Flight Servers to be shut down, end of the road.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

Think I might be repeating myself but what the heck; always thought Flight was the Syd Barrett of sims. The one with the greatest potential but just couldn't quite hold it all together. Shine on you crazy diamond.

 

Hold it together.......?

 

I don't think it was ever given a fair chance. MS bailed after only about 4 months, apparently not because it wasn't making money, but because it wasn't making the type of money MS was interested in. (apparently combined with some internal corporate turf wars)

 

Evidence seems to indicate it was doing as well as FSX after the same period, which is telling, considering the main program was free.

 

We'll have to see what the future holds, as the technology deserves better than to languish in obscurity. In the meantime, right now, for whatever reason, the multiplayer servers are still active.

[CoolP 283]

Are there any plans to allow the current customers an offline mode?

[Heimi 91]

You can use MSFlight offline right now. Just the online features are gone.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

You can use MSFlight offline right now. Just the online features are gone.

 

And of course multiplayer is still working, for however much longer........ I'm on it now. ^_^  

[stonelance 136]

There is a lot of misinformation here.

 

Flight never was available for 3rd party developers to create addons for.  We wanted it to be at some point, but we wanted to iron out the production bumps before opening that road so that they would have a good experience.  We were really close in the end, but not quite there.  Early on we gave them tools to produce content and give us feedback, and very few of them did (unfortunately our tools did have some bugs and issues at the time as well).  I think they were too busy trying to make ends meet with FSX, and weren't going to invest time in a new platform until they knew it would be viable.  Look at how long it took them to officially support P3D.

 

Flight was never paid software, it was always free to download, and always intended to be that way.  In our eyes it was the same as downloading the demo for FSX, but you could actually buy the product in pieces.  Unfortunately when you do higher quality content, you need to narrow down your breadth and we couldn't do everything in a first release.

 

Also, I don't see how using a game controller or mouse controls matters.  Joysticks, throttle, stick and rudder (even TrackIR eventually) all worked.  Believe it or not 95% of people with computers don't have a game controller or a joystick.  Why should we make those people suffer with a terrible mouse control scheme just because hardcore users don't think it is realistic enough?  Would you rather those people just don't have a good option for playing a flight sim unless they spend hundreds of dollars on hardware first?

[HiFlyer 9,360]

I have never used MS Flight, but I am still sad for you guys. I know that you all enjoyed it a lot, and it's a shame that some other members of the forum can't see that. I assume that we all want the flight simulation community to grow as a whole, and one way of achieveing that is by having as many flight simulator options as possible. I wish you all the best of luck with the community mod updates B)

 

Thank you very much. I found some other comments pretty disappointing in terms of community, but I know that's not everyone.

[jcomm 5,939]

Also, I don't see how using a game controller or mouse controls matters.  Joysticks, throttle, stick and rudder (even TrackIR eventually) all worked.  Believe it or not 95% of people with computers don't have a game controller or a joystick.  Why should we make those people suffer with a terrible mouse control scheme just because hardcore users don't think it is realistic enough?  Would you rather those people just don't have a good option for playing a flight sim unless they spend hundreds of dollars on hardware first?

 

 

+10000!!!!!

 

Stonelance, I am using Aerowinx PSX with a mouse, most of the time.

 

I am a pilot IRL at more than 30 yrs,  I used to fly Condor Soaring with mouse, and MS FLIGHT with mouse. I was never able to use MSFS or X-Plane  with mouse!

 

Actually mouse in MS FLIGHT came a lot closer to the way I interact with the stick in the gliders I fly than my previous COUGAR Hotas stick...  The rudders were a different matter of course....

 

I should point out that, IMO, you have developed for MS FLIGHT the best possible way of controlling the aircraft with your mouse, without losing realism, given the limitations of a PC-based, desktop, flight simulation game that these all are!

[188AHC 2,138]

I merged two topics on this subject, one started by Heimi and one by Dillon.

It came up with Dillon's title which is ok.

 

Carry on.

[BaronKen 144]

Mouse control works great; was easy to learn... very enjoyable way to fly with Flight.

[Christopher Low 5,354]

Stonelance,

 

Were you one of the developers of MS Flight? I had assumed that you were some clever mod guy who worked out how to do stuff with the base package, but your words further up this thread suggest that you were directly involved with the product.

[jcomm 5,939]

Yes he was...

[KavindaJD 31]

... and he has basically saved Microsoft Flight ...

[Air1 136]

Stonelance,

 

Were you one of the developers of MS Flight? I had assumed that you were some clever mod guy who worked out how to do stuff with the base package, but your words further up this thread suggest that you were directly involved with the product.

Shame shame, you have not been paying attention.

 

Steve

[stonelance 136]

Yes, I was one of the graphics devs and also worked on a lot of infrastructure (why I know so much about addons) and performance.

[goates 576]

Could be played with game controllers?? The realism factor? Maybe something for the gamers instead of simmers?

 

Hmm, the FSX quick reference card I have has both mouse and Xbox 360 sections. Guess that makes it an arcade sim for those lowly gamers too.

 

For those with joysticks the realism was just as good as FSX, and I found it very enjoyable to fly in, even more so than FSX many days. It's too bad Flight was killed before the devs had a chance to create more content, which is what I think the biggest problem was. Hawaii and Alaska are nice places for sure, but are still only a small fraction of the world. From posts here and elsewhere it sounds like ATC and AI were on the timeline to come back too.

 

And I also liked where they were going with the built in marketplace. As much fun as it is installing and managing add-ons manually, I would rather just have them installed and ready to go with the click of a button. Yes, there are potential problems with online activation, and if it does become a major problem, there is always FlightGear. Sooner or later an OS update is going to prevent FS9 from working and the ability to run older hardware and operating system won't last forever (or at least not easily).