Skip Talbot

I have fond memories hanging out at the Microsoft booth, playing their alpha or betas of the latest Flight Simulator that had yet to be released. I've made it up to Oshkosh every year since I was born (that's 27 years now), my dad flying his Long-EZ up there to hang out with the experimental aviation folks. I was just a kid when Microsoft first starting showing off flight sim there, and I'd wait in line to play it while the real pilots watched from the back and scoffed. Microsoft hasn't been there the last couple years obviously, but I was looking forward to seeing if they had a presense there this year with Flight. It looks like the news of coming down over the wire that they're closing development of Flight might have had something to do with their absense. I'm planning on heading up there Saturday. I'll bug the xplane and third party developer guys that do have booths there and see if they have the skinny on what's going on. Just an aside, I don't like the dates they're using for Oshkosh now days. Years ago it used to be Wednesday to Wednesday for a week, and now it's Monday through Sunday. The problem is, everyone packs up and leaves starting Friday. The place is half empty by Saturday and a ghost town on Sunday, even though it's the weekend when most people have off from work. I guess I'll just have to take off some time from work to catch the highlights during the week.

Flight Simulator helped during my flight training as well. I still don't think Microsoft really owes us anything though. They make a product, we buy it or we don't. Flight didn't really destroy flight simulator. It was destroyed when the ACES team was disbanded. This is a new game. I'll have fun tooling around in the Stearman in Hawaii, but I'll still use FSX when I want to practice maneuvers and running through the checklists in in a 172. I mean, I'm disappointed Flight isn't more than what it could be, but flight simulator remains in the same state it has been for the past several years now.

My reputation and experience with the flight simulating world should be irrelevant in most of these conversations. However, if you must know, I've been using Flight Simulator since the FS4 days, have been developing my own add-ons since FS98, and have my private pilot's certificate. I don't recall what the first add-on I purchased was, it was either an aircraft or the MS Hawaii expansion scenery. That doesn't make me king of flight simulator land, but I'm no stranger to it either. I'm a new member because I was interested in following the news on Flight and P3D. Lots of chaff to get that kernel of wheat in this forum though. So yes, judge me solely by my post count. My observations and criticisms are blunt, but were not intended to be condescending.

I didn't know better. I sat tight until the beta was released, shrugged, and went back to playing FSX.

Your lofty expectations and misunderstanding of Microsoft's vague media hype misled you.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/11/world/asia/china-microsoft-factory/index.html?hpt=hp_t3I read that headline and thought it was about you guys fretting over Flight at first.

Because you can't slew or set a high tailwind in the demo/beta, does not mean there will not be jets added at a future time as an add-on. Again, there are hints in the interface that there will be jets and distant scenery locations added in the future.

I speculate MS will add jets before other third parties can if they can. They'll simply see a lower resolution version of the sceneries they don't have. They'll see some sort of placeholder.

There is no unlimited fuel option. There's no slewing, and you can't give yourself a 150 knot tailwind either. So you will indeed run out of fuel long before you reach the mainland.I'll elaborate on the details in a more humorous post, but from what I can gather, the entire globe is in the game, and the rest of the landmasses are represented as an extremely low resolution, crude place holder. I'm sure that will probably change as the user is not intended to be able to make it that far.

There are hints if you look carefully.The Stearman and A5 have radios with clickable tuner knobs and display frequencies in certain missions. A hint that there may be ATC added in the future.There are achievements you can earn for carrying more than 10,000 passengers a certain distance, exceeding an altitude of 60,000 feet, and going supersonic. That's going to be tough to do in the A5. Hints that there will be airliners, other jets, and worldwide flight.They can add anything they want to Flight, especially since its built from FSX. Of course you angrily demand everything from this game up front, forgetting that Microsoft owes you nothing and has the right to develop whatever they want to try and be profitable. They don't have to bend over backwards for the niche market of whiney, uber geeks, while suffering losses at the same time.

