PMDG:我们的展望

以下为Facebook英文原文。下有谷歌机翻。

Captains,

There is an ancient curse that occasionally comes to mind:  "May you live in interesting times."

As a software developer and a pilot, I am a big fan of boredom.  Boredom means everything is stable.  To my point of view, stable is good.

A few years ago the sim world went into panic when Microsoft killed off their flight simulation development and walked away from the market.  Those of you who have been here a while will recall that I have been quite vocal in my musing that this was a good thing, as it would open the door to newer ideas and innovation and might signal a renewal of the hobby after a period of pain.  I have continued to support this point of view- and I think 2017 will be the year that finally begins to see modern software and hardware architecture bringing joy to simmers.

We are coming out of a period of unprecedented platform stability.  A full decade with a single platform has allowed developers to innovate and build capability without having to re-learn the process every two years as we used to do "back in the day."

With that in mind- we are starting to get quite a few folks asking questions about future platforms so I wanted to put a bit of information out to you in order to ease any concerns you might have about our plans for the future:

Prepar3D v4:

There is quite a bit of "noise" in the community, none of which has been confirmed, indicating that Lockheed Martin is working on the next iteration of Prepar3D.  For our P3D customers, please know that our long-standing policy has been that we intend to support our existing products through P3D v4 "at least."  This is included in the purchase you have already made and will not require further costs.  It is reasonable to expect that a new version will include new features, and we expect that we will adopt those that make sense and roll them out using the micro-update process we have been developing over the past couple of years.

All of this is just a re-statement of the policy we announced in January 2015 when we launched our first products for Prepar3D- nothing has changed.


Dovetail Games' Flight Sim World:

A number of folks have been wondering what our official position is with regard to the recently announced Dovetail Games' Flight Sim World package.  I wanted to summarize our thoughts in hopes that it will prevent some of the uninformed conjecture that has started up on the topic.

Summary:  We are very excited to see Dovetail's work beginning to bear fruit and we look forward to learning more.  At this juncture it is really not a simple task to answer the many questions being asked about whether or not PMDG will support the platform, whether our existing product line can be converted to FSW, etc etc.  The bottom line is that we don't know much of anything about the platform.

For a period we were in fairly regular communication with DTG regarding their plans and progress, but that communication dried up shortly after we declined to offer our product line via the DTG controlled Steam channel for FSX-Steam Edition, and we haven't really heard much of anything from them since that time.  We received a few email announcing staff changes, but we received no replies to our ongoing outreach effort, so at the moment when I look at the planning board for the next year, I see only a question mark next to the DTG platform.

We are simply waiting to hear, and remaining open minded.

With that said, I can boil the whole thing down pretty easily:  Once we have a platform and an SDK and some marketing direction from DTG to work with, we will make a business decision:  If the platform is capable of supporting highly complex simulations of modern airliners (we presume it will) and if we are able to market our products through our existing channels then there is a high degree of certainty that we will support it.  If the market will require participation through a market controlled channel such as steam, the likelihood of our support diminishes rather significantly depending upon the costs of doing business through that channel.

As for whether our products can be ported to their new platform- it is safe to presume that they can...  After all- it is just software.  We do not doubt that it will require some dedicated development work and that is why we have the big question mark next to DTG on the planning board...  We know work will be required, but we don't know when or how much to plan...

So stay tuned...

In the mean time, work progresses on the nearly completed PMDG DC-6 Cloudmaster for FSX and P3D, and the PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II for both FSX and P3D is well on it's way to testing.  We will likely have another couple of updates for the 747-400 very shortly, as we have been continuing to chip away at open items as we move the 747-8 down the assembly line.

As you can imagine, adding in all of the 747-8 functionality has created a bit of chaos in the code base, which has slowed down the update cycle for the 744, but I think we are through the worst of it now.  (touch wood, hold thumbs, cross fingers and toes, etc...)

These may not be "interesting" times, but they are darned exciting!



Oh and wait until you see what else we are working on.

