Jim,"A minor amount of research on your assertions would prove to you that you are absolutely wrong. I can only surmise that you make these accusations with no foundation."Gee whiz... that's profound! Just what "research" are you referring to?"When asked to trust in the business advice of "Greg from the FS forum" or "Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer", I know where my money's going."It's your money, put it on whatever ponies you wish. But first you should make an effort to learn what owning a business is all about. Till then, your opinions hold little credence.Regards,

"But first you should make an effort to learn what owning a business is all about."Do you know in fact that I don't? :) I'm not sure how to answer your question on "what research" I'm referring to. You make many assertions concerning what Microsoft's "culture" is, and you make many assertions regarding what Microsoft does and does not understand. I happen to know for a fact that you are wrong in your assertions. If you do some cursory research into Microsoft as a company, you will see that your judgements cannot be based on any solid foundation. You also state that Microsoft doesn't listen to its customers. This is just simply wrong. In addition to listening directly to customers who contact them, they also spend more money than any other company in business today on R&D and user-interface studies. If they were to ignore the results of those studies (which would be required if your assertions are correct), that would be an awful lot of wasted money! I assure you that they do not ignore the results.You appear to be showing a pattern of attacking the man making the argument instead of the argument itself. You have so far belittled Will and me for holding an opinion that differs from yours, and while doing so, you have said that people need to stay on issue. I agree. Let's stay on issue and refrain from personal attacks. Our opinions differ enough that there are plenty of conceptual attacks that can be made. :)Jim

Jim,OK, that research.I understand that Ms does market research, and indeed tries to be sensitive to their customer's wants and needs. But trying and succeeding are sometimes two very different things. One can espouse the strengths and thoroughness of MS's R&D efforts, and their efforts with focus groups, as well as their spoken and written commitments to customer service, but in the end it is the customer's perception of how MS treats them that matters most. And, clearly, MS has alot of unhappy customers. The customers are growing increasingly discontented, which raises the question of how well all of MS's efforts to appease their customers are really working.Back to the point of this discussion... please explain further why MS has no culpability in the flickering screen issue with ATI cards. How is that a piece of hardware, made to perform within current DirectX specs, and it's established drivers at the time of FS9 beta testing is the problem? And if indeed the problem lies in ATI's drivers, why didn't Microsoft do more with them to resolve the issue within their new product before releasing it to the public. Just because Microsoft isn't responsible for ATI drivers doesn't mean they are without responsibilty here. The mere fact that Microsoft knew of the issue before FS9 release (and it's hard to imagine that they didn't know) puts the onus squarely on them to insure the issue was resolved. Afterall, it was their product that was new. The ATI cards and drivers were at that time working very well with most games.

The folks that I know (granted, most are developers working on Microsoft's new .NET Framework) are extremely happy with Microsoft and the fact that Microsoft listened to and responded to what they wanted. I would argue that Flight Simulator users are in the same boat. What have you heard from FS users over the past couple of versions? 1. Better weather engine. Microsoft responded with an excellent engine.2. ATC. Microsoft responded with ATC, and now has better ATC than we've seen in any simulator.3. Better graphics AND better performance. Most would say that FS2004 performs almost as well as FS2002 and yet has vastly improved graphics.4. Better training lessons and documentation. Microsoft responded in a HUGE way.I just don't think your argument holds water, Greg.As to the display anomoly issue, I'm not sure how much more persuasive I can be. When I first posted on the Nvidia disappearing menu issue, people attacked me and said that Nvidia can't fix it. It's a Microsoft problem. In the end, I was proven right. I am confident in my stance on the ATI issue as well. Jim

Spend 2 hours on google and figure out its a driver problem. Not the first for ATI.

>(FDE fix, dancing mountains, etc.). I must be missing the fun.......Havn't even heard of the "dancing mountain" syndrome yet!L.Adamson

Set your sim to have clear skies in an area with lots of mountains around (Seattle is perfect). Climb to about 25,000ft and pan around your virtual cockpit looking at the mountains in the distance. You'll see they don't exactly appear to be solid objects, they tend to flutter around a bit at the top edges (even more noticeable when viewed from outside the aircraft)...

