Individually? Or collectively?I know when I was on the team, I spent about an hour every morning looking at various sites. Then some spot checking throughout the day.

Hi all.My interest is generally scenery design.The general standard of providing backward compatibility for 1 or 2 previous versions has been a good thing for the progress of scenery design in the sim.Landclass, mesh, VTP and LWM terrain, and object design all benefit from this approach, as designers often lag behind using the new features by as much as two years. Some of the lag is caused by the delay in releasing the SDKs for the current sim version. Some of the lag is caused by designers needing to backward engineer undocumented features, or their need to create work-arounds for bugs found in the new scenery process ( or bugs/omissions in the SDKs ). Most of the lag is caused by designers needing to wait until the tools are developed to create the new scenery.The next version of the sim will be delivered a bit later in the cycle that we have been familiar with. This is a good thing, as it allows more advanced scenery terrain and objects to become available. We're just leaving the learning phase of translating real-world data to the FS environment. If the next version is backward compatible, we'll have a good jump on not only terrain and scenery, but also on the tools and techniques needed for more advanced design. Just now, accurate coastlines, mesh, landclass, roads and rivers are becoming available for FS9. They were not widely available for FS2002... because FS9 was delivered before we had time to digest the information and devlop the design process! Oddly, CFS2 is becoming a big recipient of this tooling and knowledge... due to it's basic compatibility of terrain design/tools.The limitations of terrain and object design in the current sim also point to areas of improvement for the next versions. Compatibility becomes a key to the evolvement of new features in the sim, as designers push the limits of the possible. For example, we realise now there are improvements needed in dynamic scenery, such as moving ground vehicles, and their conditional elements... moving road traffic and airport vehicles.Now imagine this:An entirely new scenery/terrain engine with no backward compatibility. A two year lag to get scenery developers up to speed and the tools developed. And then FS11 released, before any well-crafted scenery is released for FS10.That's not going to make anyone happy.CFS3 was mentioned in an earlier post. That sim was a disaster for terrain designers, as it deviated from the whole-earth design philosophy of the FS series, and became a "local" theatre flightsim.The tools/SDKs released for that sim are very awkward to deal with, as the lack of new theatres ( and lack of sophistication of terrain scenery ) are now clearly evident. What the designers wanted was FS2002, with guns and bombs.... backward compatibility and familiar tooling. Without relative ease of expandibility of terrain, the sim has become sterile in terms new theatres and campaigns... the active user-base shrivels and the sim dies.Oddly, CFS2 is experiencing a new spurt of growth by designers, as FS2002 and FS9 design techniques/tools are being put to use by CFS2 designers. A surprisingly good benefit of backward compatibility! ( Should Microsoft venture a CFS4... make it compatible with scenery/terrain from FS10, and you'll have a huge hit! )So my vote is for having backward compatibility as a major priority, as it has been in the past. Compatibility is not exclusive of improvements... they can, and do, co-exist.Dick

Either way will hurt them in sales somewhat, so it's always a juggling match between those who won't buy something that won't run their addons (or whatever) and those who won't buy something because it's not different enough from what they already have.In the end I think the current policy of providing backwards compatibility with 1 or 2 previous releases as long as the addons/plugins did not use any functionality outside of the published API is a good one.It's worked for Microsoft for the last 20 years so why change it now?

>Yes, but how big is THIS market segment? Don't know for sure.>How much time does the MSFS team spend reading these forums?More than I care to think about.