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If Microsoft wants to prevent failure, they need to get HERE, and right quick.
I'm absolutely against the idea of FS20 picking up anything related to legacy code, tools and development procedures or even ask the community for opinions. It's supposed to be a fresh start and clean cut after all and any contact would just produce half-hearted compromises. Let the dev team do their thing first, evaluate the result and only then help them to make it better.
I do not necessarily agree for all type of content.I totally agree with that
As far as "SDK" goes I hope it works more like a modern game engine such as Unity. No closed formats like BGL or MDL, just drop a standard FBX, GLTF or Alembic file into the game. Then it works with the built-in exporters of all modern 3D modeling tools, no silly "gamepacks" or secretive ".X" export plugins. Have an in-game editor to attach colliders and scripts for animation or other behaviors like flight dynamics. Have a built-in script debugger and logger, perhaps integrated with VSCode or Visual Studio. Drop in .TIF for elevation maps or ground textures and support plugins for Substance Painter/Designer. Make it easy and open to define/edit airport facilities, navaids, airways etc.
I do not necessarily agree for all type of content.
Take the flight model part for instance. Many people claim it does not work as it should, it is not realistic etc... Some even say xplane does a better job.
My findings is the model implemented is quite good. From a mathematical standpoint, we are very close to the models used in full flight simulators. It would require just some more flexibility in the tables offered, plus a better compressibility model for higher altitude/mach numbers. And engine model as well.
But the accuracy, if you have the good derivatives, is closer to the real deal than the marketing flow model from xplane.
This means they don't need to go from scratch here. And it would be very easy to keep current FDM files as compatible while enabling better models to be developed.
I hated Unity when I tried making parts for Kerbal Space Program. Having to have an entire game engine development package installed just to produce a game-compatible bunch of vertices and textures exported from a modeling tool plus a collision model just struck me as too much effort for too little return.
Besides, the .X file format is not really secretive at all and perfectly human-readable and ready for manual manipulation.
it's more my perspective which is that the Gmax plugin doesn't allow access to the .X file
The reasons for that are historical and can be forgotten now, since there’s not the least chance of Gmax being used again. So long as they don’t use Granny 3D or suchlike which makes even 3ds Max look cheap and was talked about for MS Fl***t
Some of us are still Gmax grannies...
I’d think a little cold commercial reality might intrude here - imagine (say) Milviz spending appreciable sums building a systems-heavy 787 Dreamliner only to find anyone can open the final model in XYZ Modelling suite and read the model source code and mesh. I believe we’ll still be dealing with a compiler, whichever tool a model is built with.
Can confirm.Some of us are still Gmax grannies...
Interesting, my experience was the opposite. Animation keyframing/tagging/exporting seemed a lot more laborious than just edit/test in-game. Same with colliders. But the more important thing to me is to avoid the lock-in to a specific 3D software that MS chooses.
True, it's more my perspective which is that the Gmax plugin doesn't allow access to the .X file (unless you use the FS9 SDK and install a MakeMDL trojan horse).
I’d think a little cold commercial reality might intrude here - imagine (say) Milviz spending appreciable sums building a systems-heavy 787 Dreamliner only to find anyone can open the final model in XYZ Modelling suite and read the model source code and mesh. I believe we’ll still be dealing with a compiler, whichever tool a model is built with.
The Azure cloud won't be down.I don't think there's much of a problem for the developer community. Many of us (freeware and commercial) are gently drifting away from FSX and across to P3D anyway, so the lack of an SDK in this game is not going to be that much of a problem. Then comes the day that you start it up and the Azure cloud is down. Yes, it does happen and far more often than Microsoft would have you believe. I went onto Azure as a developer and came off it almost as quickly because its stability was unreliable. I'll give this game a miss, despite the beautiful visuals.