Live erupting volcano’s would be great but the sim can’t yet do live snow cover so first things first eh?
As I said in an earlier post there are loads of third party sceneries out there that put life into the world. For people that want that sort of thing they’re fantastic. A while back I made a Glen Coe scenery add on thats still available over on flightsim.to that puts people out hill walking and mountain biking in the glen and even flying low and slow in a chopper its still difficult to spot them. I realised after making it its kind of pointless trying make the world down there seem more alive because you simply don’t see any of it unless you land.
Road traffic based on live real world information is a bit of a pointless waste of processing power but there is definitely an argument for the road traffic AI to be a bit more finally tuned. You don’t want super busy roads out in the middle of nowhere. A more dynamic approach is needed I think.
I agree with you ! It would be nice to have traffic cross bridges ON the bridge instead of UNDER the bridge. Of course the bridges, even the Interstate 10 bridge, here in Pensacola, FL have been missing spans since the first release of MSFS. Apparently, bridges are not “Eye Candy” enough !
Nobody said it couldn’t be done. It was a comment on your lazy and, to use your word, “facetious” suggestion that this is something that could be achieved with a “couple of lines of code”.
Maybe the fact that this is something that, whilst easy to pontificate about on a forum", isn’t just something that that can be achieved with said “couple of lines of code” is one of the reasons why it hasn’t been done.
Whilst i think certain elements can & should be improved with time, for example the road traffic system (which a certain competitor does much better), ground crew, better AI traffic including the addition of helicopters & seasons etc. It’s pretty time-consuming & technically difficult to go into the finite details beyond that.
This is another reason why i miss the FSX missions (which were somehow much more enjoyable & technically advanced then the recent 40th mission additions to MSFS). They put you in separate & controlled scenarios where the interaction & immersion was able to be much better & more detailed whilst putting you in a range of different experiences.
what I miss the most, and what is quite realistic to do, are streams of car traffic with front and rear lights visible from afar, and point sources of smoke / steam from chimneys, fires, air conditioners (in winter!) lying on the ground, according to wind direction. Imagine what New York would look like on a frosty day. nice dream, isn’t it?
X-plane 11 actually does car traffic pretty well. Even at night you see car headlights moving along highways at night. The car LOD is pretty far too. Wish MSFS had something like that.
I am constantly surprised at how many people don’t realize what a technical achievement this sim is. It is truly unbelievable. It stands miles ahead of all those that came before it. If you had told me just a few years ago that a flight simulator such as MSFS 2020 was technically possible, I would have called you naive and ill-informed.
I had to set traffic (not planes, but cars, airport vehicles etc…) settings to 0 to gain 25 fps since apparently this is what trashed my i9 12900k CPU and caused the stuttering.
What you ask is possible, just not with the current way the sim is designed. Small steps guys, before 2019 noone thought MSFS level of visual fidelity was even possible.
I agree with the last two comments, but as long as such ideas for the future are not stated as an explicit criticism of the current simulator, I’d argue that they should be welcomed.
Maybe this thread ought to have been in the wish list category?
So I agree that we need life in the sim to bring it alive. This is why I buy the boats from seafront simulations. I do like to fly near water often, it’s usually pretty scenery, and the current flat mess is awful especially around marinas. The seafront sims boats really brings it alive. Just a few days ago I was flying around the Solent checking out the boat traffic with my heli, it was heaps of fun.
I’m happy to buy these 3rd party though. This is a flight simulator and I really want Asobo to focus on making the best flight simulator possible. That’s the most realistic flight models, convincing ATC, realistic scenery, and realistic weather. These things are necessary for flying.
I think pretty much everything else can be an optional extra provided by 3rd parties. Of course it would be amazing if the base sim did all of this other stuff for free, but that’s fantasy not real life and I recognise that.
About the only thing I’ve seen in this thread I’m expecting to get added to the sim is seasons. This is kind of a cross between weather and world scenery and I think really would benefit from being core. Asobo have said they plan to add this eventually, I’m hoping for 2024 on this one.
Maybe a faithful representation of the world where all simulated passtimes can co-exist could be an ultimate objective?
Flight simmers could co-exist with racing drivers, truck drivers, ships captains, rock climbers, skiers, divers etc.
A long way off maybe and although early steps towards such “shared worlds” didn’t work out too well for CCP, with Eve Online and Dust 514, for example, we should perhaps never say never.
It could work if one day in the distant future all developers used the same engine and there was some universal and coordinated way of sharing data and states between each “game element”, so for example racing developers could plug in to the world, put their tracks in, and have a kind of meeting / transition point in the over world that triggers the transition to their “game instance” when someone goes there (either by going into a trigger e.g. car park, or fast travel from some GUI menu that is a quick entry to all and any content on offer (and handled by the top level of this coordinated universe). Then the game would be instantly streamed with all latest patches etc (as we will all have 1tb/s internet by then, right?) and the whole thing would be relatively seamless. But then if you’re expecting to see a race going on in real-time whilst you’re flying overhead, there would only be the chance to have ONE race at ONE track at the same time going on? Or how do you choose which “race that’s currently instanced and going on right now” to show? It’s insanely complicated when you think about every game style, use case and genre that would be incorporated. A football match at a specific stadium? What time zone etc etc. Nice idea though!
But any way you look at it, we are so far away from this being reality or for competitor developers to want to even work in this collaborative way, probably disrupting their workflow and increasing complexity / risk of dependency failure. Unless you are thinking of a single developer handing it all but then it’s a never ending project with a team size that would be unrealistic if you need specialist coders for EVERY game genre all under one company.
It would need to be managed incredibly tightly and made “easy access” for specialist genre game developers to want to get involved. But yeah, never say never!
Don’t see the real benefit of just downloading games you and your mates play and just load up what you want to play at the time though.
Seasons are an absolute necessity. Apparently they’re working on it. Really what’s needed there outside of the trees (which are easy enough to apply globally) is green grass/fields vs brown grass/fields. The lower altitudes in western US have green grass in the winter and spring, brown in the summer and fall. Depending on where you are exactly, the Midwest can be brown from fall into spring and green late spring through fall. Seeing green fields with several inches of snow on them in January is pretty funny.
The hard part is getting enough aerial photos to stitch together. On the back half of the year, clear weather and daylight with to do so are much more scarce. Longer shadows, etc.
My vote for immersion and vibrance is parks and athletic stadia. Beaches are also a good idea. Stadia are fairly low-hanging fruit, though. Seems like something could be implemented there first.
