Ground vehicles in FSX Release

I haven't heard anything in terms of ground traffic, but then a lot of the links addressing the sim directly are around the tropical area, near the cruise ship, so its hard to tell.

As for the real airlines, I would say this is unlikely because it would cost Microsoft way too much, which would mean they would charge us more, and no one would buy it 😉

oh, I also hope all the buildings will be solid too, instead of all the tall buildings. I've seen that u can land on the ship in the videos. As for the Airlines, some good Repainter will probably paint the stock craft in airlines.

Thanx for the help

Alohajoe 😛

if there is a lot of moving ground objects like the follow me car it would b great but imagine the huge hit on frame rates you would have!!

Hmmmmm.....

Micah 😉

I doubt it would be that bad because you already have moving airplanes. 😕

I hope it will be good 😉

I can't wait to get my hands on FSX. I hope I will be able to run it though

spitfiresrule wrote:

I can't wait to get my hands on FSX. I hope I will be able to run it though

I guess that is exactly what we are all thinking!

I believe one of the pics shows a road and if you look closesly there are cars on it.

FSX haves moving traffic, and even animals like dolphins.

How much will they be selling FSX for i wonder?

A shop in my city said they will be shipped for 80 euros.

FlightSimulatorX.nl wrote:

A shop in my city said they will be shipped for 80 euros.

80 Euros?? I'd say they're trying to rob you blind

Flightsimulatorx.nl wrote:

FSX haves moving traffic, and even animals like dolphins.

Since there is no way to see that from FL360, I sure hope there will be a way to turn off the non-essential eye candy.

I'd like to save the resources for realistic weather, etc.

80 EUROS!!!!!!!!! thats like robbing you poor!!! 😳 😳

well i suppose ill have to pay the price!

That is like 95 American dollars. The fancy metal case for FS9 was only $80. I will just wait till I can get it cheaper...

That is like 95 American dollars. The fancy metal case for FS9 was only $80. I will just wait till I can get it cheaper...

😳 😳 😳

Good Lord!!! I got mine in the fancy metal case for $25 at Target! That was like 7 months ago too!

Hopefully, they'll tighten up ground protocol at airports - and moving ground vehicles and gates would be an awesome addition. Also... I think they are using satellite photos for ground cover, probably making cars/traffic static.

I couldn't imagine Microsoft buying the rights to use airline trademarks - way to expensive. Fortunately we have flyawaysim for that

I'd go for ground units - anything that makes it more realistic.

We haven't seen that much in the development over the years from the FS series, others than better graphics and more planes.

I think its time to step up the game, and introduce something new. 😀
Somehow I can't feel bad about ppl complaining about Frame-rate and such - if you're on to posting in the FSX Forum, get yourself the right equipment to handle it 😉

If you want to waste resources for something you see for 10 minutes out of a 12 hour flight, go ahead. I sure won't stop you. I just think it is a waste.

Well i heard something abouth ground objects, detailed, but not moving ones. So i think they could be parking cars, or other add-ons. Not sure about this last one. 🙄

CrashGordon wrote:

If you want to waste resources for something you see for 10 minutes out of a 12 hour flight, go ahead. I sure won't stop you. I just think it is a waste.

I agree. I'd prefer MS to spend their already stretched budget 🙄 on denser clouds or better ATC rather than ground vehicles 😉

Yes, really good ATC would be great.

Ask for ALL the detail you can. I am 60 years old and as well as being an aviation enthusiast and life-long sim pilot, I am a WW2 virtual submariner using Silent Hunter III. The subsim community asked for all manner of details to be added to SH III and I myself asked for seagulls because I spent a career at sea and I know that their presence indicates both the proximity of land and where warships have dumped their garbage. So they gave us seagulls and they are a major factor in creating immersion.

There are still people out there who seriously say that they prefer DOS to Windows - so I am totally unimpressed by those who think it's OK to leave the ground detail in a flightsim at a primitive level indefinitely. Wake up and smell the coffee in the real world guys! Stop and think about this for a minute. We fly to get from point to point on the ground. Without the earth's surface there would be no motive for flying, and no take-off or landing possible. The sky may be the medium we fly THROUGH but it is the earth that we fly from and to. It is also the surface of the earth that we use and rely on to navigate. As navigation is more crucial in flight than in any other mode of transportation and it is easier to lose one's orientation and sense of direction in the air than in any other medium, the level of detail with which the ground terrain, rivers, roads, cities and moving traffic are modelled is absolutely as crucial to accurate simulation as dynamic and convincing air traffic control dialogue.

