anondev

Me again. It seems that most of you are in some sort of denial about accepting any truth. The MS community manager's name is Husain Bengali. He is the one who sent the email to developers cancelling the program. Call Microsoft and ask for him by name, that will confirm that in fact I received the information directly from MS themselves. Of course there is one island and one aircraft for the initial version. It may even be given away in some sort of demo. Then if you want the rest of Hawaii, you will need to pay for it. Then if you want more aircraft, you will need to pay for it. If you want more missions or other goodies, you will have to pay for it. If you visit anywhere outside of Hawaii you see nothing but a blurry brown nothingness, not even any textures. But of course, if you want the rest of the world in FSX-style, you will probably have to pay for that too, but they have not even started on that. If you want airliners or your favourite aircraft from your favourite developers, you can't. They have been locked out of Flight. Same for scenery. Nada. I am sure things may change slightly by the time it launches, but check this thread back in 2012 sometime when it's released and you will say "he was right after all". As for respect and NDAs - please, give me a break! Where was MS's respect when they tossed all the developers aside?

I refer to the anonymous post at AirDailyX - http://airdailyx.blogspot.com/2011/09/microsoft-flight-not-on-hold.html I have created a temporary account here at AVSIM so I can post. It probably contravenes forum rules, but having signed an NDA with Microsoft I am not about to risk getting sued. I am a US based developer. I am under NDA with MS. They had a developer program in place, but they shut it down a few weeks ago. No explanation, no reasons, just shut down completely.All the information shown above on the AirDailyX blog is correct. Flight will be Hawaii only and there will be no third party content or addons, payware or freeware.As a developer I am furious about what MS have done, and I think this simulator is dead before it has even launched. It is definitely not going to compete with FSX, not by a long shot. They are aiming at a mass market audience who want a simple flight experience not much different to Nintendo's Pilot wings. The serious simmer here at AVSIM will laugh at what will be released. It will be a curious oddity at best.The engine is based on FSX with some added code. It still runs like crap if you tweak the cfg file to "max the sliders" (there are no in-game sliders like FSX).I hear on the developer network that they are not renewing contracts of some key staff on their team. I also heard one of their core engine developers is leaving.I am sorry that I have to hide behind a cloak of anon, but the nature of litigious large corporations means that I will not risk getting sued by MS, but I do feel the sim community deserves to hear about this deception and really bad treatment of the developers who wanted to create content for this new sim.I hope that the mods will allow this topic to remain because the community here deserves to hear the truth about this.