支队长，

有一种古老的诅咒，偶尔会想到：“愿你生活在有趣的时刻”。

作为软件开发商和飞行员，我是一个无聊的粉丝。无聊意味着一切都很稳定。对我来说，稳定是好的。

几年前，当微软杀死飞行模拟开发并走出市场时，sim世界变得恐慌。那些曾经在这里的人会回想起来，我很m quite地说，这是一件好事，因为它会打开新的想法和创新的大门，并且可能在一段时间之后发出兴趣的更新疼痛。我继续支持这一观点 - 我认为2017年将是最终开始看到现代软件和硬件架构为煨食者带来欢乐的一年。

我们正在摆脱前所未有的平台稳定期。整个十年的单一平台使开发人员能够创新和建立能力，而无需每两年重新学习这个过程，就像我们以前做的那样。

考虑到这一点，我们开始有相当多的人询问有关未来平台的问题，所以我想把一些信息提供给你，以减轻你对未来计划的担忧：

Prepar3D v4：

社区中有相当多的“噪音”，其中没有一个被证实，表明洛克希德·马丁正在进行下一次的Prepar3D的迭代。对于我们的P3D客户，请注意，我们的长期政策是，我们打算通过P3D v4“至少”支持我们现有的产品。这已包含在您已经购买的购买中，不需要额外的费用。期望新版本将包含新功能是合理的，我们期望我们将采用有意义的内容，并使用我们在过去几年中一直在开发的微更新过程将其推出。

所有这一切都只是对我们在2015年1月发布的第一款产品，我们在2015年1月发布的政策的重新声明 - 没有任何改变。


Dovetail游戏的飞行模拟世界：

一些人一直在想，我们的官方立场是关于最近发布的Dovetail Games的“飞行模拟世界”包。我想概括一下我们的想法，希望它能够防止一些在这个话题上开始的不知情的猜想。

总结：我们非常高兴看到Dovetail的工作开始有成果，我们期待着更多的了解。在这个时刻，回答关于PMDG是否支持平台的问题，无论我们现有的产品线是否可以转换为FSW等问题，问题真的不是一个简单的任务。最重要的是我们不了解平台的任何事情。

在一段时间内，我们与DTG进行了有关其计划和进展的正常沟通，但是在我们拒绝透过DTG控制的Steam频道为FSX-Steam版提供我们的产品线之后，这种沟通已经干涸了，我们还没有听说过从那时起，他们中的大部分东西都是。我们收到了几封电子邮件，宣布员工变动，但是我们没有收到我们正在进行的推广工作的回复，所以在我看看明年的规划委员会的时候，我只看到DTG平台旁边的问号。

我们只是等待听到，并保持开放态度。

就这样说，我可以很容易地把整个事情搞清楚：一旦我们有一个平台，一个SDK和一些DTG的营销方向，我们将做出一个决定：如果该平台能够支持高度复杂的模拟现代航空公司（我们假定它会），如果我们能够通过我们现有的渠道销售我们的产品，那么我们将会很高的确定性来支持它。如果市场需要通过诸如蒸汽等市场控制渠道进行参与，那么我们支持的可能性就会因业务通过该渠道的成本而显着下降。

至于我们的产品是否可以移植到他们的新平台上呢，可以安全地假设他们可以...毕竟只是软件。我们不会怀疑，这将需要一些专门的开发工作，这就是为什么我们在规划委员会旁边有一个重要的问号，我们知道工作是必需的，但是我们不知道什么时候或多少计划...

所以请继续关注...

同时，FSX和P3D几乎完成的PMDG DC-6 Cloudmaster的工作也取得了进展，FSX和P3D的Skys II的PMDG 747-8 Queen都是测试方式。我们很可能会再次为747-400进行更新，因为随着我们将747-8向下移动，我们一直在不遗余力地削减开放项目。

你可以想像，加上所有的747-8功能，在代码库中造成了一些混乱，这减慢了744的更新周期，但是我