Torg Smith

42 is a recent update. They sent it to the marketplace as well. It takes a while for Microsoft to get the updates verified and released. You can update the plane through the operations center. I bought my DC-6 in the marketplace and was able to update it in the operations center.

This is one plane I had given up hope of ever seeing in the sim again. I am looking forward to this coming out. I used to fly the one made by Milton Shoup and his crew all the time.

The community team has gone under the AoEO team from the fact that Solicest (I believe the lead community person at AoEO) is now working with the Flight web site. They don’t plan on shutting down the Flight authentication servers anytime soon. I don’t believe they want to take the products off the market soon so they will want to have minimum support for it. I suspect over time the updates on the main site will slow down. Now after what they did with ACES Studio on their announced closure, we can’t be sure they have really stopped development on a flight simulator. I do not know if any of you are familiar with Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) that was published by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). They were a little jealous with Blizzard’s WoW and thought that SWG should have the same sales. They did a Combat Upgrade (CU) that angered the vast majority of the existing user community. They then came out with the Next Game Engine (NGE I may have the wrong word for N, it might have been New) because sales tanked after CU. NGE did not put the game back to where it was before. I do not know if they ever got the sales numbers back up to where they were pre-CU before they shut the game down for good. The main guy for SOE has stated that if he had it to do over again, he would not have done the CU. I do not know what the sales were for Flight and how they compared with FSX over the original few months of that products life. The outcry from the existing fan base was quite similar to the CU of SWG. We can hope they went back to the drawing board and are planning to produce the successor to FSX with some of the community oriented stuff they started in Flight. I took a survey when in beta and one question was about how much I would want to manage baggage handlers and something else I can’t remember right now. The question as I took it was how deep into the weeds do you want to manage a virtual airline. That sounded good. Sorry for the wall of text.

What gets me is why they just don’t dump the plane on the market now unless it is not ready yet. Holding out on the sale of it serves no purpose with the cancelation of development. If it’s not ready yet and they aren’t developing new content then something is not adding up here.

I have been averaging 5400XP per hour of flight. 369,024XP with 68:21 hr:min I have done a large percentage of free flight.

Microsoft may be waiting to see how the economy does as the economy has been floundering. I will hold out hope that some years down the road they will do another FS. I can’t help it, I am an extreme optimist. :Big Grin:

The job posting above says the location is in Redmond. Do we know if the game studio was really in Vancouver? Wasn’t Aces Studio in Redmond? They had a number or employees from Aces Studio on Flight and I wonder if they would have really relocated to Vancouver. Now it is only 100+ miles northwest of Seattle.

I made about 5 landings today and did improve. Although I still look like that drunken plane jack stunt video somebody linked about a month ago.

I like the Carbon Cub. It does make the small strips easy to land on. It is kind of tough to control it below 60MPH even with full flaps. A slight shift on the stick and you think you just made a heavy yank on it. :Nail Biting:

As far as new places I would like to see. I would like the area I live in (South Texas) but know that will probably not happen any time soon. For an alternate choice, I would like Scandinavia. More specifically the country of Norway. They have a number of airports that have rather large obstructions near the airports. You can’t make a straight in approach due to the rather monstrous piles of earth protruding from the water. :Big Grin:

There is a Payload.DropObjects default bound to the K key in the config file. Somebody did say that there are jobs in real Alaska that involve dropping good at a location. Maybe they will add a new class of job. Who knows, maybe they wanted to release the cockpit with Alaska but did not have the jobs ready yet. One can hope. :Praying:

I have done a couple long distance jobs that required me to refuel on the way there.

If you look at what they are doing with the MetroUI on Windows 8, developers have to submit their applications for a certification check to be made available on the application store. Look at Flight as a mini-Windows. Developers upload their content to the store. Microsoft runs its validation software on it. It gets approved and loads on the store front. No more Flight1 wrapper as it is encrypted by Microsoft in flight. There is benefit to the 3PD in the sense that distribution and copy protection are built in. The downside is that there is no competition in distribution so you are forced into whatever price they want to charge. The Windows Application Store is going to be 70% developer and 30% Microsoft. I do not know what kind of markup retailers normally make on software. The only real problem is that many distribution chains are lost and you have less competition.

The next plane will have a cockpit. I think they are collecting performance data while people are playing to tweak optimizations. They have said it would be two to three years before 3PDs will be able to produce for it. The Magic 8 Ball says… "Cannot predict now"

I liked the interview. I thought it was informative. I do like the fact that he explicitly stated the weather engine is intended to support icing. :yahoo: