The elephant in the room is whether it's P3D or DTS's offerings, the FSX code has been problematic to fix.  Because of this I would far from give DTS a hard time fixing it and wish them well.  I believe hands down if they were upgrading and/or expanding the FLIGHT engine we'd be have a whole different conversation right now.  

Talking about things to wish for, that surely would have been nice.

Even better imho would have been for them to work together with the developers of Aerofly FS 2, which i consider a superior engine without a doubt but maybe not fitting their business plan or their capabilities and know how.

7 minutes ago, france89 said:

Talking about things to wish for, that surely would have been nice.

Even better imho would have been for them to work together with the developers of Aerofly FS 2, which i consider a superior engine without a doubt but maybe not fitting their business plan or their capabilities and know how.

 

When the news hit DTS was licensing Flight Simulator I remember we all were like, 'Why FSX?'.  We all knew the work needed with the code to bring that engine up to speed.  A better move for DTS would have been to purchase the FLIGHT engine and build on that, oh well... Guess we were right.  I wish them well with this and hopefully seeing this rollout they modify their 3d' party policy so they can get the support for this thing and not run out of money... Talk about choosing the harder road.

Dovetail did purchase the Flight engine. They chose not to pursue that code. Please note, most of the scenery and some aircraft from FSX can be imported to the Flight game. But Flight lacks much of the capability of FSX, like AI, SimConnect, etc...

 

Dick

56 minutes ago, rhumbaflappy said:

Dovetail did purchase the Flight engine. They chose not to pursue that code. Please note, most of the scenery and some aircraft from FSX can be imported to the Flight game. But Flight lacks much of the capability of FSX, like AI, SimConnect, etc...

 

Dick

It still surprises me that they didn't use Flight. Technology-wise, they could have started 5 years further ahead. With how modern and organized Flight supposedly was, it would have made upgrades much easier, I'd imagine. As well, to my understanding, code for AI traffic and ATC was there, just disabled as it needed to be reworked to work with the new engine. Time could have instead been spent reworking these systems and improving them rather than trying to modernize 10 year old code. However I'm sure there's reasons that they chose to use FSX (likely they were already familiar with it due to Steam Edition).

Flight only runs on DirectX 9. It came out way back in 2001. FSX can use up to DirectX 10, which was released in 2006.

MS probably had a good reason to kill that project.

They didn't use MS Flight because that would mean they'd have to program the ATC, AI, and other systems from scratch. By using FSX, the foundations were already there.

1 hour ago, magnetite said:

Flight only runs on DirectX 9. It came out way back in 2001. FSX can use up to DirectX 10, which was released in 2006.

What?

Flight came out in Feb 2012

1 hour ago, GHarrall said:

What?

Flight came out in Feb 2012

Yes, but it's rendering engine is based around DirectX 9, which came out way before FSX existed. That's what I was referring to. I didn't say Flight came out in 2001. I was referring to the DirectX versions.

3 hours ago, magnetite said:

Flight only runs on DirectX 9. It came out way back in 2001. FSX can use up to DirectX 10, which was released in 2006.

What stops them from just updating the rendering engine to use the new DirectX version just like Microsoft did for FSX? With Flight as modular as it was, it would have been an even easier task, if I had to take a guess.

 

2 hours ago, fsxkitty said:

They didn't use MS Flight because that would mean they'd have to program the ATC, AI, and other systems from scratch. By using FSX, the foundations were already there.

To my knowledge, these systems were in the code for Flight, just disabled as they needed to be reworked for the new engine. Time could have been spent improving these systems instead of reworking the entire core.

14 minutes ago, HughesMDflyer4 said:

What stops them from just updating the rendering engine to use the new DirectX version just like Microsoft did for FSX? With Flight as modular as it was, it would have been an even easier task, if I had to take a guess.

To my knowledge, these systems were in the code for Flight, just disabled as they needed to be reworked for the new engine. Time could have been spent improving these systems instead of reworking the entire core.

When Microsoft updated FSX to DirectX 10, it was a major rewrite of the FSX code (second last paragraph). It wasn't simply patched in. They rewrote a lot of FSX's code when they upgraded it from DX9 to DX10. 

The issues with the rendering of FSX has little to do with DirectX version.

Also, I have a feeling a bit of FLIGHT has ended up inside FlightSimWorld.  Just because FSX and Flight were separate products doesn't mean you can't use code from one in the other... I've been writing software for far too many years to believe that.  I'm pretty certain the map interface in FSW is based on FLIGHT, and maybe even the UI itself.

I had a feeling some part of Flight was borrowed as well. FSX has 5 tabs of rendering options you can set, while FSW and Flight have one. 

Both the FSX and Flight engines have IMO outlived their usefulness. They're outdated and based on old tech and ideas, with things duct taped on throughout the years. A new engine, written from the ground up for multi threading, 64-bit and DX12 would both perform much better and look more comparable to modern PC games released in the last 5 years, rather than like some time anomaly from 2004.

The problem is that developing a new engine from scratch is crazy expensive. Even big AAA game development studios rarely develop their own engines in house any more. Many that do, license it out to other developers to pay off the R&D, or are under the umbrella of a massive publisher so they can re-use the engine across multiple development teams and franchises.

So why not license some third party engine? Very few engines are suitable for flight sims and the unique demands they place on scaling and draw distance (from ground level to 50,000+ feet, with a visibility distances of hundreds of miles). Licensing costs and the development time/cost of adapting such an engine for a flight sim would be too high compared to the expected sales. 
So we have good old FSX/ESP. It was state of the art in open world rendering 15 years ago, so it still gets the job done even though the cracks are showing through everywhere.