>Unfortunately, flight simulation isn't a big seller, takes>many years to develop & most game industry employees would>regard it dull.I'm not sure what people base this on. I understand that Flight Sim is not Gears of War or Madden, but the customer base is absolutely immense worldwide, and this is indicated in the fact that up until late February, Gamasutra's weekly Amazon sales report had FSX in the top five selling PC games each week. Even now, going to Amazon.com and looking at the video game bestsellers for PC (updated hourly) shows FSX at eighth.The game was released last year, and still is in the top ten of PC games sold on Amazon? I mean, that is really impressive. WoW, Sims, LotR Online, C&C 3, things like that are in front of it. Out of all video games on Amazon, including console hardware, console games, pre-orders (including Halo 3), the Deluxe version of FSX is currently 64th.That sort of long term sales success is the sign of a very strong product in this industry. Most companies engage in such aggressive launch marketing for their games because they only have a limited time on the new release shelf before their product vanishes into the shelf with all the other mediocre games.I just think there's a lot of assumptions around here about what Flight Sim is that aren't supported by anything whatsoever outside of popular opinion on this forum.

>I'd expect FS20 to look far better than that shot given that>it's probably 15 years away at least.>>That looks like a console game I remember seeing... Ace>Combat Zero maybe?Funny it will be sooner as you all think ;-) and time too...Andr

My assumptions are based on working in the games industry 12 years & even working on one of the crappy products you use as an example madden2006&2007).I also worked at Kuju Entertainment during MS Train Sims development. Believe me, no one wanted to work on that. Microsoft's desire to make trainsim came from market research that concluded most train spotting anoraks also own PCs.The Microsoft bux sniffers won't be keen on re-working Flight Simulator from the ground up when they can add more giraffes, dx10 shaders,new box cover & ship the same crap again for 70bux. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the in-house guys at ACES are well up for developing a new gfx engine. Usually its either a senior engine guy that viciously hangs onto old obsolete code, or more usually, bean counters/marketing not willing to pay the extra dev time.

>My assumptions are based on working in the games industry 12>years & even working on one of the crappy products you use as>an example madden2006&2007).>>I also worked at Kuju Entertainment during MS Train Sims>development. Believe me, no one wanted to work on that. >>Microsoft's desire to make trainsim came from market research>that concluded most train spotting anoraks also own PCs.>>The Microsoft bux sniffers won't be keen on re-working Flight>Simulator from the ground up when they can add more giraffes,>dx10 shaders,new box cover & ship the same crap again for>70bux. >>I wouldn't be surprised if some of the in-house guys at ACES>are well up for developing a new gfx engine. Usually its>either a senior engine guy that viciously hangs onto old>obsolete code, or more usually, bean counters/marketing not>willing to pay the extra dev time.>>I certainly appreciate your experience, I still think the Amazon numbers tell a different story.And no offense meant, but you come off as really jaded towards the games industry.

>>And no offense meant, but you come off as really jaded towards>the games industry.>I've just done two years at EA. I am :)

The first shot really looks worse than FSX. Fewer 3d objects (so called "autogen"), mesh and textures are nothing special.The second shot looks so good because of HDR, High Dynamic Range, rendering. This allows brights to be much brighter, and dark colours to be much darker, all without losing detail. It's a shame FSX only supports bloom, as its nowhere near as good. Hopefully the DX10 patch will include full HDR. HDR aside, it really looks quite similar to FSX. Look at the ground, there are fewer 3d objects than in a typical FSX scene.

>This isn't true anymore. >It is true, till today. As previous poster correctly stated the fact the you have to cover the whole globe and deliver textures in time for reasonably smooth flying experience makes ALL the difference. Some can't seem to comprehend it .. till today.Michael J.http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/9320/apollo17vf7.jpg

>>>>And no offense meant, but you come off as really jaded>towards>>the games industry.>>>>I've just done two years at EA. I am :):-lol some have still to learn that they do not know everything... Amazon isn't used here in Europe as a major retailer ;-)Andr

Some of you guys make it sound as if FSX is keeping the whole globe in RAM while flying, with continious unique textures at that... The fact is that only the area very close to your aircraft is loaded high detail and the scenery makes heavy use of repeating texture tiles.The stuttering and blurring is unique to the FS engine. Other games will stutter if your system is too slow, true.. but then it's a more constant low framerate. The hestitations, jerky motion, sudden lurches forward etc. only exist in FSX.The blurries is probably the most absurd "feature" of the FS engine. *NO* other 3D engine I know of does this. All other engines "fill in" textures instantly when you move around/pan the view.The whole texturing system in FS needs to be reworked. If you slew to a new location, it can take minutes to load a handful of 700KB textures and place a few hundred textured boxes and alpha textured placards (autogen buildings and trees). Modern videocards are exceeding 100GB/s of memory bandwidth. Loading the textures should be done in a matter of milliseconds, not MINUTES...Also, if you want to see how much cpu those complex flight models (doing some basic table lookups) use, try running FSX at its lowest detail settings at 800x600 with everything turned off.. See FS struggle with those models, probably only managing three or four hundred FPS.....

No, but several studies have shown that Amazon is an excellent benchmark for sales. The point is not how many products Amazon sells, the point is if Amazon sales are represenative of true sales distributions - and that it very much seems to be. Even if people in Europe don't buy from Amazon, it's safe to assume they get it from somewhere else.Christian

>If>Microsoft can make so nice software for the 360 why not for>their own flightsimulator?MS doesn't make games for the 360 outside of a couple subsidiary companies they own like Bungie (the Halo makers). Ace Combat is made by Namco, a 3rd party dev just like virtually any other game...Remember too guys a console is a lot easier to program for because you can deal directly with the hardware that's there and not worry about having to support a million different configurations like you do with PC.

Those shots are awesome. Why not release a bunch of CD's with all that high rez stuff on it. That way you could load whatever you wanted. If you had a big enough hard drive you could load it all but give the users the option. Anyway if FS ever gets to that level of detail at say 30FPS I would be a very happy camper.

>>>>>>And no offense meant, but you come off as really jaded>>towards>>>the games industry.>>>>>>>I've just done two years at EA. I am :)>>:-lol some have still to learn that they do not know>everything... >Amazon isn't used here in Europe as a major retailer ;-)>>>Andr