Attila

I agree. These features are essential for the longevity of the product. While the graphics and other things are great, one can only fly alone in the world for so long.

We all have imagination. We had to have lots of it to have played FS1 and the like.We should not have to have as much imagination in 2012 as Flight requires, because then where do you draw the line. Just close your eyes and imagine whatever you want.The whole point of a computer game is to immerse you into whatever you are doing, not having to imagine yourself doing it, imho.

While you and I like a challenge and worked our way up from just flying around to flying complex aircraft, the general public that MS wants to reach - the vast majority - does not operate like this, unfortunately. This is why game franchises that have been running for many years re-invent themselves and the inevitable result is that the long-time supporters call them dumbed down for the masses.I think Flight wanted to avoid being called dumbed down and attempted to retain some level of simulation, in case it would be labeled as such. The way things are now is that anyone who asks for such complexity is labeled hardcore with a negative connotation. It's as if wanting to challenge oneself to go beyond the comfort zone is just not trendy any more. Not only is it not good, but downright bad.How else to explain the negative attitude to having jets in Flight. It should not bother any of the VFR pilots that jets can be flown, but they downright laugh at the prospect. Not only that, it is now a badge of honor not to have anything to do with anything more complex that manually flying an ILS approach. Who needs an autopilot, gps, fmc they say.Of course, at the same time we discover that people have been flight simulation fans for many years and never learned to navigate with VORs and NDBs. It is no surprise that the two initial planes in Flight have no radio navigation capabilities.So, while I agree with your post, Flight is exactly the opposite of what you and I want. It does not want to promote complexity and higher levels of intellectual challenges. It wants to dazzle with scenery and give awards for finding aerocaches.

FSX has Round Earth and higher res graphics, ground traffic and more high detail airports over FS9 for a start.FSX has only one problem, performance.Flight has only one thing going for it over FSX, performance. If FSXI came out with Flight's performance and a few minor visual and audio updates, everyone would have been happy. The reviews would have given it an 8.5 and we'd all be doing exactly what we'd want to be doing, be it buying an Alaska add-on and flying VFR or flying at FL350 with a jet.I doubt you'd be here bemoaning the lack of your ability to do aerobatic maneuvers with an RV6 over a detailed scenery of Hawaii.

And so the single worst thing MS did with Flight is to deliberately mislead the community about what Flight was going to be. Thereby sending a message to any other parties that might have been thinking about creating a replacement for FSX. Nobody would want to compete with an MS produced FSXI and right until late last year, most people didn't know that Flight will be nothing like FSXI should have been.

The fact remains that all of what Flight offers has been done before. I will go out on a limb and say that at the time these older games were made, they were cutting edge and a far greater technical achievement than what went into Flight.This is the reason Flight is not well received, not because it is not FSXI.Flight needed to show something that has not been done before. There is no wow factor in Flight for people who have seen it done better. This goes for graphics as well. There are tons of games that do visuals better and one could pick any area of Flight and point out the many flaws. There may be some improvements over FSX, but this is hardly an achievement over a five year old game.

I define a casual user who is happy to jump into a plane without reading the manual, start on the runway and fly around checking out the sights. When it comes time to land, gear down and aim for the runway, land without care about vertical speed, flaps, safety, weight and a host of other things. Has no clue about what to do in bad weather or in an emergency.If one does more than this, then it is beyond casual, but when does it become hardcore? I read the manual and fly with real weather, follow the takeoff and landing procedures, but I do this with all planes, not just jets. In fact I like flying all types of planes and this poll does not allow me to express that.In fact, trying to group people as hardcore or not is not relevant. What is relevant is what level of simulation someone wants, to have flying enjoyable. So, a better poll would be....Do you use --- a joystick, rudder pedals, real weather, ATC, AI traffic, read the manual, failures, etc...The more of these people select, the more hardcore they are likely to be.So, yes, I would be closer to the hard core end of the scale, but I did not vote, because I fly all kinds of planes, including helicopters and GA aircraft.One last thing, how much money one spends on add-ons has nothing to do with being hardcore, especially on scenery. You can buy one well made plane and fly only that between the same few airports and be very hardcore if you do things as real as possible.

