Great post Jason

I was hoping to design my favorite airport and share it with others, but now Flight has ruined that dream :( ! They could at least allow freeware addons... Business is all they think nowadays.

Let's hope that MS see sense on this and open up the doors so that ANY developer can at least submit their work, and be allowed to brand and market it how they want. As apps for iPhone, for example. That seems to me to be a reasonable way of doing things.

I think, you have a general problem in your argument:There isn't one Microsoft. You are talking about a huge company with different departments. You can expect the general management has no real interest in Flight. There is one team that thought that they could get something new from this old property, and they achieved to get a budget from the management. If they fail to make enough money within a certain time frame they simply shut the project down.Their team was responsible to find the best method to make money from their idea, and if they fail the general management won't look very closely at this small project. It was simply an idea that didn't work. It won't be the managers that close this project, it will be the accountants.The problem is: They already put two years of work into the project, and if you trust the reports they were thinking about third party involvement in the beginning, but they shot they idea down and I think that they did it with a reason. The big problem with thzese projects is: You know that you need a certain amount of money for your budget, The more revenue you promise, the bigger the budget you might get..In the beginning at least parts of the team were obviously interested in the third party developers, but then something happened and they obviously totally alienated most of the bigger third party companies. There was no real reason behind it. They could have easily said: "Ok, guys. Here is the deal first we make a release with a limited number of locations,once we stabilized the environment we will work out a SDK for you and talk ybout the licence agreements that you have to sign to download your plug-ins vie our store. There won't be any external uploads.Nothing major, nothing final, everything would have been the same as it is now with a difference: There wouldn't be so many ###### of third party developers...The only reason for their aggressiveness, that I can find: They simply learned how much money these developers were making and it was a very small number compared to the money that they have to earn.There is one major advantage if you don't have to take care of third parties. There is no need for scripting workflows, everything can work directly in the shared memory. This is something that you try to avoid with external programs since one stupid bug could crash the whole program. It is obvious, something shook the whole team up and they were no longer interested in talking to these tiny third party producers.I must admit, if I would have to write sceneries for the download crowd I would probably go for something like hunt for oxygen packs on mars, or fly around dragons, than tidyous rounds on earth. If you want to sell excitement you have to offer them more excitement and bigger changes than you will find on earth with realistic planes and sceneries.

The requirements for Microsoft software certification are at the Microsoft website for anyone to read. We don't need to know what the deal was because it is there to read. There is no bargaining, proposals, or agreements.

Very true, and major add-on providers would, IMO, be suicidal to agree to such terms. They essentially strip the developer of the rights to their own software, including barring self-advertising, free updates, etc, not to mention the sizeable chunk MGS would take from every sale. The royalties don't bother me, that's licensing, but it would result in increased cost to the consumer (vs. the dev taking a hit). As a developer, one would have to be crazy to buy into the "we're going to sell 30 million copies so it's worth it" spiel. Just doesn't seem too promising IMO...

...not to mention the sizeable chunk MGS would take from every sale.

My personal experience has been that the online store want 30 to 35% of the selling price. It's been bantered about that MS wants 30%.My best guesstimate is that the former reaches a lot fewer potential customers than what the latter might.Based upon the above, what part of my math is not working?

The part about what you might spend just to MAYBE have your software be approved by MS. How would you like to spend months programming some DLC and all the costs that go along with that, pay MS an application fee, submit your your work and then have MS say no thanks? Then what? You are out time, money, and a DLC that is now good for nobody but you. How much $$ are you willing to invest in this process?

How much $$ are you willing to invest in this process?

Jim,At my age, there is no $$ spent in the time invested. It's either develop or watch Oprah. Wait a minute! Oprah has left the airways, now it's Ellen!While expected ROI is nice, for a lot of developers it's not a full-time occupation and any $$ made is supplemental. My ROI is what it costs to power a computer or two. That amounts to maybe $5.00 a month. The rest is my time and effort. Effort is my choice and time is something I have an abundance to share.Each developer has to evaluate whether it's worth it or not to develop products for the Flight Simulation community. I might suggest for many that it's not worthy of a spreadsheet to answer that question. There will be a few who do need to do a proper business pro-forma analysis when deciding what direction that may take. But those (IMO) are few and far between.The business world is littered with those who failed to adapt to a changing financial model. Expecting different from the flight simulation world is not wise, IMO.

What have they seen in return....?

A well-lauded and successful franchise that has been synonymous with Flight Simulation on a PC. What else did they expect?

Back then a pubic, free-for-all SDK made sense. Today, it doesn't. Times change, it's different now - thank Apple :)

I'll pay for the SDK, I'd be happy to. It appears that there will NOT be a publicly available SDK is all.

And they'll see less than back, by over a factor of ten.

Please provide the facts informing this assertion...

All simulators are, by the english definition, video games(as much as the old farts hate it):http://dictionary.re...owse/video+game

Wow, couldn't you have linked to the definition of a simulator?

