MS Flight / Prepar3d topic

[Snave 466]

So you have evidence that MS have actually handed the project, lock, stock and barrel to L-M?

If that is the case where is the evidence? And why would the tortuous agreement between MS and L-M specifically EXCLUDE an area of the market that MS still have a product in..? *

*At least for the moment

I personally believe that to engage as a consumer with the L-M product at this time is indicative of an unsound mind. I might feel better about it in six months or twelve. And I hope you do too...

[bionicCrab 7]

What agreement are you talking about? That agreement was probably 20 pages long... you saw only a news summary not even the preamble. Or are you privy to LM/MS contract talks?

Also to give your entire code base over to the competitor which they did along with programmers, and then start a competition through a zero-sum game is insane. LM doesn't make games, nor do they distribute through Walmart. Obviously some people have a hard time understanding that it's just an engine.

[Sharrow 107]

To be honest I don't hold too much hope in MS Flight. I've worked with MS in other channels of development and administration far too long to be anything less than skeptical about how things tend to go over there in Redmond. But I'm always open to being pleasantly surprised, so MS please, do surprise me!

How about if they include MSFlight for free with every copy of Windows8 or perhaps even pre-installed on every xbox720? With more scenery and aircraft available at the MS Store/GFWL whatever. Perhaps some potential anti-trust issues? Not my idea btw - picked it up from a thread over at AVSIM.

A pleasure reading your posts Graeme. Sounds to me like you have a nice view out of some or other window in the house?

[Graeme Wright 4]

How about if they include MSFlight for free with every copy of Windows8 or perhaps even pre-installed on every xbox720?

Hehe, might it be a good candidate for an easter egg in their next Office product? Was it Office 95 that had the flight sim easter egg in it where you typed in a certain equation into a cell in Excel and it would open? Duke Nukem Forever has just come out this year, so it'd be a good nostalgic venture for MS to do something the same from that era too I will admit though that it scares the socks off me every time they announce a road map for a game or piece of software and it seems to be online centric. I get visions of having an America's Army style scenario where if I'm not online, all I can do is play the training level.

It's my pleasure conversing with folk such as yourself too. I've been using flight sims since about 93 I think, but only really forcing myself now to spend more time to try and interact with a few more online regarding it. We've done the whole tree change thing, and I'm hoping to replace that 19 hour day caper with some time of my own to enjoy life, and maybe do a bit of development just for the fun of it (which was actually the first reason I started following Prepar3d back around April this year, figuring if it's new, it might be where the new skills need to be learnt). The last time I did development for fun though was for add-ons to ID Software's Quake (if you know what that is, you know how long ago that was).

We actually do have a pretty good view out a few of the window here , including Kangaroos, Koalas, and hand tame Rosellas, but unfortunately it's not quite as close to any major aviation hubs, so this is my access for now to more regular flight fulfillment (as much as it can be anyway). Thankfully I do enjoy photography and outdoor adventure as well, and there's certainly a lot of space for it around here. We just need to keep an eye on the bush fires in summer. Mind you, the poor guys in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Canberra do now just as much too, so not necessarily much different there.

[bionicCrab 7]

Graeme: give it a go. There really isn't much you can't do with FSX when it comes to learning how to code against a graphics engine. With P3D you can even do a whole lot more and pretty soon the ability to work with the DirectX11 libraries. But given developers want to be on the cutting edge at all times, it's a sure bet a lot of them will be switching over just to make FSX products in a more stable environment.

[Graeme Wright 4]

Thanks bionicCrab. I was pretty hopeful that Prepar3d might be the better way to look as far as starting into development again, rather than FSX (I won't be doing it for profit, just interest and education value, so it's not as if I need to appease a wider market or anything, just myself). The guys at Lockheed Martin do seem to be pretty open minded and also reasonably transparent in how they answer questions in the forums, not tending to try and pull the wool over peoples eyes. If they have no intention of changing something, or in all reality it'll be a long while before they look at doing it, then from what I've seen they seem to just tell everyone that straight up. Gives you a pretty honest idea about where things are heading anyway, and from my past experience teams that worked in that way seemed to nurture the best productivity in such a communal sense, as well as enjoyment for all as well. And as you say, there's good scope for working in newer technologies, which will definitely be the way to go as far as making the most use of new skills being acquired.

