frankla

Within couple of months of closing ACES, MS rehired many ACES programmers back to work under MGS. Exactly at the same time they had job openings posted on their web site for programmers to work on a "flying game". That was 2 1/2 years ago. Also please note that it has been already 8 months since they showed us Flight. So what makes you think they started just a year ago? There is no way this is in early development. I don't care what MS claims, but they would not have shown us their work if they were just starting on it. Once a developer starts leaking pictures and videos, most of what they are showing you is what they are confident will stay in the final product. (Don't bring up the magic screen of FSX with god rays, that was not an in game shot and was supposed to be an artist's rendition of what DX10 might look like. They are much closer to beta than you think.

MS has been giving us scenery shots and movies about Flight for almost 8 months and they all have been shots of a very small area of Hawaii! Its like watching re-runs of an opening episode repeatedly. To me this is bad marketing. Come on Microsoft, It has been 8 months and you keep showing us the same thing over and over. Please move on and show us something different for heaven's sake. If you don't have any other area types developed, perhaps you were not ready to announce Flight in August.

He is talking about source of news for MS Flight. Why would it be in hanger chat?

This is one point that I can not agree with other people on this forum. I find it extremely hard to believe that Flight is in early development.Consider the facts:1)MS used to produce a new version of FS every two years. 2)We know many of the ACES were rehired about two years ago.3)Job openings by MS for a "flying game" were posted about two years ago.3)It has been nearly 8 months since Flight was announced.As mentioned on this thread, MS has been very hush about Flight. They are quiet so that they may not give us any expectation beyond what they may deliver. Logic tells me that what little they do show us, is perhaps what they are confident in keeping in the sim. So I say what you see is close to final product and they are not still in early development.

He is just passionate about it.

It seems like at least you are arguing that you prefer better scaled autogen than volume. You just don't like what Microsoft has chosen to sacrifice. Which makes me believe you have accepted that there is a compromise that needs to be made. We heard you. WE HEARD YOU. It doesn't make you or me wrong. It just shows that we have different taste. To loudly argue and put down other peoples preferences is just silly. Please stop this! We heard you and we appreciate your input

Read my post about outera again. I edited it. What is Czech Uni using outera for? I doubt they have invested in their own flight simulator. Also I don't believe outera is designed for an average home pc (which microsoft is trying to target to with flight). I doubt Czech Uni is going to run it on a midrange i3 processor with a mid level dedicated video card. Outera is targeting organizations not typical average Joe who is mildly interested in flight simulator with his laptop.

Can you give me a link to a pic of autogen in XP10 at above 1000 ft altitude? Thank you! You described it with numbers and thus did it better than I did. Somehow Mathew thinks MS designers have no sense of dimension and/or are trying to deliberately not fix a bug from version to version. He calls it cutting corners as if making smaller autogen is too much work! :( For me, once you gain altitude you lose the sense of the size and scale of autogen but not sense of depth and volume. So please don't decide for me and rest of the people about what needs to be sacrificed . If you like looking at autogen on ground level and or very low altitude then get a Train Sim or something. By the way OUTERA does not have a flight, ATC, AI and weather engine on it, so we don't know what it can achieve in a flight simulator. Obviously people in Outera are talented enough to have a scenery in which even wave motions are calculated. All of this brings up a question; why with all the talent, have they not created a flight simulator? Perhaps they don't have the overhead for having the scenery as is and have a fully functioning flight simulator? Have you thought that outera is not meant to run on a typical average home PC? (Microsoft goal for Flight is to make it work on broader range of current PCs)

You don't have to use phrases like "you've got to be kidding" or throw words like "rubbish" and "lame" to make your point. It doesn't make your points any more effective. It only makes you look like a bitter ex. Just move on to X-Plane and forget Microsoft. But If you insist on thinking about MS, I will tell you that FSX autogen was made bigger to create volume (hence depth) because they couldn't increase the volume by adding extra building and trees. If they didn't increase the size and couldn't add extra autogen, the lack of autogen coverage would been very noticeable at altitude and would have taken away from perception of depth in the sim. Hence,it was a choice and not a bug. Now, with more powerful computers and better coding for multi-cores, they may be able to increase autogen numbers without increasing their size. The fact that XP10 is creating volume by using larger numbers of autogen five years after introduction of FSX and after five years of increase in processor speed is not as impressive as if they had done it so with XP9 or XP8. By the way, I still don't know how XP10 will look like at 3000 ft.

