I really hope they build a completely new simulator, from the ground up,,60fps in the highest of settings needs to happen for 2011+ technoglogy

I really hope they build a completely new simulator, from the ground up,,60fps in the highest of settings needs to happen for 2011+ technoglogy

My feeling is that this is exactly what MS has in mind for Flight. Hence the marketing break with the past. As far as I have seen Flight isn't marketed as "The successor to the highly acclaimed FSX" etc. etc... I'm taking this to mean that they are rebuilding things from the ground up and we shouldn't expect backwards compatibility.At least I'm hoping. This is all speculative.It will likely be awhile before we have more concrete information.

with the focus on the universal appeal of the experience of Flight.

Jump out of a window. You'll have a great 'flight experience'.

social connectivity

Fire up your MSN, you'll have same. Live is a devilish invention. I still can't get GTA IV up and running.

MS Flight might be a "Vista" in the sense that it will try to do some new things but get them wrong.

Sorry to say, but... exactly.

Jump out of a window. You'll have a great 'flight experience'.

I personally wouldn't recommend this.For flying is only the second best feeling in the world.The first best is landing.

At least if this means a complete rebuilt from the ground-ups, I expect to see future SDKs being improved and less limited. The more features we get, the more realism will be perceived. Dave.

Somehow I still expect an almost "Sims 3" kind of upgrade. In the Sims 3, they updated a bunch of stuff, like to graphics and u.i. interface and everything. I don't believe it was 100% backwards compatible, and was more socially involved than 2. It had better performance, but kept the same underlying game, just enhanced. I would love to see that happen with Flight. I would be okay waiting for addons, but I would continue with FSX in the inerim. I've always been the 'get the latest and greatest' type, so I'm going to get it just to say I have it. My fear is that it's the Flight Sim's world's Vista like Ahuimanu said above. Microsoft does have a tendency to jack up some things when attempting a whole new generation of something. Just my opinion.

For those that are speculating, some of your questions are answered — at least partially — in the press release accompanying the screenshots:

Wednesday, December 8, 2010 — Welcome to News from the Development Team!Welcome! We’ve created this section to provide news and updates direct from the Microsoft Flight development team. We’ve been getting all your emails and comments and are creating this central point of contact to respond to your questions. Currently, we’re still early in the development process, so there are many things not yet ready for detailed discussion. We’ll address what we can for now and will provide more in-depth information over time.Since the very first introduction to Microsoft Flight at Gamescom back in August 2010, we’ve received a tremendous response from both new and longtime Flight Simulator fans. We truly appreciate the warm welcome back. For this inaugural “News from the Development Team” update, we want to give you some context for our new direction. For starters, we’re still some time away from launching the product — far enough out that we are currently unable to provide any details, such as the launch date. We apologize for any frustrations this may cause. We can’t wait, either, to deliver this new experience to all of you! We’re delighted to be able to provide a view into our game at such an early time and to share our progress as we get closer to finalizing the product. We’ve never reached out this early in the development cycle before, so hang in there, and we hope you enjoy the sneak peek.A number of you have asked, “Why did you drop ‘Simulator’ from the title of the game?”In addition to the FAQ on this topic, we want to directly address the concern that by dropping the “Simulator” from the name, we’re dumbing down the experience. Quite the contrary! We’ve developed on the “simulation” aspect for many years and have no intention of losing that legacy. What we’re doing now is improving the total experience while building on this legacy, enhancing the enjoyment for all who share a passion for flight. The more people who join us in the Flight experience, the greater the opportunity we’ll have to do even more.Many of you are concerned that because we want to appeal to a wider audience, we must be building an arcade game.We don’t need to create an arcade game to welcome a wider audience. But we do need to improve the total user experience if we’re to be successful in welcoming new audiences into the experience of Flight. The passion and fascination of flight is powerful, with so many different aspects to aviation and different levels of enjoyment to experience. There is distinct value and strength to be gained by welcoming a wider audience, and we can’t claim to have done the best job of it in the past.What does appealing to a wider audience mean?It means improving the user-interface experience, achieving better performance on today’s hardware, providing more focused challenges for people who aren’t quite sure what to do next, and introducing more persistent experiences for people who return often. It also means keeping alive the freedom to go where you want, when you want, and to do what you want. Regardless of their hardware power, piloting experience, or level of interest, many people have enjoyed the traditional flight-simulation experience as a solitary activity. We see a compelling social aspect to the experience inherent in the fun, and we need to better enable and support this dynamic to strengthen the entire Flight experience for everyone.Based on the previous webisode, we’ve heard, “This doesn’t look any different from FSX!”As we said in the introduction, we’re still early in the development cycle, so the fact that you comment on the similarity to FSX is great! This comment alone should ease some of the arcade concerns. Please follow along with our progress as we continue to release more webisodes, screenshots, and additional information. In the end, we hope that you’ll have a great time looking back at these early samples and being part of the evolution. Thank you for all your enthusiasm and support!If you want to get advanced notice of updates to this section and the website in general, please sign up for our mailing list at http://newsletters.msn.com/Insite.aspx?SNID=2893.Thank you,The Microsoft Flight Development Team

