What should developers be looking at in terms of relevant api's in order to produce software for Flight? Is it all X-Box development? Please advise and thanks!Mark

What should developers be looking at in terms of relevant api's in order to produce software for Flight? Is it all X-Box development? Please advise and thanks!

Developers should keep their noses to the grindstone for FS9/FSX work, since Flight is not currently open for 3rd party involvement. Maybe in one or two years... Maybe.

Flight is not currently open for 3rd party involvement. Maybe in one or two years... Maybe.

What a totally BS comment! What do you know about this? If you have some inside information, please say so. You have 10 stars and 9242 posts in 242 topics and I suppose that makes you an insider into MS Flight's development plans.And you being a Moderator, I'll probably find myself shut down after this post.

What a totally BS comment! What do you know about this? If you have some inside information, please say so. You have 10 stars and 9242 posts in 242 topics and I suppose that makes you an insider into MS Flight's development plans.And you being a Moderator, I'll probably find myself shut down after this post.

He's actually more of an insider than you realize... :Whistle:

What a totally BS comment! What do you know about this? If you have some inside information, please say so. You have 10 stars and 9242 posts in 242 topics and I suppose that makes you an insider into MS Flight's development plans.And you being a Moderator, I'll probably find myself shut down after this post.

Well, I guess he got it from the Man:INTERVIEW: Joshua Howard, Microsoft Flight

What a totally BS comment! What do you know about this? If you have some inside information, please say so. You have 10 stars and 9242 posts in 242 topics and I suppose that makes you an insider into MS Flight's development plans.And you being a Moderator, I'll probably find myself shut down after this post.

"If you have some inside information, please say so." I think he did.

If someone have inside info about this, then say so. I still have a hard time believing that MS would wait 1-2 years to release API's if the game is a success. The whole sim community would have lost interest long before that, and that revenue stream would be hard to replace by trigger-happy teens. I just love the new engine, and I refuse to believe they will only pander to "newcomers" and casual arm chair pilots. It's too good to let that happen!

My apologies to n4gix. Just read the article in MCV, and sadly, I have to bow my head. I was so excited about the new flight and graphics engine and the promises, that I lost sight of reality.I spent 40 bucks already on Flight, and I do love it, but that's it. Going back to FSX and my PDMG aircrafts. Very sad day indeed.

Yes. Its unfortunate that currently Flight is a locked eco-system. I hope this changes, but by the time it does, it will be interesting to see if any of the 3rd party dev's that were scorn by MS will be willing to work with them at all. Im sure many of the big names wont simply out of principle alone, and I cant fault them for that.

It's so sad. What a lost opportunity. Is it blasphemy to hope it will fail so it (the project) can be taken over by someone else? Like a re-born ACES studio :)They (ACES) were rightfully blamed for "going native" as a reason for their demise, but for sim-fans, "going native" is not a negative, quite the opposite.Imagine ACES in a situation where they have the MS Flight model as underpinnings and then open up Joint Development with people like PMDG, ORBX etc. What a wonderful day that would be. And judging by prices they can charge for their products, it could certainly be profitable.

If Flight dies, any chance of a flight sim happening again at MS dies, and MS is not known for being generous with there source. A few former members of ACES did start there own game studio, but they have not released any information about anything. Knowning the people that are on this new team, if they release anything, it will be Train Sim, not Flight Sim. If MS fails to make money on Flight, and they canned the MSFS series, no invester will ever touch flight simming. Its impossible to get funding as it is. There is the open source flight sim project (Flight Tools?) but it will never be to the level of a commercial product, and XP still has not surpassed FSX. I thin if Flight fails, flight simming fails.

If Flight dies, any chance of a flight sim happening again at MS dies, and MS is not known for being generous with there source. A few former members of ACES did start there own game studio, but they have not released any information about anything. Knowning the people that are on this new team, if they release anything, it will be Train Sim, not Flight Sim. If MS fails to make money on Flight, and they canned the MSFS series, no invester will ever touch flight simming. Its impossible to get funding as it is. There is the open source flight sim project (Flight Tools?) but it will never be to the level of a commercial product, and XP still has not surpassed FSX. I thin if Flight fails, flight simming fails.

And if Flight succeeds, there is the possibility of the same team being allowed to evolve it into a separate FS11-type product.As for your earlier comment about 3pd staying away on principal - if Flight capture 70% plus of the addon market over the next 2 years (and i believe that could happen) - then it would be a bold business decision to stay away.

I just love the new engine, and I refuse to believe they will only pander to "newcomers" and casual arm chair pilots. It's too good to let that happen!

Microsoft isn't 'pandering to newcomers' with Flight. It was designed from the ground up to cater to newcomers.

Like a re-born ACES studio :)They (ACES) were rightfully blamed for "going native" as a reason for their demise, but for sim-fans, "going native" is not a negative, quite the opposite.

The ACES team weren't some sort of digital demi-gods; they were people with jobs, most of which seem to have gone on to other jobs.I don't know which sim-fans think 'going native' is a great thing - 'going native' is a negative term for any major design or creative industry. Great fashion designers are not fashion models. Great aircraft designers are not great pilots (and vice-versa). Great architects usually have lousy (or incomplete) houses. The foremost attribute for a present day major-production sim programmer is to be a great coder. Being great at code precludes spending 12 hours a day flying simulated 737s.

Imagine ACES in a situation where they have the MS Flight model as underpinnings and then open up Joint Development with people like PMDG, ORBX etc. What a wonderful day that would be.