 

The thing with freeware is that it's motivated by pure interest and enthusiasm,

I do agree with your post, unfortunately often the road to Hell is paved with good intentions (freeware) and sometimes not so good intentions (payware).The victim of an open environment of course is system stability.We are all aware of the commercial advantage to MS of closing Flight, but the other advantage is a stable gaming system.Part of the reason for MS deciding to close Flight I might surmise is the preponderance of ill-designed add-ons that mess-up your FSX installation shamelessly over-writing standard FSX files. Another culprit are add-on installers that believe an "uninstall" is simply restoring a previously backed-up copy of a cfg or xml file, so woe the one to uninstall add-ons in the wrong order or their FSX installation will be irretrievably broken.The astounding variety of anti-piracy features we, the 100% always paying members who never stole software, all have to go through during an FSX re-install (I presume now fully automatic for Flight) is another hassle done away with via a closed Flight environment.I'm sure there is a lesson here for commercial and freeware developpers of the costs of not getting together and developping voluntary minimum standards and a standards compliance rating system to weed out those add-ons that are dangerous to the stability of an FSX installation.It's all nice and dandy when FSX and your add-ons work as they should, but ask yourselves over the years how many serious simmers has our hobby lost because they just didn't have the time to sort-out FSX instability due to add-ons and got fed-up and reformatted their HDD to never again install FSX?Of course MS is also partly to blame for lack of tools to assist in identifying the source of any instability, too often limited to "App Crash: FSX.EXE".The answer is FSX grew explosively beyond anyone's wildest dreams and did so before a decent infrastructure could be mounted to manage the quality of that growth. Chauncey Gardner might say "The tree needed a tutor". So now Flight is closed.Just some musings on the pros and cons of an open simming platform.Cheers,- jahman.

Edited February 15, 201214 yr by jahman

I think you hit on a lot of very good points jahman. Anyone who has spent any time in the muddy world of FSX add-on's will testify to all the DLL errors and copy protections you need to wade though just to play. Many times, they dont work in harmony.

I think, you have a general problem in your argument:There isn't one Microsoft. You are talking about a huge company with different departments. You can expect the general management has no real interest in Flight. There is one team that thought that they could get something new from this old property, and they achieved to get a budget from the management. If they fail to make enough money within a certain time frame they simply shut the project down.

There may be a problem in my argument, but if there is I suspect its because there isn't really another argument other than to accept what MS are doing without criticism. All I can think of at the moment is to send the message to Microsoft that I want them to allow 3rd party development without the restrictions they want to impose. And I guess its obvious to you that what you say about the way Microsoft works is not conducive to producing a good quality simulator. We should stand up for what we want, in my opinion. I want a platform that I can develop on.Microsft could still produce their DLC, and still have the simulator open ended. That way we have the best of both worlds right? Those who want stability can stick with the approved DLC, while those want to be use 3rd party content can use that but do so with the knowledge that they are risking stability. It's a choice.

The victim of an open environment of course is system stability.We are all aware of the commercial advantage to MS of closing Flight, but the other advantage is a stable gaming system.

I have heard this point before and I can understand it. However, it doesn't have to be one thing, or the other. We can have a choice. Personally, given the choice between the creative hotpot of an open environment, and closed but stable development environment, I'd choose the open one, simply because it's more interesting for me. I find to experiment with different add-ons, and come up with my own customised, personlised adaptation is all part of the fun.I have a simulator game called "Silent Hunter 5". When it was released it was terrible. It was unfinished, buggy, and lacking many features that should have been there from the beginning. However, the developers made it open and "moddable" and now, over a 18 months after its release, there is an enormous number of add-ons and mods and thriving mod community. This for me is fun. It requires a bit of effort, and some trial and error, but the reward is you learn something and you are actually part of the creative process. You feel involved. And there is also the possibility that you can change something yourself. The simulator is unbelievable good now. Great things have been created out of enthusiam that no-one would have created commercially.Now to compare that with another niche game - the Train Simulator "Railworks 3", which has a different, but still very good, approach. Railworks 3 is available on Steam and as DLC. But anyone can submit DLC, plus, you have the option to install non-dlc and modify files. Thus those who want a stable system can be happy, because they can just use the DLC, while those who want to try their hand at developing can do that also. This is also a great solution because it allows the producers of railworks to produce DLC to make money, but to that they must compete with other developers. Competition is healthy, right? For the consumer, it's what leads to good products. What MS want to do with Flight is eliminate the competion. This is, I am afraid to say, very typical of western thinking today. Their game is chess. Their goal is to destroy the competitor; whereas with Eastern thinking their game is marbles, and their goal is to own the most marbles. As long as they own most marbles then it's ok - there's rioom for other competitors. This is health competition in my opinion.This issue isn't just about Flight, for me it runs a bit deeper. I think the world would be better off if it changed how it played the game.

Edited February 15, 201214 yr by JasonD210

I think you hit on a lot of very good points jahman. Anyone who has spent any time in the muddy world of FSX add-on's will testify to all the DLL errors and copy protections you need to wade though just to play. Many times, they dont work in harmony.

Thanks!

given the choice between the creative hotpot of an open environment, and closed but stable development environment

As I tried to explain in my post above, hat's a false dichotomy. There's alot that could have been done by MS (hardening against CTD's, Identifying offending modules) and by developpers (rating system, automation for reinstalls, etc.) that could have been done to stabilize the platform but unfortunately wasn't.So while I completely side with your point-of-view, I think a lot could and should (and still can for FSXI :( ) to stabilize FSX, decrease the need for reinstalling FSX and if and when FSX needs to be reinstalled, make it easier to reinstall the piles of add-ons we all have by now.Cheers,- jahman.

I think a lot could and should (and still can for FSXI ) to stabilize FSX, decrease the need for reinstalling FSX and if and when FSX needs to be reinstalled, make it easier to reinstall the piles of add-ons we all have by now.

Yes it could but who's going to do it and how would they be paid?Let's face the reality that Microsoft have no interest in any further development of FSX so enhancements are not going to happen.

The part about what you might spend just to MAYBE have your software be approved by MS. How would you like to spend months programming some DLC and all the costs that go along with that, pay MS an application fee, submit your your work and then have MS say no thanks? Then what? You are out time, money, and a DLC that is now good for nobody but you. How much $$ are you willing to invest in this process?

A company these days will spend milions of pounds in responding to a competitive Invitation To Tender (ITT) and lose it all if it doesn't win. That's the way business works - nothing if for free and there are no guarantess of success.