Hi John - "But really, who is to blame? All of us are!"True to a point. That would be entirely true if Microsoft announced that if enough people pre-order 2004, 2002 would not be patched;"How many had issues with FS2002, wanting Microsoft to patch it, then went out and bought FS2004 anyway?"Maybe that's because the 2 year interval without an update showed simmers that there would not be a patch for 2002?"In my opinion, it tells Microsoft you accept their business practices--and it is perfectly fair for Microsoft to read it that way."I disagree. What you're suggesting is that because Microsoft has not patched a released product in the past, we should not expect that a future product will be patched - and that by purchasing this potentially faulty product, we accept that any issue beyond the inability to run the software with X number of features working shall go uncorrected. "You can read in any other of a million reasons, but basically your dollar is your vote. And every "election", the MSFS team wins hands down (rightly so, IMHO--let's hope they "run" again)."Right. And just like a politician, they're only pretending to be your friend when there's competition..."There's also another great myth--that of MSFS being easily patchable with all the resources and all the revenue Microsoft has coming in. Again, many making that statement have never worked in a programming shop of any size."Isn't there a known issue with overcast? I'm comfortable in saying that if there is, there is no excuse - whether it's "easy" or not. I'm not concerned with how "easy" it may be to patch something which simply does not work correctly, or as promised - the promise being made by Microsoft when accepting your money for a product which you believe to be working as advertised.I don't know what other issues there may be with 2004, but there sure were some with 2002. "I'd love to see a patch, but I simply believe the product has grown so complex, and our wish for a new release every two years so demanding, that the MSFS team (not Microsoft) doesn't have nor can it obtain the resources to work these issues and whip up a new sim every 24 months."Sure, but how many people would rather the opposite - bug fixes and enhancements, say, once a year, for a subscription - rather than a new basket of bees?I would. And while it seems easy to blame the complexity of the product for the inability to get it working right, let me point you toward our laws... which, due to their complexity, do not work right. Point being, it's not the inability of the laws to work right, it's the unwillingness of the producer to fix them - based on whatever it is they like to suggest as being the "real" reason, if any.I'm still a big fan of the product, and I think it's generally a good piece of software. But if it's broke....cheersAndrew

Hello John,Standing besides you and your opinion 1000%. You truly know what is involved and understand the situation . . Kudos!!!Clayton T.Dopke (Clay)Major, USAF (retired)"Drac"

"I'd love to see a patch, but I simply believe the product has grown so complex, and our wish for a new release every two years so demanding, that the MSFS team (not Microsoft) doesn't have nor can it obtain the resources to work these issues and whip up a new sim every 24 months."I don't see why you'd need so many "resources" to fix the most nagging issues. Take autogen for example - someone simply forgot to put in some sensible "off" values which results in accumulating autogen. If someone figured out where those values are stored, it would be fixed in a day. Microsoft knows where those values are stored - they only need to change them. That's probably the easiest one to fix though. The mesh issue and seasonal CTD may even require two days for one guy to fix. The overcast issue is beyond the scope of a patch and is "by design" ie. they probably knew about this limitation but didn't have the time or resources to fix it.

Again, I yield to long years of experience in the field. You may be right--the issues could be simple. Or, they could be extremely complex and tied to code that is already working well. Honestly I have no way of knowing, but I can tell you some of my shop's simplest bugs are still unpatched, because the fix would require updates/rewrites to nearly all of our code. And guess what--like the "big boys", we are waiting until our next major release to address those. I think it is too presumptive of someone to think of these things as "one guy" fixes, although I do appreciate the tone of most of the responses here. And I do say that IF they were quick and easy fixes, then there is no excuse not to try to patch the product. That is the one unfair piece in all of this--those who know the answers aren't talking. Sorry to say though, it is not their fault. Going back to what I said earlier about public enterprises....they can't make statements that could reflect in a negative way vs. the product. Those dang pencil pushers, bean counters, and shareholders :)-John

JohnCi,Recanted some thoughts, post #50.