I really hope they build a completely new simulator, from the ground up,,60fps in the highest of settings needs to happen for 2011+ technoglogy

Sorry, but that is a really unhelpful thing to say for three different reasons. Firstly, fps mattered back in 2003 ~ 2004, a time when a reasonably powerful machine was a 32bit processor running 2.4GHz, 128Meg meant a serious graphics card and hyper threading was brand new. Putting a limitation on the next incarnation of the franchise based of restrictions from the previous version (not even the current version) is a bit like saying "I demand it runs in 512k RAM!". It can be done, but only by compromising so heavily in other areas that it bears a price not worth paying. Remember, in 2005 when FSX was being finalised, everyone expected 2007 hardware to be a hyperthreading core running 4GHz. (Oddly enough, exactly what you need to make FSX sing!). Secondly, what is the point in limiting what it can do on future hardware? By specifying "...in the highest of settings" for 2011, what have you got to look forward to in 2012? And thirdly, there is really no point setting limitations based on future hardware anyway since, obviously, we don't know what it will be. For all we know, AMD is planning to release a massivly parrallel but low speed chip, ARM will re-invent the market with a 64bit RISC and the new kid on the block will be dynamically programmable virtual ASIC's.A more reasonable request would be something like asking that the game experience of MF be almost as smooth as FSX for the same (current generation) hardware with equivilent graphic settings. That does NOT mean all sliders at MAX, it means slider settings that produce the equivelent visual results! New features could include (for example) a much better weather model, a surface model that allows for sloping (if not bent) runways and the ability to scale up visuals and other effects as hardware improves, taking advantage of current style multicore processors, current GPU's and physics processors.

Am I missing something or did that press release say nothing at all of substance?

Sorry, but that is a really unhelpful thing to say for three different reasons. Firstly, fps mattered back in 2003 ~ 2004, a time when a reasonably powerful machine was a 32bit processor running 2.4GHz, 128Meg meant a serious graphics card and hyper threading was brand new. Putting a limitation on the next incarnation of the franchise based of restrictions from the previous version (not even the current version) is a bit like saying "I demand it runs in 512k RAM!". It can be done, but only by compromising so heavily in other areas that it bears a price not worth paying. Remember, in 2005 when FSX was being finalised, everyone expected 2007 hardware to be a hyperthreading core running 4GHz. (Oddly enough, exactly what you need to make FSX sing!). Secondly, what is the point in limiting what it can do on future hardware? By specifying "...in the highest of settings" for 2011, what have you got to look forward to in 2012? And thirdly, there is really no point setting limitations based on future hardware anyway since, obviously, we don't know what it will be. For all we know, AMD is planning to release a massivly parrallel but low speed chip, ARM will re-invent the market with a 64bit RISC and the new kid on the block will be dynamically programmable virtual ASIC's.A more reasonable request would be something like asking that the game experience of MF be almost as smooth as FSX for the same (current generation) hardware with equivilent graphic settings. That does NOT mean all sliders at MAX, it means slider settings that produce the equivelent visual results! New features could include (for example) a much better weather model, a surface model that allows for sloping (if not bent) runways and the ability to scale up visuals and other effects as hardware improves, taking advantage of current style multicore processors, current GPU's and physics processors.