I suspect this is an issue with the beta, or perhaps a hardware limitation of that user. Textures in remote areas render to pretty decent detail, but in the busier areas such as Hilo, the ground starts to get fairly blurry. I suspect the memory is being exhausted on the graphics card, forcing the use of smaller mips, or there some kinks yet in the beta.

Let's ask productive questions. Ask what kind of third party development support there will be, and if there is any, what the revenue sharing between Microsoft and third parties is going to be.

Ha! We're the 1% cult ###### demographic Microsoft is not targeting with this game. We're the 1% flight sim elitists. Microsoft is trying to spread the wealth of and joy of flying with the non geek masses! This is simulator socialism! I propose a virtual fly-in at Redmond within FSX to stage our protest.

Yeah, random or maybe first come first serve. Those who signed up a month ago might be in the first batch, and those who got on later will probably be in a later batch. Microsoft is still advertising that the beta is open. If all the candidates were picked, they probably wouldn't bother with that. Well, much of that is the core of the game and aircraft.

True. Its just over 1GB ;)

I would have assumed a nearly open beta phase since the game is going to be released for free. You'd think they'd want as many beta testers as they could get so they buy the addons later. Perhaps more beta testers will be added, and they are separating them into batches to ease server strain? They probably don't want hundreds (or thousands) all piling on at once to download several gigabytes.

I discovered this last night after I flew into a fog bank... it didn't go over so well.

Yeah its definitely built out of FSX. Sorry, I should have clarified that its a fresh start in terms of addons.

I assume a good chunk of the performance gain comes from dropping support for legacy code and content. The code base gets pretty bloated when it has to drag around support for formats that are 10-15 years old. This is a fresh start, folks. We, the hardcore simmers, are too tiny of a market to make it worthwhile for Microsoft to invest in the development costs of maintaining legacy code or the feature set of a high end simulator.

Its a dolled up and performance tuned FSX that's missing the content. There is huge potential if it can be unlocked. Like a throttled sports car engine sitting in a base model compact, or for you geeks, a six core sandy bridge running at 1.0 GHz with the multiplier locked.

Microsoft better have put a lot of effort into locking the game down to keep it from being hacked because I foresee a strong push by people wanting to put their own content into it. Its probably just a matter of time before the game is cracked like the Wii, iPhone, or any other proprietary platform over which people wanted more control.

Anyone being the few that actually know how and where to get Prepar3d, or what it even is. That's going to be a tiny, niche group of users. You're not going to see Prepar3d sitting on the shelf at Best Buy or advertised except by word on forums like these, so it won't have a consumer user base.

X-Plane 10 users sure. Prepar3d is not a competitor with Flight though. The license restricts its use for educational, research, and government use. Its not a consumer application. The third party addons for Prepar3d might have a consumer audience, but that's going to be a pretty niche market that Microsoft can get away with overlooking. Microsoft wouldn't manufature a direct competitor by selling to Lockheed. The two applications are diverging on distinct paths. Tons of people will download the game and not buy any addons. Microsoft is banking on the few that do buy addons to push their sales higher than if they sold the game as a fully packaged deal. Since the user base will be a lot larger than previous versions, only a fraction of the users will have to shell out for addons to make it profitable. This model already works spectacularly in other markets. How about the Google Android OS? Google gives it away to phone manufacturers. A booming app market followed. The difference here is that Microsoft isn't opening up to third parties. I think there would be huge potential for profits for third parties and Microsoft if they did.Some protesting from the relatively small flight simulator cult following isn't going to make much of a dent in this model.

For direct competitors to their products probably, but Microsoft has a long history embracing third party developers: 20 years of Flight Simulator addons, SDK's to write plugins into their popular applications like Office, free development tools like the express version of Visual Studio, .Net framework, c# and Visual Basic for creating full featured Windows applications...

I'm surprised they are closing up like a clam to third party developers. After seeing the wildly successful mobile app markets, I thought Microsoft might want to encourage third part development with Flight, but channel the third party add-ons through their own web store. Developers could go nuts making scenery and aircraft, consumers would get a safe, centralized place to browse and purchase them, and Microsoft would get a chunk of all the sales.