"You raise many good points, Dillon."Thanks 'Tdragger', no offence intended toward the Aces team, just putting down what many I know are feeling but afraid to speak on for obvious reasons seen here in this thread. Just call me the Preverbal Gunny Pig on this one... The responses I

amen, brother!

>"Pretty much all the important "decision makers" (including>designers, developers, artists, testers--even our studio>manager) read this forum... on a regular basis." :)>>Can I quote that?>Sure, Tom, if you really think a quote from me is all that valuable. I mean, perhaps if it was Jason who wrote it--he is, after all, above me in the pecking order. ;)

No problem. In reality we really do value you folks as customers and influencers of the product. It's a challenge designing a single product that has to meet so many different needs but that's also what makes coming to work every day so interesting.Keep the feedback coming...

You need to keep in mind that you're not the only FSX customer. Get used to the reality that people will have different expectations and desires from the product from what you're after.Stop speaking for us "hardcore" simmers, because you're not.Oh, and from what I've seen FSX seems like a brilliant piece of software, comprised of MANY long man-hours of work. Being a programmer myself I can definitely appreciate the amount of work that would've gone into it. Not only have the team come up with a huge improvement over FS9, itself an awesome piece of software, but they've pulled it off nicely, and have pleased countless potential customers like myself. If you lack that level of insight the only person to blame is yourself.James

I've been playing FS9 here and there, and I am a very casual gamer. What I like about the game is to be able to fly around in this virtual world, and the more realistic they make the world, the better.I'm not interested in (or have the time for) spending weeks in learning how to fly. I actually find the game difficult and rewarding enough when I set the flight-realism settings to minimum.I'm personally superbly pleased with the changes that are coming to FSX. There is more to explore, more fun to be had....The only other game that I ever play is Grand Theft Auto, for the very reason that I don't have to play the mission, or the game... I can just go about, explore, and do crazy 'virtual' things that in life are not quite possible. (You'd be surprised at how close Grand theft Auto, and FS are, in concept)So I relish the idea of being able to take off from my local airport, fly over my house, and land on the motorway freeway) near home. Fly past a train, and land on it. Cause a traffic jam, with angry passengers coming out of their cars, and beeping horns. Fly towards a herd of elephants, fire my weapons and find out what Elephant kebabs smell like.....Of course you won't be able to do all this in FSX, but the closer they can get to just 'playing around' in a virtual world, the better. (In the meantime, my imagination will have to fill in the gaps, until FS2010...) Finally, to be honest, I don't own a legal copy of FS9, but I have already paid my cash for a legal pre-order of FSX. I'm doing that because I feel that the game is allot closer to what I would like to play (better virtual reality, prettier, etc), and FSX looks like something I would definitely like to play.In conclusion, I think that the FS team are doing the right thing in trying to appeal to different sectors of the market. I can attest that my case is proof of this.

Geofa wins the thread... ;)"It is impossible for MS to make a sim that is everything to everyone-but they do make a sim that can become everything to everyone-pretty amazing."Truer words have never been spoken.Just as MSFS2004 wasn't the end-all-be-all of flight simulations, I am sure that many of you will agree that with various addons and 3rd party programs, it has come quite a long way towards that goal. You can purchase aerial photo based scenery and make a great VFR experience, you can purchase highly complex aircraft and simulate IFR... you can focus on general aviation, airline operations, or military flying (minus the weapons, though). Add on terrain can enhance the mountains and hills in your local area of interest (or the whole world, should you choose), and plugins like Radar Contact and/or VATSIM can bring real-world radio communications to your computer desk.Considering how many different personalities use MSFS, it would be difficult if not impossible add every one of our pet projects to the sim. Granted many if not all of the fixes would be beneficial to the sim as a whole, but sometimes it is difficult to see past that fact that even though the changes you lobby for are small ones, there are thousands more just like it competing for the developers time. Microsoft has done a fantastic job of balancing the features and new inclusions around their limited amount of time and money to develop them. I think it's quite telling that Microsoft did some additional work on the SDK/APIs that addon creators will use to interface with the sim. Rather than spend resources playing catch up to all of our personal preferences, they spent some time making sure that those developers who DO focus on specific aspects within the FS world will have better opportunities and flexability to meet the goals that we hard-core simmers put upon them. I can't wait to see the final product... but that would begin a few months of waiting for my favorite addons to patch/upgrade up. :) -Greg

>>because Dillon has always assumed that his opinion is fact,>that everyone shares it who should have any say at all.>Therefore in his mindset any deviation by Microsoft from his>ideal is a gross insult to the entire community.Dillon, tells it, as it is, we was all hoping for the same things to be improved. That's why we all contribute here with our plea's.Microsoft should listen to us, otherwise there is no point in saying anything, surely?

>Dillon, tells it, as it is, we was all hoping for the same>things to be improved.Who is "we?" That's the entire point, after all. The hypothetical "we" you (and others) refer to are just one, tiny segment of a very large market.

No Dillon wins the thread.... :-waveIf that's where this is at. From the wording of the original post it was aimed at Aces. The response back from 'Tdragger' was basically, 'We got it, thanks for the write up, and keep the ideas coming'... So the intended recipient got the message and the point. I don't know what the rest of you got but what ever it was it was way off base. Maybe a course in 'Understanding the Written Word' is in order for most of you...Most of the crap in this thread is mindless babble. Dillon was stating what people keep reiterating over and over yet missing the point at the same time of this particular post. 'FSX needs to perform well on a wide variety of systems especially lower end. The type of systems the target market is mostly using along side that market's 'XBOX360' machines. Dillon, me, and many others are not stating FSX needs to be this or that for any one particular simmer but rather the performance of FSX can't carter to only the top of the line machines. This ensures a wide variety of users can enjoy the sim especially the proposed target market. Specific features are nice but what's important is 'Jason' with his lowly 2.6gig machine and XBOX360 can enjoy FSX along with 'Command and Conquer' (with similar in game performance) the same way Bill Leaming enjoys the sim with his high end rig. Yes Bill Leaming will see a little more eye candy with his 3+gig machine but the sim still looks and runs great on 'Jason's' box. Jason can take part in the add-on market with better performance than what we see with FS9. This point has nothing to do with specific features.Tdragger got it and that's all that matters. In tweaking the sim for final release, it

I think most got the performance issue along time ago starting with fuIII-called "sliders" in the options menu.....http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Sure could have fooled me with the responces I've been reading here. It's more like, "Bring on the candy not matter what the cost..."

"eye candy" of course being what "we" (and of course "we" speak for "all") consider not to be important or serious...http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Speak for yourself Geofa, I happen to think eye candy is very important and will buy the rig to make it happen. :-)

But Geof is in a sense correct. FS9 has sliders as will FS. I currently have 2 year old wal-mart computer amd 2.2ghz. It's like any game/sim out there, if you want fluidity tune down the graphics, it's a fact of life irregardless of what game or sim one uses unless you have the cash to buy the top end system (FS95 and nascar 2 for me come to mind as the beginning of the painful cash versus maximum graphics battle).There are some very good flight simulators out there that cater to a specific part of aviation, FS and x-plane are the only ones I can think of that attempt to capture the overall aspect of aviation and flight, but the cost for this all-encompassing approach is to put in features that appeal to the masses (even x-plane has added many graphical enhancements). With that said, the 3rd party world of both base products fills the need for specific desires of individual customers.As far as marketing, I don't think targeting as many people as possible is such a bad idea even if that does include tweens and teens. Anyone with a remote interest in flight is a potential hard-core simmer and that can only be good for this hobby we all enjoy.Ian.