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CCIP · 07-31-12, 10:46 AM

Yeah, I believe Outerra is designed just as a terrain-rendering engine that plugs into other systems.

For all the excitement over it, I keep saying that I'll believe it when I see it in an actual game

I think it's easy to be enthused, but it's been in development for a long bloody time without a single real title using it or indeed announcing commitment to it yet, so we'll see.

Combat Helo looks really cool, but it is a combat sim. As far as civvie flying sims, we'll have to see who can run with it. Right now X-Plane is best-positioned to take the market lead, but there's still a lot of work to do and while it is attracting some third-party development, it hasn't been able to draw the huge Flight Sim add-on community away from FSX. At the same time, it's a title that's been around for a while and still hasn't made nearly as much of an impact as FS - so whether it can or not is also doubtful. If Prepar3D ever decided to go a more commercial route, it might be pretty successful with that community. Other entries into the market, like Aerofly FS, haven't really been able to quite win over the community and take home the bacon commercially.

I actually suspect that the "next big thing" will come from left-of-field, not from a Western developer but from somewhere like Russia (where a lot of FS add-on development and combat sims like DCS, IL-2 and Rise of Flight are based anyway). It will probably be a few years before it shows up, but my money is that as FSX ages, somebody over there will find a way to build a new platform, and do it cheaper than Microsoft could ever do, and more efficiently than X-plane has been able to develop. But we'll see, I guess.

07-31-12, 10:46 AM	#4
CCIP Navy Seal Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Waterloo, Canada Posts: 8,700 Downloads: 29 Uploads: 2	Yeah, I believe Outerra is designed just as a terrain-rendering engine that plugs into other systems. For all the excitement over it, I keep saying that I'll believe it when I see it in an actual game I think it's easy to be enthused, but it's been in development for a long bloody time without a single real title using it or indeed announcing commitment to it yet, so we'll see. Combat Helo looks really cool, but it is a combat sim. As far as civvie flying sims, we'll have to see who can run with it. Right now X-Plane is best-positioned to take the market lead, but there's still a lot of work to do and while it is attracting some third-party development, it hasn't been able to draw the huge Flight Sim add-on community away from FSX. At the same time, it's a title that's been around for a while and still hasn't made nearly as much of an impact as FS - so whether it can or not is also doubtful. If Prepar3D ever decided to go a more commercial route, it might be pretty successful with that community. Other entries into the market, like Aerofly FS, haven't really been able to quite win over the community and take home the bacon commercially. I actually suspect that the "next big thing" will come from left-of-field, not from a Western developer but from somewhere like Russia (where a lot of FS add-on development and combat sims like DCS, IL-2 and Rise of Flight are based anyway). It will probably be a few years before it shows up, but my money is that as FSX ages, somebody over there will find a way to build a new platform, and do it cheaper than Microsoft could ever do, and more efficiently than X-plane has been able to develop. But we'll see, I guess. __________________ There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers. -Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart)