Hi,Both sims have their unique programming qualities, but we are just more aware of the FS9 qualities and work a rounds. For us it's not a big deal supporting both because I understand the FS9 base program pretty well. We'll support FS9 until it becomes clear that from a business standpoint it is not worth our efforts.Thanks,

On a GA aircraft with a 3d panel there are likely well over 1000 lines of object script.It requires two versions because FSX and FS9 scripts are not compatible

I'll bet that Eaglesoft is glad they still develop for both sims!!

You got that right in one! Danny does have a point though. Because the workload is increased to support dual platforms, projects can easily take up to twice as long to get ready for market. :(

Some developers support both, but I suspect it does more harm than we appreciate...

...this is a very poor choice of words.I don

I think the golden age of MSFS was around 2005-2006 and ever since then I can see the enthusiasm on the various forums has waned (as has my own). In recent years we have hit something of a bumpy road and things have not gone smoothly:i) FSX - whichever way you cut it FSX did not live up to the expectations of many users. It didn't live up to the pre-release hype and a great many users were left sorely disappointed by the lack of performance and failure to take full advantage of contemporary hardware. FSX was also not compatible with many of the most popular FS9 addons.ii) The RTM/SP1/SP2 issues meant developers had to deal with a moving target, delaying the introduction of new products to the market and obsoleting existing ones.iii) More than a few developers engaged in the rather cynical practice of porting existing FS9 models into FSX and then charging full price for them, with all the inherent issues of using FS9 models in FSX.iv) All of this combined to make the uptake of FSX by the user base especially slow. The community and market was split, and that split endures right up to this day, almost THREE years after the release of FSX.v) The closure of Aces and uncertainty over the future of the MSFS series.vi) The rampant commercialisation of the hobby, with multitudes of developers and publishers all pushing their wares, many of them with unsatisfactory support and customer service combined with ever increasing prices and elaborate anti-piracy measures has created an adversarial relationship between the developer and customer.vii) The glaring lack of freeware for FSX compared to earlier versions.viii) There are too many payware addons chasing too few customers. It seems everyone and their dog is now selling something for MSFS. The market is unsustainable.Look at it this way - if you were a newbie to the hobby of flight simulation you would be faced with having to spend a considerable sum of money on high end hardware, then spending a considerable amount of time setting it all up, researching the black art of tweaking Windows and FSX to achieve the best results. You would then be faced with a bewildering array of increasingly expensive products to choose from, having to work out what is and isn't compatible with your setup, jump through hoops to get the addons activated on your computer... and finally if you have any problems you have to deal with often very unfriendly and unhelpful developers.Is it any wonder the hobby is in decline?Nowadays it's all about commercial developers releasing whizz bang addons with all the latest bells and whistles, trying to keep up with the latest hardware and constantly tweaking trying to get your setup to work properly. I find that I simply don't enjoy FS as much as I used to, and I think that holds true for a lot of others too. The friendly side of flight simming has all but disappeared. I think this change has occured over the last five or six years when developers stopped to be enthusiasts and hobbyists and became businessmen. It just seems everywhere I look there is somebody ready to try and make money out of my enjoyment of this hobby.What I find interesting is the military flight simulation community. Back in the late 1990s the market was saturated with combat flight simulations. The publishers were producing expensive to develop titles with long development cycles that appealed only to a niche of the market. The big developers pulled the plug and it seemed like it was the end for military flight simulators. Most of the big names slipped into history, some of them moved to other publishers or developers and the whole hobby of military flight sims seemed to be on life support for quite some time with only a trickle of new titles.Today the big developers from the UK/US who were the staple of military flight sims have gone. The Russians have taken over development of most of the military flight sims, with outfits like Maddox Software and Eagle Dynamics giving us the IL-2 series and Flanker/Lock On/DCS series. Recently released from Neoqb (another Russian developer) is the all-new Rise of Flight. On the horizon is "Storm of War" and an A-10 expansion for DCS (with more aircraft planned for the future). The critically acclaimed Over Flanders Fields series has recently seen its first commercial release "Between Heaven and Hell" which has been received extremely well by the community, having done truly amazing things with the old CFS3 platform. The leaking of the Falcon 4 source code some years ago spawned a huge outburst of community development for that simulator, culminating in the latest release of Free Falcon 5. Likewise someone managed to hack the data files for IL-2 and that has resulted in the community adding new aircraft, cockpits and maps to the sim. A WW1 addon for IL-2 called Canvas Knights is also in development.Ten years ago the military flight sim was where we are now - market saturation, falling sales, rising costs. It then went through a painful period of realignment and is now alive and well with the right balance between commercial interests and enthusiast interests. That is the direction our hobby needs to move in.

Even though I has never being into Military Airplanes or CFS3, your comment summarized well what has taken place in the last 5 years or so. Cheers,MAB

Haha. Everyone thinks FSX is going in the crapper. Well look @ this. There are so many new features that FSX developers have made/discovered, its amazing, and most could never be possible with FS9.Lets list a few*Dynamic Lighting, sorry I forgot what this is called, but colors of the sky can affect the atmosphere, clouds, ground, autogen, etc.*3D cockpits in which you can see the depth of the needle in the altimeter, you can see the dimensions of knobs, etc, artificial horizon actually looks real and has depth, and is smooth.*Default features HDR (Light Bloom), animals such as birds, elephants, etc. Airplane can cast shadows, VC shadows, ground scenery can form shadows, Shader Model 2.0, bump mapping, etc*Cessna Mustang has new icing effects*PMDG J41. Based on the loads you choose for the aircraft, you see the loads on a 3D piece of paper in the cockpit. Just like real life.*Lotus Sim makes new lighting effects for strobe lights, and landing/taxi lights, instrument lights, you can see rain in the VC. *Add-on developers have custom animations such as pitot tube covers, ground power units, etc, etc*Active Sky and REX with weather (finally PIREPS)*So much more that you can't list*and FSX never ceases to amaze me because I just say this today, which blew my head of my body!http://realenvironmentxtreme.com/forum/ind...hp?topic=4769.0 Seriously, people said this was never possible due to limitations within FSX, but it seems like there is a way around limits, or barely an limits at all with Flight Sim! This is GREAT! :(So many features on the wish list for FSvNext (below in my sig) that we thought were never possible for FSX or Xplane have been developed or discovered and its great!...and there will be hundreds maybe even thousands of special effects and features that can be developed for FSX and not for FS9 or X-Plane.

I'll bet that Eaglesoft is glad they still develop for both sims!!

Have heard of any future Eaglesoft projects? I really enjoy their Beechjet 400.

Haha. Everyone thinks FSX is going in the crapper. Well look @ this

Most of those features you list are "eye candy" (I never really liked that term), which really seemed to be the focus of FSX. Not a great deal was done to actually improve the simulation aspects from an end-user perspective. Where are the sloping runways? Braking effectiveness based on runway conditions? Better ATC? Better AI traffic handling? Better turboprop modelling? What about the still crude damage model?I never said FSX is going down the toilet, simply the enjoyment and friendliness of the hobby is disappearing because of the commercialisation and the market cannot sustain so many commercial developers all at the same time.

In my mind there

Have heard of any future Eaglesoft projects? I really enjoy their Beechjet 400.

Look at our website... ;)http://eaglesoftdg.com

Most of those features you list are "eye candy" (I never really liked that term), which really seemed to be the focus of FSX.

That's exactly it. I'm one of the many that stayed behind in fs9 purely for that reason. Besides looking prettier...fsx does not do much to actual dynamic simulations and inturn just lowers fps from what I'm used to.

We aren't going to turn this into a FS9 vs. FS10 thread are we?We'll need the beating the dead horse animation if we do.

Most of those features you list are "eye candy" (I never really liked that term), which really seemed to be the focus of FSX. Not a great deal was done to actually improve the simulation aspects from an end-user perspective.

