Well, judging by the brief updates over at Gamespy, FS9 is one of the top selling games of the year - and was in the top ten for a long, long time. Seems to me they know something about marketing...

>I would expect the best, most feature-rich coding, that a>collecttive mind could produce, for my money. Not merely a>platform by which others later, could deliver at a premium>add-on cost. I don't buy a car thinking I will meet my>expectations ONCE I leave the car lot.>>Microsoft states, 'as real as it gets'.... The _entire_ package is 'as real as it gets' at the time it is produced. In coding, there are limitations caused by "Copyrights" if you violate them, the lawsuit is not worth the benefit. Then, they make a drastic change to the FS, to create their own way of doing something. And then everyone complains because the Old Addons are no longer working as well as they did or not at all.There are Millions of lines of code to produce the FS. It must be backward compatable to work with previous versions. It must work on many different systems, sometimes five previous versions of computers or they cut out a large portion of the market. Yet, it is still 'as real as it gets' for there is NO OTHER Flightsim which comes close. That is why it is as real as it gets.... It does not have to = reality.After all, they COULD lock it up, so that no addon's could be created. So that no one could make freeware which would look better. WHY? If they did, WE would be the loosers. Sure a freeware programmer can make an aircraft which flies better than a default aircraft. For it is based on MS code, or he could not make it fly with FS9. Because they use MS code, it dramatically reduced the work they had to do. Many freeware programmers like Mike Stone or Chuck Dome in my opinion make aircraft as good as many payware companies. MS benefits from it, we benefit from it, and if you want them to put out a package as good as all addons combined, are you willing to pay the several Thousand dollars for it? Just checking out the prices on REAL aircraft simulators, to get an idea of what it would cost.I think you would not, certainly I would not.

Actually what strikes me as odd is that no one pointed out that all that ActiveSky ALONG with FSUIPC are doing is manipulating what Microsoft already had in place currently. It's just that Microsoft's weather coding allowed undesired results like missing layers and disappearing clouds, etc... But all that you see is internal existing memory registers which are tweaked here and there.I wouldn't fly without ActiveSky when I wanted more realistic weather but they couldn't have done what you see without the code having been there to begin with. And of course this is in no way to minimalize what Activesky has done which I am thankful they spent the time researching and producing. I guess I wanted to take a stand in between Microsoft and Activesky with which I have no affiliation to either.Carmine http://ftp.avsim.com/dcforum/Images/wave.gif

Carmine, JohnCi posted the stuff about the "piggy backing" on FS9.;)

>Actually what strikes me as odd is that no one pointed out>that all that ActiveSky ALONG with FSUIPC are doing is>manipulating what Microsoft already had in place currently. JohnCi touched on that above:"As for the beauty AS displays, I've done the same by just setting the weather parameters on my own. I've been asked many times if my screenshots are made with Active Sky. And the answer is no--I just spend a few seconds with the weather settings and paint on the rich canvas--the beautiful weather engine--that FS9 provides."

"Actually what strikes me as odd is that no one pointed out that all that ActiveSky ALONG with FSUIPC are doing is manipulating what Microsoft already had in place currently."That's a very good point. The same is essentially true for addon aircraft and scenery as well as weather tools and miscallenous addons.Microsoft has provided a flexible host program which addon developers build on top of. When using the latest addon plane, weather generator or scenery it's easy to forget that you're still seeing Microsoft's flight dynamics, weather and scenery engine in action. There's no way Microsoft could have developed a weather generator like that of AS2004, ~20 aircraft at the level of quality that some addons achieve and photoreal scenery and kept the price at $60. So instead they make their sim flexible enough so that this can be added if the user wants it.