Captain Lars

244 voters / 366 votes. Thank you!

I admit I didn't take your suggestion seriously. What are you here for?

Apparently a customer desperately looking for OLC SA and Africa.

You are right. A lot of people care enough for expressing their opinion here by voting. But that's just the die hards! My guess is that we can multiply this number by 5 at least.

As long as there are people who fly P3D, XPlane or even FSX, there's a market for these products. This market likely may be gradually giving way to MSFS. TE, Regions and OpenLC will have no future in MSFS. The somewhat limited future in the field of scenery is airports and POI collections. While landclass technology is of no use for MSFS, it is already there. So, while it is a "past technology", it doesn't need invention first, and we can safely assume that people will buy it for their P3D, just as they will buy airports. There's no difference between the two products from a customer perspective. This: has been the key error. I remember the figure, it was 2000 customers. Let's say 600 if we split Asia into three reasonable parts. A quarter of these expressed their commitment to buy an OLC part of Asia. I think that's more than it looks like if we take into account that not all customers visit the forums and express their opinion there. I don't think so. The hype apart, OpenLC can still be commercially viable due to the reasons I stated above. It also takes its time until PMDG has all their planes in MSFS, MS has ironed out the worst bugs and people have better hardware. As it looks now, Orbx has but airports and POI collections in their portfolio. I guess a POI collection is a lot less costly to produce than an OpenLC part, granted. But how much does it yield? They can keep on stating phrases of excitement about "enlarged customer bases" as much as they want, but in my opinion, MSFS has narrowed down their business perspective quite considerably. Following the logic of the worshippers, people are throwing away their P3Ds and view state-of-the-art LC as a somewhat deficient thing of the past. My guess is that ratio comes when the hype goes. Due to commercial reasons, Orbx will / has to continue to produce for the other platforms, too.

And some rumours are just there to cater the needs of the worshipping masses. People need their dose of hallelujah.

Rumour has it that some people were so excited about the new sim that they claimed that addons were not needed anymore in the bright future of MSFS. This broad array of with/without comparisons speak for themselves.

238 voters / 357 votes Three days before the release of the new one, people still vote for a landclass solution for Asia. To be honest, I would have never thought that so many people would speak up in favour of a landclass solution for Asia. 145 out of 238 = 61 % commited to buy (remember, I made this question rather rigid) a single lc product. 141 out of 238 = 59 % would positively buy more than one LC product for Asia. Let's assume Orbx (or someone else) would make three OLC products for the area for P3D for EUR 30 each, these would generate EUR 12.690 just by the people who have a forum account and visit here often enough and who care enough to take part in such a poll.

No. Prepar3D offers no scenery like MSFS does. If this is OK for a customer, he's still going to buy LC scenery for his P3D as much as he is going to buy airports. Why shouldn't he? If this is not OK for him, he's not going to buy airports either. There's no difference between the two categories of products for someone who stays with P3D for the time being.

If you like to fly in the Arctic or in Antarctica, you're better off with the old Addon Antarctica X from Aerosoft, because these areas do not even exist in MSFS. Not everyone is so keen on chasing Giraffes or looking for his house in a Cessna. Not everyone thinks that the lighting in MSFS is so great, or even that the default airports would look somehow... well non-default. MSFS doesn't matter to me now, in 10 days or in a year. MSFS doesn't make sense to everyone. 231 voters / 347 votes

OK, that's good news!

Women and boys' toys, is this a good combination? In the meantime, another fellow simmer expressed his vote and commitment to OLC Asia.

Yeah, me too. Some of the statements by seemingly adult males today were just cringy.

224/335 How many more votes can we get until august the 18th? And how many after this date?

220 voters / 329 votes. I'm afraid I can't really answer this question, you would have to ask Orbx. My take on it is that MSFS 2020 ruined OpenLC, since everyone seems to believe that the new one is going to be the solution to absolutely everything. People rejoice at the sight of a (quite dull) default airport and think that they are not going to need any scenery addon products anymore (well, according to YT comments). Has anyone ever raised the question to which ends you're going to need a TE product in MSFS 2020, a sim that's based on photogrammetry on a world wide scale? I'm never going to understand why people want the same regions done over and over again.

212/316 @carlosqr, don't stop linking to this thread.

202/302

Thank you very much, Carlos. Any help is appreciated! In any case, this should be share-able by posting the URL.

199 voters / 299 votes.

Only three votes left to the next milestone: 197 voters / 296 votes.

Looking fantástico.

Here's the result of the poll I made where simmers like to fly to in Asia as of june 7th 2020. I think it might be of relevance for this thread, too, since we discussed the possible partitioning of Asia in terms of OpenLC. How I made this: I divided the maximum number of votes into four and gave the regions dots in four sizes according to the number of votes received by each.

Let me show you another suggestion: OpenLC Asia Northeast: 23.851.000 km2 OpenLC Asia Southwest: 15.023.800 km2 OpenLC Asia Pacific: 5.079.800+ km2 In this vision, South East Asia is a landclass region on its own, together with the islands of the South Pacific Ocean. This option would still allow for a lot of fancy destinations for each of the three parts and give Orbx the opportunity to model some of the Pacific Islands in greater detail. Alternatively, you could view OpenLC Pacific as one of the stages of a two-stage release of OLC Asia Southwest, alongside with what @Stillwater pointed out. The possibilities are endless.

This might have been the original idea. OpenLC Asia North: 14.693.800 km2 OpenLC Asia South: 15.023.800 km2 OpenLC Asia East: 13.967.000 km2 I see it a bit problematic with this suggestion that Siberia / OLC Asia North doesnt hold any special points of interest, so that the question arises, why anyone should pay for it (though I certainly would). Or they treat Russia as an extension of OpenLC North / Canada and give it away for free or for around 10 Euros. Anyway, I drawed a map of your suggestion:

You understand my suggestion exactly as it was intended and added details. The suggested plan to split the remaining 41 million square km of Asia into two or three parts makes sense, absolutely. Northern America encompasses 25 million square km, its southern counterpart 18 million. Europe in the borders of OpenLC EU not more than 9 million. Africa plus the Arabian peninsula covers 33 million square km. My suggestion would be to split Asia into two parts, a northeastern one and a southwestern one. I did a little calculating and here's what I come up with: OpenLC Asia Northeast: 23.581.000 km2 The Russian territory east of OLC EU, Mongolia, Eastern China, the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and Japan. OpenLC Asia Southwest: 20.103.600 km2 The rest, including the Caucasus, Middle East, Central Asia, India, the Himalayas, Tibet, Xinjian, Southeast Asia incl. Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, optionally stretching to some of the Pacific islands to the east. This repartition of Asia would allow for two almost equally sized landmasses that both feature a nice number of showcases and areas of heightened interest: the cities of mainland China like Beijing, Shanghai, Guanghzou, Japan and Korea for OpenLC Asia Northeast; Israel, the glorious mountains of Central Asia incl. the Himalayas, India, Thailand and Singapore for OpenLC Asia Southwest. For longhaulers, OLC-ANE (the northeast) would allow the route from Europe to all of eastern Asia, OLC-ASW (the southwest) would make the routes to India, Singapore and South East Asia possible. I edited a little map to illustrate my point, OLC-ANE in red, OLC-ASW in blue: