"Redmond, WA, January 19, 2007

While it is still the ACES group, it looks to be a different team of designers working on this one, including Mike (tdragger).I agree though, hard to get excited when there are issues with FSX that need to be adressed, especially since it will be based on the FSX platform.Wonder if you can add FS aircraft to it, LOLRegards, MichaelKDFW

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI-x16 / AMD

No gamer is going to play a Train Simulator with the current performance of FSX, that's out the question. Maybe being that it's a ground based game it'll be fine using one of the two 2.6gig processors in the newer machines...

Hard to imagine a market for a train simulator except for maybe the types of guys that have those huge basement setups. Anyway, MS sees FSX as a huge success since it has been in the top 5 highest selling games every month since its release. They are in no hurry to patch it since the sales figures indicate the public support of the game. It all boils down to numbers. I will be happy to see a patch if it comes but at this point with a new pc I don't even need it. I want them to get on the stick with that dx10 patch more than anything. I'd like to see that dx10 patch by March.

DX10 might not be out by March... We may have a while to see the final verdic of FSX performance in the environment it was actually designed for (Vista/DX10)."MS sees FSX as a huge success since it has been in the top 5 highest selling games every month since its release."FSX sold and is selling based on a 20 year reputation of the Flight Simulator franchise as a whole. Train Sim doesn't have that kind of legacy behind it. That's Aces problem though. As far as we're concerned, maybe this will help the FSX patch development as they (Aces) optimize the FSX graphics engine for another plateform...

DX10 will be out with Vista, which is Jan 31 unless I missed something.Train sims are neat and I agree, it can't hurt that ACES is going to fiddle with the graphics engine vis a vis Train Sim. That can only help us.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

"unless I missed something"You missed something... :-roll

>While it is still the ACES group, it looks to be a different>team of designers working on this one, including Mike>(tdragger).>>I agree though, hard to get excited when there are issues with>FSX that need to be adressed, especially since it will be>based on the FSX platform.>>Wonder if you can add FS aircraft to it, LOL>>Regards, Michael>KDFWIt's more than a different team of designers. It's an entire team (design, dev, test, art, pm, ...).The FSX team is currently working their butts off on SP1 and DX10.The Train Simulator initiative should certainly benefit the low-altitude story of future versions of FS.-Doug@ACES

Unless EA dumped Kuju's upcoming TrainSim (http://www.railsimulator.com) & Microsoft picked it up, I have to agree their efforts would be best spent fixing FSX or developing a new gfx engine.

I wonder, since Train Simulator is based on FSX technology, if the two games are designed to integrate! Perhaps, all along, there was more of a reason for those elephants and giraffs in FSX!! You may be able to see and explore the same living dynamic world of FSX from a different prepective! That would be cool!

"The Train Simulator initiative should certainly benefit the low-altitude story of future versions of FS." Duuuuuude cool!

"You may be able to see and explore the same living dynamic world of FSX from a different prepective!"I think your going a little too far with this... :-spacecraft

too far where? From prespective of a person riding a car or or train? Why not?

Many people laugh at flightsimmers, they dont see how it can be fun playing pilot, theres a huge market for trainsims and sims in general.

As a developer for the current Microsoft Train Simulator, I can tell you that there is, indeed, a fairly large following of Train Simulator enthusiasts. The first MS Train Simulator sold well over 1 million copies. I can only imagine that the next version would sell equally as many, or more. The first version had TRAINZ as competition, and this version will have KUJU's Rail Simulator as competition. So, I don't see the competition as being a factor on the total number of sales surpassing that of its predecessor. Cheers,Dan Zollner - 3DTrains.com