"I knew that Microsoft bashing, evil practices, etc would make it into this thread sooner or later. Let me ask you this: Do you have a 401K? A retirement plan? A college savings fund?"I'm surprised someone didn't beat me to the mark & yes I have all but the latter."My point is, if you are invested in anything (or plan on it), then you are likely part of the evil software empire. Ohhh nooo..."I know exactly what your point is & you're absolutely spot on. Recall I mentioned that Microsoft engaged in "evil practices" ONLY partially. "I work in a software shop--do you?" I used to work for Sun in Fremont CA, so a resounding "yes" to your question; I'm not sure how that qualifies anyone to argiue this point authoritatively though. This is all fairly common sensical stuff. "But it simply ain't going to happen. You can blame evil empires, "stick in the mud" simmers who don't want to rock the boat. You name it. But really, who is to blame? All of us are!"I blamed the politics that is a result of the "system" that comes with an empire, the size of which is Microsoft (for better or for worse), not evil empires.... Lastly, I'm not sure which boat are we not supposed to rocking OR who we should be behaving nicely for? You won't get any "thankyou" or any added features for "keeping shut".....(much less patches)."How many had issues with FS2002, wanting Microsoft to patch it, then went out and bought FS2004 anyway? I'd bet those screaming loudest for a patch fall into that category. What does that tell Microsoft? In my opinion, it tells Microsoft you accept their business practices--and it is perfectly fair for Microsoft to read it that way. You can read in any other of a million reasons, but basically your dollar is your vote. And every "election", the MSFS team wins hands down (rightly so, IMHO--let's hope they "run" again)."Yes this is the "scale of economy" I mentioned that allows Microsoft to do this & all the more power to them; please note I never accussed them of being successful.....While I won't call this evil, this is clearly where the ethical & moral fibre starts stripping at the seams, which you intimate it rightly should. Would I vote them back in if there were a worthy competitor? Absolutely not.... It's interesting you brought politics into this yourself (if only to illustrate a point). It could be said that the mainstream software world with respect to simulators is basically facist (at "election" time anyway), & Microsoft is the dictator. Give them a pass? No way...."There's also another great myth--that of MSFS being easily patchable with all the resources and all the revenue Microsoft has coming in. Again, many making that statement have never worked in a programming shop of any size. You just can't walk over to the O/S division, and say "we need you over here to assist the MSFS team"Having worked in a programming shop of size, I would correct you to the extent that they normally "walk over" to the legal department. not the OS. Rembering the original context under which I replied to begin with, I discount your assessment of this in any case.I too will yield to experience when stating that I agree with "most" of your view/s more than you think. Please keep that in mind.

