Posts by Almdudler

    My experience of running a business that involves software development is that it can be very difficult

    @deanl90

    hiring staff, kickstarter funding, expanding core team,

    none of this gets things done.

    The 2 core guys are in a creative coding process,

    all they need is time and freedom. and a sandwich once in a while.

    adding non-core-content or getting funds is so easy,

    they will source up at the time they need it.

    Here some scope matters that would be fun to discuss, if you guys like to join:

    1. Marketing Aspect

    5 major products to deal with in the next 5 years or so, that in some form feature flight.

    Every of these 5 developers needs to identify and perform its niche, unless a direct competition .

    Aerofly wanted to be a flight sim thing for everbody, with a smaller range of usable content,

    and phototextured sceneries. Their selling proposal is smooth performance and easy flying with a connectivity to mobile devices and VR.

    Despite that aspect of usage, they hate being associated with "Arcade", so the PC side has been improved and strengthened. Their plans

    show commitment to be a serious flight simulation.

    Since their initial engine proved so good, thoughts went into more system depth and cooperations with 3rd parties for complexer scenery stakes.

    This has been proved succesful too. Game runs perfect and smooth with Orbx Content added.

    Next challenges are some flight sim-related modules like ATC, Weather etc., that brings them nearly half way to the users look for.

    More Sceneries will be added.

    The end?

    I'm totally fine if you have a different perception, and everyone has their own expectations from Aerofly FS2 and what gathers us is we still believe in it.

    It will be successful if it gets flexible and accessible enough for a wide community with different aeronautical perspectives to find in it what they're searching for.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    what in your eyes make any of my words being a different perception? to what? trolling around here? :)

    not expectiing an answer actually.

    hey, five !

    What I mean is please don't overload airports with too many useless details, they're just not the place to go sightseeing.

    Please work on consistent detailed sceneries. Currently, only desert places are beautifully featured.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    what exactly is "useless" to you?

    why not sightseeing? i thought that has been cleared up, we do want sightseeing.

    Tres, so many things i disagree with what you guys speculate around with, can't list it all.

    ipacs is a rather closed business model and can in no way be compared with the 3rd parties architecture

    of other sims, You guys keep projecting legacy matters onto aerofly anyway, on and on and on,

    i don't get it.

    LOD is the key for your performance matters, you get your desert at FL350, i get my chopper run at 20ft, that is what ipacs wants.

    It needs an extensive 3D coverage with vegetation, buildings, landmarks, powerlines, etc. Ground traffic then also brings an interesting touch of life, especially on highways.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    what you are saying Antoine is absolutely right.

    i drive an old GTX470 with low Rams and AMD, and of course my game settings are not highest nor i run VR.

    Game performance is outstanding as a consequence.

    Most people buy expensive video cards and expect a good performance.

    All i do is basically clean performance killers across the system, and keep a combination of hardware components that transports the right amount of data.

    Regarding your Details Coverage:

    Flight levels are a principal way of building segments. Overflying Mojave at FL350 does not need trees.

    However, getting yourself into a helicopter would require a close up world of details, at least 50 meters in diameter ground level.

    At that point, you don't care about buildings beyond the next hill. Arma III is nice in that regard. I love a realistic vegetation mix and fly low with agile choppers.

    I think LOD has easy principals and with the lean code ipacs obviously has written, this will not be an issue like in other games.

    Find the performance killers in your system and the right settings. Verify a smooth transmission of dataflow from disk to cache to memory to graphics, check Dxdiag, check drivers, CPU-Videocard-Drive must be in top sync.

    I would love to upgrade my hardware to something like you own, so i can run all current releases in the genre, but i hesitate until i am sure i find the best possible combination.

    On youtube i find some really nice videos, mainly for xplane11 and DCS. So i ask them for their specs to gather a safe purchase list.

    i am so confident when reading you guys, guess we just need to continue being patient.

    i hope ipacs will tell if help is needed or ideas need to be discussed on the user side.

    Such an incredible and addicted power group on this platform that can assist with real world issues, use it.

