bonchie

There has to be more to this story. If they have loans, why would they not continue to sell the product to recoup as much as they can? Why not a $5 flash sale on Steam as a final grab? I wonder if MS was one of the creditors and FSW lost the rights to their own product. That's the only thing that makes sense to me. Why else remove it from Steam?

I'll admit the timing of this is odd. Even if FSW's development is stopping, why would they stop selling it? Defunct games stay for sale on Steam all the time to keep generating income. DTG just released a new addon like three days ago...and now all the sudden it's leaving Steam and the doors are closed? Something weird is going on here. That's why I speculated that they've lost the right to sell FSW (i.e. they never actually owned the FS franchise but just leased it's rights). With that said, I do not want to see anyone else pick up the ESP code. P3D is already doing that and the ESP engine itself is just too far dated at this point. As much as I like the weather (with addons) and airplanes (with addons) in P3D, the graphical limits are really starting to show in regards to scenery presentation and lighting, even with the best addons. It's tough to go back to P3D after experiencing graphical fidelity like DCS or even XP11 w/ Ortho. I can't even fly at night in P3D anymore because it looks so ridiculous compared to the other modern sims. I'm not sure if we'll see another civilian simulator anytime soon, but I'm just done with the ESP reboots. P3D can keep doing it's thing but someone needs to do something new.

I don't know why people keep playing this game where they pretend LM has made no changes due to the sim community's feedback. The vast majority of new features in P3D4 started as suggestions by civilian simmers on their forums. There's ample evidence at this point that LM does indeed care what simmers think and that they do make changes based on their requests. Commercial and government clients are not the only thing that matters. Heck, on the topic of interfaces, the current new interface is a result of lots of complaining by simmers, not government clients saying they want spinning airplanes. I'm gonna guess the military wasn't fighting for cloud shadows or dynamic lights either.

Nah, I was concerned the week it was released. I honestly thought they'd made a big mistake with the early access roll out. The only reason you shut down a title like FSW is if the money has run out and the customer base has dried up. My impression is that most of their users grew disillusioned a while ago and gave up on the sim. That seems to be true, otherwise they wouldn't be closing shop. Unlike almost every other early access title out there, DTG never could manage to give a clear roadmap with timed, clear goals. Buyers and users never knew what they were actually going to get at the end of development. You can not run an early access title that way and succeed.

Several have mentioned their owning of the license, but I'd almost guarantee that their deal with MS was like when a developer leases the Crysis or Unreal engines. They probably owed MS for each copy sold vs. paying them millions upfront. Another thing that makes me think that MS retains the ultimate rights is Dovetail removing FSW from Steam. Even if they stop development, why not keep cashing in while you can? Probably because they can no longer maintain the lease of the license.

Like I said over a year ago (and got argued down how this was different), you can't go early access without also giving fans a real roadmap and end game to look forward to. Goals and stretch goals met on a timeline are what keep original good will intact. Otherwise the early access with wither and die. FSW's answer was basically to just trust them and the hardcore believers carried that message while many other original buyers went elsewhere. Another point I made at release was that they released too soon. There was not enough new there at the start. They blew all their hype way too early. If they'd of waited, things might of been different. That and of course some of the design and 3PD decisions also hurt them.

Deleted because of merger duplicating post.

After recently reinstalling P3D, I have no idea how people play at 30FPS and are happy with it. I used to do the same thing, but maybe it's getting used to other games while not simming for a while, but the panning is just not smooth until I'm over 40FPS.

Even if it worked in P3D, the engine just doesn't do ortho scenery well IMO. At least not without a developer spending resources to color correct it and annotate it properly. And the way P3D does autogen isn't really compatible with how XP11 can do overlays on orthos. Not as freeware at least. Orbx obviously has it figured out for their coming payware but it's not being done by a simple tool like Ortho4XP.

Default XP11 is way too hazy compared to most real world conditions outside of bad weather. The simple way to get rid of it is with the art controls and fog be gone. Set it to like 0.5 instead of 1.0. If you turn it off too much, you'll get weird transitions at the horizon (that were previously covered by the haze).

Until LR fixes the ground handling and some other aerodynamic issues, it'll continue to be off-putting to P3D users. If it were just about graphics, XP11 already beats P3D by a mile with Ortho4XP.

Or LR could just fix the ground handling problems that have existed for a very long time. It's really not that much to ask at this point. Ground handling is not an issue on the margins. It's a major part of a simulator. Fixing issues is the developers job. That's why you pay them money to buy their software. This non-sense where everyone who makes a valid complaint is told to go fix it themselves or file some super-detailed bug report that tells LR exactly how to fix it is stupid. That's not how consumer software works and it's not the end-users responsibility to know how to fix issues.

Well, that structure goes back decades of FSX versions so that's the simple answer. There's no reason it couldn't actually be designed to be self-contained like XP11 is, but because it's a legacy program, it is what it is.

8700k You are just pissing money away with those other CPUs, which will not overclock as well. P3D thrives on a high overclock.

It does everything better than both. The atmospherics, reflections, and lighting are much better. The resolution of cities and textures is also much better. The performance for such detail is loads better. Cities actually look like hand crafted cities and have a very 3D quality to them (somewhat like XP11 but better). It's head and shoulders above anything P3D's is capable of. But it's not world wide, so there's that.

It'd be more reassuring if he wasn't still telling people to file bug reports. At this point, he's no doubt got 1000 bug reports on the ground handling issue. And if he wants data on the problem, he can boot up his sim and see how terrible it is. It's not like it's intermittent or occasional. Another user filing yet another bug report is not going to give him anymore usable data.

I'm a fan of options. While it might melt your computer if they gave the option to increase the LOD on the lights, it'd be nice to have the choice because right now it looks terrible. Same way I felt about P3D and autogen radius. Finally in v4, they gave people the option to greatly increase it.

I haven't simmed in a while so this is my outsiders perspective. I think it looks good but it's not enough for me anymore. These small incremental steps that cost $50 here, $60 there have just pushed me away. I'm tired of the expensive cycle that never quite pays off. Every few months something supposedly groundbreaking comes out and it's never really that groundbreaking. Maybe in a few years something will catch my eye again to get me back interested.

Me as well. My performance went to word not allowed after the update. I'm really seeing nothing else that got "fixed" either that made it worth it. I should of just waited.

XP's ground handling is pretty terrible. So there's probably nothing wrong.

What KABQ senery is that?

Is that autogen just overlays with Orthos? It looks really accurate.

I think it's logical that freeware will become less prominent, but that was always going to happen if an increase in quality became deserved by users and I think we are at that point. It's a trade off. Higher quality addons will ultimately attract new players. But because XP has done such a great job in how they've built tools for freeware, we'll probably always have a lot more freeware vs. FSX/P3D, where it's non-existent. It's just so easy to go make your home airport and have it actually look passable. I wouldn't worry about it.

From what I hear, the 7600k makes 5.0ghz just like the 7700k so that's a good compromise as long as you overclock it.

Think of it like the "extended DSF" option in XP10.