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A next gen flite sim is coming?

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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby Thorsten » Fri Nov 20, 2015 7:25 am

Call me a spoilsport, but that's a CFD code - far too heavy to be of use in a flightsim.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby MIG29pilot » Fri Nov 20, 2015 4:14 pm

Spoilsport!
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby Hooray » Fri Nov 20, 2015 4:36 pm

I haven't checked if there are any other existing weather simulations out there, open source or proprietary - but I find it hard to believe that there's nothing that could not be directly adapted to be used for such purposes - on the other hand, that seems to be the case according to this discussion - which only has 2 responses, which is fairly uncommon for reddit discussions: https://www.reddit. com/r/weather/comments/1wl3s2/weather_simulator_opensource/

I guess that having an open source weather engine that could be reused by other projects could be extremely popular, i.e. not just flight simulator.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby Hooray » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:41 pm

Hooray wrote in Fri Nov 20, 2015 4:36 pm:I guess that having an open source weather engine that could be reused by other projects could be extremely popular, i.e. not just flight simulator.


Here's a pretty cool, and very accessible, 12-page PDF research paper from 2010 titled The possibilities of a virtual weather engine: http://www.olafurandri.com/nyti/papers2 ... Engine.pdf
A successful weather engine that’s capable of producing realistic weather phenomena for videos and virtual
environments will without a doubt be a successful product. The goal in most projects is to get as much effects/content/
features into the environment and that they look and work as well as possible.
It is safe to say that if you were to ask any developer or filmmaker that you could save them valuable time, money and
resource, simply by purchasing a powerful specialized product that can deliver the complicated effects in an easy to use
manner, he would answer the question in the affirmative.
And because the engine has such a broad customer base it is very likely that it become successful and its popularity will
grow stronger with each new customer and every new product that uses it. That’s exactly how SpeedTree has gone from
being a small product with bags of potential into becoming the product that the top game developers use regularly for
their best selling games.
The logical assumption could be made that if there’s a market for trees and grass in virtual worlds there certainly should
be a market for for weather. If successful, it is the author’s hope that the effects created with this engine will become the
benchmark for all virtual weather creations. This type of engine has a great chance of seriously impacting the overall
development in future films, games and other media.


PS: The weather engine in Far Cry is said to be based on the "Dunia Engine", which comes with dynamic weather support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunia_Engine

Which does make sense (the lead-developer at Crytek holds a PhD in Met and implemented the weather engine):
Subject: Weather algorithms
Hooray wrote:This looks pretty interesting, while I can't really contribute anything to the algorithmic side at the moment, I think the "Slope Soaring Sim" that we found last year when WooT was working on the ridge lift support contained some neat algorithms and is open source (GPL) and cross platform software.

I downloaded it last year (fairly small) and also took a brief look at the source code, but to be honest I gave up pretty quickly when I read on the webpage that the author of SSS has a PhD in meteorology and written plenty of other simulations :lol:

[...]

Given that SSS is open source and even GPL, it would be perfectly fine to look at the code and borrow ideas from it for re-implementation in FlightGear/Nasal for your local weather system.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby Richard » Sun Dec 20, 2015 12:06 am

I've had a play with the unigine port angeles demo - it's a big download (3.3G) (https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B4kzsw_ ... t=download)

Quite impressive, especially close up; the LOD is good, but I got some graphics artefacts which looked like z-fighting.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby Richard » Fri Jun 30, 2017 9:16 pm

Just to finish the story, and sadly[1] the project that promised so much is no more.

From the Next Generation iNTERACTiVE Software facebook

It is with a great amount of sorrow that we have had to close the doors (metaphorically speaking) of Next Generation Interactive Software and with it the Next Generation Flight Simulator. After nearly 2 years of work by members of NGiS, and several Cooperative companies, NGiS no longer has a 3D gaming engine to build our Flight Simulator in. We would have loved to continue the project, but we do not have the financial means to create our own engine, and the cooperative simply feel apart.
We would like to thank everyone who supported us in this endeavor and we truly hope that the recent offerings of X-Plane 11; P3DV4; and Flight Sim World will continue the trend of advancing their flight simulation platforms with the advancing technology so that we might truly get a Next Generation Flight Simulator in the near future.
Thank you Again
Michael C.
Vice President NGiS


----------------
[1] but not unexpectedly; too ambitious and with no funding lead to nothing.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby erik » Sat Jul 01, 2017 7:29 am

Yeah it was an ambitious project. I normally don't say it can't happen (anything can happen given enough time and money) but I already had my doubts.