After all, when all the technology fails (as it DOES in real life sometimes) one has to be able to fly by VFR just as any true sailor can sail safely by using dead reconning. Any REAL pilot will confirm what I am saying and only those whose "flying experience" is entirely virtual would dismiss ground detail as "a waste of frame rate". Indeed we should all press as a community for the very maximum detail in our simulated world. It is important to realise that we gamers are actually DRIVING the cutting edge of computer hardware and software development globally. The consequences are increasingly being used by the Pentagon and other western countries to develop the future of remote weaponry and safe military training simulators for everything from aircraft, through tanks to infantry. Yet there are still plenty of luddites out there who think that online gaming itself is "a waste of time"! I even had a close friend, an otherwise intelligent woman, who discounted all online social exchanegs as a "waste of time" because they "weren't real". DUH! (She failed to see that this had also applied to the telephone since it's invention.)

Here are some predictions.

Within 5 years our avatars in FPS games will bear our own faces, scanned in from our own photographs and animated and lipsynced to our voices using VOIP.

Future iterations of Flight Simulator and something like Google Earth will combine to produce a true, dynamic, real-world groundscape, downloaded like the current real-time weather from satellite and limited only by those sensible security precautions that our Military will choose to impose, such as blurring military airbase detail and delaying events in real time where such information might be a security issue. But we will, within 5 years be able to fly over a totally realistic real-world virtual presentation of the ground landscape and traffic of all kinds, including our own homes. If for no other reason than transmitting moving detail via satellite will require far less HD space and software power than storing the whole earth's surface on DVD!

I also predict that there will be a far greater convergence between real and virtual worlds in all media. If FS X doesn't include it already (and it really SHOULD) then FS XI will come with most real-world airline traffic built-in, running in real time, so that one's virtual flying will have to take just as careful account of other traffic as in the real world. The single difference will be the possibility of over riding or inserting replacements into those real-world schedules to allow one's own flights to occur "in sync". This is not a simple matter as crashes and accidents will have to be allowed to affect the virtual world and a decision will have to be made about how and where. By that I mean that behind this apparently simple issue is a more profound one because that virtual world that we all fly in really needs to be the same virtual world and so all that I am saying will have to operate online in real-time. i.e. If somebody crashes their plane the consequences will have to effact everybody else in the virtual community who is flying "nearby" along with all the shared traffic.

I will go further. Within 10 years those of us who choose to will be able to have a universal photo-realistic avatar to represent ourselves online in all games and virtual communities. One will be able to "drive to the airfield" as one's avatar in one's "virtual car" walk to the "virtual aircraft", open the "virtual door" just as one can now in FPS games, enter the "virtual cockpit" and "sit down" virtually. Hell we may even be able to fasten our virtual flight harness and one will be able to see one's own body in shot (knees, hands etc.) instead of the insane empty seats in current cockpits. (Just as we already have that in combat sims like Lock-On) All future flight simulators will be pre-fitted to use Head Tracking IR which will develop even more sophistication and all simulators will automatically be prodiuced with a 3D option.

The next really big development will be permitted by massive increases in bandwidth, dual CPU speeds, multi-threading which will permit the return to the development of true wrap-around virtuality glasses or even helmets, which will permit us to move around and "see" in 360 degrees in our virtual world. Along with that will come 360 degree motion flight sim "chairs" although actually one can buy those already.

Simulation and virtuality are going to play a far greater part in the development of human society, technology, history, demographics and art than any of us can possibly currently imagine and those industries that get into this field first and farthest are going to become the Microsoft's of tomorrow's world.

The bottom lines is this - the human species is just not going to stop pushing until we have made real that greatest of all wish-fulfillment gaming fantasies from Star Trek - the HOLLODECK. We ALL want the Hollodeck - each for our own reason. Amongst the civilised Western nations the internet is already making one's geographical location socially irrelevant. Anthropologists please note that this is a truly massive demographic change in human society whose furture implications stretch out of sight. Information is also becoming harder to conceal which is having accelerating effects politically. IN all seriousness, how long will China's attempts to "hold back history" and "deny individual freedom" last in the Internet's global village?

Those people wittering about "wasted frame rates" should remember that all the greatest original creations of human art, science, invention and technology have come from what was in the first instance "mere" fantasy and "play". i.e. "wasting time"as the less imaginative geeks who are always among our ranks would say! We will always need the engineers to build things better for us and make things work but with out the artists, dreamers, writers and gamers they would have no plans to work from and no objectives to achieve! There is no rank in this. We need all the skills in our human tribe. None are trivial in the end.