Because, JH said as much in an early interview, where he said that they decided to release it now instead of letting it age, as he put it. Doublespeak for having to release it early and unfinished.

It's like this...you have 50 people taking up space and they make you X million per year. This is, let's say, normal profit margin.Then you look at the other side of the street and see another company with 50 people making 50*X million per year. You want your 50 people to make more money. They were cashing in before, but greed is a powerful motivator for some people, even to the point of betting the farm by wiping out a profitable crop and plant something entirely different in the hopes of hitting the jackpot.The crop could be a failure and for smaller companies it could spell the end and for some game companies it did. MS isn't going to live or die by Flight's success or failure, which is all the more surprising why they would want to take such a huge hit in the goodwill department by going down this road.It seems to me that MS had a few people it didn't know what to do with. Someone made a presentation about an idea to get 20 million people back into this field and management gave them some money to see what happens. JH ran out of time and or money and now hopes that what they have is enough to keep selling enough DLC and keep the project going.

Strict Standards: Declaration of group_forum_breadcrumb::sendOutput() should be compatible with that of output::sendOutput() in /opt/webdocs/newsite/forum/hooks/group_forum_breadcrumb_d29bf565a59f776807044fd19e49258a.php on line 107 You just don't get it. What Sagan and Asimov would write should be an introductory chapter or two in a book that is devoted to the serious scientific discussion.Some of the gamy features of Flight could have been incorporated into FSXI and everyone would have been happy. There was no need to end a product line. It was a decision that will come back to bite JH, just like it did the latest lead designer of another long running and heavily redesigned franchise, Civilization.

This is bashing. You have no right to say this. You have no right to try and push me out of this forum, just because you do not like to hear what I have to say. By what measure do you think that you have more rights here?How is the TrackIR concern more right than say real-time weather or AI or ATC or twin engine planes or - wait for it - jets?It is an arrogant position to think that you can make decisions for others and the arrogance level of some posters in the guise of righteousness is way off the scale.So, please refrain from trying to impose your will on me. I am as much a Flight user as many others, dissatisfied for the most part, but with all the rights that a customer has.

Let me start by saying that the interview questions were very good and the answers as bad as expected, both in content and delivery. It is now clear to many more people, as it has been to many already, where Flight is going.Also...The posts in this forum are so skewed to one side by a vocal and highly protected subset of people, that these people are starting to think that they represent the majority of flight simulation enthusiasts and the so called hard core simmer is a minority that should just go by the way of the dodo.This is entirely the fault of this forum, which encourages this sort of thinking by its selective pruning of posts. The people who are allowed to post here ad-nauseum about the virtues of Flight are braver and braver at bashing the hard-core simmers and revel in the fact that they are happy with a product that barely represents half of the first rung of what might be considered an aviation ladder.Even in the supporter group, there are a sizable number of people who are unsatisfied with Flight for one reason or another. The interview makes it clear that most of these concerns will not be addressed, certainly not in a timely manner.While many people in this forum are waiting for Alaska to be released, I cannot help but wonder how 19 knot winds and the preset weather themes will be different there. Sure it will look different, but one sloped dirt runway between trees looks much the same in Alaska as it does in Hawaii. It will still not have TrackIR, real weather nor any sort of AI. It will be interesting to see what weight is put on the simulation of the effects of icing and snow on an aircraft in this package.I also wonder where MS is getting the idea that people want a leaderboard and such things. Avsim is the only forum where Flight is actively discussed and this place has not turned into a flood of newly minted Flight users - as predicted by some people.As low as people have now set their expectations for Flight, it is hard to imagine what is the depth and breadth that is talked about.

As soon as anything works as in real life, it simulates the real thing. So if you move the rudder pedals on the floor and the rudder on the plane moves, it is a simulator.Flight is a simulator, just not a very high fidelity one. It has a narrower scope than flight simulators had ten years ago. It also lacks in many areas that have been better simulated before. For many people this is a step backwards and not something to be applauded, some improvements in visuals and claims of better feel notwithstanding.Feature for feature, Flight is more game than simulator, which would not be so bad if it were a good game, but it is not even that.