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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby stuart » Mon Jul 03, 2017 3:49 pm

Not at all surprised that this has fallen apart. They clearly didn't have any real funding behind them, and they never seemed to be able to show concrete progress. Quite apart from the management style of the people involved and the ambition of the project.

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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby akoyeh » Thu Apr 26, 2018 2:33 am

And yet another once-promising 64-bit flight simulation is shuttering it's doors:


Flight Sim World: Closure Announcement
April 23, 2018

"It is with great sadness that we announce the future closure of Flight Sim World.

As you know, we always had a strong ambition to bring a new experience into the established world of flight simulation, one that deliberately overhauled both the flying experience and the graphical fidelity, offering new ways to fly.

Unfortunately, after many detailed discussions, we regrettably don’t see a clear direction that will allow us to keep to the development time we’d want, alongside the player numbers we need.

So, slightly before a year since we first launched into Early Access, we have made the intensely difficult decision to fully scale back all future development on Flight Sim World and remove it from sale on 24th May."

https://live.dovetailgames.com/live/fli ... nouncement

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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby glofix » Thu Apr 26, 2018 4:25 am

It's a very difficult task to build a profitable flightsim from scratch. I wonder if they could open source their product or any part of it (models, libraries, sounds, graphics...). It's a pity that advanced projects get trashed and forgotten.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby bugman » Thu Apr 26, 2018 10:06 am

glofix wrote in Thu Apr 26, 2018 4:25 am:It's a pity that advanced projects get trashed and forgotten.


That's the key difference between proprietary and free or open source software. Flightgear can never disappear like this :)

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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby curt » Thu Apr 26, 2018 1:01 pm

Consider MSFS which started out as Bruce Artwick's thesis (another UIUC connection) in 1976. His goal was to prove that available microcomputers could do flight simulation. He founded sublogic, created a successful program, and that was later bought out by MSFS which continued to develop it for a number of years. This is still the benchmark against everything else is compared.

X-Plane started out similarly (I think?) Going from memory, it was an outgrowth of a college job that Austin wanted to keep working on. He developed the 'blade element' theory into a full fledged simulator and figured out how to do all the other parts that he needed for his sim. I think for a long time his office was out of a corner of his bedroom. His work became commercially successful and he was able to expand from there.

For FlightGear we adopted an open-source strategy for growth and world domination.

Along the way, several groups have tried ramping up commercial ventures. I've seen some amazing demos, and even a few of them got to first releases ... but couldn't sustain the momentum commercially. (Or in some cases couldn't plot a trajectory to get out of the initial debt and pay back their investors.)

We live in a culture of IPO's and venture capitalists and high flying visionaries can quickly grab $5-25 million startup money if they have the right connections and know how to make a dynamic presentation. But then you have a deep hole to climb out of before you can ever break even. (And you have a bunch of new bosses telling you exactly what to do, when to do it, and applying the big time pressure on you to turn a profit soon.) Sometimes this approach works, but so often it doesn't. Personally, most of the success stories I have seen are from people that built their way up from the bottom the hard way and stayed out of debt. They found ways to build bigger successes on top of smaller successes. Even the story of Microsoft plays out much that way in their early years. Elon Musk (tesla, space x, etc.) who is king of the hill right now ... they are still talking about puling in more venture capital and hoping certain portions of their business will break even or turn a profit real soon. In my opinion they are still mostly living on hopes and dreams and borrowed dollars for now, and it takes quite a dynamic leader to keep bringing in the big money! So good luck to them, they are amazing cool people doing amazing cool things, but I do wonder about their long term trajectory as a company.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby glofix » Thu Apr 26, 2018 9:06 pm

I'm all in the opensource boat but it would be really when a company discontinues a project and let all those work rot because is not profitable anymore. I understand that some parts can be scrapped for using in another projects or resold or have any IP value but maybe others could be used to improve OSS projects if the owners liberate them. I don't know the strategic details of FG development and maybe it's a miss shot but, could FG benefit of this on any way? If so maybe we can ask them if they are open to donate any of their work to the project. It would be not only an improvement for this amazing sim but also a way to honor their job in a cool product.
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Re: A next gen flite sim is coming?

Postby Parnikkapore » Fri Apr 27, 2018 1:24 am

Think of Blender.

It started its life as an in-house tool for an animation studio (hence the utilitarian UI!), and that went out of business or something and it's on the heavy ditch-or-opensource decision. They ultimately picked opensourcing it, and it (and Ton) lived till today.

Now if other industries can follow its footsteps...
There are free alternatives to (almost) every program you encounter. You just have to find them.
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