Dovetail Games to launch two new flight simulation titles in 2016 (Official)
After months of speculation we are very excited to finally be able to lift the lid on our plans for the future of flight simulation with the announcement of Dovetail Games Flight School. We understand that some of you may have not been expecting us to head in this direction, and so you probably have lots of questions about what is happening. We have therefore created this dedicated space for you to ask questions and for us to answer them.
The big questions are: What is happening with the announced Dovetail Games Flight Simulator (DFS)? Are Flight School and DFS the same? Will Flight School turn into DFS?
Firstly, Flight School is not DFS. Flight School is a standalone experience designed to teach players the basics of flight simulation in a fun, accessible way. Flight Simulator is still very much in active development, and upon release will be a much bigger and feature-rich simulator.
Why have we made Flight School? What is our intent for this new simulator?
We have spent the last two years listening to both existing and would-be simmers alike. We have been intent on discovering what keeps you all simming, and what stops those who would like to get into flight simulation from doing so. We learned that flight simulation appeals to an incredible amount of people, a lot of which find it too hard to get started with. It is our aim to reclaim those would-be simmers, but in order to do so, we need to present flight simulation in a way that doesn't initially overwhelm them. That is where Flight School comes in.
So you didn’t develop Flight School with existing simmers in mind, you may ask?
Flight School has been developed to give anyone who wants to give flight simming a try the chance to do so. While established simmers will likely already know what we are aiming to teach, it is a chance to get an early preview of some of the new technologies we have implemented which will be carried over to DFS. Of course if you fancy brushing up on your skills or putting them to the test, then Flight School has piloting tests and missions which will also do just that.
But enough about Flight School – here is what you can expect from DFS.
Dovetail Games Flight School and Dovetail Games Flight Simulator do share the same underlying technology. In 2014, we acquired the rights to develop and publish new flight simulators utilizing Microsoft’s genre-defining flight simulation technology. This means that both Flight School and Flight Simulator are based on an evolution of Flight Simulator X technology.
Our goal is to put flight simulation at the forefront of people’s minds once more and present the genre in a way that doesn't initially overwhelm new simmers. With Flight School, we have created a realistic representation of how pilots learn to fly. Flight Simulator builds upon the foundations of Flight School, however it will include more content, additional features, and will extend the technology even further… and that’s just the beginning!
DTG Flight Simulator is still very much in development and is planned to be more expansive and evolved than Flight School. We are committed to developing a cutting edge flight simulator which takes full advantage of modern PCs and can be continuously built upon. For starters, Dovetail Games Flight Simulator will be a 64-bit simulator using DirectX 11 and take full advantage of modern GPU and CPU performance.
We are in this for the long term and intend to support and expand upon DFS for years to come. We aren’t just going to make a new simulator – we intend to build a new simulation platform which grows with you, our players, over time.
And finally, yes, Dovetail Games Flight Simulator will include a Free Flight mode which will allow you to explore and fly wherever you want in the world from the very start.
Right now the team is heads down working hard on developing the sim to its fullest potential, so we may go a little quiet for a while until we have more news to share. If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below and we will do our best to answer as many of them as we can.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far, we consider ourselves to be very lucky to be part of such a passionate community of simmers.
Last edited by alg68 on Sat, 13th Feb 2016 11:59; edited 2 times in total
This shit is exactly why LMco had to put a disclaimer up for Prepar3d.
"Prepar3D is not to be used, offered, sold or distributed through markets or channels for use as a personal/consumer entertainment product."
FSX Steam was kind of a hackjob anyway. What background in sims did these guys have prior to somehow scoring the FSX "entertainment" side of things? We'll see if they can make the same sorts of improvements to the base that Lockheed did.
Precisely why these guys can go get fucked. They're just going to TRY to turn a flight sim into a DLC cash cow. Yeah, that worked really well for MS Flight, didn't it? Fuck them. I'll stick to P3D and X-plane.
Precisely why these guys can go get fucked. They're just going to TRY to turn a flight sim into a DLC cash cow. Yeah, that worked really well for MS Flight, didn't it? Fuck them. I'll stick to P3D and X-plane.
Yeah, I've known about this for a while, but couldn't really say anything. It sounded like they didn't really bother to look at the MS Flight code, and since they had to do a bunch of work to get FSX onto steam, and had become familiar with that code base they were just going to continue with it. By the time I talked to them they seemed pretty resolved to use FSX as a base as they had already converted it to 64 bit. They seemed to think they could just take some of the improvements from Flight and move them over, but I told them that was close to impossible without major rework. They may have done some of it, but I doubt it. The impression I got seemed to be that they thought it would be too much work to convert Flight to 64 bits since they had already done it for FSX. They also thought the perf of FSX was as good as Flight once they converted it to compile with VS 2013, which made me laugh. Do they have any screenshots or other info about either of the products?
