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E3 2018... No Simulators in sight...

lionheart said:
How about that russian sim that uses fractal coding? That thing is amazing. I have totally forgotten the name of it and the studio that is building it. Taking forever, but they are open to garage studios that wish to use their engine. You could easily create other worlds, which I would love to do... Make a hyper drive and hop from planet to planet.. Purchase new planets and really have a wild setup.
Click to expand...

Outerra

 
rhumbaflappy said:
I think flight simulation has become so demanding of realism that no game developer is willing to wade in. The recent cancellation of Dovetail's efforts is not surprising, nor was the collapse of Microsoft's Flight. As a group, we are so critical and demanding that no one can deliver a satisfying product. In retrospect, FSX was an amazing achievement, probably not to be repeated. The few viable sims we have are probably what will exist for the foreseeable future, with P3D and XPlane being the primary sims.
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Aerofly is in there swinging, but the community is so demanding that it struggles to get a fair shake. The general vibe is "call us when it gets everything P3D has" but that sets up a pretty vicious catch 22, since its very hard to do that, when people are so unwilling to invest in development.

This seems to be the paradigm that helped (amongst other factors) do in both FLIGHT and DTG sim, and is helping now to slow down Aerofly. I post updates here but hardly ever get any interest, and DTG sim barely got more.

So.....

I honestly wonder does the community really want a new sim, or is it mostly just talk?

In the meantime, Flyinside sim has my sympathies. I think their only hope is the fact that you can shoehorn some esp-engine planes into it, which might get them some interest.
 
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"rhumbaflappy said: I honestly wonder does the community really want a new sim, or is it mostly just talk?"

For me, Id say yes. Looking at the Quality of the games out there for XBOX etc and as stated tried a battle fly with VR head set, Id go for one if they did become available - however, any production team would close the loop on add on scenery except at cost, the same with aircraft and repaints All would be cost based - that's the only way to claw back the production cost outlay. Sims would be pretty expensive as well due to the 3d assets required etc. However, if updates for the changing world came in at a reasonable price base maybe people would look to invest in a hobby which I still think has great potential and you know I see loads of people on the assassins creed , black ops etc and when they come off they seem to be adrenaline powered practically ready to punch out those around them lol. Simmers have a complete different mindset - if we can turn up realism to the max get in, land and taxi to the right gate without being completely lost at an AP we're pretty darned happy with ourselves
 
HiFlyer said:
Aerofly is in there swinging, but the community is so demanding that it struggles to get a fair shake.
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I gave Aerofly a 110% chance. For a solid month, I tried to get one, just one, of my planes fully working in AF2. I worked with 2 of their 2 developers (aircraft builders), and we couldnt get my landing gear to function correctly. They insisted that if they did it with their program, they could get it going, but I said 'I should learn how to do this. We (the developers) need to know how to make our planes work in this simulator. I need to know how to make my landing gear work.' They couldnt let me use the program, but they wouldnt give me the App. They would tell me to keep trying, tell me that I needed to calculate this and that, and I did, and the landing gear refused to work, wouldnt fold, would go animating down the wing. I worked hard for 30 days. I wasnt going to quit because of a time element, I wanted my planes in that sim. But it got to the point where the developers were like, not helping at all. I got very angry and thought to myself 'this SDK is not ready, I have waisted 30 days of my life and business on this. I am out. Perhaps when their SDK is working, I might give it another go, but for now, I am definitely out'.

Something was fishy. Perhaps the developers didnt want other people coming in? Why couldnt they just show me how to animate landing gear to fold up? Why couldnt they show me that simple thing? That tells me, something was just not right. (Political agenda? Not wanting others having certain capabilities? Wanting people to want the program that can work the landing gear, so that it can be sold to the public? (You need the program to make things work??) I dont know... But I did give it a try.

It is good to see that Dino has had great success working Aerofly2. Glad for him. I love the sim. I think its better then XP11. But XP11 is world wide. Anywhere you want to go.

Remember, FSX / P3D have ATC and its moderately refined. (It still cant handle touch and goes and then 'break' to another airport for ATC... sigh... ) But it works. Better ATC then XP11.

My Bullette plane looked so awesome in Aerofly. I wanted that so bad to work. I worked hard on that. Nothing worked. What a waist... :(
 
HiFlyer said:
Outerra

Click to expand...

I would love to do my own sims... FS Mars and a futuristic version of FS, like FS2040 with modernistic aerospace... Outerra is for garage startups. They boast on trying to get beginners to consider their game engine. If you succeed, you both win... I think there are a couple of games out in Steam that use the Outerra game engine. Beautiful thing... Amazing tech.
 
lionheart said:
How about that russian sim that uses fractal coding? That thing is amazing. I have totally forgotten the name of it and the studio that is building it. Taking forever, but they are open to garage studios that wish to use their engine. You could easily create other worlds, which I would love to do... Make a hyper drive and hop from planet to planet.. Purchase new planets and really have a wild setup.
Click to expand...
That sounds really cool! I like the idea of being able to have separate "worlds". In P3D, if you want to create a new "imagery planet" you can't, unless you make a huge island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! If you get any information or links on this, be sure to let me know, I am very interested.

Thanks.
 
lionheart said:
My Bullette plane looked so awesome in Aerofly. I wanted that so bad to work. I worked hard on that. Nothing worked. What a waist... :(
Click to expand...