    Ray, you are my windsock. Jan, your visions are very much of what we are looking for, and one day i will get my scroll zoom, sure about that :))

    FS2 is a primarily a FLIGHT simulator and not a sightseeing game.

    105OE and Trespassers, fully disagree with your statement, if i may say.

    first: flight and flight simulation is indeed connected with sightseeing, and very much so. Unless you fly IFR at dark night (no moon, no stars),

    neither ground traffic potentially hits your plane while at the gate.

    It sounded like you do real flights around the Alps, so you should be very aware of the visual orientation business.

    No instrument replaces the eye in such environments.

    Trains, Flags, and other moving objects (cross-directional) are a tremendous enrichment of the flight feel, and part of the pilot's visual references,

    which to provide as navigational assistance as well as entertaining objects to reflect the real world is the highest goal in flight simming.

    Using Elite-Trainers in closed rooms or hydraulic CAE-tubs may do their part of the training, but the flight sim business covering the worldwide home

    entertainment market

    touches 95% of the gaming expections rather than the simple Instrument reading. That includes every visual activity in and around the airplane, which

    is connected to your role as a player. So, i was very very shocked reading your statement. Let trains be. Together with street, water and air traffic they

    contribute to a "simulated world" experience, that shows signs of life. This may not be as important for Flight level 350 upwards, but certainly for VFR

    simmers and of course helicopter pilots.

    second: it is my understanding that ipacs has not defined its final objectives for what this product is supposed to be at the end. It may have began with the

    architecture of a Flight Simulation, but give it a chance to be what it can be.

    So, if we end up in a first person pilot being driven in a crew bus to the plane, entering the aircraft before we begin to feed some FMC or

    buddy up with flight attendants, don't get surprised, could happen, let it happen. Cause we want it? Cause it can be done? who cares.

    third: the market allows half a dozen leading edge products in this field. As the 2 founders are physicians, i doubt that airplanes will be the sole definition

    of a thing that can move. Yes, they are dedicated to aviation, as we all are, but this engine allows to drive anything if my impressions are correct.

    Ipacs has jumped into a leak, and we all are invited to fill it, with what we can get and what's on our minds. if it is Baloons, no problem. If it is street or rail traffic, no problem. Why not let it happen? Let's do it. Say yes. The Sky is just the limit.

    fourth: i run aerofly on a pc that is as old as you would think it was built by the old greeks, and i have no noticable frame rate impact when approaching LOWI.

    If framerates are your concern about featuring life, we need to see where things have to become optional. Traffic is certainly something that should be

    able to size up or down, depending on your computing power. Ipacs will consider this at all times, i am absolutely positive.

    jozef

    it is easy to modify your cams by yourself, simply adjust the XYZ-coordinates in the .tmd file, every aircraft type has.

    You may also delete cams if you find they make no sense.

    Crawl the forum for earlier threads regarding cam points and field of view FOV.

    not sure whether there has been uploaded a tutorial, if not, i can do one for you.

    Give it a try, if you fail, come back, we'll do it together.

    Backup your .tmd file before working on it.

    Do you need historical weather for each and every minute of the last 100 years, what about rain, snow fall, snow on the ground?, hail that damages your airplane? ice build up? what about turbulence that is strong enough to damage your airplane as well, how about wind shear, wake of other aircraft? mountain waves, rotor clouds,... the list goes on and on. That all takes a bit of time, so how far is good enough?

    forget historical, i don't even understand what that is supposed to be.

    For the rest of your considerations (today's weather), i would not make things sound more complex than they actually are,

    but a bit more indepth than what other flight sims are providing to their users.

    There is a precise differentiation of expectations on behalf of the demanding part of users,

    which to name is as easy as learning weather in flight school.

    Turbulences of any kind, Icing, all that stuff is certainly expected. Why shouldn't it.

    Priotize one thing while tinier stuff can wait. Turbulence is priority.

    The variety of the dynamics in macro and overhead is what i called weather system in my earlier post.

