top priority. All I ask here is that you have the guys at HiFi involved with this project. If so I know all of the previous requests plus my own desire for more realistic weather will be delivered on.

2. Certain airports are challenging because of persistent weather patterns like Adak in the Aleutian Islands or Narsarsuaq in Greenland. If possible I would like the sim to be able to emulate these real world environments

3. Improve on the floating orbs of light that seem to penetrate physical matter which are used on planes and at airports. Add blinking lights on radio towers and tall buildings.

4. Though I have no interest in a combat simulator I also realize that for all of us to get what we want means this project needs to be a commercial success. Therefore the basic package needs to attract as many people as possible. Given the number of requests and constant comments about a desire for combat functionality over the years on forums it sounds like there is a potentially large market for this. Aerosoft may not be interested in developing it themselves but at the very least the SDK should be open to allow someone to develop a combat add-on.

5. I can understand that having regional variations in ATC would require too much work that it would not be practical to deliver in a ~$50 software package. What I would recommend though is that you keep the SDK open to allow for it. If so, the flight sim community - either through freeware or payware add-ons - will inevitably do the grunt work to make it happen. I would also like to add my voice to the request for ATC to remain as an AI and to add to the complexity by allowing it to handle emergency requests and if possible download and integrate NOTAMs into airspace approvals.

6. Allow seaplanes to bump into docks without crashing.

7. An option to allow users to set a minimal FPS and establish parameters to make other parts of the flight sim take the hit when hardware capabilities are maxed out.

8. If risking a few million Euro in capital is a barrier to get this project going maybe you could consider establishing it under a separate holding structure allowing for other add-on companies to contribute equity, as well as the flight sim community in general.

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Hi Mathijs,

Great idea to have a June edition. Surely makes the topic better stuctured.

Couple more things over FS that I would like to see.

1. Realistic Landing Lights: As much as MSFS have improved so many aspects of their sim from earlier versions, the landing light beam is really a joke. If I recall Fly! and X-Plane simulate it so much better when viewed from the cockpit. Also, if the strobes flash can be seen on the ground, it would be a neat effect. Not sure if it is there in FSX.

2. Airport Rendition: Lets face it, default airports in MS are woefully lacking so may features that you find in most airports around the world. It is odd to find an automobile/GA style pumping station in the middle of an international airport's parking apron. I would really like to see a much better rendition of the airport. Things like baggage carts, airport specific vehicles like fuel trucks, ladders, pax buses etc. Also, a fire station with fire engines. Another thing would be a more realistic "grass areas" near the aprons, taxiways and runway sides, much like what we see in Aerosoft's sceneries. Also the clumps of grass along the edges that you add to your sceneries would be a nice touch. Another thing I would like to see is a marshaller at every parking spot. I wonder if AI aircraft can follow the taxi lines as per the AFCAD, would it be difficult to incorporate a marshaller like AES does to guide your aircraft to its parking spot. Also it would great to have a solid compound/boundary wall along the perimeter of the airport. It is odd to be parked at a bay/stand which has no building in front of you and you see the terrain surrounding the airport instead. It would be great if you could incorporate a powerful AFCAD type of utility cum scenery library/placer for airport objects and surroundings that we could use to enhance our favourite airports. These are just a tiny number of items one can think of to make the airport environment better. At the end of the day, is that not why we wait eagerly for every Mega Airport release of Aerosoft?? :D

3. Night Environment: Black water and sky is a must according to me. I have noticed that when flying at night in FS the water is a dark green or blue. But all of us who have flown at night would have noticed the water is actually only one colour, and that is black, even on a nice moonlit night. The same would apply to the sky as well. Also it would be nice to have elevated light points for the roads like UT Europe does.

4. Photoreal Runways and aprons: Maybe a tool to download a specific airport's runway and apron textures from an aerial photo from say Google maps, and overlay it over the default one to enhance your personal experience. If the tool could be a user friendly GUI like a wizard, which does not involve a basic designing knowledge of GMAX, or layers, or xml etc...that would be great :) I understand that the image may be a low res depending on the photo, but I think it still adds to the realism.