Nevermind....L.Adamson

I have resisted responding to this post because it is such a hot button topic, but many of the points made by various individuals are simply ignorant, or wrong. Let's look at some of the major points.1. MICROSOFT DOESN'T RELEASE A PATCH BECAUSE THEY "DON'T CARE" ARE "GREEDY" ARE "POLITICAL" OR WHATEVER.Some of you have been watching too many episodes of the X-Files or Michael Moore movies. I have been a contractor for Microsoft, and I know how it's "sim" development phase operates. There has never been that attitude expressed by the people I have met that work there. Almost everyone is almost fanatic in their support for the product. Please be aware that the "sim" team does more than just Flight Sim. None of you have mentioned that Combat Flight Sim also is on a bi-annual development cycle. If you could take time to read the credits, you would note many of the same names on both products. Which means that once one project ships, most of the team is sent to the next project. It should also be noted that many of the team work on MS Gaming Zones Fighter Ace project. So instead of just one project going every two years, MS sim developers are usually working on two simultaneously, while the Third one is going through the first stages of Milestone meetings. 2. PATCHES DON'T NEED AS MUCH TESTING AS RELEASE CODE: Balderdash. In fact, patches often require MORE testing, so that they can ensure that the patch did not break a previously functioning subroutine. Please realize that for both the Sim department and the Games department, there is usually one hardware test lab. Time must be scheduled in that lab to ensure product compatibility across a variety of machines. MSFS must compete with all other MS PC games that are in production for this lab time. As a project approaches "release" that project gets first dibs to lab time. So the lab time available for an already released product is pretty hard to come by.3. BUGS ARE EASY TO FIX!: That's a funny one. Bugs are much easier to find than to fix. And the workarounds provided by simmer's here often are simply "fixes" in the fact that they eliminate or rename files or values to avoid the bug. This is hardly an acceptable answer. Forums are hardly the place for bug reporting, as most individuals who report a bug, rarely are running a "clean" system, and almost never is there any "step by step" reproduction steps to give the required information to reproduce. If a major bug is found, then additional time is required to try and find out how deep the bug is in the code. Yes, some bugs are fairly easy to fix, but some are deep within the base code, and fixing it may require a complete rewrite.4. TESTERS AND BETA TESTERS IGNORE BUGS: This one really chaps my a$$. Working as a tester, I can be the first to say that I NEVER ignored a bug that I found. It was reported and entered into the bug tracking system. (RAID, is the internal program we used when I was there). It is not the tester's decision to fix a bug. It is only his job to report it and report it as accurately as possible. The decision to fix, or not to fix is made higher up. For those of you who wish to blame testers and beta testers, I suggest you do some time doing the job, instead of sitting in your ivory tower with the shades drawn complaining how dark it is. You must also realize that your particular pet-peeve bug, while most annoying to you, may be trivial compared with other things that required fixing. All bugs are assigned a severity and a priority. A SEV 1 PRI 1 bug is usually something that causes a CTD every time the sim is loaded, Many people have made great mention of the "seasonal" CTD's that occur. Let's examine that one, shall we.It is impossible to create every test case imaginable for a given product, so many tests are based on what is called "boundary" tests. For example, If I had to test a database containing 10,000 entries, I would not be able to create a test case by running the test for each single entry I made. Instead, I would have to create test for about 5 cases. One case would test database operation at 0 entries. This is the low boundary. One case would be with the data base at 1 entry. This is the first valid value above the boundary. One test case might be with 9,999 entries, 1 entry below the high boundary. One test would test the database at 10,000 entries, the high boundary. And one test would be at 10,001 entries to see how the software handles an invalid condition. You have to assume, that if the database functions properly with zero, one, 9,999, and 10,000 entries, that it will operate properly for all the values inbetween. Some of you may chaff at that explanation, but let me assure you, if those "assumptions" were NOT made, product would NEVER be released, because it is impossible to test every single variable. So yes, bugs do sometimes sneak in even with proper boundary testing.The CTD issue would have been much the same way. Tests were not run every single day. They would have had to test seasonal changes. Now this might have undercovered the bug. But as you know, the seasonal changes alone didn't cause the CTD. It was the seasonal changes with many other factors built in. So it's quite possible, that even with excellent test coverage, the area tested did not contain the elements required to cause the CTD during the "seasonal transition"The fact that the CTD bug took several months to uncover the exact nature, shows how deeply buried that bug was occurring.Even if it was discovered, it may have been too late in the development process to fix. Since it occurred fairly infrequently (only during certain times of the year) and in relatively few locations, it was probably not too high on the priority list, had it been found at all.Whereas a less severe bug, that was reproducable 100% of the time, at every location, during every launching of the sim, would have been given much higher priority.Microsoft has over 24000 airports, if you think that a tester or a group of testers had time to validate each and every airport by flying a circuit around it, you are sadly mistaken.Add to this fact that MSFS uses Direct X, and that product is developed by an entirely different, atonomous team.When I was working on Close Combat 3, The Russian Front, we completely overhauled the multiplayer code to use the new directplay code that was being developed for the newest release of Direct X. Direct X did not release their code until 3 to 4 weeks prior to ship. And it was found out that there were MAJOR problems with the direct play code they released. We had to release the product, and then work post-release to fix the multiplayer issues, that developed from Direct X, not even our product. All the gamers assumed that CC3 multiplayer sucked because of a flaw in OUR code. When the truth was, our game was the first to use the new Direct X functionality in a real world application, and thus caught the brunt of the issues. Direct X eventually fixed the Direct Play issues, which made our multiplayer better, and of course each game after OURS had much more stable multiplayer. But of course, it was CC3 that took the wrath of online players, not Direct X, who was really the cause of the problem.I know this is a long post, and I don't expect people to understand the operations of a software development team, nor to understand the unimaginable amount of code we are dealing with. FS flight sim contains over two gigs of data. And much of that is compressed through the use of compiling. It is quite possible that if uncompiled and printed out on paper, the code for all the various files of flight sim would circle the earth. We are really talking about finding needles in a haystack here. Sure, it may be easy to get pricked by that needle when you are in the haystack. But being pricked by it, and finding it is another story all together.But for people to come in and spout conspiracy theories about MS being the big bad wolf, or the testers and beta testers being negligent on their job is just insulting. And for those of you who have that opinion, develop your own flight simulator, and tell me when it releases. I will be sure to give you the same courtesy that you have shown some of my friends and former collegues.