It's interesting. Dino Cattaneo just released a plane for Aerofly, and also had problems with landing gear. I think Jan and some users are fixing it for him, and maybe from that he can backtrack the issue. There is also a user working on another plane and there is at least one other that I know of, in progress, so I think the fixes will eventually enter the common lore.

https://www.aerofly.com/community/forum/index.php?thread/13562-siai-marchetti-s-211-for-aerofly-fs2/

https://www.aerofly.com/community/forum/index.php?thread/13585-f104g-starfighter/

https://www.aerofly.com/community/f...stmann-gomhouria-mk-6/&postID=68340#post68340
 
caleb said:
That sounds really cool! I like the idea of being able to have separate "worlds". In P3D, if you want to create a new "imagery planet" you can't, unless you make a huge island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! If you get any information or links on this, be sure to let me know, I am very interested.
Click to expand...

http://www.outerra.com/ They just had a major update, and the next update will add world building coverage.

They also have a Developer discord: https://discord.gg/2cHzwrR

 
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The only thing that does not excite me about Outerra is that all (I mean all) of the gauges in those planes seem to be 100% static. It would be nice if they could add gauge functionality to the aircraft, and/or create an SDK that would allow developers to create their own planes, with functional gauges.

It would be great if maybe Outerra could become a platform for developers to develop environments/worlds and then be able to convert them to a format that P3D can read, so that we can use our outerra created environments in our P3D planes. Sadly, I think this would require supercomputers beyond our belief though, to run such a complex environment in P3D. But maybe if there is a future version of P3D that can better manage the processes it might work. :)

Caleb
 
caleb said:
The only thing that does not excite me about Outerra is that all (I mean all) of the gauges in those planes seem to be 100% static. It would be nice if they could add gauge functionality to the aircraft, and/or create an SDK that would allow developers to create their own planes, with functional gauges.
Click to expand...

You can do gauges, etc. the aircraft physics engine is JSBsim. (The demo is free. The full thing is $15 dollars, last time I checked.
 
caleb said:
It would be great if maybe Outerra could become a platform for developers to develop environments/worlds and then be able to convert them to a format that P3D can read, so that we can use our outerra created environments in our P3D planes. Sadly, I think this would require supercomputers beyond our belief though, to run such a complex environment in P3D. But maybe if there is a future version of P3D that can better manage the processes it might work. :)
Click to expand...

The thing is, that enthusiasm for such a thing waxes and wanes, to the point that the Outerra developers have become a bit bemused by it all....

As the OP, noted, the community can be quite demanding, and has a high, and I suspect mostly unrealistic understanding about the resources available to the small companies that might be interested in this niche market...

Again, good luck to the flyinside guys.

In the meanwhile, here is what Brano, one of the Outerra developers, had to say to one of my posts regarding this on Avsim:

You know, for the time we exist we have been approached by several flight sim (scenery, aircraft) developers that were planning to make their own flight simulator. From that bunch there were/are probably 3 with somewhat realistic idea of the development costs involved and also not just a bunch of idealists without anything bigger behind them, that were also seriously considering the development and not just pinging us at the very beginning of their vague planning.

One went bankrupt shortly after trying and failing to secure the funds from a third party, with nothing to contribute on their own but their brand name, but hoping to get us to give our tech into the project for a minor share.
The second one went on and off with it for some time, and they still may return again. We never got anywhere deeper into technical discussions, it was quite weird actually - like the design doc in the form of a wish list, and while they asserted to had enough funds for the development on their own, we later learned they sought to share the development costs with the developer. Was it because of the risks they saw, or their estimates had to inflate after the research? I don't know. Nevertheless they backed off, stating some reasons ...

The third is an acknowledged developer that probably knows well what the requirements and costs are, and there may still come something out of it, but it's all so cautious that it drags on for years and they have no sufficient large SW dev experience and seemingly nobody able to analyze what it would mean to use OT and change some paradigms they are used to. It's all painful to watch.

IMHO the biggest problem are the money. Aviation fans tell us - you have such a big potential, why don't you make a simulator? When we do any research, the result basically is that if it has all the features and everything then they will buy it, but best if it also imported all the mods they already had. So basically lets invest a few millions and then have a few more for an add campaign, in a niche environment where there already are some established competitors, undead or alive. No wonder that the developers already operating in this market are getting nowhere all the time.
 
caleb said:
That sounds really cool! I like the idea of being able to have separate "worlds". In P3D, if you want to create a new "imagery planet" you can't, unless you make a huge island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! If you get any information or links on this, be sure to let me know, I am very interested.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
You can make a new planet with FSX/P3d. It would still have the sun and moon, as I recall, but you have to start with a new set of elevations (DEMs). From there you can add landclass and water masking. The landclass could have custom textures... The DEMs are probably the hardest, but there are a few ways to get fantasy elevations, with some control.
 
There is also VR to consider. Since PD3/X-plane occupies so much of the current community mindspace, perhaps Virtual reality is one of the obvious spots to carve out a niche-within-a-niche, as those older sims are not yet fully comfortable technically (FPS-wise) in that regard.

 
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VR is kind of a curse at the moment as it diverts development resources away from more pressing issues (speaking of X-Plane here).
 
Heretic said:
VR is kind of a curse at the moment as it diverts development resources away from more pressing issues (speaking of X-Plane here).
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It depends on how important one feels that VR is. Judging from all the effort being devoted, it seems that some (Laminar, Lockheed Martin, Ipacs, Flyinside etc) think it's very pressing.
 
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