Just a few suggestions for now.

Thanks for everything,

Dinshaw.

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Hallo @all,

to the point - things wich make daily SIM-Handling faster:

Favorites

- Top 5 Airplanes with Favorite Liveries

- Top 5 Airports

- Cold & Dark Start-Button!

and one thing I beg you for:

-> BUILD A SIM NOT A GAME!

:) Cirnoc

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  • Aerosoft
This just seems to me like the perfect opportunity for some "out of the box" thinking on this whole issue.

Indeed, indeed... A lot will depend on the graphics engine we'll decide to use. I know some have some options for this. Very usefull comments though.

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8. If risking a few million Euro in capital is a barrier to get this project going maybe you could consider establishing it under a separate holding structure allowing for other add-on companies to contribute equity, as well as the flight sim community in general.

Thanks for the comments, want to comment on this one.

As I said before there is not so much we can get from other companies that you know in this field at this moment. Making an addon for a sim is not at all the same as building a part of a simulator. Even Aerosoft, by far the biggest addon builder with in house staff for most bits we do would have to hire new people for almost all bits. Making scenery, aircraft etc is expected to be on 15% of the complete work. Right now we need mathematicians and engineers. To explain it very simple: no FS aircraft 'knows' how fast it goes. It simply read the airspeed variable that the sim offers. We are building the parts that provide that speed, not the aircraft and the rather simple gauge that displays it.

Money will be a big thing of course. We got some to burn and we are looking for additional money. But there has never been any serious good software made by a committee. We believe FSX and the new TS Microsoft were not as good as hoped for because project management was not as solid as could be (mind you, they can only do as much they are allowed, this is not a comment on the actual people who done it). FSX was done by a very large team, Xplane is done by one person. See what I mean?

We do intend to build a very open platform (in fact a lot more open then FSX) and we'll talk to everybody, this forum is proof of that. Every design decision will be seen and checked by our competitor friends and a few customer forums. But the company that puts up the development money calls the shots. If you know somebody willing to invest half a million (Euro, Dollars) he will get a lot of influence. That's how these things work.

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Thanks for the comments, want to comment on this one.

As I said before there is not so much we can get from other companies that you know in this field at this moment. Making an addon for a sim is not at all the same as building a part of a simulator. Even Aerosoft, by far the biggest addon builder with in house staff for most bits we do would have to hire new people for almost all bits. Making scenery, aircraft etc is expected to be on 15% of the complete work. Right now we need mathematicians and engineers. To explain it very simple: no FS aircraft 'knows' how fast it goes. It simply read the airspeed variable that the sim offers. We are building the parts that provide that speed, not the aircraft and the rather simple gauge that displays it.

Money will be a big thing of course. We got some to burn and we are looking for additional money. But there has never been any serious good software made by a committee. We believe FSX and the new TS Microsoft were not as good as hoped for because project management was not as solid as could be (mind you, they can only do as much they are allowed, this is not a comment on the actual people who done it). FSX was done by a very large team, Xplane is done by one person. See what I mean?

We do intend to build a very open platform (in fact a lot more open then FSX) and we'll talk to everybody, this forum is proof of that. Every design decision will be seen and checked by our competitor friends and a few customer forums. But the company that puts up the development money calls the shots. If you know somebody willing to invest half a million (Euro, Dollars) he will get a lot of influence. That's how these things work.

Well...... :blush: Perhaps a really stupid idea, but have you thought of asking for donations. Perhaps there is some law against it, but it seems to me that Obama proved the power of soliciting the aid of like minded people.....

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Very important- realistic force feedback effects for trim and all other forces active on the controls. The lack of this feature is one of the biggest failings and misses in every flight simulator FS2004,FSX, X-Plane. Without realistic movement of the yoke and trim forces this is not a flight simulator at all.

