I beg to differ. 1 - A 100% photorealistic world is possible right now. Its just the fact that it would take terrabytes of space to store it on your harddrive. Even so, such massive amounts of hard drive space is freely available at any Best Buy or CompUSA. 2 - Replication of every instrument, circuit breaker, subsystem, nut, bolt and bug splatter is possible right now. Typical advancements in CPU technology are required to eventually allow this into MSFS well within 20 years without diminishing frame rates to unflyable levels.3 - A 100% realistic ATC environment is possible today. As real-speech technology sounds better and negate the need for individual grammar recordings. Aces chose not to improve on this, not because it is not possible to be improved, but because they simply chose not to.4 - Implementing far smart AI aircraft is also possible today. Aces simply chose not to focus on this in FSX. Adding the ability to implement SID, STAR and Airway use as well as intelligent approach spacing and even diversions due to weather is just a matter of getting it programmed. This to is more than possible right now.5 - High fidelity, real time, weather has been implemented into FSX by default. It is just a matter of adding the intricate and detailed fluid-dynamic calculation of each airfoil and surface reacting to the laminar airflow.6 - High fidelity flight dynamics allow "by-the-book" aircraft behavior today.The Flightsim journey from where I joined in FS4 is much like climbing Mt. Everest. We are at the point where it is far closer to climb to the top than it is to go back. But once you reach the top, you have reached the top. As much as you enjoyed the journey, there comes a point when there is no where to go. After you have done 1 - 6, where else is there to go?What resources or abilities are so lacking that in 10 years we cannot have everything I describe? Of course I am not taking into account the lack of will to implement these things, at which point we can drag the FS franchise out forever to put in a photoreal tree here and an anatomically correct whale there but then, FS ceases being FS and must be renamed PFCWWS (Photorealistic Foilage and Anatomically Correct Whale and Wildlife Simulator 1).20 years ago when I first fell in love with FS4, clouds were pointy pancakes and buildings were colored spikes. In FSX, the oceans look like oceans, cites look like cites, aircraft look like aircraft, airports look like airports, clouds look like clouds, voices sound like voices and heards of roaming sheep look like heards of roaming sheep.The only things that we really don't have is a full motion platform, the smell of JetA and stale first class meals or virtual reality. I think you overestimate the resources, will, and ability to take MSFS the final mile. Then again, long before FS20 is released, there is always the chance that the earth will shift its polar axis thereby rearranging the mass of the earth thereby setting off massive earthquakes, tidal waves and volcanos, resulting in the death of billions of people. In such as case, chances are that everyone who knows how to develop MSFS will be dead and we'll have to start over with FS1 all over again.

In 2017, I'll buy my new copy FSXV from the Microsoft website. I'll opt for the deluxe version at $350 so I can play control tower and fly an old 787...back when the pilots were in the plane, not in the flight control centers in India with satellite uplinks.The 2.7 TB installer will download in about 10 minutes. It will expand to 15 TB after install, but fortunately I will have just bought a new Western Digital 8 PB holographic disk drive, so no problem.I'll be anxious to try it out on my new MicroTel processor with 128 cores (Microsoft having merged with Intel in 2012). I'll wonder if 8 TB of RAM is enough.I'll need to update the driver for the holographic display card and clean the dust off the laser projector again.Unfortunately the retinal scan genuine validation doesn't work, so I have to call them, and stay on hold for 5 hours.It starts up great, and the first thing I have to do is find out how to kill the cheesy music.I'll start with the default flight, a 787 at Bill Gates Field in Seattle. They'll have every Starbucks 3-D modeled perfecly.My fiberoptic gateway activity light flashes as the game updates all the autogen billboards with new ad content and downloads 3D weather data for each cloud currently floating over Seattle.Then I'll hit CRTL-Z and be disappointed to see only 5 FPS. A quick check will reveal that it's using only 1 of my 128 cores. Then I'll shut down the game and log onto Avsim and count the threads griping about poor framerates, staggers as the holo-display is rotated, and the inability to log onto GameSpy Massively Multiflyer Online Servers.I'll join the flamefest.

