1. More accurate scenery based on aerial photos. I think seeing farmland and scattered houses along the I-85 corridor isn't realistic. I'm planning to move to GA later this year, and I plan on making my FS X purchase hopefully at the Best Buy at Gwinnett Place. What I see, is hopefully what I get. 2. More accurate weather. Need I say more?3. A FMS for the planes.4. The ability to fly higher than 99,999 MSL.

>Wow you guys!!!!Unbelievable...>Why don't you also add these:>>1. Stewardess on the stairs to check the tickets.>2. Traffic jams at the airports.>3. Random hijackers>4. Space shuttles and moon landscape>5. Traffic lights in the cities that work with traffic flow>6. Bicycles for the 3rd world counties.>7. Typhoons and twisters.>8 .......I am all the way for 1) 2)*, 3)**, 4) (definitely) 6) (actually countries like Denmark would use it too)If not possible, just please include just #1* with crashes and all kind of mess** only when they are always caught

well said....

> The ability to fly higher than 99,999 MSL.Where you planning to go, to the moon :-hmmm

>Having spent many years programming in VB and C++ with OpenGL>I fully understand what can and what cannot be done so I am>not a normal "punter".>>These other non FSX games are more detailed because that is>how the designers have chosen to display their games. For>example if 1 unit represents 1 metre in flightsim, then in the>other games 1 unit represents 1 inch. Therefore, the other>games are more detailed because of their lower scale but that>does not mean that FS cannot implement the same calculations.>Regardless of which game, a unit is a unit. It only matters>what that unit represents. Therefore the calculation for a>falling object in Battlefield 2 is the same calculation as>that in FSX. The only difference is the precision (ie>Battlefield will be precise to 1 inch where as fsx will be>precise to 1 metre).Scale isn't the real issue here. The issue is how many polygons you can efficiently throw at a modern GPU, after doing HSR & LOD on the scene. Unfortunately, terrain engines are complicated beasts, and difficult to get right for many reasons.The terrain data is probably some sort of pre-calculated TIN (irreg. grid) from DEM sources using something like dulaney triangulation to reduce the overall mesh complexity, thus rendering techniques are limited, as opposed to an algorithm that can take advantage of a (regular grid). Unless they do some resampling to form a nice regular grid, I don't know, I'm not an MS dev team member. It's nice when it's a regular grid because you can take advantage of triangle strips during the rendering process. You want to push as much rendering to the GPU as possible to free up the CPU, and right now we are limited to only a few algorithms that can do this well. In addition to this, the terrain data must be stitched together, accounting for the different LOD's, and doing this with TIN's is complicated and tough to get right. Games like Battlefield 2, Far Cry etc, have an advantage in their use of heightmaps that a flight simulator doesn't have. Let's just say that an engine like BF2 isn't nearly as complex as one required for world wide scenery and flight, although the sheer amount of eye candy in those games does add quite a bit of complexity on top of the terrain engine.On top of the terrain, you have buildings, and scenery like bushes, trees, water, roads, and more. This ads another layer of complexity to the rendering engine, and with an entire city, that's a lot of polygons to render, and there aren't many ways to reduce the complexity of viewing a building from the outside. On the inside, we could use portals, BSP trees, and more to do HSR, culling etc...The weather and sky system is also very nice in MSFS, and with their clouds, sky shaders, particle engine system and more, I believe that MSFS is one of the most beautifully rendered landscape systems on the market today. It's unbelievable how complex a scenery generation system like the FS engine is. The sheer distances that you can view in the game is amazing, and they have done a stunning job in making all this rendering possible at acceptable frame rates, while running an AI, Physics, & multiplayer system all at once.Now MS is upping the ante with way more detailed terrain mesh's, autogen scenery, and more. I'm excited, but remember, the computer does not have infinite quantities of processing power, thus there are some limitations and tradeoffs, such as in lighting, shadows, HDR, and other special effects that require a good deal of power to render.

>Remember that it is easier to do a 20 x 20 miles area than>the whole world... that is why these are $29.95 each and FSX>is likely to be in the $99 range.yes but imagine with MS' budget and more than a handful of people working on the product, like flight scenery has. Imagine a office building a few stories high full of programmers, testers, artists, coordinators, marketing, etc and then you will see your comparison isn't valid

It does not get less expensive by putting more people to work on it...apart from which, there are over 20,000 airports in the FS database...So an office building full of people (especially marketing people, I can say that since I used to be one of them :-) ) does not help much..

it does get less expensive because your marketing machine and financial backing means you can reach a larger audience and get much higher sales figures than an airport scenery add-on for an existing game.

We're kind of going around in circles here... If you are now saying that the higher cost could be recovered by selling more copies, we have a different question... and one that is right on the money, so to speak.So, if you choose to pursue this one more step, you'd have to ask yourself how much more you could charge per copy or how many more copies you could sell by including more high resolution airports than currently. It is exactly these kind of business considerations that have in the past caused MS to include "samples" of detailed scenery and airplanes, and leave the pursuit of developing this further to the add-on companies and enthusiasts. :-)

<>Hmm, try one corner of one floor of one building--about 40 people.

How about aircraft with current color schemes instead of 6-10yr schemes. I'd like to have a plane that you can see on a new manufacturer's website. Take my plane for example. The 182 is a model that was last built in 2000 even though the sim is labeled 2004. I'm new to the forum, but just thought I'd put this in (in case anybody from MS reads this) Thanks John, Lubbock, TX Included pic of my plane for the wish list!:

For FSX we're going to include only paint schemes on model year 2009 aircraft.

I"m sorry, I didn't mean to offend anybody, but even the FSX screenshots show a Cessna having paint schemes that are dated back into the 70's with dull yellow and faded red straight striping. If you look at the '04 & '05 Cessna's, their paint schemes are amazing. So are the NEW Cirrus with Mardi Gras paint, etc that you can buy aftermarket. They are finally getting away from blah and into the wow.Good luck MS, I know you're going to do good!John,Lubbock, TX

>1. More accurate scenery based on aerial photos. I think>seeing farmland and scattered houses along the I-85 corridor>isn't realistic. >>I'm planning to move to GA later this year, and I plan on>making my FS X purchase hopefully at the Best Buy at Gwinnett>Place. What I see, is hopefully what I get. >>2. More accurate weather. Need I say more?>hmm, ok.. what do you mean by accurate? Accurate according to what's going on in the real world? Accurate with regard to the wind blows your AC? What is it you're looking for here?>3. A FMS for the planes.>Why? What's wrong with 3rd party developers who can devote way more man hours to making wonderful FMS software for specific aircraft? That's what makes MSFS so great, it's extensible.>4. The ability to fly higher than 99,999 MSL.Um, what do you plan on flying here? Maybe only a few aircraft have ever made it that high, and it gets tricky with the atmosphere. 99.99999999999999999% of aircraft are going to be below 45,000 feet. I suppose if you want to go higher, try a space simulation, not a flight simulation, it just might be your cup of tea.