Flight was an evolved version of FSX. Regrettably FSW was also a modified version of FSX rather than FSW because the Dovetail staff were already familiar with the FSX code from creating FSX-SE. I would suspect that MSFS2020 is an evolved version of Flight but we'll all have to wait to discover the truth.

I thoroughly enjoyed Flight and would not worry if parts of it were used in MSFS. 

Im still holding my finger on either Unity or Unigine. My personal opinion though.

We will find out soon... all we are doing at this point is speculating.

19 hours ago, Baber20 said:

Their in house custom built engine I guess.

Microsoft don't have the team of coders to build an entirely new next gen flight sim engine with all the bells and whistles, hdr, Ray tracing etc, so they partner with (or buy) 3rd party companies who already have that.

8 hours ago, rjfry said:

FSW was 64bit but I think Microsoft have a new code for MSFS to take advantage of more modern hardware, the GPU has advanced faster than the CPU in the past 5years, and the present sims do not make full use of todays GPU.

Late September "Feature Discovery Series-Preview" 1 World  2 Weather  3 Aerodynamics 4 Cockpits, this may tell us all we need to know.

I simply don't think Microsoft would have had enough time to implement the features they've got in the FSW engine.

My guess is that they've been researching MSFS concepts for a while now, well before the plug on FSW was pulled and would done this in a different engine almost certainly based in some form on the FSXI/Flight codebase (yes I did say FSXI - ACES was known to be well into development for that sim before it got pulled).

I think FSW has provided more inspiration than anything else, if you actually look at what MSFS has, it's all very different asset wise, even the clouds - the Simul clouds lack the definition of the Microsoft clouds yet the absorbing of light seems bettter on the Simul clouds so to me the cloud bases are more consistent so to be that suggests different technologies at play.

56 minutes ago, Greazer said:

Microsoft don't have the team of coders to build an entirely new next gen flight sim engine with all the bells and whistles, hdr, Ray tracing etc, so they partner with (or buy) 3rd party companies who already have that.

You say this as a fact, so where did you get that information?

22 minutes ago, Noooch said:

You say this as a fact, so where did you get that information?

This is a common knowledge from news sites, contacts, blogs etc. They earn Billions each quarter, it makes sense and saves a lot of time to work with 3rd parties. They don't need to reinvent the wheel. In fact if I was the program manager I would do exactly the same thing.

"Don't believe everything you read on the internet" - Abraham Lincoln

1 hour ago, Greazer said:

Microsoft don't have the team of coders to build an entirely new next gen flight sim engine with all the bells and whistles, hdr, Ray tracing etc, so they partner with (or buy) 3rd party companies who already have that.

Says who? You? Based on what?
They might have some of the companies working for them to do it. It's not like this is the first game released by microsoft recently with a new engine, uh.

8 hours ago, domkle said:

Then again, it is reasonable to surmise that a product developed with Unity for MR would find its way to FS20

Why? Actual games (rather than MR) released recently by Microsoft have used a number of different game engines, including bespoke ones. It may well use Unity, but it might just as easily use one of the others. Whilst it's fun to jump to conclusions, that's all you're doing.

Edited August 20, 20196 yr by vortex681

1 hour ago, Greazer said:

This is a common knowledge from news sites, contacts, blogs etc. They earn Billions each quarter, it makes sense and saves a lot of time to work with 3rd parties. They don't need to reinvent the wheel. In fact if I was the program manager I would do exactly the same thing.

That's most probably why you are not the program manager.

"Common knowledge", too easy.

Looks like FSX (and FSW) to me.  If it was a new engine we could expect quite different looking runways.

https://ibb.co/6nMpSMg

It makes sense that MS are reusing old code and not reinventing the wheel. They're not fools and are bowing to their bean counters. I suspect the only reason they got the go-ahead on the project in the first place was because they decided to reuse and enhance old code.

Edited August 20, 20196 yr by MatthewS

18 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Looks like FSX (and FSW) to me.  If it was a new engine we could expect quite different looking runways.

https://ibb.co/6nMpSMg

It makes sense that MS are reusing old code and not reinventing the wheel. They're not fools and are bowing to their bean counters. I suspect the only reason they got the go-ahead on the project in the first place was because they decided to reuse and enhance old code.

You came to that conclusion based on the runways? Fascinating.

6 minutes ago, Krakin said:

You came to that conclusion based on the runways? Fascinating.

Yes OFC.  My conclusions are based on the available evidence. If you have evidence that challenges my conclusion then what is it? I'm happy to be proven wrong. At the moment I'm not seeing anything that makes me want to change my mind.