>What resources or abilities are so lacking that in 10 years we cannot >have everything I describe?Bearing in mind the following quote from your previous post: "10 Years from now, boot up FS 14 and it looks and behaves exactly as it does in the real world".Let's take just a handful of areas as examples:1) Systems modeling: How many man-hours do you suppose would be required to model to a high-degree of fidelity all of the systems in, say, an Airbus A320? Then, multiply that level of effort by the number of aircraft types and systems being modeled. You would need to essentially duplicate the efforts of all of the software engineers in the entire aerospace industry combined. Not a trivial task, even assuming you can get all of the necessary specifications from each manufacturer.2) ATC: full-blown ATC requires the following:a) voice recognition:( natural language parsingc) artificial agents capable of acting and reacting in an appropriate manner - accounting for regional differences in rulesets - in a way that is indistinguishable from a human (i.e. agents capable of passing a Turing test, albeit in the constrained context of the ATC environment).e) natural language generationEach of these is an active area of research and has been for several decades. There is no reason to believe that any of these areas will be sufficiently well understood to allow the development of functional consumer level products within the next decade.3) Terrain. In other threads, you anticipate that every building, every person and even every blade of grass would be able to be modeled in the not too distant future. High-resolution (e.g. 1m or less) terrain coverage for the entire planet will be available when? How much longer until global data in the sub 10-cm range required to be able to model even individual boulders becomes available? How much secondary storage space would such high-resolution terrain require? How would the texture data be derived? How much secondary store would the textures require? How would this enormous amount of data be distributed? And so on. The FS franchise advances in increments. Apparently, MS anticipates the spacing between increments to be roughly 2 years. That means that in a mere 5 increments, you expect that MS should be able to model the entire world and everything in it in sufficient detail to meet your 100% realistic expectations. Not a chance.

I interpreted it as a joke. IOW, a prediction of what will be true in 30 years 30 years ago.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180

>just want to dream a little as to what lies in store for us 10 years>and 20 years down the road......Probably something like that:http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/v/tg2g...valley.jpg.htmlMarco

Announcement:I have pondered the question posed by the OP carefully and at length and now have a quantative answer as to the true future of Flight Simming. As with most elegant and factual responses to philosophical musings, the answer is best put in song so if you'll indulge me, I hope you enjoy it...Appropriately, this is sung to the tune of the 1969 Top 40 hit "In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" by Zager and Evans. Those of you above the general age of 40 should have no problem identifying the lyrics and tune, those of you who are younger are encouraged to download the original song to your iPods.Ready? All together now....In the year 2525If PC's are still aliveIf simmers can surviveThey may find...In the year 3535Ain't gonna need to RTM, or look at README'sEverything you think, do, and sayIs in the forum you visited todayIn the year 4545Ain't gonna need no ATC, it'll all be onlineYou won't find the key for "slew"Everybody's gonna yell at youIn the year 5555Your joystick's hanging limp at your sidesYour legs got not nothing to doautomated rudder pedals are doin' that for youIn the year 6565You'll be tweaking so much you won't have no wifeYou'll get the blurries, get the stutters tooWhen they come out with SP22, woa woa...In the year 7510If CFS4 is comin', it ought to make it by thenMaybe we'll look around ourselves and sayGuess it's time we mowed the lawn todayIn the year 8510ACES program manager is gonna shake his mighty headHe'll either say I'm pleased where FS has beenOr tear it down and make new autogenIn the year 9595I'm kinda wondering if photoreal is gonna be aliveIt's showing everything this old earth has on itBut the load times are still slow, doggone it!Now it's been 10,000 yearssimming has gained a billion peerswith all the addons you ever knewBut now simmer's reign is throughBut through the eternal nightThe twinkling of Tileproxy starlightSo very far awayMaybe it's only yesterday...In the year 2525If PC's are still aliveIf simmers can surviveThey may find...:)

Wide grin!Jaap.

I'd hope for global terrain that looks as good as the small areas featured in action games such as Ace Combat on the Xbox 360.But I'd probably settle for the vector objects finally being integrated into the FS texture world. So instead of vector roads being placed over city textures - they interact and don't look like two separate sets of items.Oh and for FS to be able to handle the kind of complex HUDs we've seen in military flight sims for ages.

I'd like to see braking distances affected by weather conditions - rain, ice, etc. Haven't Project Tupolev worked this into their freeware TU-154?

In many decades, there will be one huge all-encompassing sim. People can do all sorts of things including flight simming, traffic control, service vehicle operation or even endless things not in the flight-sim catagory. In fact to increase realism, the idea of working in the sim is introduced. Wages and dept are also realistic features added into the sim life. Eventually we will all be lying on reclining chairs with brain caps plugged directly into the central CPU all living within this sim 24 hours a day. The reality of it will be so great you won't be able to tell the difference from real life.... maybe we are already in that sim and we don't even know it :-O