The one good thing is that older addons have a chance of working with their new sim, but who knows if they will block them so that you have to buy everything through them.
I still have access to the Flight code at work, and in order to learn D3D12, I ported the code from D3D9 to D3D12. Took 1 week of refactoring, 1-2 weeks to get it running in D3D12 at the same visual parity and another 2-3 to optimize. In the end the rendering code is 3 times faster than it was on D3D9, even without multi-threading anything. I'm guessing the results for the FSX engine will not be as good without a lot of extra work.
Dovetail using FSX instead of Flight is probably part of the reason I haven't really worked on the toolkit much. I had contacted them to ask if they would be willing to publish the resample from the Flight SDK, but they were more interested in getting information out of me. However, over the last couple months I have been working with Kavinda and FS Tester on the fsdev forums, and we have made some good progress on aircraft conversion from FSX to Flight. It still requires a lot of manual steps, but there are a lot more possibilities now. I'm hoping to have a new version out in the next couple weeks.
The less MS Flight code brought to DFS the better.
MS Flight was a fucking joke, you won't build any actual flight simulator from this. It was just about put some planes in the air, and that is NO Flight simulation to me.
But yes, I am surprised they didn't start from this one because it was perfect for a "Milk a cow" point of view.
So this makes me think "Did they got it right this time ?"
I so much want to believe !
Because I really want a brand new and nice civilian flight simulator, for combat flightsim DCS is almost perfect (new 2.0 map/engine is promising).
But for civilian flight simulation we have to pick from some old and "weird" stuff :
Xplanes seriously ?
I won't even talk about Prepar3D and their "Hey look we did an awesome Flightsim but guess what ? It is not for you simple human being so don't use it at home ! Looser !"
...
"Errr what ? You still there ! Ok you want it ? Here just subscribe for $$/month or give us some hundreds $$$, but remember we won't support you as you are just a simple person, got it ?"
What-a-joke! And of course software performance is still a joke as well.
FSX:Steam wasn't so bad, but they it seems they rather spent more time to develop/implement $1500 worth DLCs (which the majority are just 'excuse me' SHIAT) than to fix some crucial flaws FSX has (Multi-thread support,ATC communication, AI traffic, DX10 buggy support, weather system, ...)
May they used FSX:Steam income to fix all the above FSX flaws and provide a nice actual pilot experience, they will got my money again, no discussion.
The Flight School thingy wants to tell me they did actually more than just a "put the plane in thii air and mission complete !".
Time will tell.
Only one thing is obvious...
You better save up some thousands $$$ for next year DLCs if you want them all, Dovetail(tm).
One last thing, if they don't make this IVAO/VATSIM compatible and multiplayer friendly from the start, they will fail miserably.
Also alg68 thanks for the head up, I would have missed this announcement otherwise
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I believe it doesn't simulate the all world, only California??
Quote:
Explore the skies with Aerofly 2, an advanced flight simulator for iOS and Android. Aerofly features one of the best 3D graphics available. The sophisticated flight dynamics model gives you a stunning level of realism.
Take the controls of aircraft such as the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, McDonnell Douglas F-18, Airbus A320 and others - an airplane for any situation. Select your starting location, set the time and weather. Take off from one of more than 70 airports in central California and explore a world of aviation beauty that has entranced many of plane fans from across the globe.
Aerofly 2 will be a joke just like the first one. Also, "Explore the skies with Aerofly 2, an advanced flight simulator for iOS and Android."
Right now the only real sim options are X-plane or Prepar3d. FSX is alright but the flight model is crap and performance is still abysmal.
And they ALL suck for helicopter flight. Give me the flight model from DCS (which isn't perfect but miles above the others) and slap that into a whole world sim and I'd be happy.
The less MS Flight code brought to DFS the better.
MS Flight was a fucking joke, you won't build any actual flight simulator from this. It was just about put some planes in the air, and that is NO Flight simulation to me.
But yes, I am surprised they didn't start from this one because it was perfect for a "Milk a cow" point of view.
So this makes me think "Did they got it right this time ?"
I so much want to believe !
Because I really want a brand new and nice civilian flight simulator, for combat flightsim DCS is almost perfect (new 2.0 map/engine is promising).
But for civilian flight simulation we have to pick from some old and "weird" stuff :
Xplanes seriously ?
I won't even talk about Prepar3D and their "Hey look we did an awesome Flightsim but guess what ? It is not for you simple human being so don't use it at home ! Looser !"
...
"Errr what ? You still there ! Ok you want it ? Here just subscribe for $$/month or give us some hundreds $$$, but remember we won't support you as you are just a simple person, got it ?"
What-a-joke! And of course software performance is still a joke as well.
