Alright I missed it by one day. But this is the 1 year anniversary of the announcement of Microsoft Flight Simulator being developed once again, on June 9th, 2019. I thought they were done, and it surprised the heck out of me, and I thought it was not true at first, and of course most of use were confused and some thought it was Xbox only also, among other things from maybe not being true, to whatever you could think of at the time.

I actually thought they were done, and would probably never develop another version. But, that was just me.

Edited June 10, 20205 yr by in2tech

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that unless you were somehow associated with the project, everyone was caught off guard. ...Ok, so maybe not that far out on the limb...and actually I know I can't speak for everyone. I know there is still a dent where my jaw hit the floor when I first saw the trailer.

No DTG was working on MS commercial flight sim and 64bit and talk of airliners to be added all with the backing of MS, then someone pulled the plug (cough), Now they have been working on TS2020 for XBOX.

I tweaked the poll questions to hopefully make a little more sense 🙂 At least I hope it does? Just trying to bring back the memory of that day, when for most Microsoft Flight Simulator fans, and general flight simulations fans, the internet blew up for our hobby. And if I remember correctly a flight simulation conference had just ended that day, I think? 

6 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

No DTG was working on MS commercial flight sim and 64bit and talk of airliners to be added all with the backing of MS, then someone pulled the plug (cough), Now they have been working on TS2020 for XBOX.

You know what they bloody mean.

I agree with the OP. I thought MS were done. It is good news that they reconsidered and decided to enter the market again, especially bringing with it the new technologies to make FS even more realistic.

Having said that, I think MS does need to rebuild their reputation and confidence within the flight simming community. If they mess it up this time, I think they are done for good IMHO.

 

Regards
Mark

On ‎6‎/‎11‎/‎2020 at 2:44 AM, aldridgem said:

I agree with the OP. I thought MS were done. It is good news that they reconsidered and decided to enter the market again, especially bringing with it the new technologies to make FS even more realistic.

Having said that, I think MS does need to rebuild their reputation and confidence within the flight simming community. If they mess it up this time, I think they are done for good IMHO.

 

Regards
Mark

that's an interesting point.  With the 'old' line of flightsim, every second one was good, while the in between ones tended to have serious issues (they bucked that trend with both 2002 and 2004 being fairly good.)

Hopefully they are putting enough time and attention to this release to avoid that.

I was surprised by how far it has already evolved.

 

16 hours ago, andyjohnston.net said:

 With the 'old' line of flightsim, every second one was good, while the in between ones tended to have serious issues (they bucked that trend with both 2002 and 2004 being fairly good.)

 

 

11 hours ago, tweekz said:

I was surprised by how far it has already evolved.

 

Yes, the Flight Simulator franchise goes back a long while and some versions were more r/evolutionary than others. My very first experience and entrance to FS was the Psion product that ran on a ZX Spectrum back in the early eighties. In those days it was just jagged lines that represented a very simplistic cockpit and the numbers changed in the right direction on some very rudimentary gauges. Scenery detail was pretty much non-existent back then.

But looking back specifically on the MS FS product line, my first experience was FS98, then went to FS2002 which was OK and good for its time. Then I moved to FS2004 which I believe was a game changer at least in terms of all the different variety of add-on products that became available in the marketplace and that's when I became seriously interested flight simulation. I subsequently moved to FSX which was great so this meant I actually skipped over all the early editions of FS 1-5, FS2000 and MS Flight altogether.

For me FSX brought to the table that not only could you simulate the cockpit experience, but also opened up other avenues that I explored such as painting liveries for certain aircraft and also tinkering with scenery design based on all the scenery tools and utilities that also came to fruition. As a final note, I skipped over all P3D versions until v4. Just look at the wide array of hardware products that can help support your experience today. That's also become a huge business, but also helped further advanced the realism aspects of FS.

I will definitely consider FS2020. Again I am looking forward to what Asobo and MS can bring to the FS landscape. Of course we must not forget that FS2020 isn't the only sim in town now. P3D and X-Plane have made tremendous advances, there's Aerofly FS and I believe a number of other app-based sim products out there now. We have a lot of good choices available right now and hopefully later this year.

Enjoy the coming year! 😄