Google and MS, it'll be a cold day in you know where but I see what you mean about "scenery".
Would MS spend the money and still be able to keep the price in the reasonable range for the sim, I doubt it.
That they leave to the add-on community.
You can now buy global mesh, photo-realistic scenery, roads taken from satellite imagery, "real" airline traffic add-ons and much more to enhance the sim to "fly by the seat of your pants" (if you will).
As for the future, hologram computers. The "gaming" or simulation software that we now use will become a hologram either table-top or in the middle of your room.
Will we live to see this, I certainly hope so, even a rudimentary form of it is very appealing.

Congratulations on your first post, Lionman. You put forth some interesting ideas. I think you are overly optimisitic as far as time frame is concerned.

What you are looking for would require faster CPUs, a lot more system RAM as well as graphics cards that also are a lot faster and have a lot more RAM.

The reason it will take considerably longer is economics. Let's make an arbitrary assumption that what you would like to see can be done with a 5 GHz CPU, 32 GB system RAM, an equally healthy graphics card and a 1TB hard drive.

That will be too expensive for the mass market in the forseeable future. Right now, hardware manufacturers have no compelling reason to bring out heftier hardware because there is no software that requires it. They will wait for MS Vista and then release hardware that is incrementally more powerful. The reason is that there will be enough people going to the new OS to justify producing such hardware.

That, in turn, will allow software developers to produce software that takes advantage of the newly available hardware. Then everyone waits for the next cycle of incremental changes. These cycles have historically been 3 to 5 years. So my guess is that it will take a minimum of 10 years before things approach what you are suggesting. Maybe more.

Until there is enough mainstream need for the hardware that will be needed, it won't be available at a price that people are willing to pay. Until then, the software won't be developed.

The argument isn't really about whether FS should have all these features, it is about which ones take priority given the constraints of currently available affordable hardware.

YES there will be ground cars.......take a look at the second to last photo on this link http://www.fsplanet.com/fsplanet_com_fsx.htm Now about animals YES in this video it clearly shows the,!! Video- [url]http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/c/1/ac1c12d9-e5ea-4e43-8444-183d27200428/FlightSimX_streamHI_615k.wmv [/url] Enjoy!

Oh!, Thanks for the link it is really amazing. 🙂

pilotwannabe wrote:

CrashGordon wrote:

If you want to waste resources for something you see for 10 minutes out of a 12 hour flight, go ahead. I sure won't stop you. I just think it is a waste.

I agree. I'd prefer MS to spend their already stretched budget 🙄 on denser clouds or better ATC rather than ground vehicles 😉

YES but we all have bit*ched about crapy grond vehicals and unrealistic roads....they listend and they put cars in! be cant B*tch about something we asked for!

Lionman wrote:

Ask for ALL the detail you can. I am 60 years old and as well as being an aviation enthusiast and life-long sim pilot, I am a WW2 virtual submariner using Silent Hunter III. The subsim community asked for all manner of details to be added to SH III and I myself asked for seagulls because I spent a career at sea and I know that their presence indicates both the proximity of land and where warships have dumped their garbage. So they gave us seagulls and they are a major factor in creating immersion.

There are still people out there who seriously say that they prefer DOS to Windows - so I am totally unimpressed by those who think it's OK to leave the ground detail in a flightsim at a primitive level indefinitely. Wake up and smell the coffee in the real world guys! Stop and think about this for a minute. We fly to get from point to point on the ground. Without the earth's surface there would be no motive for flying, and no take-off or landing possible. The sky may be the medium we fly THROUGH but it is the earth that we fly from and to. It is also the surface of the earth that we use and rely on to navigate. As navigation is more crucial in flight than in any other mode of transportation and it is easier to lose one's orientation and sense of direction in the air than in any other medium, the level of detail with which the ground terrain, rivers, roads, cities and moving traffic are modelled is absolutely as crucial to accurate simulation as dynamic and convincing air traffic control dialogue.

After all, when all the technology fails (as it DOES in real life sometimes) one has to be able to fly by VFR just as any true sailor can sail safely by using dead reconning. Any REAL pilot will confirm what I am saying and only those whose "flying experience" is entirely virtual would dismiss ground detail as "a waste of frame rate". Indeed we should all press as a community for the very maximum detail in our simulated world. It is important to realise that we gamers are actually DRIVING the cutting edge of computer hardware and software development globally. The consequences are increasingly being used by the Pentagon and other western countries to develop the future of remote weaponry and safe military training simulators for everything from aircraft, through tanks to infantry. Yet there are still plenty of luddites out there who think that online gaming itself is "a waste of time"! I even had a close friend, an otherwise intelligent woman, who discounted all online social exchanegs as a "waste of time" because they "weren't real". DUH! (She failed to see that this had also applied to the telephone since it's invention.)

Here are some predictions.

