FLIGHT News Update

[GlennAV8R]

[quote name='Adrian Brausch' date='Jan 7 2012,3:06 PM' post='8300595']
ha video ( not surprisingly) is removed

There are still a couple of clips on there showing mission one. The HD one gives a much better impression. Interesting.

[hasegawa]

Glenn... there is nothing "interesting" it is a simple toy... It is only a appetizer... something like software-sushi.

It may good looking for someone, it may be flyable for kids aged 3 to 8 and if the parents are rich enough... they can buy the whole world from Microsoft.

No Addons, no simulation... only a game you can play via Live... nothing less... but nothing more...

and not enough for simmers like us. It is not from further interest "if it looks good" or "it looks nice"

Who the frog need this castrato software?

[Adamski]

Looks to me like the Lockheed Martin Prepar3D offering will end up carrying the torch ...

[AdrianPetford]

QUOTE (Adamski @ Jan 7 2012,12:22 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Looks to me like the Lockheed Martin Prepar3D offering will end up carrying the torch ...

I've been interested in Prepar3D for a while and definitely agree it looks like the way to go. I fly exclusively in NZ, the UK, Australia and Antarctica in that order so even if Flight was a legitimate simulator rather than a toy flying game, it would hold no interest for me without wider coverage. If I want to fly around an island, I'll choose Earth Simulations' brilliant Alderney, Guernsey, Isles of Scilly or VLC's Chathams. With worldwide coverage you have that choice. You can build up your home country, or other areas you like as you please.

The other issue is the lockout of third party developers. Microsoft's FSX default UK showed some effort, but Australia and NZ were very poorly rendered before the local talent started working their magic. FSX may be the base platform, but for me, flight simming IS the community and its contributions. The fun of the experience comes entirely from addon scenery or aircraft, be they payware or freeware. Microsoft face an uphill challenge if they think they can render the whole world to Orbx, RealNZ, VLC or Horizon standards on their own for Flight, and would they even try? Would there be demand from the likely audience? I very much doubt it. Flight doesn't even need a real world location; it's little more than an arcade game judging by the previews and could just as easily be set in a fantasy environment. I see maybe a handful of areas being made available as add ons in the future, but I bet these will most likely be small, restricted areas like Hawaii and located in the US or Europe.

My FSX directory is almost 300Gb now thanks to addons and it's taken years to get to this stage of sophistication and performance. I'm really happy with it and am sure FSX will have a long life yet, but it's frozen in time in terms of its capabilities and the technical issues with it. The idea of Prepar3D as "FSX 2.0" with performance improvements, graphics on the GPU and support for modern standards is very appealing. With Orbx, Aerosoft and REX already on board and Rob looking at Prepar3D for RealNZ, I can see all the areas I fly in being available on a significantly enhanced platform down the line. Even though everyone seems to be hanging on for Prepar3D 2.0 as I was, I think I'm going to get a subscription now just to support the development work LM are doing.


Ade

[Adamski]

Ade ... so elegantly put. I agree 100% with everything you say ... and, I suspect, many others will too.

I also rarely go beyond NZ in simming terms - why should I? NZ has everything - both in RL and in FS terms. We're even lucky enough to have a whole stash of *flying* warbirds to enjoy. I have Ultimate Traffic2 and get quite a thrill from popping in to Ardmore and seeing the DC-3, Catalina and the odd Tiger Moth or Chipmunk pottering around just as I remember them from the displays or open days. I have no connection with Hawaii whatsoever - and NZ beats it 100 times over anyway

[cowpatz]

This is so Microsoft. Promise the world then under deliver. Not surprising that they are losing market share in every one of their ventures.

[toprob]

I still hold out some hope for an MS simulator sometime in the future. If you consider that they've slipped a few years behind by ceasing development with FSX, then Flight is a good way for them to get back into the market. This allows them to forget about backward compatibility, and build something from the ground up, but to match the features of FSX would take them a lot of man hours. In the meantime, Flight can keep further development funded. In fact further development is the only way they'll make any money from this, so it is pretty much guaranteed.

So one day, provided it makes them some money, they are likely to have enough resources to put together a proper sim, just add ATC and AI and box it up for a 'retro' sim experience.

However it would be a real shame to see everything shift to 99 cent downloads, for an easily accessible but short term thrill.

Remember that the online community probably amounts to point one of a percent of FSX's total user base, and from Microsoft's point of view we are more trouble than we are worth. Sure, we spend a lot of money, but none of it ends up with Microsoft after our initial $50 purchase. The openness of MSFS in the past was really the result of a bunch of sim fans who drove development at MS, but these days it wouldn't make sense to do things that way.

Microsoft had to choose a business model for Flight, and they've gone for an 'app store' approach, but if you read the 'disgruntled developer' posts, that was never their only choice. Maybe one day we'll see a modern, feature-rich sim from MS, but it doesn't look good for freeware and smaller payware developers.