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发表于 2016-4-7 12:33:02
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来个教育贴,先看看三种平台历史, 该文是一个在P3D商业飞行培训公司供职的开发人员写的,很诚实的对比..
Let's start with a brief history lesson. What eventually became Microsoft Flight Simulator started development in 1977. In 1982 Microsoft licensed it to show off the new 16-bit technology and branded it Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.00. Development continued through the 2006 release of FSX and until early 2009 when Microsoft announced the closure of Aces Studios, the brains behind the franchise. Months after the demise of Aces Studios, Lockheed Martin announced it had negotiated the purchase of Microsoft Enterprise Simulation Platform (ESP) intellectual property which is the commercial use version of FSX. About a year later Lockheed Martin released Prepar3d for commercial use. Switching over to X-Plane, it was first released in 1993 as a simulator on the Mac platform and focused on the Piper Archer. The brain child behind it was software engineer and pilot Austin Meyer. Austin created a company (a very small one) called Laminar Research to handle the development of X-Plane. By the time X-Plane was just coming out, Microsoft already had a mature product and considerably larger team working on future versions. As we all know every product has its strengths and its weaknesses. Austin wanted to address all the weaknesses in Microsoft Flight Simulator by focussing on those areas when developing X-Plane. Austin put his emphasis on the realism of the simulation where MSFS used a table to estimate what an aircraft would do in certain conditions. Microsoft really wanted to blend the pretty visuals of a game with the accuracy of a simulation product and certain concessions were made because of that focus. For X-Plane, it was all about how real does the aircraft fly and not about how pretty it looks. Laminar Research put all their effort into a flight model that calculates the physics happening on the airfoil and aircraft in real time. Over the years of development of both platforms without a doubt Microsoft was lightyears ahead in market share. Their team was larger, the graphics were incredible and the 3rd party quality add-on market was growing at a rapid pace. Unless you were strictly wanting the ultra realism of the X-Plane flight modeling, the Microsoft solution was hands down the winner. While X-Plane only had a small market share, Laminar Research did a few things that later down the road would be a critical key component in its growth. They gave everyone the tools to create their own aircraft, airfoils, scenery and plugins... They also made it easy for individuals to develop their own add-ons. For most of X-Plane's history the community created add-ons has been incredibly strong. Once the demise of Aces came along, X-Plane as a platform and development tools were now matured. For a while it was really the only flight simulator that was undergoing any active development leaving the developers of Microsoft Flight Simulator add-ons wondering what to do since future development of FSX was over. This set the stage for the X-Plane's explosion. Established FSX developers like Carenado joined the solid X-Plane only developers like Flight Factor and FlyJSim in making incredible 3rd party add-ons for the first time in X-Plane's life time. Even PMDG has announced upcoming X-Plane projects and I am sure more developers will come. |
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