Absolutely we all need to take a wait and see approach. Microsoft has made it abundantly clear that this is first and foremost a Flight simulator and not an Xbox game. The members of the development team also said in front of the preview attendees that were invited to Renton this week, that they learned from the "MS Flight" debacle on what their core audience is, not gamers but serious flight sim users like us.
They've also said they are going to involve third party development and I am inclined to believe that includes company's like ORBX, etc. Now of course with an out of the box entire world landscape showing scenery like we're already seeing in these videos AND over 40,000 airports worldwide that come included as default, that kind of package will be a great starting point of course.
How a company like ORBX can shift their model to this new engine will be the determining factor. I have heard that there will be an SDK so companies may be able to work with that to make their product compatible in the new engine. I'm curious what Holger might have to say. He's been dealing with various simulator engines, code and sim software creation, for a long time.
I am hoping that there will be a way to introduce the already highly detailed airports that we own by ORBX and other various POI's that they've modeled into the scenery world of FS2020. Maybe using some kind of exclude tech that will remove the FS2020 objects at a given airport location and let the ORBX objects placed at that airport populate the satellite locations showing on the Bing Maps detail.
I've been holding off on any new sim purchases like I said before and I've also been so busy that any scenery development on my end has been non-existent. The pipeline may never get completed unfortunately. Unless there's a way to use our scenery inside those areas, I'm not going to want to develop scenery for awhile because I'll be too busy enjoying that 4K landscape displaying below me!!!
Again, I'm not going to say that what we've created here and done at RTMM will end anytime soon. Why? I think that we will still have our home here for quite some time actually because this is a legacy product software base that we are using already and it's over 10 years old. People will not all shift right away to FS2020. There could be cost limitations that prohibit users from being able to afford it. No pricing has been announced at all. What kind of content delivery requirements will it take? High Speed connections might not
be affordable to some. Hardware requirements on computers, monitors and other things that we don't really know about that could be a deal breaker, lot's of things to think about that could come along that keep the FSX/P3D community alive for several years to come.
Let's sit back and enjoy the coming wave and embrace this new feeling of what's next for our hobby. I'm excited.
Brad