FSX:Steam wasn't so bad, but they it seems they rather spent more time to develop/implement $1500 worth DLCs (which the majority are just 'excuse me' SHIAT) than to fix some crucial flaws FSX has (Multi-thread support,ATC communication, AI traffic, DX10 buggy support, weather system, ...)
May they used FSX:Steam income to fix all the above FSX flaws and provide a nice actual pilot experience, they will got my money again, no discussion.
The Flight School thingy wants to tell me they did actually more than just a "put the plane in thii air and mission complete !".
Time will tell.
Only one thing is obvious...
You better save up some thousands $$$ for next year DLCs if you want them all, Dovetail(tm).
One last thing, if they don't make this IVAO/VATSIM compatible and multiplayer friendly from the start, they will fail miserably.
Also alg68 thanks for the head up, I would have missed this announcement otherwise
Pretty much anything after the first paragraph is
Prepar3d is lightyears ahead of FSX with all the changes they've done. It runs great (performance is FAR from being a joke). It looks great. And most of the fsx addons can still be made to work if that's your thing. They could not make a consumer entertainment version for licensing reasons. They didn't buy FSX. They bought microsoft's ESP which was the big commercial version they sold to companies to use in their own products like flight simulators. They had a "professional" version that is really quite nice. A little pricey if you want to buy it at $199. But again, licensing. Just yarr it like everyone else. 3.1 and earlier versions are readily available. The academic version is damn near identical with only a few minor differences, one being an annoying fucking watermark. Then the pro-plus version which is ridiculously expensive and is geared more toward military as it allows for weapons and some other pretty cool shit. They were and are not permitted to make a version for us "simple looser humans." (nice spelling!) Support is fine - better than it ever was from MS. The monthly charges is just if you want to develop for it. $9.95 a month for a developer and two copies of the pro version isn't terrible if you're planning on making money from it.
x-plane is pretty decent as long as you throw some horsepower at it. It will seem to run smooth on a slower machine but if you make a major control input the aircraft will be all over the fucking place. But with a machine from the past few years (I only have an FX8320 w/ 8gb and a 4gb GTX760) it runs great at 1080p. Nice and smooth and works great with either a joystick or a flight yoke and pedals.
FSX Steam was crap. It didn't run for a lot of people (works ok for me though) but other than that it's just an attempted DLC cash cow like you mentioned. Performance is still as shitty as FSX. My guess is that the sole purpose of that version was to gain some sort of experience on flight sims since they're not quite the same as a fucking train sim. And to get some cash to work on their new shitty DFS:Trains in the Sky sim.I predict total failure.
The thing I miss about all of them, including prepar3d, is a proper ATC (don't give a shit about vatsim) that can do proper IFR flights. Half the time if you file direct, ATC will stairstep you all the way there and it's annoying. And then they can only do vectors for final. You're pretty much better just ignoring ATC in the game and just flying the route and approach you want without ATC.
Maybe, I tried Prepar3D last year I wasn't so much impressed with performance, I almost had the same with a tweaked FSX:SE .
Some effects like lighting and UI looked better.
I may give it another try with my new config, not holding my breath tho
And I agree that a good and credible ATC which finally gives a shit about SIDs/STARs is the thing I want the most on a new Flightsim.
But most of the time we get that "There is multiplayer ATC option" answer.
IFR is a pain at the moment indeed, I got it working but with lots of workarounds like using ASN for locking wind at destination and tweaking my Airbus FMS to match the flight route as much as possible with the FSX one and its old navdata.
Sometimes I start with IFR, cancel it and replan the IFR flight before approach to not be annoyed enroute.
Still I want to believe they wont fail again like MS Flight and provide a "digne" FSX successor.
I know I am derp, but hey not my fault
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Maybe, I tried Prepar3D last year I wasn't so much impressed with performance, I almost had the same with a tweaked FSX:SE .
Some effects like lighting and UI looked better.
I may give it another try with my new config, not holding my breath tho
And I agree that a good and credible ATC which finally gives a shit about SIDs/STARs is the thing I want the most on a new Flightsim.
But most of the time we get that "There is multiplayer ATC option" answer.
IFR is a pain at the moment indeed, I got it working but with lots of workarounds like using ASN for locking wind at destination and tweaking my Airbus FMS to match the flight route as much as possible with the FSX one and its old navdata.
Sometimes I start with IFR, cancel it and replan the IFR flight before approach to not be annoyed enroute.
Still I want to believe they wont fail again like MS Flight and provide a "digne" FSX successor.