Regardless of what you think of Flight, the rest of the world views it much the same as this review. The MS advertising and PR department is fully to blame for this. This is the impression people get when they try the game. Once that impression is given, not many people will spend the time to find out if there is more, especially when there is no indication that there is more.The planes in the free game do not have radio navigation. The nav frequencies are hidden and not at all obvious to locate, just like the game manual, which by the way is rather useless. There is very little indication of what the future holds, either in scenery, planes or functionality.If a person whose job it is to review the game is going to give Flight only this much of his time, what can you expect from people who have a wide range of gaming interests and are not casual flight simmers already.The re-emerging theme in many reviews is that Flight fails at interesting people who have had no interest in flying games and that Flight fails at interesting people who enjoy serious flying. That leaves only the people who already have an interest in flying and rather spend money on Flight instead of FSX or have enough time and money to spend on both.

We are talking about Flight DLC, not FSX and not XPlane. One has nothing to do with the other. The situation would be the same if there never was an FSX nor an XP. One choice is one choice.Also, FSX add-ons are worth more because you generally get more with your purchase (planes) and it is far more likely that what you bought is pretty close to what you want to be entertained with.

This thread is just begging for me to write something critical, but all I am going to say is that I have been critical of the moderators and some people who recently became moderators, since the Flight beta started.I stopped posting, because it seemed that I was the last person posting critical views of Flight and my days were numbered.So, kudos to the OP for speaking up and good luck.

Considering that Flight does not even have a forum in which to voice an opinion, I don't see how Flight DLC and "Customer Support" can even come up in the same sentence.As for $20 for something like Hawaii, ask yourself the question, is $20 too much for a DVD that you know you don't really want to watch. Now ask the same question if you know that that's the only DVD you can watch for the next two months and there is no other entertainment.Of course $20 is too much. With Flight, MS is trying to cache in not only on the reputation of the MSFS franchise, but on the reputation of 3PD payware products. Value is different for everyone, but just because you can afford it, it does not mean you get good value for your money.

I think you are seeing graphics glitches because the graphics pipeline gets corrupted. This is because you have tweaked some settings that allow too much data to be pushed to your gpu and it cannot handle it. The only other possibility is heat related corruption. I have seen this sort of thing while experimenting with various cfg settings on my systems, where my current one is the same as yours, except for 570x2.

I would normally have some fun with this thread, but I have lost interest to the point that I will just say, have fun with this sort of thing. You have another week, maybe.Just FYI, I checked the boards very early today (ET) and there were twice as many people in the FSX forum than in here. I guess it just shows how excited the world outside of North America is about Flight.

Upon reading this post, my first impression was "what happened to Arwen?".I am pretty sure I read this wrong, because you seem to be saying that long-time simmers are just replaced by new ones, instead of Flight extending the user base.I would certainly agree with this. I see very little evidence that the user base is being extended, however, it appears that people who have not flown FSn for a long time are trying out Flight.My view is that a performance upgraded FSX would have done the same thing and would not have alienated a sizable part of the flight simulation community.

Thanks for the detailed reply. You obviously enjoy flying by hand. So do I, but I mentioned the water, because the very first job I did with the Maule was a long flight - over water. Nothing to see really, or worry about and the autopilot would have been useful.

Sorry, but what is the point of this post? You want to have a good laugh at some other Avsim member's expense?I guess I will get banned from reading this topic as well.

So, Ozzie, how many 200+ nm trips do you make over water when you fly your GA aircraft?

Not to start a new discussion here, but MS may have created a huge void. By leaving the traditional simulation market, it is now possible for other companies to come in and do something better. While MS was releasing a simulator every two years, no other company in its right mind was going to compete with it on the same level. Perhaps now it is another story - and with the inclusion of add-on developers.

The more likely reason is that it is a huge area of auto-generated wilderness where no landmark buildings need to be designed, no road network to speak of, etc. I suspect that will be the hallmark of all future large areas. Small ares like Hawaii can be in slightly higher detail, but let's face it, even Hawaii is mostly the same terrain with some development here and there, except for Oahu.We have yet to see Alaska and we know that Hawaii was a real showcase DLC. Alaska will likely better represent the DLC to come.