"Landscapes looked like pastel chalk drawings"At least they were accurate instead of having entire cities missing like in FS200x."the old FS2K Mt. Rainier was much better,"FS2k graphics looked better than a PHOTO of the mountain?"the Lake amphibian had glide capabilities that exceeds most gliders"At least you can FLY a glider in FU3, you don't just slowly sink to the ground. It also simulates thermals, downdrafts, rotor winds, turbulence, wake turbulence (not even X-Plane does this) and several other features and you can actually steer the airplane on the ground, it doesn't just glide around as if you're driving on ice covered by soap like it is in FS200x."most panels & aircraft exteriors were "crude" when it comes to graphics........"So are most default FS planes. Just download a third party panel and aircraft."Looking Glass only had to worry about two cities & area's in between."Smaller areas, but with much more attention to detail than the generic FS scenery. I don't know what world you're living in, but the world I'm in certainly doesn't look like FS. If it did, I would be living in the middle of a forest, and the nearby lake would just be a blue square of water. Also the terrain would be basically flat with clearly visible lines linking the elevation points.Also, just like you can download more detailed scenery for a small region in FS, you can get some nice scenery for FU3 like Switzerland and the UK."then buy X-Plane..... I did.."Speaking of scenery and graphics... :-lol

>Set your sim to have clear skies in an area with lots of>mountains around (Seattle is perfect). Climb to about>25,000ft and pan around your virtual cockpit looking at the>mountains in the distance. You'll see they don't exactly>appear to be solid objects, they tend to flutter around a bit>at the top edges (even more noticeable when viewed from>outside the aircraft)...I've seriously never seen this phenomenon, and nearly all my simulated flights involve mountainous areas, since I live in the Rocky Mtn. region. I've let the 747 fly for long periods while I do office work, at altitudes around 35,000', and have made numerous mountain flights at around 25,000' in the new F-16 with VC cockpit; as well as many lower altitude flights in the twins. And as I've previously mentioned, much of my flight time is from spot view. I just don't have "dancing mountains" because if I did......... I'd be quite annoyed! Did have bad "shimmers" for one day, but different settings took care of that. Maybe it's just my tried & true, two year old CPU. Athlon1900XP/Geforce3Ti500/512DDRramL.Adamsonedit-- second pic at 31,000'msl -- no dancing mountains either..

"Finally, this problem of screen flickering with ATI cards is indeed Microsoft's responsibilty. Because Microsoft was the party bringing the product to market, not ATI. ATI had drivers in place that worked quiet well with a large majority of games throughout the entire beta testing period od FS9. Yet MS failed to properly coordinate it's new product with the established drivers. The priority for them was to hit that July 29 release date. Let ATI provide a fix. Arrogance on the part of MS."The DRIVERS are the responsibility of the hardware manufacturer. If there is a function that the drivers can't handle properly, the software developer should not have to rewrite his code to work around this problem. The hardware manufacturers should make sure that new drivers are out quickly to fix this (this does not mean three months like it took for ATI).In this case, the problem seems to be the drawing of GDI windows on top of a Direct3D (or DirectDraw and OpenGL, it seems) accelerated sceen. The checklists etc. are actually standard IE windows with a twist.I have experienced the screen corruption in two other cases: X-Plane (by bringing up the task manager on top of the X-Plane screen) and WinUAE (setting dialog window pops up on top of DirectDraw accelerated screen). But basically any accelerated app will display those problems if you put a normal window on top of it (Task manager is good because it stays on top all the time). In the case of X-Plane, killing the X-Plane process without allowing it to shut down properly actually leaved the display errors (corrupted windows etc.) even after the application was apparently no longer running. Switching to another resolution and back again fixed the garbled graphics permanently. The flashing screen can also be experienced in certain EA sports games.So, what do you want MS to do? Write some nonstandard UI instead of using the Windows standard format because of a BUG in ATI's drivers? Try to hack their way around the flashing screen problem because of a problem with the display driver?

O.K. JimmiG now that you've harped on ATI, what was the problem then with Nividia??? How many companies do you see release products that aren

NV cards have similar problem, which card do you think MS used to develop FS9 with, Matrox?

Could be...

"...now that you've harped on ATI, what was the problem then with Nividia??? How many companies do you see release products that aren

hi dillo,i've got the dancing/shimmering mtns. in the distance as well.p4 3.069700pro (3.8's)winxp sp1dx9.0b