Hmm, I'm flying around with essentially the default scenery and pretty much everytime I fly I'm absolutely blown away by how good it looks. In fact, ftmp I find the visuals in FS9 to be drop dead gorgeous. Thats not to say that if you fly around looking for problems you won't find them - I mean do you really expect the sim to model every stream and detail on the entire planet correctly? It'd certainly be nice if MS were to release a patch that cleaned up a few rough edges, but I've flown sims that never got half as good as FS9 even after a whole series of patches. I feel I'm getting every cent of my 60 bucks out of this sim and them some...

I disagree that FS2K2 was the first version not to have received a patch. I don't remember which version it was now, maybe FS95, but one of them had major errors with a faulty magvar model that made the ILS's in the US all wrong. It was never fixed. We had to wait for the next release for an official fix, though users came up with fixes for the problem.-Basil

I think the next real quantum leap in fs technology will be when we get the 64 bit Intel processors "en masse". Before you flamers for AMD jump up and tell me there arlready is a popular 64 bit processor, I know, and Mac has one too. But MS is in the Intel world deeply and basically controls the direction of progress in PC hardware and software technology and when Intel gets it going, they (MS) will release a 64 bit operating system and other software. It is only a question of time and most likely some time in '06 will be the time. MS hedges on its release date of the XP replacement but everything looks like late '06.Just in time for the biennial release of the new fs:-jumpy :-lol

Each new version usually fixes a lot of things that was wrong with the previous version. On top of that, however, they also add a TON of new features that cause new problems, then those problems get fixed in the next version and we get yet another set of new, buggy features. Luckily, FS is fairly modular, so we can disable features that don't work so well (example: New autogen objects, new airport-landclass blending). Also, by the time all SDKs are out and addon developers can actually start using the new features, the next version is already released.The FS programs needs a "feature freeze". They should completely STOP adding features and only make sure everything that is already there actually WORKS.When you keep adding things without proper testing, you end up with a total mess.This applies both to professionally developed programs and smaller projects - When we did programming at school, I made an adventure game. I kept adding characters, puzzles etc. and by the time I was supposed to be finished with it -NOTHING- worked :-lol