Hey I don't call your writings rubbish and you won't call mine. But pal, Lacy wrote that on his blog, months after he left Microsoft. He was not trying to speak on behalf of microsoft. And since you are so smart, can you tell me why you can't create smaller autogen?

Look guys, there is a reason the autogen is really big. It is not a bug. Do you really think that they can't produce smaller objects for FSX? After all, custom sceneries are correctly sized. The autogens are big, even, in after market sceneries such as Orbx and this is not a FS limitation. Jim Lacy of ACES explained this problem after he left ACES. Whey you place real size autogens, the sim loses its sense of depth at around 500 to 3000 feet altitude. This is due to limitation of viewing scenery on a small 2D screen. The autogen is enlarged to give this much needed depth to the scenery when flying low. So MS and scenery developers have always had a choice to make; to make the scenery look proportional at ground level or have depth at altitude. They have always decided that depth perception at altitude is more important.So be careful of what you wish, you may not like it.

I don't have Wings of Prey. But perhaps it has a lot more processing headroom to allow for better graphics. Does it generate weather or is the weather preset in campaigns? Does it generate more than 5-10 miles visibilities that I have seen in all the videos you have posted? How many AI's does it handle at any given time? Does it render massive number of roads from a database? Or are the roads just predetermined in the scenery? ATC? Navigational data? Processing headroom for huge number of moving parts on any aircraft? Does it have to render glass navigational displays that eat up processing resources like crazy? The problem is not Flight, but the fact that our PCs are not strong enough to have it all. The wings of prey developers had years to come up with a Flight Simulator when everybody thought Microsoft had left FS for good. They didn't because they couldn't offer the same graphics with all the functionality of a complete simulator.

while I was impressed by Oterra's waves near the shoreline, the rest of the ocean rendering was so bland.

Did you notice how limited the visibility radius in those videos are? I don't think they have more than 5-10 miles of scenery rendering. That is how they can have such more detailed graphics with smooth as silk frame rates. They are rendering a lot less objects. I don't think you would want that in a flight simulator which concentrates on procedures and realism instead of one that concentrates on action per Wings of Prey.

come on people, lets not rub it in. He is new and if we were new we may have concluded the same thing. Take it easy on him please.

Read the FAQ section of Flights website. It will show you that all your assumptions are wrong. Just check the Flight website and on top of the frame there is a section called FAQ. Also read Mircosofts news update of Dec 2010 in the same website next to FAQ.

Dear Paper94For many years people screamed that they will NEVER, ever, abondon FS2000, FS2002 and FS9 with all their glorious add ons. They screamed that each new version did not offer enough to justify an upgrade. Simmers in droves complained that FS2004 was a "re package of FS2002 with some old classic airplanes". FSX was the most controversial and problematic of all FS upgrades. Not only it didn't run well on our super over-clocked computers, it was said to not offer anything but missions which was not worthy of us serious simmers. Despite four years of non stop FSX bashing and all its associated problems, you, like many others upgraded to FSX anyway. Now after owning the most controversial and non performant version of FS , you vow that you will not abandon it unless they offered you more than a "lipstick on a pig". Since I assume your comment about lipstick on a pig comes from your experience with FSX, I wonder why you haven't uninstalled FSX and go back to FS9. The answer is that you and I will not go back to FS9 nor FS2002 because we value the lipstick. We may complain that there are no new good features, but we will refuse to go back to, for example, the lower resolution textures of FS9. I remember when MS removed the moving lights representing car movements at night from FS2000 (I may have the version wrong). Nobody, until then had thought that the moving lights were important, but when it was removed, people including myself really missed it. Year after year, people asked if MS was bringing them back. My point is that we will upgrade for lipstick and I believe you will too. After all you upgraded to (whisper)..gulp.. FSX!