Most of the features that HE listed are eye-candy, that doesn't mean those are the *only* features FSX has and FS9 hasn't, that improves also the simulation aspects.The issue is, many of them are only available by programming Simconnect so, developers that are willing to use them, have to scrap FS9 compatibility, because there's now way to have them in FS9 and, even in the best case, when FS9 might be *hacked* into having time, requires a so different approach, the it's not worth the effort to have them in a cross-platform way.For example, you are mentioning a "better AI" handling. Using Simconnect it's possible to create AI traffic that behaves like proper AI traffic, that flies using real world routes and flight planes, which wasn't possible in FS9. I believe UT2 uses this kind of approach to generate AI. This IS a clear example of something that affects the realism of the sim.Also, it's possible to programmatically create ground airport traffic this way.There are other example of what is possible using Simconnect in a creative way, like interaction with weather, conditional scenery animations ( and yet, there are still well respected developers that pretend is not possible to create interactive animations anymore in FSX and FS9 was more powerful...which is wrong, it's just that FSX is entirely *different*... ). Simconnect offers also many useful services to Gauges developers, like much better handling of the simulation events, in order not to use unreliable methods or horrible initialization problems that are usually solved in the wrong way in FS9, like asking the user to "load the Cessna first", and such. And, let's not forget the Shared Cockpit feature, which is great and open a whole new dimension in flying, and is way more realistic too, because most of the airplanes over a certain size are not supposed to be handled by a single pilot.I'm sorry not be be very specific on this but, believe me, FSX is a MUCH more reliable developement platform, even OUTSIDE the "Eye Candy" domain.BUT, it requires the developer to be fully committed to it. Those who are developing cross-platform, especially airplanes (scenery developers can still get away more easily with what backward compatibility still exists in FSX), and are applying FS9-method to their "FSX" products, even it they WORK (and no, it's not enough to compile the airplane .MDL with the FSX SDK just to call it "native"...), they are not really exploiting FSX. Perhaps they just a couple of bump maps, which is also not enough to qualify an FSX airplane as truly FSX native.That's the main issue: if there WASN'T a market split, maybe more developers would really invest their time in RE-LEARNING the way an addon is made. So, it's really a chicken-egg situation: FS9 users don't see much incentive to upgrade, because, judging the products available, it SEEMS that FSX it's just more "eye candy" so they don't switch, and developers don't fully invest in FSX, because of that.

Most of the features that HE listed are eye-candy, that doesn't mean those are the *only* features FSX has and FS9 hasn't, that improves also the simulation aspects.The issue is, many of them are only available by programming Simconnect so, developers that are willing to use them, have to scrap FS9 compatibility, because there's now way to have them in FS9 and, even in the best case, when FS9 might be *hacked* into having time, requires a so different approach, the it's not worth the effort to have them in a cross-platform way.For example, you are mentioning a "better AI" handling. Using Simconnect it's possible to create AI traffic that behaves like proper AI traffic, that flies using real world routes and flight planes, which wasn't possible in FS9. I believe UT2 uses this kind of approach to generate AI. This IS a clear example of something that affects the realism of the sim.Also, it's possible to programmatically create ground airport traffic this way.There are other example of what is possible using Simconnect in a creative way, like interaction with weather, conditional scenery animations ( and yet, there are still well respected developers that pretend is not possible to create interactive animations anymore in FSX and FS9 was more powerful...which is wrong, it's just that FSX is entirely *different*... ). Simconnect offers also many useful services to Gauges developers, like much better handling of the simulation events, in order not to use unreliable methods or horrible initialization problems that are usually solved in the wrong way in FS9, like asking the user to "load the Cessna first", and such. And, let's not forget the Shared Cockpit feature, which is great and open a whole new dimension in flying, and is way more realistic too, because most of the airplanes over a certain size are not supposed to be handled by a single pilot.I'm sorry not be be very specific on this but, believe me, FSX is a MUCH more reliable developement platform, even OUTSIDE the "Eye Candy" domain.BUT, it requires the developer to be fully committed to it. Those who are developing cross-platform, especially airplanes (scenery developers can still get away more easily with what backward compatibility still exists in FSX), and are applying FS9-method to their "FSX" products, even it they WORK (and no, it's not enough to compile the airplane .MDL with the FSX SDK just to call it "native"...), they are not really exploiting FSX. Perhaps they just a couple of bump maps, which is also not enough to qualify an FSX airplane as truly FSX native.That's the main issue: if there WASN'T a market split, maybe more developers would really invest their time in RE-LEARNING the way an addon is made. So, it's really a chicken-egg situation: FS9 users don't see much incentive to upgrade, because, judging the products available, it SEEMS that FSX it's just more "eye candy" so they don't switch, and developers don't fully invest in FSX, because of that.

and then there are of course these new uses of fsx (and esp)...I want this one for my living room ( FAA Advanced Aviation Training Devices (AATD.) :( :http://www.redbirdflightsimulations.com/rbfmx.asphttp://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=256065and this one for my den :( :http://www.flight1tech.com/Simulation/G1000/g1000.html