Go tell Ariane that... :-roll

BillYou only have to look at the uploads at Avsim to see the amount of repaints and the very sparce original aircraft.Gone are the days where an individual released a complete aircraft.Freeware as stated above is now in the realms of groups or aircraft alone without panels, Vc s or complex individual gauges.People like PMDG and Aeroworx have raised the bar of expectations so high that anything less is a dissapointment and that in itself has led to the demise of the individual freeware producer who cannot alone be expected to turn out anything good.Flight modelling alone is highly specialised and complex requiring hundreds of hours work nevermind the rest.The level of specialised programming again requires a genious in that field and so the list goes on.Peter

Peter,Well said and I couldn't agree more.

Certainly an interesting philosophical discussion.Many of us have been simming since the days of the TRS-80 and Apple II ... and the changes in 20+ years are quite awesome ... I remember Fokker Triplane on the Mac in 1985 ,,, I thought I was a hot #### because I could actually fly a pattern.Barry, I have no doubt that there will be people who will rise to take advantage of the available technology ... we have seen that in spades over the past few years even ... from FS98 to now. MS provides the platform ... the awesome freeware people and payware people tap all the possibilities for us. The development community expand the possibilities .. and MS tries to provide more of a base for them ... good for us.For myself, I am an old dinosaurus in the DP biz spending many years programming and in systems ... now i am a manager of all this stuff ... thankfully making room for my son and YOUR son ... life has a wonderful way about it ... old giving way to the new ... hahahaha ... feels right ... as much as I try to keep up with the latest technology, my son razzle-dazzles me with autonomic computing, grid computing and all those things I only have vague notions about.Finally, "Make it and they will buy" seems to be a fair assessment of the sim world as well as all other facets of our world ... I buy and try most new aircraft ... because I can (luckily) and because I am still curious and looking for a challenge. There are people trying to make a living at this business and some who give freely of their time and expertise to provide us with the toys we ALL CRAVE and enjoy ... I am sure it will be no different 20 years from now .. planes will be different, technology will be way more advanced ... we will be older ... but I am sure people will still be enjoying the dream, suspension of reality that simming sometimes provides (where I can fly a 747-200 (or whatever) whereever and whenever I want!!!) and feeling of flight in their office chair or whatever ...!!!!

The future for Payware is... in the likes of "Flight1 Meridian".. the upcoming Dreamfleets... ATR. IF anyone manages to build the sim of the G1000 glass cockpit...and other Avionics... I'd pay some good money for these...

>Gone are the days where an individual released a complete>aircraft.>Freeware as stated above is now in the realms of groups or>aircraft alone without panels, Vc s or complex individual>gauges.>>People like PMDG and Aeroworx have raised the bar of>expectations so high that anything less is a dissapointment>and that in itself has led to the demise of the individual>freeware producer who cannot alone be expected to turn out>anything good.yes -- this is the kind of thing that I was questioning. When I used the word "monopoly", I wasn't thinking about price -- but more about a knowledge/ability monopoly. I can see the future being so complex that the number of providers - either freeware or payware - shrinking to only a small few. Maybe this will be good or bad - I don't know. But one thing I highly suspect - is that this increase in complexity and quality , while generally praised right now as being good, may someday be a little regretted by us. But - as I said in the original post -- I'm glad i'm not a payware designer trying to keep up with all this -- and that includes those at MS.Barry

>I fly>in the real world and I must say using the CH Yoke/Peddles>combo in conjunction with the default Cessna's, you get a>pretty good representation of what you get in the real bird. True.........That's how I felt about the 172 during the beta test. It does what it's suppose to do with normal imputs, and is much better than some stock aircraft for other sims I've run into. Add-ons such as the RealAir update for the 172, adds some improved slips as well as spinning ability. But few airplanes for MSFS have that ability, since it's specialized programming that took months & months to produce.At least I didn't feel in a panic to get a quick 3rd party update with the stock 172 model........... this time around.And yes, rudder pedals DO make all the difference!!!L.Adamson

I'd pay some good money for these...And you'll have to. As the development cycle runs into periods of over a year for a team of 5-10 people (not counting beta testers and documentation writers) the cost of addon development is rising exponentially.At the same time the amount people are willing to pay for that addon is not rising at all, in fact if you take inflation into account it is dropping.Due to the constant increase in complexity the target market is getting smaller as less and less people find themselves in a position where they want to pay for such complexity (yet will complain if it's not there that the product is not good or incomplete and still not buy it), which reduces the number of units sold over which the development cost has to be spread.This will inevitably lead to groups deciding that enough is enough and they can no longer afford to remain in business unless prices go up drastically.Unless customers are at that time prepared to accept those higher prices the development groups will have to shut down or loose money on every single project.

