I totally agree with Chris when he said MSFS feels sterile. MSFS should break it off with continuity and start from a clean sheet of paper. We all seem to spend gobs of money on every new MSFS release...then we look closely and it feels like all the old ones with a couple of new planes bunged on. *Yawn*MSFS would benefit from AI like Chris said. MSFS airports now look like empty football stadiums. We could do with some FAs,baggage loaders & fuellers, trucks scurrying around, other planes pushing back, fire trucks rushing to an emergency, baggage trolleys trundling around....We could do with a virtual pre-flight walk-around of the aeroplane. And with todays processor power theres no excuses - so we should be able to walk up to an engine nacelle, peek into it then duck under the jet, peek at the landing gear & get our hands oily by feeling a strut or two....go round the back to see the fan blades windmilling slowly in the breeze....& almost hit our heads on the catering truck whose forklift rises slowly to meet with the rear cabin door of our A340-600.....FPS games have been doing this sort of thing for a long time & it would make for a nice immersive airline experience.It would also be nice to walk around the cabin in a first-person view peeking out of windows and watching our virtual passengers settling in (loading overhead bins etc).So yea...Im all for flight simulator AI humans:)

I can't stop smiling reading all these posts :-) I've been thinking about these kind of stuff (currently all missing in FS) for quite some time and I truely hope some guys from the MSFS development team read this thread and get some ideas from it.One thing that I think would be really fun part from a more "living" FS environment with baggage trolleys etc would be to have a play mode that resembles the real life for an airliner pilot where you will be assigned actual flights to preset destinations where you will have to wait for (and SEE) all your virtual passengers board the a/c, loading the overhead bins as said above etc while you setup the FMC and prepare the cockpit before you get the call from the cabin crew that all pax & cargo is loaded and you're by that ready to request pushback...

sure, if your building a boat sim...lets stick to flight, flying, planes and the non-liquid atmosphere shall we MSFS team (please)

We'd like to land on realistic-looking water when we fly the Cessna Caravan amphibian :)MSFS is a good sim, it just needs to sort itself out a bit.

If you want a truly versatile sim (game), check out Operation Flashpoint for example, or what Novalogic are working on for some time now. There you can fly, drive, walk, shoot, explore houses, forests, beaches etc. Something like this I actually dreamed of years ago, a sim in which you could eject from your F-16, then draw your gun and fight your way through a detailed environment to the rescue team. But this is only possible on a very small scale today - the world is just too huge! And we're still talking about a civil flight sim here - boats? yeah might be nice. Cars? Well, would be nice too. But do we need that? I'd rather have a good flight sim! There's enough to do, flight dynamics, graphics, AI, ... it all costs money and time to develop all of this, then realistic aircraft, buildings, trees etc. need to be modelled, meshes created, sounds, cockpits, interface, effects, different countries, different seasons ... Everyone who ever did any FS design should know how hard it is. Let's just focus on the stuff that needs to be done, no? Farcry I belive only has small islands modelled, if you need to walk, 5 miles is a real distance - in the air, it's just a few minutes long flight. There's only some typical vegetation, some stones thrown around, some nice shaders. That's probably about it. -Daniel

No ones saying its gonna be easy. Im just saying that MSFS needs to develop more. The visuals in a sim are important yes? Well IMO MSFS just doesnt cut it in this day and age with its current visuals. Imagine what a rush it would be if they sorted that out...then low-level flying in the MSFS Bell JetRanger helicopter will actually be *fun*. Of course it doesnt make a difference when you are at FL390 as to what the landscape looks like.Also no-ones saying that MSFS should include cars & boats! We are calling for an airport & in-aricraft environment: something real-world flight has :)I'll bet many people on here will have played some other computer game, seen the awesome graphics and think "Man, that would look good in a flight sim!"Yes it will be expensive to develop such an all-out sim but if it delivers...Im first in line to buy it :)

