Flight Sim World, going once, going twice

[winjimon 6]

Hi fellow MS Flight enthusiasts.

The new hope we had in Dovetail's Flight Sim World is sadly over.  As a casual MS Flight player, I'd been keeping my eye on this one since its announcement.

Development has been canceled, however the game remains on Steam until May 25th, on sale for US$7.99 including all 1st party DLC.

I picked up a copy and had a tinker. It's not better or worse than MS Flight, kind of a step to the side. It has only a few aircraft and whole world scenery.  The few planes have quite a lot of cockpit detail and functionality.  The world scenery is classic MS scenery with some modern enhancements for ground clutter and cloudy weather generation.

Clearly this game is no longer an investment, but a cheap thrill for people who want to play around for some hours with some planes and scenery.  It comes with a bunch of training scenarios and canned missions to play through.  Free flight allows basic multi-step mission planning and time acceleration.

I won't talk about the community commentary as I haven't been following that at all. I'm sure it's a mix of sadness and anger.  I'm just sad to see another attempt at a new generation of Flight Simulator canceled.  Thought I'd post here in case anyone wanted to try the unfinished product as a cheap toy.

[Beardyman 604]

i would not say that there is a lot of sadness around here..

[signmanbob 592]

Yes, I bought it when it was first offered, but never installed it.

I think I only paid a little over $5 for it at the time because I had bought Flight, but figured if it was developed extensively then I'd install it.

I don't think it ever amounted to enough to become something that the community would miss if it went belly-up. It's surely not anything that I would want to install now.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Wrong forum.

[winjimon 6]

4 hours ago, rhumbaflappy said:

Wrong forum.

While technically correct, if you look at my post and my profile, you'll see that MS Flight is really the only flight sim I own and play, and this is the only forum I frequent. So this is a thought or opinion from that perspective.  Besides, this forum is next to silent, so no one will mind. 🙂

I love MS Flight so much and haven't switched to anything else yet. Having tinkered with FSW a little more, it is clunky and not as polished as MSF. Kind of frustrating to play with. I might persist a bit more, but my eye has been caught by XPlane 11 and Aerofly FS2. I'll be keeping an eye on them now.

Being a totally casual player these days, I mainly want beautiful scenery and a fun flight model, in roughly that order. Once upon a time I'd pour over manuals and spend 30min flipping cockpit switches to get started. These days I want to be in the air in seconds for a 20min flight max as a break from busy life.

[Christopher Low 5,332]

Quote

It's not better or worse than MS Flight, kind of a step to the side. It has only a few aircraft and whole world scenery.  The few planes have quite a lot of cockpit detail and functionality.  The world scenery is classic MS scenery with some modern enhancements for ground clutter and cloudy weather generation.

This is basically the problem I had with FSW. Despite the intended enhancements and improvements to the core engine, I never saw it as anything other than "FSX Plus". As a platform for the flight simulation community, I really didn't see the point. Why did we need another version of Microsoft Flight Simulator? What benefits would it have provided over P3D? Yes, I know.....we can't use P3D for entertainment purposes......blah blah blah. Except, we can....and we do. So where did FSW fit in? Would it have been so different to P3D (and offered so many positive benefits over that platform) that all of the gamers/aviation students/FBI wanted list candidates would have "jumped ship", and moved across to yet another version of the same thing?

I would like to see any new developers steer clear of anything to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator. Leave that to Lockheed Martin (who are doing an admirable job), and concentrate on creating something fresh and new. Aerofly FS2 has its faults (and lacks certain features that the flight simulation community expect as standard "out of the box"), but at least it has nothing whatsoever to do with MSFS!

[jcomm 5,889]

And that "Bush Flying" sim is coming too 🙂

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

5 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

This is basically the problem I had with FSW. Despite the intended enhancements and improvements to the core engine, I never saw it as anything other than "FSX Plus". As a platform for the flight simulation community, I really didn't see the point. Why did we need another version of Microsoft Flight Simulator? What benefits would it have provided over P3D? Yes, I know.....we can't use P3D for entertainment purposes......blah blah blah. Except, we can....and we do. So where did FSW fit in? Would it have been so different to P3D (and offered so many positive benefits over that platform) that all of the gamers/aviation students/FBI wanted list candidates would have "jumped ship", and moved across to yet another version of the same thing?

