• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Flight Sim World

3DS is a no-go for me too. Maya LT might be OK if DTG doesn't want to work with Blender, and a Blender exporter by a third party should be possible if the SDK has open file formats. DTG has been hearing about all this for a while, we shall see if they listened.

As Tom says, not wasting any more time on this until they show us the SDK.
 
I heard a rumor (and that's all this is though the source has been right before) that DTG is expecting devs to give over their product(s) for 90 days exclusivity on the DTG Steam channel during which time Steam will take 30% off the top and then DTG will take 70% of what remains. After the 90 days are over, you're free to market it where and how you wish as long as it stays for sale on the Steam site.

Anyone else hear this?
 
Well, they're certainly free to have 80% of the $0 I charge per addon.... but here's what I want to know: what percentage of you commercial developers' sales generally come in the first 90 days? I'd imagine there's a pretty big taper with a new release, no? I mean, that sounds like a good way to milk the most money out of the content provider while the getting's good, and then let them have all they want of the dregs afterwards. For content that could be sold just as well by Flight1, JustFlight, Aerosim, or whoever...

You know what was great? How MS didn't give a damn. You could self-publish if you wanted, and keep all of the earnings. Now they want to milk money out of developers for the privilege of adding value to their product? Who do they think they are, Capitol records?

Has it occurred to them that developers can happily decline to develop for their platform? I mean, why pay the price for a lesson that Nintendo already taught everyone?
 
Last edited:
ErickC said:
Well, they're certainly free to have 80% of the $0 I charge per addon.... but here's what I want to know: what percentage of you commercial developers' sales generally come in the first 90 days? I'd imagine there's a pretty big taper with a new release, no? I mean, that sounds like a good way to milk the most money out of the content provider while the getting's good, and then let them have all they want of the dregs afterwards. For content that could be sold just as well by Flight1, JustFlight, Aerosim, or whoever...

You know what was great? How MS didn't give a damn. You could self-publish if you wanted, and keep all of the earnings. Now they want to milk money out of developers for the privilege of adding value to their product? Who do they think they are, Capitol records?

Has it occurred to them that developers can happily decline to develop for their platform? I mean, why pay the price for a lesson that Nintendo already taught everyone?
Click to expand...



you must be mad to agree to these terms !
with p3d 4 (64 bit) - to develop and can be developed freely.
 
Last edited:
So freeware is allowed, but no answer to whetever the said freeware is to be restricted to mission, and whetever aircraft/scenery would be allowed.
just like in cricket : very well not played!
 
PBR is the new way of materials in gaming. Super high quality. We have been living in the extreme past with FSX.

I will miss making AO's... if this is so... :(
 
Just guessing, but the issue with backward compatibility is primarily with 32-bit gauges. Flight School's aircraft were xml-gauge only to avoid that problem... otherwise it was backwardly compatible. Some scenery may have problems due to the use of ORBX' landclass and vector definitions. Otherwise it was the same BGLs. I expect Flight Sim World to be the same. And I expect the world vectors to be the same as FSX. And the AI... probably the same.

Edit:

After reading what DTG_Amiee(sp?) writes, it may be that DTG has sabotaged the engine (tinkered under the hood) to reject FSX BGLs that might have been compatible, forcing end-users to buy authorized addons, and developers to use the Steam system to market.
 
Last edited:
Kekelekou said:
So freeware is allowed, but no answer to whetever the said freeware is to be restricted to mission, and whetever aircraft/scenery would be allowed.
just like in cricket : very well not played!
Click to expand...

When they say allowed, I am thinking that they sell your work for you, and you have to adjust your content to their perameters. For instance, presently with Dovetail, selling for FSX Steam, they sell it for you, they claim 60% charge for royalties to sell your work (you get 40%), and you have to take off all logos and trademarks from EVERYTHING including gauges, radios, Garmins, planes, clothes on the pilots, decals on the planes, war emblems on WWII planes, etc, etc, etc, which can be a monumental task if you have quite a few gauges and work in both GAU and XML format as all the layers of gauges have to be redone. Imagine this with PBR, all the decals needing to be redone in the other layers such as specular, refection, etc, etc. THAT is a nightmare. 60% charge is not good. They also pay quarterly, so look at getting paid happening every several months.

That is if you are trying to sell things for this sim at Steam.

I am sure you can sell your own things on your own site for this simulator without issue. Most everyone presently sets up their installers for FSX Steam as an option in their installers, so you do not need to
 
It feels like right now we're at a massive fork in the road when it comes to development platforms. You've got P3D V4 coming any day now (which we still don't really know anything about), X-Plane 11 slowly gaining some traction, Aerofly showing a bit of hope...not to mention the millions of people who are still flying and making content for FSX or even FS9. And now Dovetail rolls out Flight Sim World. All of these having completely different SDK's doesn't make choosing a path any easier for developers looking to the future.