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My 5 cent (I assume, that "AeroSim" could have a similar programming interface like FSX):

Graphics Engine:

  • Please, select a graphics engine that handles transparancies well (I know that this is a principle problem). Making realistic clouds is a nightmare otherwise.
  • You may consider also the old "Rotate-to-user" function, which could create a number of objects types (including clouds) much more efficient.
  • Consider add-on-programmer-defined lighting effects for scenery and AI objects.
  • Peeking into to the terrain database for elevations, landclasses etc.
  • Programmatic creation of scenery objects (not only AI aircraft and the like)

Weather engine:

  • Provide an option to overwrite weather conditions locally at the aircraft, wind in particular, while keeping the general METAR situation. This makes life much easier for weather add-ons (like CumulusX!).
  • As
    the above would more easily allow the creation of tools like CumulusX!, a built-in solution of realistic slope lift and thermals would be very appreciated anyway.

I'm not very optimisitc about the chance to have a real weather simulation, producing weather phenomena due to appropriate input like temp, humidity, wind, pressure gradient, etc. Usually supercomputers are fully occupied by this, and most likely there is not sufficient real weather data available to fill up the input of such an engine. An advantage of any sim is that the resulting situation is in a way predictable, which will be difficult to achieve by a real weather simulator.

Sim Engine

  • comprehensive documentation of the flight dynamics model and its a parameters.
  • option to affect the flight model with extra forces. e.g. for towing, winches, etc. ("vectored" thrust was mentioned already).
  • good documentation how to inject own alterations of the sim's state without fighting with the sim's integrators.

best regards,

Peter

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Hello Mathijs,

I have seen it suggested only a couple of times, but a career mode (passenger and/or cargo) would be nice. You don't need to incorporate running a company or airline, just a career/skills progression.

Regards,

Bob McCue

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Native Add-on Version Control: When you fire up the sim it would check all your add-on versions against a central online database and tell you if there are any updates or service packs or whatever available (with the options to download now, ignore for now and remove from list). Obviously the exact same thing could be applied to the sim itself. For those who like to do it manually it would be easy to offer an option to disable add-on version control within the options menu.

This kind of approach will make it easy to manage your add-ons - the more you have the more time consuming this issue becomes.

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  • Aerosoft
I have a question, when are you guys planning to start with the new simulator? When would this simulator be finished (appoximately 1 year or 2 years?)?

We will not start until we are as sure as can be it will work, it's a massive investment. But development time is scheduled to be 18 months at least.

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Very important- realistic force feedback effects for trim and all other forces active on the controls. The lack of this feature is one of the biggest failings and misses in every flight simulator FS2004,FSX, X-Plane. Without realistic movement of the yoke and trim forces this is not a flight simulator at all.

yeah but to be serious, there is no hardware that could give serious force feedback. Even a old 737 can pull enough to move your whole computer towards you if you have not bolted it to the floor. I know, I almost lost my balls when I was not seated back in a simulator when they were testing force feedback. If your system can crush your balls at half power we'll talk.

Force feedback on the few sticks that still handle it (note that there has not been ANY development in this in the last 5 years), always feels very silly to me (not at all as I know aircraft and always 0,5 seconds late).

But comments are welcome!

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Native Add-on Version Control: When you fire up the sim it would check all your add-on versions against a central online database and tell you if there are any updates or service packs or whatever available (with the options to download now, ignore for now and remove from list). Obviously the exact same thing could be applied to the sim itself. For those who like to do it manually it would be easy to offer an option to disable add-on version control within the options menu.

This kind of approach will make it easy to manage your add-ons - the more you have the more time consuming this issue becomes.

I done that when I was still working at LAGO and even with only our addons it was problematic. See it this way, Firefox does it that way and when I just want to see if there is going to be rain in the next 15 minutes it tells me there are updates for this and this addons I got installed. And it won't even let me avoid that easy.

I woud consider a check innitiated by the user, but not something running on startup.

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We will not start until we are as sure as can be it will work, it's a massive investment. But development time is scheduled to be 18 months at least.

Even 18 months sounds very optimistic for a project this size

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Force feedback is important, but also growth potential for future hardware like Virtual Reality glasses, motion platforms and (the successors of) Buttkicker. Perhaps this does not need extra modifications of the software; i9 don’t know.

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Really good news!

One of the first thing I thought after I read that Microsoft had closed ACES was, that Aerosoft must do something because otherwise their business case may be obsolete in the mid future...

