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Flight Simulator 2016 announced

DovetailGamesDovetail Games achieved a partnership with Microsoft to allow them to publish new products for Windows 10 on PC, and Xbox One.

Out of Train Simulator 2016 that we already heard about, the last press release of the developers announce both Dovetail Games Fishing and Flight Simulator 2016, in this order, ‘built on the foundations of Microsoft’s award-winning Flight technology’. I guess they were referring to FS series awards.

0 Responses

  1. … refer to FS awards ?
    Don’t think so. It says “Flight technology”, not “Flight Simulator technology”. One word, big difference …

  2. MS Flight’s “flight dynamics engine” was basically a slightly improved MS FS flight FDE. It’s not the FDE that brought Flight down.

  3. Flight used the same engine as MS FS, tweaked and updated with newer shader BUT they stripped it from everything that was alive in the virtual world of FSX. They made the seas static, no AI anything and so on… Flight was therefore a no man’s land ghost world (Hawai)… the goal was to make it light and perform well on most PCs to grab gamers… I just hope Dovetail will not take this stripped down version of MS FS and use it as a template but rather rework the foundations of the engine itself to make it 64bits and get rid of this limited virtual memory thingy before anything else! And indeed keep the living world as is and make the sim open for add-ons… Otherwise I doubt it will fly that much in the sim market…

    1. Flight was intended to be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple ITunes DLCfest. Give away the rock bottom basics free, then charge, charge and charge again for everything else. Nothing was taken out of the engine, it just wasn’t included in the free package, because of marketing, not the developers. Never mistake bad marketing for bad sim design. There were a lot of improvements in Flight compared to FSX. The FDE was far from ‘slightly improved’ it was significantly improved – if you set it up to full complexity. Trim was still mishandled by moving the CofG rather than positioning the elevator, but in most other areas, it handled far more realistically than FSX with default aircraft. The marketing, however, was so utterly badly handled that it never stood a chance with any area of the FS marketplace. Using Flight’s core engine rather than FSX’s is exactly the right thing to do.

      1. Yes about bad Marketing and yes about handling but handling or fligth dynamic programming is not alien science today, any sim can profit today from engineering oriented programming pretty easily. the issue is that Flight as I mentioned was striped from anything that made FSX evolve to where it was in terms of immersion: (AI traffic in air, land and seas,animals etc), the seas are static with stiff photoreal waves etc etc etc. They did this to make it performe better on the average PC and yes to grab more users for the DLC model… There is a DLC title that is doing fairly well since many years now (thehunter.com), for hunting enthousiasts this is the game… DLC by itself is not a bad model but in the case of Flight, it was a DLC built upon the ruins of FSX wth its compreheive living world wide coverage, fly anthing, anywhere sim boost with add-ons product… Now when users knew FSX, Flight as a DLC with a no man’s land Hawai was a silly joke… Going from this spot of land to fly around the world in the dynamic manner FSX featured would take light years… So all in all, yes bad Marketing + a seed of a DLC model that is built upon the souvenirs of a rich huge platform… All this made Flight collapse in my view…

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