Sounds daunting, Will.Of course, Ubi has released not one but two patches for LOMAC and it's been on the store shelves for three months less than FS9. While FS9 includes the entire world, LOMAC's radars and avionics systems are infinetly more complex than anything MS built into FS9.Regards,Greg

Ditto Clay. As a penquin, I find FS9 amazing, AND with my new "Kewl Beans" machine (3.2ghz, 1 GIG ram, ATI 800XT Pro) its truly as real as it gets, and it gets pretty real Cheers,Braun

Thanks guys,LOL.......even my wife thinks I'm reasonable, once in awhile.No, I've never tried to get on the beta, but it's not a bad idea. Lord knows I do a ton of beta's for add on aircraft and enjoy the heck out of it . . .and think that every once in awhile I do make a difference and add to a product, and from one who use to enjoy flying so much, not to be able to anylonger because of medical reasons, FS sort of saves the day for me.To be honest, if you look at what MS gives us, for what we pay, and the enjoyment we get and all the developers who profit from the open code for add on's . . . its just one great product. As I said, for those of us who have been around this hobby for some time, 2004 is just wonderful, (little problems included, as nothing made by man is perfect). For those who grew up on computers, well, they expect a wee bit more I presume, but then again, as was said of MY generation, by MY elders..LOL.. they are a tad spoiled. I guess every generation has its tales . . . my daughters best one to her kids now is: " . . I had to ride 12 miles every darned day in my dads Turbo Porsche to get to school!!!" (taken from my parents old:) "I had to walk six miles each way, in the blustering snow to go to school . . "Some things never seem to change! Best to all,Clayton T.Dopke (Clay)Major, USAF (retired)"Drac" ........fighter pilots make movies . . .Bomber pilots make HISTORY!"

Hi Clayton - "I had to ride 12 miles every darned day in my dads Turbo Porsche to get to school!!!"The sad thing here - and I have two kids, 2 and 4 years old - is that you can't let young kids walk to school any more. By the time my kids start you'd better believe I'll be driving them, even if it's "only" a mile ;)That said, if you're not using that Turbo any more, I'd like to give my kids something to complain about...Andrew

He, he. Well my daughter turns one on Monday so she's not quite ready to be bored by my tales of hardship! Although my father-in-law (ex-KC-135 driver, BTW) has some good stories about riding his pony to the one-room school house in central Nebraska.Anyway, I know MS reads these forums so why not drop them a line? Maybe you'll get a chance to put those years of experience to good use on the next FS.

<>This statement would seem to indicate an intimate knowledge of both product's code. If that's the case could you give some more details on exactly what about LOMAC's code is more complex?

"infintely" more complex? Really? Infinity is a big number...The funny thing is even after two patches I get the impression LOMAC is still more "broken" than FS9. Don't own it myself though so I can only go by what I read on the various forums.As far as FS9 is concerned, it'd be nice if MS had gone ahead and released a patch to tighten things up a bit. But, MS is far from the only developer who hasn't fixed known issues in a sim. EA hasn't patched either of the last two iterations of their F1 franchise and there were certainly issues that could have used fixing (maybe more so than any of the issues in FS9). Papyrus only released one patch for NR2003 and there are still things in that sim that could be improved. None of these sims are ever perfect. But anyone who expects MS to release a patch based on the complaints of a few folks on these forums is really dreaming. We (by we I mean those of us who frequent this and several other forums dedicated to MSFS) represent the really hardcore users of this product. We are literally pushing this sim to its limits adding 3rd party planes, mesh and scenery, utilities and modified textures. I'd think from Microsofts perspective they look at this and say "man, if only a few folks on these forums are experiencing these issues, we did one hell of a job on this thing." In other words, if they sell a million copies of MSFS (just for the sake of argument) and the only complaints they hear about autogen bugs and seasonal ctd's are from a handful of people on Avsim and Flightsim.com, is anyone surprised they don't get real worked up about it? I'm certainly not. Chances are, 999,000 of those customers don't have a single clue theres any problem with autogen or seasonal ctds and regardless of how improtant we like to think we are, MS works for that 999,000 customers - not for the thousand of us here.