4 hours ago, Garys said:

Not entirely correct. MS will never sell the core. They license ESP to P3D and on the consumer level we had Dovetail games investing millions in the license only to get burned when MSFS decided to take everything back and go with Asobo. Nobody wins with MS

Dovetail never got burned they were working with MS before FSW on XBOX games, but the FSW team was too small for what MS wanted in the time scale. Dovetail was compensated and given MS Train Simulator for XBOX Game studio,  Aerosoft were offered MS Flight Sim in 2010 but it would be too big a task and need large investment, so they turned it down.

The jury is out on that one. Microsoft will have received a nice fat wad of cash from Dovetail Games for the FSX licence.........plenty of free money for the R&D required to build their own next generation flight simulator. Too cynical? Maybe, but that is what it looks like to me.

Having said that, Dovetail were (IMO) doing absolutely nothing useful with the licence.

Edited April 17, 20233 yr by Christopher Low

Well, Dovetail did produce a slightly improved FSX, with OrbX textures per default, a new graphic engine and it was the first sim to use the TrueSky technology to get rid of the horrible 2D clouds. I think too many people forgot this. And it was 64 bits too, wasn't it ? (not sure about that one...)

While their first implementations were terrible, with funky colors and terribly shaped clouds, the later versions did improve on all aspects, as far as I remember.

I wouldn't say they did nothing useful. They did try to produce a new sim. It never met success, unfortunately, but it was undoubtedly better than MS Flight. 

2 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

The jury is out on that one. Microsoft will have received a nice fat wad of cash from Dovetail Games for the FSX licence.........plenty of free money for the R&D required to build their own next generation flight simulator. Too cynical? Maybe, but that is what it looks like to me.

Having said that, Dovetail were (IMO) doing absolutely nothing useful with the licence.

Only a team of 8 at Chatham studio on FSW. Only when Phil Spencer wanted more titles for the new game catalogue was it pulled from DTG they never purchased MS code. 

1 hour ago, Daube said:

Well, Dovetail did produce a slightly improved FSX, with OrbX textures per default, a new graphic engine and it was the first sim to use the TrueSky technology to get rid of the horrible 2D clouds. I think too many people forgot this. And it was 64 bits too, wasn't it ? (not sure about that one...)

Yes it was 64 bit, with PBR, many programmatic items moved from CPU to GPU, plus some great looking default rain on the cockpit windows.

A2A were also a part of it with their Accu-Feel installed as default.

In many ways it rasied the default bar higher than P3D ever has, unfortunately the seller shops and devs seemed to display a lot of hostility.

And it didn't help there was no direct backwards FSX/P3D compatiblity, probably why the shops / devs were somewhat unhappy as it devalued their current stock and meant they would have to re-write at least some aspects of existing items for compatibilty and who wants to do that ?

Well... one should always be careful of what is wished for because now they have to completely redo as new if they want to sell for MSFS, which has pretty much totally devalued their existing stock to the point where some of the devs are just giving their stock away.

Dovetail always spuked the "all in for the long run mantra", but then the beans did their counting and found out they were not going to be able to meet the MS stipulated license progress payments and it all fell apart literally overnight, with the source being returned back to Microsoft, who, if you compare the timing, were already in bed with Asobo.

So... lesson is to always be wary of the "bean counters" and also never trust Microsoft as it is their shareholders to whom they are indebited to and the execs will make quite amazingly stupid decisions in the name of shareholder profit or of being a "Team" player.

Much like that Emperor's New Clothes train wreck of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet line (remember the dancing school girls wearing Gingham ad?) that ended up costing some $900 million to MS's bottom line resulting many MS top level execs and development managers loosing their jobs including the CEO Steve Ballmer (who was given a push out the door).

Cheers

Also bear in mind MS approach to buying up game studios, Phil Spencer in an interview stated MS supports a third party studio for some time then buys out the studio if not then MS stops supporting them,

5 minutes ago, Rogen said:

Yes it was 64 bit, with PBR, many programmatic items moved from CPU to GPU, plus some great looking default rain on the cockpit windows. A2A were also a part of it with their Accu-Feel installed as default. In many ways it raised the default bar higher than P3D ever has, unfortunately the seller shops and devs seemed to display a lot of hostility.

The problem I had with it was that we already had FSX and P3D (which was effectively FSX with bells on), so why did we need a third? It may have included extra stuff, but it never looked significantly different (to me) based on all of the screenshots and videos. What we needed was a next generation flight simulator, and it seems that Microsoft ultimately agreed.

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

The problem I had with it was that we already had FSX and P3D (which was effectively FSX with bells on), so why did we need a third? It may have included extra stuff, but it never looked significantly different (to me) based on all of the screenshots and videos. What we needed was a next generation flight simulator, and it seems that Microsoft ultimately agreed.

Yeah too true, DTG were infact competing against themselves via FSX-SE which had pretty much everything to purchase where as FSW did not.

I wasn't on P3D at the time, really didn't know about its existance and it was only when I found AVSIM that I became aware of it.

And then its EULA was like what ?? that' so restrictive, but when I fully read the EULA it also said simulation / development is valid use and so that's what I use it for (as does practically everyone else outside of actual commercal licensing).

But I did like and enjoy FSW, it didn't have the problematic OOMs or bugs of FSX-SE and it was in active development at the time, in fact it is still sitting in my Steam account (as is MSFS by the way). I was holding hopes for it and when it collasped it was so utter and completely abandoned...

Cheers

Edited April 17, 20233 yr by Rogen

It didn't look different enough from FSX or P3D maybe... but the OrbX default textures and the TrueSky clouds sure looked different than the outdated FSX/P3D skies. And it was 64 bits, which many of us were waiting for. I don't remember exactly how it went, but had the 3rd party market supported that sim, the situation would have been completely different.

But I guess Dovetail is also to blame here. Why on earth did they allow their quality checker to consume so much drugs and think that such colors (on release day) were ok ? We will never know... But the rest of the community just kept in mind FSW as the ugliest sim on the planet. And despite their (excellent) efforts to fix that in later versions, it was already too late...