Since so many scenery add-ons make such a mess of the FSX installation,and since compatibility with FSX scenery ought to be a design goal for Flight,perhaps it might be wise to implement compatibility with FSX scenery (andaircraft) via an "FSX Compatibility Sandbox".Then all FSX add-ons would be required/tricked into installing their files onlyin the Compatibility Sandbox.Once add-on install completes, a special MS Flight module would analyse thefiles in the the Compatibility Box for misbehaviour, conflicts, duplicate airports,etc. and present the simmer with an on-screen report where the user couldselect fixes (whenever possible), e.g. selecting the desired airport in case ofduplicates before the sanitized add-on files are transferred to the Flightinstallation (but still kept in a separate directory!)Cheers,- jahman.

Sounds a little ambitious considering how much work is needed just to rebuild the engine to a workable state as it is. Great idea though, I think it would be nice to be able to clean all of your add-ons off your installation without having to go through multiple directories to find the files/folders they've left behind.

If you're asking, you're asking for too much. Good idea though.

Well, just in case I passed it on to the brainiacs at MS.Thing is the more stable the platform and compatible with FSX the faster the rate of adoption and the greater the rate of growth of the add-on ecosystem. If done right, Flight and associated ecosystem could grow very rapidly indeed. Such are the vagaries of exponential growth.MS Flight Programmer Brainiac:Cheers,- jahman.

Since so many scenery add-ons make such a mess of the FSX installation...

Examples please so I can make sure to avoid them. All the sceneries in my sig haven't made a mess of anything so I guess I have either choosen well or have been lucky, haha.

Thing is the more stable the platform and compatible with FSX the faster the rate of adoption and the greater the rate of growth of the add-on ecosystem. If done right, Flight and associated ecosystem could grow very rapidly indeed.

:( My maxim is; by nature frame rate and stability are inversely proportional to ecosystem size.But I agree with you that better diagnostic tools would help everyone manage much better.Some additional error reporting is already available in FSX...it's an FSX.cfg option.

:( My maxim is; by nature frame rate and stability are inversely proportional to ecosystem size.But I agree with you that better diagnostic tools would help everyone manage much better.

By ecosystem I mean the number of add-ons available, the sales figures, number of buyers, etc, rather than what is actually installed on a particualr PC, but I'm with you (and my installation as you know is big... and getting bigger! There's so much wonderful scenery coming out :-) all proof the former leads to the latter.

Some additional error reporting is already available in FSX...it's an FSX.cfg option.

Cna you explain? Is there an FPS hit if enabled? I do get CTDs too often and my start-up is currently at 16 minutes! Yikes! (No SSDs).Cheers,- jahman.

I think Jahman's proposal makes a great deal of sense. If I knew that my existing addons would work with MS Flight (and that I would experience significant framerate improvements using the new platform), then I would purchase the product as soon as it is released. If there is no compatibility with FSX addons, then I will not be purchasing MS Flight.I wonder how many others are in the same boat?

I think Jahman's proposal makes a great deal of sense. If I knew that my existing addons would work with MS Flight (and that I would experience significant framerate improvements using the new platform), then I would purchase the product as soon as it is released. If there is no compatibility with FSX addons, then I will not be purchasing MS Flight.I wonder how many others are in the same boat?

I will not be buying straight away until I see what MS have done with the performance issues. I also want to see how Flight runs in big city environments with high settings and payware aircraft. With newer harware coming onto the market it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that I may not even purchase Flight at all if I can get FSX running the way I want it.It make take time for payware add-ons to appear for Flight, assuming no backwards compatibility of course, and that will further delay my purchase decision.Bryan.

Seeing that Flight will not arrive at least until Nov 2011, I have decided to upgrade my 3.5 year old system to a 2600K that I plan on running at 4.5+ GHz with 2x570. This ought to run FSX far better than what I have now.So Flight to be bought soon after its release, it needs to be backward compatible with at least some of the stuff I have on FSX now or it has to have major improvements in areas that interest me. Online play, missions, DLCs are not going to do it. Improvements to SDKs in the areas of flight dynamics, weather, ATC will get me to take a close look.Otherwise, I will likely end up buying it, for half price or less, months after its release just to see what it is about.

Guys, what you don't realise is that by demanding there be compatibility with FSX addons you are keeping Flight in the past rather than letting it get better. To run FSX addons will require old legacy code to be included with Flight: code that is from as far back as FS98 and FS95 in some cases.The goal of flight should be to start a new, much better simulator which performs as well on current hardware as other games do. This will not only make Flight, in my opinion, far more accessible, but also far more enjoyable.

Guys, what you don't realise is that by demanding there be compatibility with FSX addons you are keeping Flight in the past rather than letting it get better. To run FSX addons will require old legacy code to be included with Flight: code that is from as far back as FS98 and FS95 in some cases.The goal of flight should be to start a new, much better simulator which performs as well on current hardware as other games do. This will not only make Flight, in my opinion, far more accessible, but also far more enjoyable.

This is not necessarily true, as you can very well have new code access previous scenery/aircraft file formats.And even if you couldn't, legacy code would only need to be loaded if the simmer wanted to run FSX add-ons, thus not hindering out-of-the-box Flight performance at all when no FSX add-ons are being run.Oh, and this is assuming all code will be re-writtem, which is highly unlikely, since software developpers profile their software to find the performance bottlenecks and tend to only re-write the affected modules.Cheers,- jahman.