Maybe their company culture is to focus on those areas that give them and their shareholders the best return?

 

I wonder then why people are actually avoiding purchasing computers that have W8 installed.

I know of people who have returned PC's that have W8 installed because they consider it unusable.

 

Ball Boy Ballmer has been a fiasco.

 

Has Microsoft had any successful products since he took over the company and almost bankrupted it by purchasing Yahoo?

 

Zune?

MetroTwit?

Vista?

W8?

Azure?

Azure Cloud?

Silverlight?

 

and on and on it goes.

 

All Ball Boy Ballmer Failures.

 

 

Well train sim wasn't exactly what most people would love to do, butflight simming has captured millions of users. There must be a profit in making it. So what is the fate of flight simming? Will we be using FSX until 2099? or will someone take over? Is P3d or x-plane our only hope?

Well train sim wasn't exactly what most people would love to do, butflight simming has captured millions of users. There must be a profit in making it. So what is the fate of flight simming? Will we be using FSX until 2099? or will someone take over? Is P3d or x-plane our only hope?

 

Don't worry Flight simming is alive and very healthy.  2013 was one of the best years ever for flight simmers IMO. Just look back at all the amazing releases we got treated to, including the awesome PMDG 777.

Disregard. I think I answered my own question.

I've given XPlane a shot for the last several releases and it just remains really not ready for prime time.  The use of OSM data for streets, buildings and traffic is impressive, but the barren airports just do not cut it.  The default aircraft more or less do not cut it.  The ATC options do not cut it.  It always remains feeling somewhat unfinished - STILL - even though they've had about 2 releases since 2006/2007 when FSX came out.

 

I would tend to agree that FSX, despite its flaws, remains the primary sim for most of us.  I'd go P3D but a LOT of addons are going to have to be able to come along.  Since this is the PMDG forum, their aircraft are probably the first I'd have in mind such that if they were made available, I'd seriously contemplate a move.

 

However, as most point out, since P3Dv2 is 32-bit, some problems would remain.  However, it would seem that DirectX 11 handles some video aspects more efficiently, which arguably makes P3Dv2 a more modern and up-to-date version. There probably isn't much more we could ask for at this stage.

 

In any case, while it is really just my opinion, Xplane just never seems to stack up to FSX completely for me.

I wonder then why people are actually avoiding purchasing computers that have W8 installed.

I know of people who have returned PC's that have W8 installed because they consider it unusable.
 

Ball Boy Ballmer has been a fiasco.

 

Has Microsoft had any successful products since he took over the company and almost bankrupted it by purchasing Yahoo?

Zune?
MetroTwit?
Vista?
W8?
Azure?
Azure Cloud?
Silverlight?

 

and on and on it goes.

All Ball Boy Ballmer Failures.

 

While I'm not sure I'd echo the snark with which this is delivered, it is founded in a bit of truth.

 

As both a consumer and a developer, Microsoft has been REALLY frustrating in the last decade.

 

I'd say their developer tools (Visual Studio, .NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server) and their office productivity(Excel, Access, Word, Visio, Project) tools remain strong.  However, in general, Microsoft in the last 10 years has caused so much confusion and heartbreak.

 

To that list I'd add XNA (which was once Managed Direct X).  Also, they really backed away from DirectX being a full-feature set of tools to create games to a mish-mash of tools.

 

I have mentioned it here at AVSIM before, but many would BEG to have Bill back at the helm.  It has been speculated that we kept Flight Simulator because Bill thought it was an important reflection of what should be available for a PC.

 

Also, the PC may be relegated to those who need work stations, developers, gamers, and other such "power users."  This will make the PC more expensive and make paying $200 for things like P3D more "normal."

I feel the very same of Skully. No more cent onto FSX addon. I will ask for Pr3D refund to buy a couple of new XP aircrafts. How the hell they could not fix a crucial bug like the black screen in almost 2 months. Is this the bright future we're moving towards?

 

And then you have this wonderful light system in XP that makes me look at FSX like an arcade game. And like skully I have invested tons of cash into FSX flying with it since my teens (I guess FS3).

 

I cannot understand why people try to compare vanilla XP10 with FSX+dozains of payware. The truth is that vanilla XP with lots of freeware is way better than FSX vanilla and new simmer will look into XP more and more. Of course the die-hard FSX simmers will prefer to stay with PR3D to benefit from the money they put into that sim, but I think in the end they will miss something.

