hornet1990

I started reading this thread but lost the will to live somewhere a long the line so what I'm about to suggest may have been covered, apologies if it has!!It seems to me that there are two non-worldwide camps, either it is Hawaii only, or Hawaii base and you pay for additional areas. But what about a third option where the box contains Hawaii but you can download the rest of the world default scenery as you chose for free, or buy third party scenery?Think about it... XP9 is what, 7 DVD's? XP10 - 8+? That's a big box, and lots of DVD duplication for scenery that most people probably won't ever use. So by only including Hawaii in the box they can use standard DVD cases, on two DVD's (your 10gb install) and have a fairly cheap to replicate product. Someone buys it and they have enough scenery to start with, and so long as on the box it says "travel the world*" "*Internet connection required" they've fulfilled any legal requirement.MS could also use their existing mechanism for getting say 64bit Vista so you can order the additional scenery areas on disc, by paying for each disc you require (~£5 when I got Vista 64).Makes sense to me... after all what do you expect for a ~£40 product?!As for the Hawaii only screenshots, correct me if I'm wrong but I recall in the build up to 2002,2004 and FSX that most, if not all, screenshots to start with came from whichever was the chosen "default" area for the sim? (2004 - Seattle, FSX - St Maarten etc) Only closer to release did they show other areas... that's my recollection anyway!

Although nobody knows for sure its logical to think that they will use Direct3D11 interfaces, if for no other reason than its "feature levels". What that means is they can write one code path (mostly) but target 11,10.1,10 and 9 without having the headache of maintaining rendering code paths for each D3D variant. Obviously they'll have to have fallback shaders for the different shader models that each version of D3D supports but that's not a huge deal for most studios, and is certainly preferable to maintaining a code path per major version! D3D11 isn't a huge leap over D3D10(.1) either. Obviously there are some very nice new features but the core is pretty much the same so although I'd expect the D3D11/SM5 path to be slightly faster (assuming they make use of the new features) I wouldn't count on the D3D11 version looking significantly different to it running on D3D10(.1) hardware... if they have limited resources (compared to most AAA titles) then it makes sense to make the best looking D3D10/SM4 code, safe in the knowledge that it'll run faster on most D3D11 hardware which will make the hardcore happy after FSX! It's now also been nearly 18 months since the last DirectX SDK release, and D3D11 was around a good while before that (not that it's that difficult to upgrade the code from 10 to 11 due to their core similarities) so I be very surprised if they weren't using it! Rather than version numbers I'm more interested in the actual nuts and bolts of it - the rendering techniques being used etc. X-plane 10 (probably a dirty word on this forum!) is certainly getting my attention from that point of view as there is a fair bit of info out there on what it's using but nothing for Flight. I'll go and hide now, this was probably far too sensible a reply!!