>The $1,000,000 question that MUST come up:>>Should MS design Flight Simulator to look this good, taking>advantage of modern technologies... would you:>>A.) Want to hear from the thousands of users without the>technology to run it?>>B.) Want to hear from the thousands of add-on users whos>programs are completely useless? I don't think A is a great problem. I have a low to average system (2400+ processor, ATI 9200) and the frame rates in Far Cry are excellent - and it runs perfectly smooth. I've seen no pauses or stutters at all, even at the height of the action. And yet many of the scenery/graphics are far ahead of FS. I'm on mostly low settings and it still looks gorgeous. I have quite a few add-ons and I've created some as well (AutoStar and AutoAsm). A week ago I would ahve been sceptical as well. But, as I said elsewhere, Far Cry has changed all that. I think the only real option for Microsoft is to make a new start. Far Cry demonstrates one solution for the problem of quickly creating add-ons for a new sim: the editor. The editor is quite extraordinary. In fact it's like half a dozen editors rolled into one. You can use it for creating terrain, textures, objects, effects etc. And you can edit the human AI behaviour. Because it is closely integrated with the scenery engine, such an editor really has to come from the manufacturer. Therefore, if Microsoft went ahead with a new generation FS, the first release should include an equivalent editor. This would unlock an enormous amount of add-ons very quickly, particularly as it does not require detailed knowledge of how the engine works. Imagine an FS editor that lets you move around the world just as if you were playing FS. You can select a tool and start sculpting the terrain so that a lake perfectly matches the terrain. You can add buildings, trees, animals at will. Add an engineer and define the path that he walks. Add 'anchors' at specific points, so that when he comes close to one he will perform a specific action. Add an anchor close to the engine of a parked aircraft so that when he approaches the aircraft he will start to work on the engine. Add some cows in a field and edit their AI parameters as appropriate for cows. Add passengers that walk to the aircraft and board. Add moving traffic on the roads. All this is in real time, with a perspective view that is identical to playing FS. Click on a button to make the AI humans and animals go about their business. Finally, hit CTRL-G and in a couple of seconds you're actually inside FS and you can go flying. See something you don't like? Hit escape and you're back in the editor, but still with the same perspective view. Add some corrections and jump back into FS. As I said elsewhere, FS scenery designers would kill for something like this. But you don't have to imagine this. Because this is *precisely* what the Far Cry editor lets you do. Best regards, Chris

Barry, I don't think the screenshot is all that bad. You can see some rocks beneath the water - maybe that doesn't look so realistic. But then, in the area portrayed (the Pacific), the water probably is very clear. Overall, the water in Far Cry is stunning. I spent some time playing with the water with the editor last night. It gives you enormous control over the water effects such as reflectivity, transparency and the size of the bumpmaps (ripples) in the X and Y direction. The range of effects you can achieve with the editor is incredible. The rippling effect in FS basically uses a set of bitmaps to make a looping animation. Unfortunately, it never looks completely smooth and you can see the looping as it constantly repeats the same pattern. I don't know how the Far Cry ripples work but it's far, far more sophisticated. I could never see a repeated pattern in the ripples and they are completely smooth. After some editing, they looked very good indeed. Unfortunately I couldn't make the water completely opaque (so that you can't see submerged terrain). The water accurately reflects terrain and clouds - if you have high reflectivity it acts like an almost perfect mirror! And on the subject of clouds, you can select different sky textures (all clouds are textures painted on the sky - no 3D clouds). Some of the sunset skies are stunning. And, of course, the water will realistically reflect the sunset colours. The shore waves are far better, too. As one wave moves up the beach you can see the previous one moving back into the sea. Very realistic. Best regards, Chris

If you want to see some awesome looking water in a flight sim, look no further than the upcoming Pacific Fighters (also from Ubisoft, same company that published Farcry; Ubisoft seems to have good taste in water effects :)) Go here: http://www.il2sturmovik.com/forgotten_batt...ment_090704.php and look at the picture of the USS Lexington under sail. This proves that water that looks really good at sea level can be put in a flight sim without chewing up speed when you're several miles high! I agree that FS9 definitely needs some more movement in order to appear more like the real world. Right now I'm in the process of making a scenery of the beautiful, tropical island of Aitutaki in the south pacific Cook Islands, and I plan to incorporate as much animation as possible in it, considering that it is a small island with a small airport in the middle of nowhere where you will have little to no AI aircraft or other things that will also eat up frame rates. I want to make people walking around the terminal, have a van or car show up every once in a while, have the airport's single baggage trolley come over to meet the aircraft on the ramp, and also possibly have people strolling around on the beach near the runway. The only problem is, Gmax is very limited when it comes to animations since everything is on a loop by default, and you have to find ways around it by using various tools that are available. But if I succeed, it should look really nice (or at least better than the gray brick that serves as terminal by default)!-Scott