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I'm getting a bit of a bad feeling about what Flight will be; based on sim experience and a bit of logical guesswork.

Some of the current screenshots of Flight look quite good; although they seem to have shown very little variation
so far in the world locations. Added to this, the rumours that it will be a web based sim, and M$ wanting to move
more and more towards cloud computing, what I see is this:

The Flight WILL be a re-vamped sim, in every single way, but it will be very limited with the amount of scenery. I
believe that we will be forced into buying extra scenery areas; we will not have a great number of detailed airports
available to us "out of the box". I think that Flight will incorporate FSX/ORBX scenery to create all of it's add on
areas, and we will have to buy, country by country so to speak.

My logic follows seeing some screenshots over on the AVSIM.com forums, where comparison screenshots show
beaches, and scenery methods identical to what ORBX appears to be making now.

This is all speculation on my part of course, but I'm happy to bet that I am partly right. M$ knows they
screwed up with FSX performance, and they have promised much improved performance in Flight. Maybe it's
because it has much less scenery and will not be so bloated now?

Food for thought anyway.

AJ.

I can see where you're coming from, AJ - but I think you're being a little overly pessimistic.
However, it's ALL speculation at this point apart from one reality: developed ground-up for 64-bit, DX11, multicore processors.
So it's 'win' for me no matter what the reality.

Heck, even if this results in a unified marketplace a-la 'App Store' for flightsim, we'll be far better off. And since people are going to spend the money anyway, it makes little difference on what is included imo.

However, there will be at least an option to get worldwide 'basic' scenery from the start - my reasoning for this is that Microsoft knows how strong their support is from the VATSIM/IVAO side of things and having restricted scenery versions would cause havoc with these communities (and make Microsoft very unpopular with core buyers) so I can't see them going down the 'build your own world one penny at a time' route. MORE likely, everything will HAVE to be sold through the app store which means that Microsoft will get a piece of each sale for add-ons. Makes sense for them and it will make it far easier for freeware and payware developers alike to get their stuff on board.

As I said before - the biggest threat that Flight brings is to independent add-on retailers such as Just Flight and Flight1. I have no idea where these guys will fit in the future (or if they will even be needed).

If the sensation of speed doesn't work right, GA flying becomes one thing - awfully boring.
At least that's what I experience in the cockpit of the FSX GA aircraft. It's like you take ages going anywhere!



FU was great, no doubt, but basically throwing out a 20xx remake with another brand is an insult to both the MSFS *and* the FU heritage.




Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.
Screenshot of Hawaii.

LOL - have you ever heard of a pre-alpha build?
Hawaii is probably the only area they've modelled to date (to get the fundamentals down).

It's knee-jerk reactions like yours that make me wonder why Microsoft even bothers making new versions of Flight Simulator.
That's the problem with catering to fanboys; they're never happy.

Reading your other comments...well, perhaps flight simulator isn't for you?

The missions in FSX are certainly not boring...lot of fun, actually.

Doesn't look very alpha to me.



After the shutdown of ACES, my personal bar for any new version of a flight simulator from MS is HIGH. After all, they've perfectly denied me a SP3 for FSX, which could have fixed annoyances in the default aircraft or made DX10 a viable alternative to DX9.

It's not that I could fix the former things, but it would require a lot of time...and time is a problem.



My plan B is FlightGear, should Flight not be for me.

Are you a software developer? ...because I am. When you build things, you start with one 'area' and build your product. Then you expand out. What you think it 'looks' like has nothing to do with it. This product is still at least a year away. Assuming that it's only going to have one area purely because that's all that's been shown is...well...lol!



Too bad. Aces code was junk and it probably cost a fortune just to make SP1 possible. I cannot blame nor expect Microsoft to do any more with FSX. They made it playable which is enough imo. (and you can bet your sweet cookies it wasn't core ACES programmers that wrote SP1) Microsoft made the only sensible decision: Scrap it, rethink and start again. It will be better for everyone ultimately.

I will remain sceptical until being proven otherwise by MS.



But they could have at least thrown out a treat at the end, like the source models for the default planes or anything else that could be built upon/improved.
Now I'd have to rebuild the entire effin' VCs to fix one or two faulty switches!



What? It's open source, it's free and still more of a hobby than an industry.

Suit yourself.



Have they ever done that? Even then - the default planes are nothing to judge (or cry) over in my opinion. It's the platform that should be sound. At any rate, I didn't find much wrong with the default planes personally. If I want the experience, I spend the money and get better stuff (i.e. Real Air simulations)




To each his own, I guess. You get what you pay for.

If I want the experience, I'll get hours in real aircraft and don't blow all my cash on payware.

FSX became a good, stable sim after the two service packs. Sure, it still could be better and make full use of DX10, but it can take fair bit of abuse, especially when developing.



The "bang-buck" ratio for FG is through the roof.

You should know that it's quite likely that FSX was terminated as a product because MS sold the core (ESP) to Lockheed Martin. Lockheed then turned around and created a product called "Prepar3d" based on the ESP 1.0 code base.

I suspect Microsoft then decided that they really didn't want out of the flight simulation niche and that's how Flight was born.

As to FlightGear... If you'll take the time to actually examine it, I think you'll be surprised. Keep in mind that while it may not be visually as pretty as MSFS, it wipes the floor with it on technical merit. Nobody uses MSFS for hard science, but quite a few use FlightGear.

I run the Hudson server for the FlightGear project - you can pick up fresh builds of FlightGear for MacOS X, Windows (both 32 and 64 bit) as well as Linux. You'll need to make sure you've got a fresh copy of fgdata (the scenery, etc) to use those builds though. Head over to http://flightgear.simpits.org:8080/

FlightGear is for the technical user. If you want something along the lines of "smack the big red button and get a food pellet" type, stick with MSFS.

g.