Are you aware 60FPS is a standard for framerate smoothness on virtually any 3D game besides FS? FS is not inherently slow because it's a simulator (which is the line that's been put out forever) but because it's a very old 3D engine at the core that dates back to 1998 and 2000 when GPU-based rendering was in its absolutely infancy. It works through CPU-based draw calls, it has no dynamic lighting engine (which can be done completely on the GPU today and would eliminate the need for "night textures" and so on.) If they design the engine with modern techology, there is no reason a flight simulator can't run at 60FPS with graphical quality that FAR surpasses FSX. The power in these new GTX 4/5 series and Radeon 5/6 series cards largely goes to waste right now in FSX. Load up a game like Metro 2033 if you want to see what the state of the art looks like in gaming graphics. Even on it's "normal" settings it looks better than any game you've ever seen. And yes, there's still room for it to grow, there's a "Very High" setting in that game with some advanced DX11 stuff that you need triple SLI or future hardware to run well.

Thanks Ryan, you've just set the bar for MS and the Flight development ;-)Guys, get to work!

Are you aware 60FPS is a standard for framerate smoothness on virtually any 3D game besides FS? FS is not inherently slow because it's a simulator (which is the line that's been put out forever) but because it's a very old 3D engine at the core that dates back to 1998 and 2000 when GPU-based rendering was in its absolutely infancy. It works through CPU-based draw calls, it has no dynamic lighting engine (which can be done completely on the GPU today and would eliminate the need for "night textures" and so on.) If they design the engine with modern techology, there is no reason a flight simulator can't run at 60FPS with graphical quality that FAR surpasses FSX. The power in these new GTX 4/5 series and Radeon 5/6 series cards largely goes to waste right now in FSX. Load up a game like Metro 2033 if you want to see what the state of the art looks like in gaming graphics. Even on it's "normal" settings it looks better than any game you've ever seen. And yes, there's still room for it to grow, there's a "Very High" setting in that game with some advanced DX11 stuff that you need triple SLI or future hardware to run well.

That's very informative. Thank you Ryan.As for those who say that the press release essentially said nothing of value, I must disagree. As far as PR goes (It's still PR. We need to remember this) this release was extremely detailed. The "What does appealing to a wider audience means" section in particular was quite verbose for modern PR standards.We need to remember that this is a press statement and not a developer report. There isn't going to be any more detailed information until later in the development cycle.

Are you aware 60FPS is a standard for framerate smoothness on virtually any 3D game besides FS? ...

Hi Ryan, I am aware of what modern game engines can acheive and even though I haven't tried Metro 2033 yet, I would dearly love to see MF come close to those visual standards. In fact, I would happily settle for 2007 level visuals but not if that meant sacrificing fidelity. I was under the impression that the 60FPS requirement was more to do with multiplayer shot-em-ups where slow refresh and/or lag times can mean the difference between a scoring a headshot and getting killed, but in the context of simulations, where there is not a huge amount of unpredictable movement going on, visual smoothness (while totally subjective) can be acheived at much lower refresh rates. As you know only too well, in the context of FS, people have been complaining about refresh rates "with all sliders MAXed" since before FSX was launched. Very rarely do these people pay attention to the fact that the sliders go so much further then the previous versions. If the poster I replied to were to get their wish, then MF 'must' have the same visual limits as FSX - there just wont be room for the sliders to go any further. Perhaps Micrsoft have learnt their lesson and will include a slider called "FSX Slider compatibility" where MIN means no restrictions to MF and MAX means all sliders have the same limits they did in FSX, then anybody who maxes everything without thinking will be happy because they still have FSX performance (and limits) and anybody who is willing to tune the sim to their hardware and requirements can get the best it has to offer.