Live traffic with liveries

[CptLucky8]

@zkdos

The Asobo developers have said on several live streams that they have been working with airlines around to world to acquire licencing of their branding but given the current global aviation climate, this has been a low priority for many of the major operators.

This is comment which I find puzzling to some extent and I’ve commented about this a few weeks ago:

@CptLucky8

AI Traffic and Liveries

I believe there is a disconnection again between language and facts. Jorg is telling us it is a simulator for simmers, yet, Microsoft is trying to control and shape everything for us, like the AI traffic liveries. Of course it will be hard for Microsoft getting all airline companies licensing, because it has always been. Long time developers like me having worked with ACE studio back in the day do know airlines are reluctant, do remember the American Airlines threats, do know the PT fiasco in trying to impose the community paying royalties for a famous airline livery…

This is not new, and this is why there is no commercial offering for this but a great choice of freeware libs of liveries and models for all other simulator but FS2020. Why wanting to control this (in addition to sandboxing 3rd party devs) instead of just creating what is necessary in the SDK for just helping these freeware authors doing the same libraries for FS2020?

I have no doubt there is some value in the actual FS2020 SDK approach for the XBox version, and this might suits well the need for some airliner developers on the PC version as well, but to me, and I’ve been working nearly 20 years in this industry, I believe what makes a simulator for simmers is 3rd party developer add-ons, not just the simulator itself.

Having said this, I strongly hope and wish Jorg will be able to secure licensing rights from all and every single airline company, but in the meantime, if this is only to get a handful of liveries per-region every 3 months… And if this is Air France we’re talking about, what will aircraft look like at KSFO for example: Air France 747 in the middle of yellow A320, or will it be limited to traffic showing up within the France World Update boundaries?

And then what about accuracy of model/liveries matching? There are some companies not operating certain types of aircraft and this is a long time resolved question with most of 3rd party libs and solutions already, but what about FS2020?

Now let’s add on top of this 3D model optimizations and variety. Again a question already solved in the simmer community for a long time with very complete libs of models. But what about the standard models in FS2020, which can’t even display their landing gears beyond 50m or so?

Really, I believe in the vision, but I fear execution will leave a sour taste and this makes me wondering what would benefit most FS2020 from a simmer perspective (maybe not from Microsoft perspective though), between investing time and resources securing assets and liveries and models, vs investing time and resources building the necessary SDK feature for 3rd parties.