Within 5 years our avatars in FPS games will bear our own faces, scanned in from our own photographs and animated and lipsynced to our voices using VOIP.

Future iterations of Flight Simulator and something like Google Earth will combine to produce a true, dynamic, real-world groundscape, downloaded like the current real-time weather from satellite and limited only by those sensible security precautions that our Military will choose to impose, such as blurring military airbase detail and delaying events in real time where such information might be a security issue. But we will, within 5 years be able to fly over a totally realistic real-world virtual presentation of the ground landscape and traffic of all kinds, including our own homes. If for no other reason than transmitting moving detail via satellite will require far less HD space and software power than storing the whole earth's surface on DVD!

I also predict that there will be a far greater convergence between real and virtual worlds in all media. If FS X doesn't include it already (and it really SHOULD) then FS XI will come with most real-world airline traffic built-in, running in real time, so that one's virtual flying will have to take just as careful account of other traffic as in the real world. The single difference will be the possibility of over riding or inserting replacements into those real-world schedules to allow one's own flights to occur "in sync". This is not a simple matter as crashes and accidents will have to be allowed to affect the virtual world and a decision will have to be made about how and where. By that I mean that behind this apparently simple issue is a more profound one because that virtual world that we all fly in really needs to be the same virtual world and so all that I am saying will have to operate online in real-time. i.e. If somebody crashes their plane the consequences will have to effact everybody else in the virtual community who is flying "nearby" along with all the shared traffic.

I will go further. Within 10 years those of us who choose to will be able to have a universal photo-realistic avatar to represent ourselves online in all games and virtual communities. One will be able to "drive to the airfield" as one's avatar in one's "virtual car" walk to the "virtual aircraft", open the "virtual door" just as one can now in FPS games, enter the "virtual cockpit" and "sit down" virtually. Hell we may even be able to fasten our virtual flight harness and one will be able to see one's own body in shot (knees, hands etc.) instead of the insane empty seats in current cockpits. (Just as we already have that in combat sims like Lock-On) All future flight simulators will be pre-fitted to use Head Tracking IR which will develop even more sophistication and all simulators will automatically be prodiuced with a 3D option.

The next really big development will be permitted by massive increases in bandwidth, dual CPU speeds, multi-threading which will permit the return to the development of true wrap-around virtuality glasses or even helmets, which will permit us to move around and "see" in 360 degrees in our virtual world. Along with that will come 360 degree motion flight sim "chairs" although actually one can buy those already.

Simulation and virtuality are going to play a far greater part in the development of human society, technology, history, demographics and art than any of us can possibly currently imagine and those industries that get into this field first and farthest are going to become the Microsoft's of tomorrow's world.

The bottom lines is this - the human species is just not going to stop pushing until we have made real that greatest of all wish-fulfillment gaming fantasies from Star Trek - the HOLLODECK. We ALL want the Hollodeck - each for our own reason. Amongst the civilised Western nations the internet is already making one's geographical location socially irrelevant. Anthropologists please note that this is a truly massive demographic change in human society whose furture implications stretch out of sight. Information is also becoming harder to conceal which is having accelerating effects politically. IN all seriousness, how long will China's attempts to "hold back history" and "deny individual freedom" last in the Internet's global village?

Those people wittering about "wasted frame rates" should remember that all the greatest original creations of human art, science, invention and technology have come from what was in the first instance "mere" fantasy and "play". i.e. "wasting time"as the less imaginative geeks who are always among our ranks would say! We will always need the engineers to build things better for us and make things work but with out the artists, dreamers, writers and gamers they would have no plans to work from and no objectives to achieve! There is no rank in this. We need all the skills in our human tribe. None are trivial in the end.

You tell it like it is Lionman, I sure hope all that stuff will happen in my life time and not in 150 years. I sure hope so... That would be the BEST FLIGHT SIMULATOR EEEEEEVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!! quote: "cant wait till FSX comes out, I hope it has moving traffic"
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Since we are talking about the future of simulation, I found this very good arcticle on quantum computing. MSFS-Qubit!

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6877077

😎

I dont see why people are complaining about extra ground detail.

Rest assured your framerate will not be impacted by dolphins or cars at high altitude. Things like that will be removed from the sim if you cant currently see it, and readded once you're at a low enough altitude to see them.

The only time this detail will effect long haulers will be having a more "alive" world at take off and landing.

I'v seen on a video of fsx that there will be birds and moving "Airport Vehicles". Dern't say that you need to have the scenery or ground efx tab to the max. I have read that DSX wont drain your system when you play it, ou can turn the graphics down, But to my opionion you would need a mid range computer or possibly Dell will bring out a new gaming rig when FSX come out to handle the detail probly Summer holidays '06.