Even though I may use FSX for my general flying for a while yet, I'd say I'll end up spending a fair bit of time in Prepar3d if I get back into trying development on scenery / airports etc. You just end up spending hours focusing on your own little patch of the world when you're creating, loading, changing, reloading things, and don't really care about any other nuances of the aircraft and wider scenery, only trying out what you've created to see if it's good enough, and finally having fun with it when (or if) it is finally good enough. So on that side of things alone I predict I'll probably spend many an hour in Prepar3d, hopefully quite enjoying myself. My thoughts were to try and just do some simple things like bush or rural strips around the area here, so it's more realistic in scope for me to start out on, and also a bit of a personal connection and enjoyment factor.

I've just got to try and clear some of these longering commercial projects off the table and start getting some time back for myself to spend on such lost luxuries in life as enjoying hobbies

[Eric Bakker 736]

Graeme, I wonder if things you would develop in P3D could also be ported to FSX without further conversions. Do you know of any limitations in that respect?

And thank you for the insight in your private life, nice to know, makes also good content for your profile update.

[bionicCrab 7]

Yes you can do that no problem. P3D just lets you extend the format to higher resolution textures. Though I'm no expert you could have probably done this with FSX as well like REX does. Nothing wrong with FSX scenery, and FSX aircraft format, they were designed to last quite a while. One of their buzz phrases was Flight Simulator and X-tensible, meaning you could always layer on more complexity.

What won't work however is the DX guages and external sim... but they should work fine if Flight goes that route. Either way I would recommend starting with the P3D documentation as I would consider them Third Editions and 90% of it's identical to FSX.

[Graeme Wright 4]

P3D just lets you extend the format to higher resolution textures.

That will be a joy in itself, not having to remember to go back into the fsx.cfg file and reset the max texture limit to 4096 every time you change settings in the program and forget to reset it when FSX rolls it back to 1024.

bionicCrab is obviously the expert here as far as Prepar3d goes, I'm just dipping toes in the water until I can get more time. But as he pointed out REX does use 2048 and 4096 textures in FSX, and ORBX also do as part of their scenery too or at least the aero tool for runway and taxiway textures etc. Though as bionicCrab also rightly pointed out in an earlier post, it'll probably be only a matter of time before FSX becomes the new FS9 in that regard, where limits eventually exceed capability, or the amount of work to back port it will exceed the value to be gained by developers (much like we've seen over the last year with some developers and their support of FS9). I'm not sure if this will be more accelerated within Prepar3d, given that it's an active project, where as FSX isn't. (Just think of the hurdles for those when SP2 and Acceleration came out, and those who did not have it.)

From what I've been reading over time for Prear3d though (I get the opportunity to read the odd stuff between work ATM, just not enough or access to play unfortunately) LM have essentially pulled all the bottle necks on ESP as much as they can, a bit like getting a car and pulling the cat convertor, ABS circuits etc to get what you can from it as it stands, and now they've got it up on the hoist to do the serious work. Mind you the whole water thing is a pretty huge venture in itself which they've done already. Obviously a targeted market their for them there.

Maybe we'll see the new generation of submariners training on Preapr3d. That's a hell of a lot less frightening than it was for me to hear the USN were looking at using MS Windows to drive central control systems on some subs and carriers.

@Eric: I should get in an add some info to my profile as well shouldn't I. I always end up procrastinating about what to enter which won't be too cliche, and never get to adding anything at all.

Edit: One thing I forgot to mention, was that ORBX and their current way of handling the use of FSX scenery in Prepar3d via their side by side licensing add-on will probably be a good barometer of when things get difficult to port between the two. From the looks of it they can directly reference most of what they have in FSX without an issue. Though I guess once we see the tool developing into a huge diff style patch which needs to append and copy hundreds of megs, there's something going on between the two which doesn't meld

[Designer Paule 24]

Still downloading 5-6 hrs half done!

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Eric Bakker 736]

Still downloading 5-6 hrs half done!

When I downloaded the three files, I downloaded them simultaneously. The individual file download speed did not go down so it saved me quite some download time.

[Designer Paule 24]

When I downloaded the three files, I downloaded them simultaneously. The individual file download speed did not go down so it saved me quite some download time.

Was doing the same here took about 5 hrs total