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A question.

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Though I've been following the conversion process avidly, still haven't jumped in with both feet, preferring to watch curiously how things went. Congratulations to all the people, Stonelance especially, for all the time and effort put into what has got to be a labor of love; but I wonder if now that its confirmed (as I think most people really keeping track always thought would be the case) that the next sim from Dovetail will rely probably pretty heavily on the flight engine, how those involved with this project see its future evolving?

 

Its there a hope to work with Dovetail? Is there a hope that the two programs would be compatible?

 

Will they split on separate paths?

 

I kind of wonder now where this will all end up?!

 

Pardons if this was answered elsewhere. 


We are all connected..... To each other, biologically...... To the Earth, chemically...... To the rest of the Universe atomically.
 
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I don't think anything is confirmed. Just speculation. Some of us are assuming the Flight 'engine' will be used and that the basic BGL style of scenery and the newer file types of Flight will also be used. some of the older FSX file formats are pretty outdated.

 

Other things are foggier. It costs to get terrain data and to license aircraft. And the model format or tools to create models in Flight might need to be re-licensed. Hard to tell how much money Dovetail wants to spend on flight simulation, or if they want a full-blown simulator to replace FSX.

 

Dick

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Or... Maybe, as Dovetail markets games, as opposed to simulators, that is where they will go, or should stick to, especially as they use Steam, one of the largest gaming distributors, to market their games.


Robin


"Onward & Upward" ...
To the Stars, & Beyond... 

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I don't think anything is confirmed. Just speculation. Some of us are assuming the Flight 'engine' will be used and that the basic BGL style of scenery and the newer file types of Flight will also be used. some of the older FSX file formats are pretty outdated.

 

Other things are foggier. It costs to get terrain data and to license aircraft. And the model format or tools to create models in Flight might need to be re-licensed. Hard to tell how much money Dovetail wants to spend on flight simulation, or if they want a full-blown simulator to replace FSX.

 

Dick

 

Interesting. Though I don't think Dovetail is going to pinch pennies. This is the tentpole of a major expansion of their company, and they would have to be pretty much insane to do all this and then undercut the whole thing by letting bean-counters get in the way.


We are all connected..... To each other, biologically...... To the Earth, chemically...... To the rest of the Universe atomically.
 
Devons rig
Intel Core i5 13600K @ 5.1GHz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series Ram 32GB / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GAMING OC 12G Graphics Card / Sound Blaster Z / Meta Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 1x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB / 2x Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB /  1x Samsung - 970 EVO Plus 2TB NVMe /  1x Samsung 980 NVMe 1TB / 2 other regular hd's with up to 10 terabyte capacity / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX Motherboard LGA 1700 DDR5

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Dovetail only makes simulators.  You could argue how accurate they are, but they are still part of the simulation genre, and Steam itself has lots of various simulators on it as well.

 

From a comment I saw from Brandon, someone at Dovetail (Facebook or forums) confirmed that they were using the Flight engine.  I'm assuming they want to get a product out quick which means keeping a lot the same.  I really hope for the future of the product that they replace the terrain engine with something a little more modern and easy to create content for, but that is a lot of work, so I doubt it will happen.

 

My hopes is that they create a compelling product that is all around better\more complete than Flight and the tools and content for Flight will be somewhat usable in Dovetail's product.  Ultimately if they release the SDK for free publically it should make my set of tools obsolete for the most part.

 

I really wonder if they would have the whole world available from their product, so the FSX conversion may still be useful.

 

I've actually just reached out to them to see if they might have any interest in releasing some small parts of the SDK to allow us to make photo imagery hoping that they will see it as a way to get people making content that could be easily usable in their product at some point.

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Doesn't it make sense that Dovetail would be looking to hire some people from the MS Flight dev team to help get this product out the door sooner?    

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They contacted several people as far as I know (or people contacted them), but their studio is in the UK and I think the majority of people have moved on to other jobs and have little interest in moving to the UK.  I wouldn't be surprised if Dovetail pays a lot less than MS too.

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All this speculation....

re DarkstarF16's comment about living/moving to England.... I am sure developers can work in the country of their choice. There is something called the Internet & on-line communications. There are actually people who work from home & do not need to go to an office!


Robin


"Onward & Upward" ...
To the Stars, & Beyond... 

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I'm sure they'll find well qualified staff -The UK has quite a long tradition in coding and game production. They've some job ads on their website looking for people working on "Aviation Products".

 

And £1.11? Is petrol that cheap now? Last time I hired a car it was somewhere around £1.30. Still, I guess I prefer my bicycles. ;-) #slightlyofftopic

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