Obviously, anything we say or think is speculation; there are little hard facts out.I go with a revamped FSX engine because:1. Their development time is relatively, and they have obviously put a lot of work into scenery design; where would they have the time to totally rewrite a FS engine that has been ten years in the making?2. It appears to have the look and feel of FSx down to some of the flaws.3. I think a revamping will still be needed to take advantage of mult-core CPUs, and to integrate it smoothly into the new application model for Windows 8 (AppX.)I also go with moderately realistic because they started down that road with FSX (eye candy and neat stuff like catapult launches and sling loads over enhanced realism), and nothing I have read so far leads me to believe they will change direction with this new release.I also believe a revamped SDK will be in the works because:1. For all intents and purposes, the current SDK is ten years old; we have to resort to DOS based tools to do some things.2. They have indicated the future is no longer native code like C++ but Java, HTML and CSS; it would only make sense to release a new set of tools that uses the new platform.To see where they will go with Flight, keep your eyes on Windows 8 and MS Office. They just announced their new version of MS Office with more of the applications online, and the App Store will be for Windows 8. Flight will not be developed in a vaccum, expect it to fit in with the rest of the "new world" of Windows 8 and future verions of other MS products.-James

+471.324

Since everyone is speculating, I'll play:It will be the same as it was. :(

So far all I've seen are pretty pictures. Actual game play and physics are a complete unknown.If it's just a bunch of shiny thingies and no improvement on flight characteristics , then it's not going on my computer.

"How could we possibly know?" could apply to this whole forum IMHO.It's Speculation Central.

LOLNew poll. Should AVSIM change this forum name from "The Microsoft Flight Forum" to "The Microsoft Flight Wild Guesses, Idle Speculation and Nutty Conspiracy Theories Forum" ?

So far all I've seen are pretty pictures. Actual game play and physics are a complete unknown.If it's just a bunch of shiny thingies and no improvement on flight characteristics , then it's not going on my computer.

I think even if the flight characteristics are identical to FSX but it looks better and runs at like 30 FPS it will go on lots of people's computers who said it will never go on their computer.Naturally I'm hoping for the best, better weather, better lighting, better performance but I'm expecting the worst, FSX SP3.Wait and see.