    Kachelmann or Häckl would explain the overall weather system being a result of tiny little rotorwinds dancing everywhere on

    our planet, on flat fields, just like around buildings, then building bigger conditions, ending in giant high or low pressure systems.

    there is tropic conditions, alpine conditions, etc.

    I can not tell the devs it's complicated, if it is not. It's just a dedicated thing to do, and it requires people like Marc and Thorsten,

    who take up on a scientific challenge rather than chasing the quick dollar.

    i see 3 effects of simulated weather:

    1. The engine, the architecture behind.

    The code of dynamic air and spheres that manages conditions and their effect on other objects.

    For some coded reason my very plane starts dropping 100feet/min. at this very moment.

    2. The look. How does simulated weather present itself towards the user.

    3. The feel. How is the modelled weather affecting my experience.

    So, your question of what is "good enough", i would answer with

    the above 3 points in the first instance.

    In a second instance i would apply a parameter of outcome quality.

    Let's assume an expected degree of weather-related objects is implemented, but the design of the volumetric clouds would

    not necesserily make everyone happy, that is the time to define the graphics expected and give that part of the object to

    the grafix team.

    Definitions, Methods, and a Plan.

    Setting up a weather simulation project requires all that of course.

    Find rules and patterns of every aspect of what you would like to design,

    may it be wake turbulence, may it be hale drop, may it be air masses colliding.

    Hold creative meetings and use lots of megasized paperwalls to design every type of weather-related topic,

    draw every aspect of weather,

    starting with reason vs. effect (ursache-wirkung, z.B. lokaler Temperaturanstieg durch Sonneneinstrahlung).

    devide condition beds: air circulation, density, humidity, temperature, terrain, altitudes.

    If you are able to draw that stuff on a paper, (just like the arrows which you use for the wind generator)

    you have a good base of finding ways of building code objects.

    build blocks of small, mid and large systems. That's how God did it.

    Then build conditions which trigger the right effect.

    Decide on feasability and the effect on the user side.

    If the effect does have an impact on the product side, do it.

    , but we shouldn't stop demanding better clouds. Again, I personally, am not happy with any clouds out there presented as highly realistic. And I am getting a bit tired when people scream: look at those clouds, they look fantastic, when they simply aren't.

    reaching for gold is reasonable.

    and part of aerofly's business intention, i hope.

    Jet-pack's motivation i highly support, maybe not at the cost a ten year wait.

    we don't have sight of Mark's and Torsten's capability in building complex weather systems,

    hard enough to understand the real stuff - espcially in dynamic areas, and even harder to build it simulated in a 3D-world.

    What we need now is these guys standing up and talk to us. Can you do it? Can you build a next generation weather model?

    at a reasonable time tag?

    If you believe you can, please go ahead and do the bloody best thing ever done for simulation.


    Long ago i gave up on expecting a time- or content line. This is a model project with an expertise on how current techniques in simulation apply to

    a potential merchandise like a flight sim. The 2 founders do the work as much for themselves as for us users, is my impression.

    And that's a special trade with a low price tag and a long waiting list for those who wish. Understanding their intentions is impossible since no pattern of a so called business model is recognizable. And we can't buy them.

    what surprises me most is that ipacs has not dealt with the question of user content delivery in the last 6 years.

    It became clear how fast users would interact with the development process at the time aerofly1 got live.

    From my point of view a central upload platform is expected to succeed over external dropboxes to prevent chaos.

    That requires large data storage and reliable, fast handling of the content trade.

    just thinking loud:

    I suggest a 10 dollar ticket, which can be purchased over paypal or steam, and which grants full access to the AEROFLY KIOSK,

    where content trade is free but quality gouverned. This ticket is linked to your product purchase code. (is there one?)

    the kiosk is basicly the up and download mart, by users for users content, and is off the main DLC line in Steam.

    just like where the livery paints are located in this forum.

    What happens to the 10 dollars:

    This service payment funds the large data storage.

    In numbers: 2000users x 10 = USD 20k, that covers a server for years.

    user content is free.