With all due respect, Gene - I will investigate Flightgear again but your impressions of MSFS are somewhat jaded and (in my opinion) completely incorrect. I know of lot of PPL and commercial guys who think Microsoft FS works just fine - so I cannot accept your interpretation of Microsoft as a technical representation other than being an extremely biased comment based on your own vested interest in FG. Yes, it's only as good as the .air model - but if you have a proper craft to drive, this is not a problem.

As far as being 'technically accurate' - why should I go with Flightgear (that has crap visuals) and not choose say...Xplane?
The 'hard science' part is purely because of the way MSFS is designed which is to interpret the flight model as programmed rather than calculate it according to geometry. This doesn't make MSFS any less credible as a sim (provided the model is programmed correctly) - it just means that it can only be used as a sim, not a research platform. As far as 'smack the red button and get a food pellet' - there was a great article written by a 767 pilot that pitched the LevelD against the real thing and LevelD flew bang on the numbers, accounting for weather, etc. Hardly 'smack the red button.'

It's funny how everyone tries to sell an alternative sim by trash-talking MSFS. One thing that puts me off Austin Meyer and X-Plane (because trashing the competition is extremely unprofessional).

LOL - ok Heretic. You don't like spending money. (or just don't have it) I get it.
Enjoy FG!

I never do instrument flying. I only do VFR with small planes and GPS with commercial airliners. That's why it is always interesting to me. Especially with clouds, storms, low visibility. Can I find the airport? Can I land without crashing? What will the other city/airport look like when I get there? Can I find that tiny mountain airstrip in the middle of nowhere? What will I see on the way while low level flying? Can I pull my Learjet up next to a American Airlines 757 at 25,000 feet, and how close can I get to it? This is all fun and adventurous. Hours of enjoyment. I have no desire to push a button and fly by instruments or VOR/NDB (I don't even know what those things are and don't care to know). Too boring.

Enhancing FSX graphically and with third party A.I. and real world liveries, and just flying around VISUALLY with all kinds of weather and times of day and types of skies (with REX), THAT is what FSX is to me. It's never boring.

I agree with RabbitC how competition fails time and again to supplant MSFS. They can't. Even real-world pilots love FSX. I would never spend a dime on FlightGear or X-Plane. They are too sterile, although REX finally took pity on X-Plane and made something for it.

I can't vouch for FG or XPlane, but MSFS' system of preprogrammed curves and factors, combined with e.g. weird interpretations of speed vs altitude vs N1 makes .cfg and .air file editing a trial & error party.

As a developer, you either just don't bother with the whole flight dynamics deal and just deliver a very rough equivalent of the real thing's performance or you have a team member who spends months fiddling here and there to make the aircraft fly right on the numbers.
(That's what LDS did.)

I'd rather just have a FEM model of the airplane and its systems and let the sim engine do the rest than messing around with n+1 coefficients and curves.



It's also funny how, after 5 years on the market, you can still start an outright flamewar with "LoL, FS9 (or FSX) sucks, lol."





Well, FS has the advantage of a larger team of programmers and generally more funding than the competition.

I'd come up with this rather long and much-hand-waving-required reply and then it dawned on me that it didn't really matter. People will use what they enjoy and that's that.

You're doing yourself a great dis-service if you dismiss FlightGear based on the quality of its scene generator.

Austin is a brilliant programmer that just happens to have a personality that will have you reaching for a crowbar inside of 5 minutes if you ever find yourself on the opposite side of an issue with him. That's often a flaw in genius programmer types. Ignore him as best you can.

The best flight dynamics model in FlightGear (there are two others, YaSIM and LARCSim), is JSBSim - you can read more about it here: http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/

g.

No one said MSFS was perfect - but the point is sound: you can achieve accurate flight simulation with it.



That's assuming the physics model is correct - it's a big ask in my opinion. I'm not saying it's not, but I WOULD argue that an aircraft such as PMDG or LevelD or Real Air that has been tweaked to fly just like the real thing (regardless of what is required) is more soundly accurate than a virtual airframe that has been dropped into a flight model and 'interpreted.' I'm not saying the latter isn't valid, but it has its own potential failings. To date, nothing compares to LevelD's add-on in any wave, shape or form (if you know of another please tell me) so MSFS trumps on that alone. As I've said, I have spoken with both PPL and Commercial captains (one was a BA 747 driver, in fact) and they all swear by MSFS.



You call it 'starting a flamewar.' I call it 'acting in an ignorant fashion'. There have been a number of very silly comments made against MSFS in this thread. That's not being fanboyish - that's stating fact. If one is to be taken seriously in critique, they must acknowledge strengths as well as weaknesses. All competing products have their relative 'good' and 'bad'





That's a interesting excuse.

I'm definitely not dismissing it, Gene. I'm just looking for credibility. I'll check out your links.

Austin is a very intelligent (if not imbecilic) individual. However, I stand by the fact that he cannot be taken seriously by some because of his very poor attitude. This may sound trivial, but it stands for much in many minds including my own.

If you've got the time, yes.



I hear the A2A stuff is pretty good, too. Never tried it though.

Well, I can understand the appeal of MSFS to real CPL/ATPL owners. After all you get decent AI traffic, ATC, weather airport, aircraft and terrain renditions (not considering that all of these elements are supplied by third parties). Other sims haven't achieved that (yet).



I develop for FSX. Is that acknowledgement enough?



It ain't an excuse. Twenty paid full time programmers can do more than five paid full time programmers and fourty spare time, unpaid programmers.

There's a new video up at the Flight website. Webisode #4 - Explore