...and Aerosoft will do something...!!!

This is a very big project and please concentrate on the basic engine and its modularity because otherwise I'm afraid that this will become another "Toll collect" project that never finishes...

Microsoft needed more than 20 years and 10 versions to end up in FSX. Maybe you can achieve this state (and a bit more) in less time and in two or three versions. But for the first version this really is impossible in my opinion (and I'm a software developer for almost 20 years).

So, please concentrate on the basic engine and its capabilities and modularity for the first version and let other good add-on companies (like Aerosoft ;) ) do the rest...

Good luck, the community is eagerly awaiting this new Aerosoft simulator to be released... (in two or three years I think)!

Regards

Bernd

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Money will be a big thing of course. We got some to burn and we are looking for additional money. But there has never been any serious good software made by a committee. We believe FSX and the new TS Microsoft were not as good as hoped for because project management was not as solid as could be (mind you, they can only do as much they are allowed, this is not a comment on the actual people who done it). FSX was done by a very large team, Xplane is done by one person. See what I mean?

This shouldn't necessarily be a problem if Aerosoft raised capital. Listed software companies generally do not have shareholders influencing the direction of the product development pipeline. Though I can understand the hesitation to have large block shareholders, especially those with a vested interest to the outcome of the project. Obvious from the Porsche attempt to take over VW what a large minority shareholder can do to muck up your well laid plans.

I think the problem MSFS has is that the ultimate owner, MSFT, has other priorities and objectives besides making a high quality flight sim. Plus, despite the best efforts of the ACES team, MSFT doesn't place a high priority on customer support. But that certainly wouldn't be a problem here.

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yeah but to be serious, there is no hardware that could give serious force feedback. Even a old 737 can pull enough to move your whole computer towards you if you have not bolted it to the floor. I know, I almost lost my balls when I was not seated back in a simulator when they were testing force feedback. If your system can crush your balls at half power we'll talk.

Force feedback on the few sticks that still handle it (note that there has not been ANY development in this in the last 5 years), always feels very silly to me (not at all as I know aircraft and always 0,5 seconds late).

But comments are welcome!

Might I suggest:

You have obviously been inundated with hundreds of suggestions, some original, many repeats...once the "flow" stops you should try and develop a poll of the top requests and let your potential customers vote on their most wanted features.

This way, not only will you know "what the poeple want" but you can also prioritize features which will surely have an impact on your development cycles...

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Good news!!! I want to see the following in new simulator:

1) Thermal effects affecting aircraft (hot runways, up and down flows). Visual component for hot runways is appreciated.

2) Cloud fronts and 3d clouds

3) SID, STARS for Russian airports (AI also should know about it)

4) Full open source simulator for addons and external programs (SDK)

5) People in the airports (scripts maybe)

6) More flexible AI (for example, fs2004 AI is flying in a week), better if I can make a month timetable

7) Flexible aircraft parts.

8) Lighting with HDRs and volume effects in fog, etc.

9) Road traffic in all roads (better if I can make models for that)

10) Possibility to export vector maps to development tools (for making scenery)

11) Dynamics for aircrafts that can calculate all situations include crashing, over speeding, over stressing etc.

12) Customizable ground service vehicles in airports (depending on country)

13) Many landclasses

14) Full sound AI traffic (the same as player)

15) AI must fly on routes, not directly to destination

This is all for now :-) Thank you for attention.

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I fly mostly GA aircraft

I fly mostly GA aircraft

The reason I didn’t bought FSX was the behavior of the aircraft like in a side slip

I am still flying FS9, like many others do

Two tings I would like to see implemented

1 Accurate Side slip drag

2 prop wash effect

If you remember Flight Unlimited 2 & 3 then you know what I mean.

This old sim did a good job with this, so it must not be difficult to make

I still love FU2

73

O my god

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Here are really a lot of interesting ideas like a new weather simulation, the AI traffic or new mesh and landclasses. What came up to my mind is a little editor, which helps you to create a much more interesting airport where you want, perhaps with default objects or something that helps you to build easy buildings with a few mouse clicks.

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