I would like to see any new developers steer clear of anything to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator. Leave that to Lockheed Martin (who are doing an admirable job), and concentrate on creating something fresh and new. Aerofly FS2 has its faults (and lacks certain features that the flight simulation community expect as standard "out of the box"), but at least it has nothing whatsoever to do with MSFS!

I agree that the next/upcoming sims should stay away from the ESP platform, but...

P3D isn't that special. Plenty of newcomers and Steam users won't ever find out about P3D. Lockheed Martin hasn't done much. They're keeping the platform alive. I don't know how long DTG was working on FSW behind the scenes, but it seems like they hit 64 bit (not that big of a deal) and graphical improvements like DX11 in less time. DTG failed at the business side of this, but their implementation was probably going to be better in my opinion. They already offered more out of the box than P3D. The problem was DLC and their brand is completely useless.

 

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

6 minutes ago, carbonbasedlifeform said:

They already offered more out of the box than P3D. 

Other these dead horse beating threads are adding nothing new, this statement now takes them to a new low and adds less than nothing.

[188AHC 2,138]

There's nothing wrong with discussing this topic but please keep it civil and lets not get into developer bashing, please.

 

[fs4fun 366]

DTG's development approach was to modernize the sim's core engine and then incrementally replace or significantly upgrade each subsystem. FSW was still in very early days of this process and in the meantime large pieces of functionality were disabled, other parts were being redone but incomplete, and other parts practically untouched. What we were left with was a sim that was quite limited in the scenarios we could create, given only piston props, half baked weather system, VFR-only ATC and barely functioning AI, incomplete SDK and so on. The approach was too radical to be considered evolutionary, but without the freedom of starting from a clean slate. Still, it's software -- there are a lot of different approaches you can take but still get to the same end goal. I think the biggest mistake was releasing it too soon, they should have waited until development was further along and in the meantime used a decent size set of external alpha testers to give them feedback. In any case comparing it with P3D is ridiculous, FSW was never useable as a primary sim while P3D clearly is.

I think if DTG could have stayed with their plan, eventually FSW would have been nearly unrecognizable as an MSFS based sim, but they didn't have the resources to get there. I suspect they badly underestimated the effort involved.

[Phantoms 800]

On 5/27/2018 at 1:40 PM, fs4fun said:

 I suspect they badly underestimated the effort involved.

And the amount of time that effort would take.

 

It's a shame because if they would have got the Jets, IFR and night lighting done, then sales would have increased dramatically.

[sightseer 895]

I wonder if maybe they discovered that some aspect of the FSX core engine was incompatible with their vision and it forced them to stop.  or maybe the owner(s) of DTG got an offer to sell what they had done so far.

Im waiting for June 9th and hoping for really good news.

[hypercide 97]

Like Winjimon, I am a casual simmer--two decades worth. Having tired of how unstable FSX had become, I had really embraced FSW, and I found a great deal to like. I got used to firing up, clicking in a flight plan, and flying over some pretty decent default scenery. I was holding out for its growth, but so it goes. I had always stayed away from X-plane because it was far too fiddly, but I dived into X-plane 11 last month after trying out the demo and liking what I saw. It's a bit more user friendly than previous iterations.

But spending some time with FSW makes the real shortcomings of the "mainstream" sim platforms really stand out. I am enjoying X-plane with its detailed airports and interesting hanger, but after FSW, and with all due respect to all the X-plane lovers, compared to even FSW's limited ATC, X-plane ATC simply sucks--its GUI is just goofy, and it doesn't handle VFR-- moreover, X-plane scenery is only passable (unless you have hours of time and tera-bites of disk space, but hopefully Orbx will slowly rectify this situation). Dovetail really was onto something that was better, especially for the casual simmer (a market P3D has no interest in).  It's a darn shame DTG's pockets weren't deeper.