HowardHughes

Not sure why it's a scandalous joke. It's arguably the highest fidelity and most accurate jet aircraft simulation ever created for a home flight simulator. I don't fly commercial jet aircraft in FSX, but if you had any idea whatsoever of the systems complexity on display you certainly wouldn't call it a scandalous joke. If anything, I'm surprised the price is as low as it is, given the decline in the flight simulator market, the relatively small amount of that market who would pay for something like this, and the massive amount of man hours attributed to its creation.

Quick question, to those developing for V2.0 and privy to the beta platform; What is p3d 2.0 allowing you to do that FSX wouldn't? We've read that performance is better all round, and we know about the volumetric shadows. In your testing however you must have found other things which are easier or less taxing on the system. i.e; - Are higher resolution textures permitted for the same performance deficit? - Are higher resolution models permitted.......... Etc etc. I'd love to know exactly what developers are finding. Can you do a lot more to your products than you could with FSX?

What you're asking is for a company to make a product that they can almost guarantee will lose money. Good luck with that one....

Vertigo Studios were making one, but I havn't seen any updates since 2010ish. These are a few renders I found digging back through google; Look over the site now however, I can't see any mention of it. Looks like it might have been dropped.

Third party developers - simple as that. If you think what developers have done to FSX, then consider what they could do to Xplane. Yes, there are some quality developers working on XP10 but not nearly enough.

Who's to say they won't? Orbx is on the verge of releasing a renovation of the lighting system, as well as a world-wide update to base textures. Odd to talk about product updates when XP10 doesn't have seasonal textures at all, whilst an FSX developer creates world-wide seasonal textures all on it's own. If anything, FSX gets updated on a daily basis and at a far greater rate than XP10.

Perhaps if you showed us what you have so far it may dispel the doubters?

They really do need to sort out the clouds. Great screenshots, and the worst thing by a long way in each of them is the clouds. The main problem...they look nothing like clouds. Are REX on board for XP10 at all?

I've got no argument to those you've posted, but you've just listed 8 aircraft.... Saying that any Carenado aircraft is better in XP10 is debatable at best, but just for fun let's consider only US military aircraft that are currently in use (off the top of my head); A-10 B1 F15 F16 F18 F22 F35 B2 B52 C5 C17 C130 KC10 KC135 U2 T6 T38 DHC6 C2 E2 F5 P3 T45 So not even including helicopters, and limited only to current US military aircraft, how can you possibly say that FSX doesn't have MASSIVELY more quality aircraft than X-plane? If we were to consider WW2 - can you name a single WW2 era aircraft done better in X-plane, barring the DC3?

You've got to be joking.... It's fairly difficult to list aircraft which FSX hasn't done better than X-plane. X-plane is a growing sim but statements like that are just silly.

Whilst I don't know the intricacies of the process and how far FSvNext was developed, the fact that it was late in the development process doesn't save it from critical review. It's difficult to have conversations on here given that you obviously know more than I do but can't discuss it openly. Regardless, I imagine that a lot of the work from FSvNext went into Flight anyway, and the fact that it was canned at such a late stage gives an indication into what they expected. I'm sure you'll agree that FS development is no money-spinner. My understanding is that MSFS was never a financial success for MS, and that it took the backing of Bill Gates to keep it running for as long as it did.

I disagree with the statement that the decision by Microsoft to cancel it's flight simulator development had nothing to do with demand. Like it or not even FSX was not a big seller, certainly not in comparison to other games and most likely not enough to justify the development cost. FSX was a massive upgrade over FS2004, but to develop further a complete code renovation was required, and an element of that was shown in Flight. Ultimately though, to develop a sim to today's standards would be a cost that would be completely unjustifiable. You mention that 3rd party developers wouldn't exist unless FSX was very successful, but most publishers operate on tiny margins. OrbX still isn't profitable (by Jon Venema's own admission). Very few developers are in the business for the money. Surely the low adoption rate of Flight (a free platform) tells you everything you need to know. Microsoft won't make another sim - the only hope is that their licensing agreement with Lockheed Martin develops to a point where general use is permitted, but even then I doubt LM's goals would be in line with our desires.

Whilst I think $200 is a reasonable price for what they're selling, it blows my mind that it will be incompatible with OrbX payware airports. I can't think of any reason for that whatsoever, beyond forcing you to buy the full regions separately. Yes they may have a different mesh and elevation data but why that couldn't be implemented in a basic form to at least allow compatibility I really don't know.

I'd say that FSX's ATC is actually fairly incredible - There still isn't a default flight sim that matches it's scope and general effectiveness all these years later.

Then take it up with them. Alternatively you could continue to laugh at other people's products. I'll leave it with you.