What we really need, IMHO...instead of all these different sims hitting the market in such a short amount of time...is a civilian version of DCS. It would be a sim with a modern graphics engine, combat capability/damage modeling built in, regular updates, incredibly accurate flight dynamics, and an active multiplayer community. With world scenery and an open SDK it would be perfect. But I don't see Eagle Dynamics making that drasti

Honestly though, I hope that FSW is a success. Not just for Dovetail but for all the people that will be pioneering in that sim's development. I hate to see a product fail and take everyone's hopes and dreams down with it.
 
I am quietly hopeful for Flight Sim World. It has always been the case that the Flight Simulator platform is an enabler for the talent and inventiveness of the third-party developer. I do not see this changing anytime soon, regardless of platform - FSW/XP/P3DFSX.

As far as MSFS codebase goes, we should remind ourselves that the "old code" has gotten us to 2017 relatively without fault. I'd say that is one definition of a good code base. In 2006 when FSX was released, programmable shaders were quite a new thing. DX9 had been updated to DX9.0c and the new kid was ultimately the short-lived DX10. As an example of how unsure the future was at the point, as far as I am aware, Aces decided to stick with CPU-based terrain computation instead of moving it to the GPU - they knew the hardware hadn't caught up to allow that on the majority of customer computers. Heck, FS2004 gave the option of "Hardware Transform and Lighting" - CPU or GPU vertex procession (Vertex Shader).

Quite honestly, DTG has potentially solved the two major fundamental restrictions to FSX; that is is 32-bit and uses a deprecated graphics API.

I fully expect that DTG FSW will be a bit of a disappointment, but truthfully so was FSX, and FS2004 before it. Just going on the product pictures release, there is a lot of legacy FSX still there - terrain, clouds, and it looks like skybox texturing. The fact that the first video they release contained equal amounts of face time and development tools unrelated to the actual sim is quite telling.

Like many, I'll buy it and hope that is truly is the successor to FSX. If DTG does botch it, I doubt they'll recover the market from more dynamic competitors - XP/AF2/P3D.
 
DTG FSW won't be getting many high end aircraft developers. Taking 60% cut for doing nothing? Seriously? A $50 aircraft nets $20 to the developer... Not a good business proposition at all. Good luck! If DTG wants 60% of my effort... they're going to have to actually offer me 60% value added... and let's face it, they really can't.
 
WarpD said:
DTG FSW won't be getting many high end aircraft developers. Taking 60% cut for doing nothing? Seriously? A $50 aircraft nets $20 to the developer... Not a good business proposition at all. Good luck! If DTG wants 60% of my effort... they're going to have to actually offer me 60% value added... and let's face it, they really can't.
Click to expand...
60% does seem very high. I guess if they could at least triple your sales by having it on Steam it would be interesting.
 
nz255 said:
60% does seem very high. I guess if they could at least triple your sales by having it on Steam it would be interesting.
Click to expand...
I suspect they are banking on:
a) relatively little effort being needed to convert content for FSW;
b) Devs rationalising that existing products could generate an additional revenue, (despite gagging on the 60% cut DTG take!)
c) Ker-ching! Profit on the back of all the FSX/P3D dev work done to date.

If so the problem is that is quite short sighted, since as others have stated previously, who in their right mind will produce new stuff through them? Unless ofc they are taking a huge gamble that they can create a market large enought that the cut they offer you is economically viable? Perhaps the strategy is to prove that through marketing existing content first...?
 
ozzman1997 said:
What we really need, IMHO...instead of all these different sims hitting the market in such a short amount of time...is a civilian version of DCS. It would be a sim with a modern graphics engine, combat capability/damage modeling built in, regular updates, incredibly accurate flight dynamics, and an active multiplayer community.
Click to expand...

You forgot the theatre the size of a shoebox, the next-to-nothing content out of the box and the non-dynamic environment.
 
WarpD said:
DTG FSW won't be getting many high end aircraft developers. Taking 60% cut for doing nothing? Seriously? A $50 aircraft nets $20 to the developer... Not a good business proposition at all. Good luck! If DTG wants 60% of my effort... they're going to have to actually offer me 60% value added... and let's face it, they really can't.
Click to expand...
PMDG announced they were initially working with DTG, but dropped out because of that sales model (https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/...-position-on-dtgs-fsw-pending-p3d-update-etc/).

If it's not viable to PMDG, it's probably not going to be viable to the other major developers either.
 
I have seen people on various fora stating how converting various things from FSX/P3d won't very hard at all, and this is presented as a good thing. (apparently because developers won't have much to relearn)

To me, this only deepens my fears that under the hood DSW is still just FSX with a new coat of paint, and no, I don't see that as a good thing.
 
HiFlyer said:
To me, this only deepens my fears that under the hood DSW is still just FSX with a new coat of paint, and no, I don't see that as a good thing.
Click to expand...
Of course it is. They've had some 2 years to work on it with only 13 (if I recall correctly) devs.

GTA5 had "much more than 1000" devs in the same amount of time
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top