stonelance

Hi everyone! I decided to leave the site up for another year (until January). Apparently they migrated the server anyway, so i'm not sure if that resulted in any issues with the SQL database connections or not. I've been working overtime with my actual job, so i haven't been paying much attention to anything related to Flight. I'm hoping once the new flight sim comes out there will be less need to keep this running.

Which version did you download? At some point i believe i was making changes to fix the login for Non-GFWL mode, but i can't remember where i ended with that. I think there is a version FlightToolkit_1_1_34

Thanks everyone. I haven't decided what to do yet, but it is nice to see people are still enjoying it.

This is being developed by the publishing group at MS which works with external developers to develop game\entertainment products. It is possible this is the "best developers" they were referring to, and not any in the flight sim industry. I did hear from people previously working with Dove Tail that this team was trying to find people with expertise in flight simming to work with, including Dove Tail. I'm guessing Dove Tail saw this and realized it was much better than FSW (or at least good enough competition), that they abandoned their plans for it.

I believe it was (and probably is) being made by one of the studio that worked on HoloLens, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are supporting VR, or will eventually.

That is what MS Flight was... Or at least what it was trying to be.

There aren't really any that can do the whole world at scale without massive modifications. Also, ACES didn't have a monopoly on expertise to make an engine :)

I was on ACES when it shutdown and one of the graphics devs on Flight. I talked to them and provided some context around code. At the time they were basically prototyping the graphics tech, and looking to implement a more physically accurate flight model, but haven't really talked to them since.

I'll just back you up in saying that it is pretty common for these types of things to record the frames at some lower frame rate, and then play them back at 60 for these types of videos\demos. Most often that is because the game\engine or what have you is not fully optimized since it is still in production. I have no idea if that was this case for this one though. I would not be surprised if they are reasonably close to a shippable "alpha" state. When i saw an early version it was definitely interactive frame rates, although it didn't look as good.

My guesses: - Use it as part of making the simulator to build better scenery from their satellite imagery - Use it for ATC - Use to fill the world with AI driven cars, planes, etc. so the world is more active

Hi, been a while since i posted on here. I've known about this for 2-3 years now and saw early prototype versions, but nothing recent. As far as I know they have the code and content from FSX and Flight, but my guess is they aren't using the majority of the code, but maybe some of the content? The satellite imagery was being used not just for imagery but also 3d geometry (like Virtual Earth\Google Earth). At least from a scenery content standpoint I'm guessing it is going to be a much different beast than FSX and other existing sims. It is nice to see how it is looking now. I'm guessing this is a big part of the reason Dove Tail abandoned it's plans.

So my hosting service has started to increase the cost of hosting because flighttoolkit.com and the database Flight Toolkit are using are on an older system that i'm guessing they are trying to get rid of. They have lower price hosting they provide, but that means ultimately moving the whole website and SQL database to a new set up, and I'm sure that will come with it own set of debugging which I don't want to spend any time on. How many people are actually still using the toolkit? I've paid for the next year, but i'm looking at doing one of the following two options sometime in the next year: - Just close the website and SQL database down. That means unless we have somewhere else to host the addon files, there won't be any way to download them. I would probably need to update the Toolkit to allow it to work without the server and possibly hard code in some of the data. - Keep the website up, move it to new hosting, but don't bother with the SQL database. The addons could still be hosted on the website, and downloaded, but i would need to move the data in the database to be hard coded, or most likely just put it into some files on the website, so they can still be updated. I think the only thing that really breaks is the ability to add aerocaches, but no one has done that in a while as far as I know. I suppose one other option would be to just shutdown and the Toolkit may not function at all any more. Or at least certain things like aerocaches probably won't work.

Yeah, I believe the max count will also get limited by the size of the objects and the placements. Each 1km x 1km tile has a certain number of building placements in it, so no matter how much you crank it up, it won't be able to put more buildings than the devs added to that tile. Vegetation locations are specified using large boxes or polygons to designate an area, so the number of things placed is more variable, but at some point i think it will still be limited by the size of the vegetation so that they don't start intersecting.

Sorry, know this is old now but for autogen you probably also want to play with these settings if you really want to get max: LoadingDistance=23000.000000 MinimumOnscreenRadius=5.000000 FullDensityDistance=5000.000000 ZeroDensityDistance=20000.000000 DensityFalloffPower=4.000000 LoadingDistance controls when we load in the autogen placement data MinimumOnscreenRadius is a size in pixels when we stop drawing autogen. This can prevent small things in the distance from rendering, even if it is withing the visible distance FullDensityDistance, anything below this distance should be at 100% density, but after this distnace it starts falling off to 0 at ZeroDensityDistance. The rate it falls off is based on DensityFalloffPower The *MaxCount values basically control what the maximum density is in a tile, which i think is 1km x 1km approximately. A long time ago i had used those to basically render every tree and building on the bigisland, and perf was still reasonable on my gaming PC. Since it uses hardware instancing, it should scale very well with your GPU.

1. No, i don't think even anyone at MS knows how to do that any more. 2. Not that i know of, but maybe there is a way to filter the list to just the content you are using? 3. Pending aerocaches are aerocaches that people on these forums have added but haven't been "approved" yet. They are there so people can test that they are showing up in the right place, but not collectible until they become approved. I'm not aware of any being added since last time I approved some, but I haven't looked either.