>>>This whole post has a feeling of extortion to me, like from>>some bad gangster movie. "You better give me the loot or>the>>dame gets it, see?">>ROFL, that was a good one and I can sooo see that in my head>from one of those movies. :) I just think it's very cheesy to>get everyone's appetite all whet like that only to yank it>away. The right thing to do would be to offer an addon pack to>the customers for free for the false advertising if they can't>duplicate the magic screenies. It really isn't cool. I'm sure>it wasn't their fault at aces but it really doesn't change the>fact that it happened though and that the customers get the>shaft. These guys definitely mean well and do a great job>overall, but they just need to fix some serious disconnects>between them and the marketing/advertising/sales/microsoft>geeks. Unfortunate that this is the case but it's not my>problem and I shouldn't be the one disappointed because of it.>I will maintain optimism until the patch is released and hope>that we get some nice features though.>>>________________________________________________________________________________________________>>Intel D975XBX2 'Bad Axe 2' | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.20Ghz>| 2 GB Super Talent DDR2 800 | >Big Typhoon VX | eVGA 8800GTS @ 565/900 | Seagate 2x320GB SATA>RAID-0 | >OCZ GameXStream 700W | Creative X-Fi | Silverstone TJ-09BW |>Matrox Triplehead SetupI absolutely agree that there are some problems (or as they say in the customer service industry, "opportunities") with the marketing side of things. I was a bit surprised reading some of the text I've seen issued about FSX from Microsoft, you get the feeling that the people writing it have never even seen a plane before.On the other side of it though, I haven't ever seen anyone from Microsoft say "This is absolutely what we are going to do in DX10 with FSX". The images always seemed to be labeled as artist's renditions and ACES was pretty quick to come out and say "it's really not going to get that good", and ever since then, I think they've been working pretty hard to set our expectations reasonably.What I've been seeing in the industry is a lot of games that have a few things tacked on to the current feature set in DX10, and only like two of them (Bioshock and World in Conflict) are really showing performance improvements. To expect a huge expansion of features at this point would really seem far-fetched to me.That being said, I went home and ordered a DX10 card after playing Acceleration in Reno, because if there's going to be performance improvements, I want it after flying those races. So I am onboard with the crowd who is desperately pining for some sort of boost.

>Thanks for pointing those out. But I wonder if those would>cause problems when upgrading the SP2...>>..in that it might require RTM. I guess a person could always>back up the originalsWell, I'm sure as with SP1, ACES will recommend installing SP2 onto a clean RTM or SP1 installation. But I highly doubt SP2 will prevent these textures from being used once SP2 is installed. These are just textures, nothing more.

>I want the alpha fade!I agree and I'm betting this is one feature we do get.

>It is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.>>YARR YA BEST BE GIVIN ME THEM GOD RAYS IF YOU KNOW WHATS>GOODFERYA, LAD!LOL, you must be a fellow NPR listener? I wanna know what the requirements are to have a day labeled like this. How does this happen? Is there an International committee of day naming that sifts through requests and votes 5-4 in favor of the "Talk Like a Pirate" one? I want to know what candidates this one beat out...

there were never cloud shadows in those shots. some people saw the terrain shadow on the central mountain in the one shot and decided those were cloud shadows. they dont show in the water in that shot, nor anywhere else. again, we are not delivering on the magic screenies, they were flat out a mistake. so yes we did overpromise, and I do apologize.can we now move on?

don't bet on any feature until I post what is in and what is out.

Given that the average flightsim consumer tends to fall into the middle-aged professional bracket (if you believe the stats), I think it's safe to say most people here *should* be mature and experienced enough in life to know that professional marketing people often live in worlds and use language that often exist independently of reality.It's just the way the game is played.Bryan

I have been trying to set expectations for months, but when people dont want to listen...

there is quite a bit of room between those two positions, so expecting us to be somewhere in between is reasonable.and note, the magic screenies show nothing "inside the plane". would you trade cloud shadows for VC shadows, for instance? VC shadows would be visible all the time when flying; cloud shadows only with weather, and only occasionally across the ground.those are exactly the sorts of tradeoffs we have worked our way through.

>don't bet on any feature until I post what is in and what is>out.I don't think anyone is going to be willing to take bets once you've announced the results ;)

>I have been trying to set expectations for months, but when>people dont want to listen...I think its simply more likely that your reach via your blog and forum posts is simply far less than the reach of the magic screenies release and the prominent gaming site articles that accompianied them. I think you are doing the best job possible, its just not feasible to expect you to be able to undo the mistake the marketers made.Anyway, Astro recognized this not really your issue. I don't think that means he no longer has the right to be upset about the magic screenies. I kinda think we are all just hoping you are passing these gripes along to the guy that requested the magic screenies (and his boss) so that we don't have our expectations abused again.

I can confirm that all involved understand the depth of our mistake.

Phil, Im starting to get more and more anxious to hear your next blog post. Have you guys worked all the way through yet? - getting close? I don't care what features there are just please list them before we all start going crazy!!!

I am waiting for us to tune the features we have, so I can post screenshots that show what we did do. Once we are there, then I can post about what is in and what is out.There is some good stuff in there, but from both a DX9 and DX10 perspective some people are going to be disappointed.

Honestly it won't make a difference to me, just as long as there's some improvements thrown in. You guys have a lot of work to do after this, rebuilding the flight simulator engine and all. :(