I see trees of green, red roses too... it's a great song, yes. Lovely sentiment; but it isn't how the modern software (rapidly becoming app development... have you noticed?) industry works. IP is valuable stuff; even if the designers want to share it they can't as IP created in a company belongs to the company, not the individual. This is true even for the small-timers; I can't speak for ORBX, but I bet they wouldn't be too keen on sharing their own development methods, tools and IP with others.

I thin if Flight fails, flight simming fails.

MS Flight is the only game in town at present. There are no other major-production-house sims on the market. X Plane is impressive, but has remained a small development house; if they were considered a profitable venture by a major they would get bought out - that's how this industry works. For flight simulation to continue as a genre, MS Flight must succeed.FSX still has a place, it will stay with us the same way FS2004 has stayed with us for 8 years now. There will not be any further development; there can't be. The code for FS has never been released, in any form. It is not likely to, either; the code is likely lost for anything earlier than 2000, it is certainly irrelevant due to technological advance.The FSX code, while interesting, would likely not allow any great advances anyway; the code for Windows 95, even Windows XP, is not going to suddenly allow you to write the next great OS.

It's so sad. What a lost opportunity.

Funny thing, but reading that article you quoted I get exactly the opposite impression. Flight is a great opportunity - it is a fantastic time for flight simulation!Why?There is a major development house investing in the concept - free-to-play, free to down load. Lets say that since launch Flight has only been downloaded 50,000 times - that's 70TB of data. MS pays for hosting as much as you or I do. It takes serious servers to run even a fraction of GFWL, love it or hate it, and serious bandwidth to give people a 1.4GB file at top speed. That isn't cheap. MS have invested serious money, and like any company that wants to avoid bankruptcy, that investment must return a profit.A year before considering 3DP sounds entirely reasonable - why? Well, to support a 3DP industry, you need to know there is a market. After a year or so, MS will look at where Flight is, how it is growing; if viable, some sort of 3DP scheme is likely to appear. How long did it take Apple to open iOS for development? The App Store didn't appear until iOS 2.0! iOS was launched in January 2007, Apple released the SDK to developers (who have to pay $99 to be able to even publish free stuff...) in March 2008! The reason is very simple - why invest in supporting an entire 3DP ecosystem for a product that is going to fail? You open yourself up to all sorts of class actions, as investment is made in a dead-end system. Look at Maemo - Nokia was dead in the water and turned to their great foe - Microsoft - because Maemo ended up in development hell; how would you feel if you tooled up to develop for Maemo? How would you feel to be a creditor or shareholder of Nokia now?Here's my guess: assuming MS Flight is a success, an SDK (already in existence: it will be the tools the dev team is using now) will be released in a year or so. Based on the development process for other MS games, it will most likely use the XNA framework, which in turn is based in .NET. Scenery will still use DDS, aircraft are still modelled in 3DS Max, BGL is still there... but what is it now?^* The current 3DP 'majors' will all convert across to Flight.NET or whatever; their FSX productions will tail off the same way FS2004 3DP has tailed off. Remember when FSX came out? Remember the slow uptake by 3DP? Scenery like ORBX's Australian series took years to appear - it wasn't available from day one - it even took a year or so for the Australian series to be completed, let alone the PNW series.Here's my strategy: make sure my skills in DDS texturing are up to speed. Read up on XNA - (Dammit Jim, I'm an architect, not a coder!) just to get a feel for the kinds to programming I may have to fake. Keep my 3DS Max skills up to date (easy, it's my main work). Refresh my knowledge of BGL; look at ways BGL can be served through a live database rather than through single local files (cloud-served scenery - you gotta know which way the wind is blowing...). Tear apart the Flight .PAK files as much as I can to determine data structures for things like Aerocaches, missions, challenges. Keep working on my unique pet aircraft projects - the RuXXX XXXXXXXX, the XXXXX XXXa and the XXXXXXX XXXXX. In the world of DLC, there will be money to be made in unique bespoke aircraft; you'll have to stand out from the 24,937 repaints of B-737s! I'm not about to make a new career from Flight, but if I can make money from a hobby it's going to be easier to fund it! (After acquiring more Lego....)* - BGL is a compiled database format. Databases are the underpinning of everything the 'cloud' does. So maybe you could serve BGL in the cloud... live, real-time scenery, turned into graphics by the local runtime. Texture libraries are needed - they are the big GB files - but BGL is small, real small... scenery on-the-fly, literally. If I was developing a large, online-ecosytem based world-mapping system, oh, say like Microsoft Flight, I'd be looking at ways to leverage datasets I already owned the IP to, like oh, say, Microsoft Digital Globe. Especially if the software already has hooks into the Bing search engine, oh my, look, so it does...

Well IF Flight does allow 3rd party devs into the game in about a year, we have some time to "spool up". If Flight has a solid user-base, 3rd party's would be foolish not to jump in. But most of the 3rd party dev's that I work with are at heart simmers, and very passionate people. They also have very STRONG convictions and a lasting will power. They need it to support a 6 year old sim with a dwindling user base that just seems to get more and more picky. (I love you guys! I do! But "rivit counting" was just a joke! Now its reality!!!) I would not be surprised if by the time MS opened up Flight, more then a few big name dev's gave MS the big 1 finger salute. Particular if there is a alternative. XP10 has a way to go before its a possible contender, but then again, they may have a year to shape up. Then you have the wild-card. Aerofly FS that came out of nowhere and stunned everyone. At its current state, its a LOT more limited then Flight in every way but ground coverage, but that wont last long with Alaska in Spring. AFS on the other hand are ACTIVLY seeking 3rd party dev's. If AFS plays there cards well, we can have a 3 team race.Its going to be an interesting race. The winner will be the simmer. That much I can promise.