If they move to XP, they will miss a lot more.

Let me ask 1 question here:Microsoft made $$millions on Flight Sim 2000-FSX, why did they pull out? Is flight simming completely dead for Microsoft? For a $142,000,000,000 company, don't they have the resources to continue with such a successful product like FSX?

 

Not if the company is in an identity crisis with a clueless CEO (Steve Ballmer - who has been fired by the way). Bill Gates lead the technology department until 2006, that's when SB totally took over. Bill was of the mindset 'let everyone build on his products. Steve wanted to have MS run like Apple which was a problem as this model almost drove Apple out of business. The iPhone/Steve Jobs saved Apple. Bill made it so suppliers like Dell and HP sold their products packaged with Windows. SB wanted the Apple approach to a point he put MS in the hardware game with products like the XBox and Surface Tablets. SB was well on his way of dismantaling everything Bill had done with the hardware/software partnerships forged over the years. Google with Android has carried on Bill's successful legacy with their approach leaving MS under SB's leadership scrambling to catch up. In hindsight he couldn't figure out that Apple controlled the Smart Phone market and Microsoft control the server business application market hence we have the hodge podge Windows 8 OS. FS was caught in the middle of all this crap and just like Apple Steve Ballmer wanted to market FS and anything associated with it through an app store controlled by MS, it failed so they dropped the product. That's the story concerning the demise of FS and MS. I could go on about Microsoft but I thought I'd just answer the basic question raised here.

64 bit is a better answer in this day and age of 4GHZ+ processors and 2GB+ video cards.

 

64 bit isn't better for any other reason than allowing effectively unlimited address space. 32 bit is more than enough for fidelity and accuracy. In your 2GB+ video card you will get half as many 64 bit variables as there are 32 bit variables. That's half as much data for a tiny increase in numerical accuracy. So you need twice as much memory to run the same amount of data items.

 

If you run 32 bit FSX in a 64 bit system the size of your video card RAM has no effect on the address space FSX uses. FSX can use all of the 4GB available.  4 GB really should be enough for a flight simulator. It's only the relatively recent arrival of very demanding addons such as the NGX and 777X that has brought the VAS limit into common experience in FSX. As long as developers are aware of this limit then this should not be a problem. PMDG have said they will add ways to tune the VAS usage of the 777X in SP1.  Also it's not difficult to reduce FSX memory usage and so increase the amount of space such addons require.

 

FSX itself is now just a platform for the addons we load to run in. The ingenuity of developers such as PMDG has increased the experience we can have in FSX dramatically.  Majestic have shown that you can have an extremely realistic external flight and engine model unaffected by FSX limitations. There's no pressing need to abandon the 32 bit ship, and all the development that goes with it. Maybe when a 64 bit version of P3D is available (and legal to use) an orderly transfer can ensue at the pace users can choose for themselves, with good commonality between old and new. Moving to X-Plane, with no such commonality, represents a much more dramatic change and a lot of burnt bridges.

And the pony express riders laughed as they watched the railroad being built.

 

Gene

 

 

And the pony express riders laughed as they watched the railroad being built.

 

And the railroad might very well be Prepar3d V2. 

 

Regards

 

Joona L

And the pony express riders laughed as they watched the railroad being built.

 

Gene

Like X Plane, the railroad has only a limited route network.

Nevertheless, his point is valid. 4GB probably should be enough for a flight simulator that was released at the end of 2006, but are we really saying that it will be enough for future versions??

Nevertheless, his point is valid. 4GB probably should be enough for a flight simulator that was released at the end of 2006, but are we really saying that it will be enough for future versions??

 

4GB is enough for majority of the modern games out there which are almost always 32 bit programs and many of them include quite large areas in high detail, thus the answer is yes.

 

It's some faulty / inefficient code which causes memory load to build up and leads to OOM problems... With new efficient code the memory usage should stay well below the  4GB limit. 

 

Regards

 

Joona L

Watch the numbers change in favor for X-Plane 10 when PMDG and other addons start developing for that platform.

 

They also said, the first X-Plane 10 release will be a "Sand Box" release to judge it's technical merit, and sales potential. Looking at the demographic survey above FS2004 has far more users then X-Plane 10, and PMDG isn't developing for them anymore, so if the amount of sales for this release continue to follow those trends, well you do the math!! If they don't reach the amount of sales they will need to justify further development, that will be it.