It's all for the best. Those one man design masters often become part of a team that produce wonderful add-ons. I believe that the next few years will produce some incredible simulations and I will do what I always do when presented with great aircraft sims, drop my jaw and say WOW..Best Wishes,[h4]Randy J. Smith[/h4][h3]P M D G's 747-400[/h3][h4]coming to a runway near you[/h4][/font color]Caution! Not a real pilot, but do play one on TV ;-)AMD 64 3200+ | ASUS KV8 DELUXE | GFORCE 5700 ULTRA @535/1000 | Maxtor 6Y080M0 SATA 80 GIG | 512 DDR 400 | Windows Xp Pro | Windows Xp Pro 64 |

BarryThere is a saying " Its only by pushing the limits that you find what lies beyond".I admire people who push the limits in whatever field they are involved in be it flight simming to medicine as that is the only way we will advance.I also question these black and white labels of Commercial Ware/ Freeware as I feel that the differences can be very hazy.You will get the so called commercial ware where the motivation is perfection of reality and the love of achieving that and the financial gain is secondary to that. You will get commercial ware where the aim is to produce a "nice" product in a reasonable time with a number of releases a year where the business is uppermost.It doesnt take me to identify which companies fill each category as that is pretty obvious.In 2004 We had century of flight somewhere along the line I would like to see Microsoft create "the living world" where they create the basis of a living breathing world with very accurate mesh, accurate city/ town shapes, real landmarks like lakes, rivers, railway lines, forest areas etc and a dynamic real world weather system which matches the world weather system of the day.This weather would be dynamic with highs and lows, fronts and their associated clouds.You would then buy sub programmes for this base world suiting your desire.Ie World Flight, World Cars, world trains, world boats, World education for schools etc.Part of these sub programmes would be links for developers and even whole aircraft files which would give a key to purchase online.Microsoft would take a percentage for this service but the effect would allow a much larger market for producers who do push the limits allowing them a much bigger capability to improve the product overall.In that way everyone would gain all round.Peter

>The future for Payware is... in the likes of "Flight1>Meridian".. the upcoming Dreamfleets... ATR. >>IF anyone manages to build the sim of the G1000 glass>cockpit...and other Avionics... >>I'd pay some good money for these...I seriously doubt anyone will attempt to model the G1000 glass system simply because it isn't possible to replicate the EVS at all with the existing FS platform. Since that one, single feature is the very heart of the G1000 system, the absence of EVS would be quite evident, making the product unsalable... :(

Jeroen, you really have a negative view on the state of flight simming. I personally will pay for great work. What I don't want happening is what happened to the great combat sim movement in the mid 90s. We had some great fighter simulations that are no longer produced because of the very thing your stating here. I'm into Flight Simulator for the very reason I was into EF2000 by DID or Falcon 3.0. The realistic edge it has. Because the general public seems too stupid to enjoy something that requires them to learn first, realistic combat sims stopped selling. The general public would rather a quick WWII shot out or Pokemon. I guess that's why the music, movies, and entertainment industry period has so much brainless content now. Gone are the days of Duke Ellington, Sara Vaughn and now we're left with Britney Spears and the East Side Boys... People don't want to use their heads for even entertainment. Now Flight Simulator is getting to a point you can really learn from it and yes it's going to cost you something, that's O.K... I save so much at home instead of paying $100+ for a 2 hour flight in real life. I can play Flight Simulator all night if I want to. Are people going to suddenly turn away because of this complexity, In our community I don't think so. We all need to embrace development of either Freeware and/or Payware. Who's to say someone may come up with a method that makes it easier to produce Virtual Cockpits and a great exterior model (ala FSDS 3). WindowsXP is ten times more complex than Windows3.1 or 95 was. Does that mean it's more complex for us to use. No, the OS is actually easier and more reliable. If things are getting so hard my hope is some company design's tools that make things easier. Lago did this with FSE. It's sad they didn't take their design farther into a real state of the art designing tool. Instead of moaning about how bad things are getting, there's just as much a chance someone could design something that would make life a little easier for Freeware/Payware designers alike. If that happens freeware will once again be on the level it was back in the days of FS98. If we had an easier way of designing things it would make a world of difference...

Well, I remember people claiming an onboard weather radar was impossible to do in FS, and I've read this not so long ago either... :-)Never say never...:-)As for the point about Windows version comparision in the above post, you may also consider that Win XP development and testing costs (10000 internal testers) were way higher than those of Win 3.1, as well as the Marketing costs... by the way, what was the single PC license cost for Win 3.1 at the time of its release...Hope this helps!

JeanLuc the development cost and testing is irrelevant to me... My point was, something is always possible to come down the pipe that would make the development process a whole lot easier...

>Well, I remember people claiming an onboard weather radar was>impossible to do in FS, and I've read this not so long ago>either... :-)>>Never say never...:-)I would never have said that "onboard weather radar" would be impossible to do in FS, but there's a whole lot of difference between a radar and an advanced, infra-red vision system that can make fog disappear as though it didn't exist, and provide a near-daytime view of the runway at midnight! :)Have you watch the online video demonstrations of the EVS? It's absolutly amazing!