I know I am derp, but hey not my fault
They made a lot of improvements with 2.5 and 3.x looks to be great too (I'll be trying 3.1 this weekend. You can actually download the installer straight from Lockheed and then look in the usual places for the activation tool). The two, no three, biggest changes (in my opinion) were 1) the change to DX11. The shadows and lighting are really nice. And the volumetric fog really adds to it if you're breaking out at minimums. No more of this being able to see everything, then suddenly a thin layer and your magically in the soup and then poof - you're out. It's pretty nice. and 2) real multi-core support so you're not just essentially running off one core like in FSX. It's just all around better. I'm not really sure if they did anything to the flight model (which used to just be lookup tables with fsx) but it feels better just because it's smoother. And 3) they fixed the VAS problem that has been around since FSX and ESP have been around. No more out of memory crashes and slowdowns because you have eleventy bazillion addons and the memory not getting properly freed up.
It'd be nice if DFS would turn out to be awesome but from what I've read, I'm not even cautiously optimistic. I think it's going to fall flat on its face. Not because there isn't a demand for a new, realistic sim. But because it's just not going to be good.
I looked into a bit on the IFR in prepar3d and it does seem like they are working to improve IFR and ATC. You can do a workaround and get pop-up clearances. You still can't request SIDS or STARS and there's no support for DPs (calm down bob, not that DP). And you can neither request nor will they assign you a hold. But you can request the full procedure for the approach you want (which hopefully means they'll just vector you to the IAF and not vectors to final). And you can declare a missed approach which will result in vectors for another try. It's not much but it's something.
Want answers? Got a burning question about DTG Flight School? Want to talk to the Creative Director who is overseeing the project? Well here is your chance. Joins us tonight (February the 15th at 22:00 GMT) for a live Q&A with Steve Hood, exclusively on our Facebook page.
For full details please see our Facebook event here:
There will be two aircraft in DTG Flight School. The first is the Piper PA-18 Super Cub. We will be announcing the second one next month.
I'd guess a Cessna 172.
Quote:
Flight School is all about your journey as a pilot. From your humble beginnings as a rookie through to an accomplished pilot. This is a very personal experience and we didn’t feel that multiplayer fitted into that concept.
Well, the real journey to becoming a pilot sure isn't single player. Your solo is a personal experience and you first X/C solo but it's very much a multi-"player" journey. Idiots.
Quote:
PC Only
Quote:
64-bit, DX11, blah blah HDR modern graphics blah. old addons not compatible
could be worse.
Quote:
We will not be updating the flight physics in DTG Flight School, however it is something we are exploring for DTG Flight Simulator. Realism is important to me and physics plays a large part in that .
See. Worse. Same flight model. blah.
Quote:
The ATC in DTG Flight School will function similar to that in FSX: Steam Edition.
Haha. This better be $9.99 max. (and I still won't buy/play it)
Quote:
no sloped runways. maybe in DFS.
Again, standalone not compatible with existing addons.
We'll try to make it work on multiple monitors
NO VR
No definite terrain improvements
Again, no xbox one
No walk arounds
No beta
No damage model
more screenshots coming in a couple weeks
no helicopters (in flight school)
working on achievements
based on FSX
will work with win7
"trying" to update the out of date fsx data (airports, etc)
Following the completion of long term discussions, Dovetail Games is pleased to announce we will be partnering with Orbx Simulation Systems in order to bring key aspects of their technology to Flight School and Flight Simulator, both scheduled for release this year.
Orbx Simulation Systems has dominated the flight simulation scenery space since CEO John Venema founded the company in 2006.
"We are thrilled to partner with Dovetail Games as they usher in a new era of 64-bit simulators built on robust technology that we have a decade of experience in developing for", says John Venema, CEO of Orbx Simulation Systems. "We've developed a solid working relationship with the Dovetail team and we're confident that our terrain will look absolutely stunning in their enhanced 3D engine and provide a level of immersion unlike anything experienced before. We look forward to a long a productive partnership."
“We are incredibly excited about working with Orbx on Flight School and Dovetail Games Flight Simulator”, says Stephen Hood, Creative Director at Dovetail games. “Orbx represents the pinnacle of what can be achieved in terms of in-game scenery, so collaborating with them on these projects was the obvious choice for us. We are deeply committed to partnering with both new and existing developers and content creators moving forwards to create the best possible combination of technologies to power our simulators – this is only the beginning”
A nice step in the right direction here.
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Not that I really need impressive or realistic crashes, all crashes in all sims so far have been embarrassingly bad. Hope some more realistic crashes are in order this time around.
I don't think it's going to happen. I hope I'm wrong as it's quite a big deal, for me it totally kills the immersion when fsx just freezes with your plane stuck in the ground like a lawn dart!
Look back at Looking Glass Flight Unlimited back in 1995 it had great crash dynamics, simple but effective. And great fun
a pig with a necktie is always a pig (not that the old fsx is a pig.. but is OLD)... seems they have changed nothing from the old fsx, the graphic engine is the same, they only added some lights... meh....
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