Matthew,A major rework of FSX code to improve performance, as you suggest in your reply, is indeed what I and others have been calling a "new code". If there is a major rework of the code, then its not a 'fresh coat of paint' as you suggested earlier .You say you base your conclusion on Flight because you don't find it visually much different than FSX. Furthermore, you claim that they will add very few minor features; mainly the improved on-line gaming. So let me ask you a question. Why would anyone buy Flight? My friend, people need reasons to pay $70 for a new version of a game. Otherwise they will all buy FSX in the bargain bin.

If there was any 'tweak" for improving performance on the existing FSX code, they would have done it in the two service packs that they worked on, during course of a whole year. The service packs could only help achieve 'up to' 20% improvement, which is nothing if you are getting 8 FPS on all setting maximized. There is nothing left to extract from the old tired code. FSX, as is, gives the best over-clocked PCs hernia. Adding features on top of the tired FSX code will only make it perform even worse. I wish you would not make conclusions on programming a game based on hand full of pictures.

fix the snow textures so they don't look like javelins. FS9 had nice floating snow.

Matthew, MS has told us in their Q&A section that their priority is making Flight work on "Today's Hardware" so that it can be used by broader public. FSX's flaw was that it only utilized multi-core processors for texture loading which reduced stutters but did not give you extra FPS. They must write the code for Flight so that it could fully utilize multi-core processors. If they, indeed, do write it for multi-core then it will be a lot more than "fresh coat of paint" as you claim. IF they don't program Flight for multi-core, then it might as well be obsolete and dead on arrival.

Matthew, I guess you didn't read my reply to you earlier post above in this same page. I'll rehash it in a shorter paragraph. The fact that FSX was written to take advantage of pure clock speed and not for utilizing multi core pcs, made it a obsolete code. ACES admitted that they were wrong to think PC clock speeds would continue to increase rapidly and didn't anticipate a switch to multi core processors. They admitted that it was a BIG mistake on their part coding FSX that way. The fact that FSX can not still be fully run on todays off the shelf system 5 years after its introduction (and two service packs) is a testament to that mistake!!!They are not going to use the same code that they called a big mistake 4 years ago. If they did, Flight will not run any better 4 years from now than FSX did 2 years ago. They have to recode Flight even if it doesn't offer visually different results as you are seeking. Otherwise its doomed to be a failure.

Mathew, The clock speed of PCs have not gone much higher in that last 6 years. (where as before it would double every two years.) In reply to horrible performance of FSX, ACES, in early 2007, said that, had they known that Intel would go to multi-core direction (instead of higher clock speeds)they would have coded FSX differently. Considering that FSX can not utilize more cores and considering that the clock speeds are not going higher, how would you suggest MS brings a sellable game in 2011 using the same code that was already obsolete in 2006? In fact FSX still brings the i7s to their knees!! That is not acceptable nor logical after 5 years of new PC advancements. I seriously doubt that they would not upgrade a good chunk of their code to take advantage of multi Core/Multi GPU PCs. If they do not rewrite the code to allow efficient use of Multi cores, Flight will not have any head room for added features and will not work on most non enthusiasts' off the shelf PCs. (Read their repeated statements of how they want to attract a broader range of customers many of whom do not have custom made, over clocked PCs). Lastly please note that this cycle of release would be 5 Years after introduction FSX (instead of typical 2). As soon as ACES was disbanded, many of the programmers got rehired to work on Flight. So development was not put on hold for long at all. Perhaps this long development cycle is indicative of a rewrite of the code rather than recycling that of FSX's old, tired and obsolete code. I admit I am speculating, but I am doing so based on what makes sense.

What many people don't remember or don't know is that, in fact FSX had cloud shadows, but was thrown out (because of unacceptable performance hit) as a feature before it went Beta. I clearly remember the early pre release screen shots of FSX that was shown to us from January to March of 2006. In one of them they published a screenshot of the settings menu in which there was a check box for selecting/deselecting cloud shawdows. FSX was running like a dog on the 2006 era PCs without cloud shadows, so they just got rid of the feature some time during alpha testing.

Two things bother me about pics:1) The autogen representing forests as in pic 2 do not form a canopy as they do in FSX. They also look to have been so evenly placed that it looks like a tree farm instead of forest.2)The tributaries are way too over exaggerated from distance in these shots. They should not be so visible from distance as to create illusion of having hundreds of rivers. I think what makes it cartoonish looking is the way they have placed the trees. Specially in pic 2.