I just read about this on Facebook!!!

Now all MS need to do is to do is make Flight Simulator 11, and I'll be the happiest man on Earth! ;D ;D ;D

Quote from Just Flight:

Quote:

Unconfirmed statement from MS last night concerning the end of Flight: "Microsoft Studios is always evaluating its portfolio of products to determine what is best for gamers, families and the company, and this decision was the result of the natural ebb and flow of our portfolio management. Many factors were considered in the difficult decision to stop development on "Microsoft Flight" and "Project Columbia," but we feel it will help us better align with our long-term goals and development plans. For "Microsoft Flight," we will continue to support the community that has embraced the title and the game will still be available to download for free at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight/."

As if this wasn't expected. LOL

I tried MS Flight a few times...nothing there for me!  :(

Mark, you are spot on - FS-11 would be great.  8-)

Lou

Fs11 but with open SDK. So Thirdparty addon developers could work on that platform! But i believe we will need clusters of 4-8 computers to make it work  ;)

The other way: to release open SDK for MS Flight :) And rename it to FSXI

So... would it be too rude to say, "I told you so!" to Microsoft?  ::)

boeing247 wrote on Jul 26^th, 2012 at 10:58pm:

So... would it be too rude to say, "I told you so!" to Microsoft?  ::)

I think all the dedicated Flight Simmers are saying this to MS! Many of us told them that it wasn't what we were hoping for (I know I did when I tested it prior to release), but they still went ahead with it. I'm not surprised it failed. It is installed on my computer, but it is months since I started it and "played" with it. Every time I looked at it I just went, moved my mouse pointer to some other game or FSX. Now I think it is time to uninstall it completely.


windplayer wrote on Jul 26^th, 2012 at 8:15pm:

Fs11 but with open SDK. So Thirdparty addon developers could work on that platform! But i believe we will need clusters of 4-8 computers to make it work  ;)

Microsoft got it right with Flight when it comes to hardware (computer) requirements, so IF they have learned anything, hopefully it is that you don't make it so that years later, it is still hard to run everything maxed out unless you have a Super Computer! ;D

I would like an FS11, but have it return to how it is done for FSX/FS9. A free SDK with anyone being able to create an addon for it. But will MS listen to me or you? I doubt it. :(

It felt more like a play station game never liked it

Never tried it.

I find it hard to forgive MS after what they did to Aces. Lots of families all of a sudden out of work. For what?

I believe that Lockheed Martin got em all under PREPAR3D project ;) Or sort of.

Here is something for you... can anyone name a product from Microsoft that has been finished at point of release.

Microsoft has never finished any of its flight sim products.. thats for sure

gandy wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 1:52pm:

Microsoft has never finished any of its flight sim products.. thats for sure

That could depend on what you call finished versus what MS calls finished. FS9 is probably the one that I would consider "finished". To improve on FS9 required dumping everything and doing a whole new Flight Sim. FSX was not it because it has backward compatibility with FS9. IF they were to do another Flight Sim, they must leave previous versions behind and do it without any compatibility with FSX\FS9 products. Seeing as Lockheed Martin now basically own FSX, this could make it easier to do.

In the mean time. We just wait and see.

Also, MS have'nt finished any of their Operating System projects.
Ron

gandy wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 1:52pm:

Here is something for you... can anyone name a product from Microsoft that has been finished at point of release. Microsoft has never finished any of its flight sim products.. thats for sure

I remember Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1
I had i486 dx4-100\4mb\855mb HDD\ and trident 9440 with 2mb video ram. It ran pretty smooth. FPS dropped only in Chicago at Very Dense scenery complexity. FS95 -98 was pretty stable too.

Very expected, anyone who knows enough about FS and gaming community generally knows that there isn't enough market for civilian flight simulator outside FS community. Most gamers just like war flying games, they maybe plaid Flight for hour or two and uninstalled it and that's it. I guess marketing people at MS haven't been in contact with gaming enough to know this.

When people were talking about Flight becoming new FSX all the time I could read between lines that Flight wasn't going to include whole world or advanced features of FSX, and I was right. Then when whole concept of Flight became fully clear, marketing it to general gaming community, I knew that it wasn't going to sell too well either.

According to an article on the Flight Sim.Com web site and an interview with some guy named Josh from Aces Studio's , the entire team of Aces has been let go, laid off, and Microsoft is NOT intersteaded in pursuing anything Flight Simulator related now, or in the distant future. If they choose to do so, it will be in the very Distant future, and most likely we'll all be dead, blind, in a wheel chair and or simply not breathing any longer . So, it looks like as I stated last summer in a somewhat long post on the SURCLARO.COM flight sim forum, that unless microsoft gets its act together and quits all the nonsense, their going to run people off from this flight sim community in record numbers , I know I left for 4 years, after having FS2002 Pro edition all Amped out, then later FSX came out, but, you had to have some ridlicious Super Computer to run the darn thing to get just decent graphics, and drop a lotta money back then in 2006 to get really good graphics, people weren't ready for that and computer parts were still fairly expensive , compared to now tho.  I know the Height of Flight simming reached its peak between 2002 and 2006 basically, after FSX was released , lotta simmers, Aircraft and scenery developers gave up and quit, because of the NEW hard to understand file format, that being DDS Files, which meant developers & designers dropping more money to make the stuff and tons of time trying to figure out how to make it work, so they could give us FREEWARE to use in the sim, and it made a lot madd. can't say I blame them either, thats why I left for 4 years.  Also, I think there needs to be some sort of Standard for designing and making Aircraft & scenery , a standard format as well as a standard way to upload files, right now theres too many loosely made mistaken aircraft & scenery files Floating around out there, that simply have a lotta mistakes in them from Newbies or those who just want to ASSUME its ready for uploading for FSX or 2004, tho they never checked or TESTED it out before uploading to a flight sim web site, the veteran and seasoned developers and designers out there know better, but some of these newbies on the block are just NOT checking or TESTING things out before uploading, yet some of what I've seen have been TITLED as FSX, and are NOT even close to being FSX material or Qualified to be true FSX aircraft or scenery.  I've got a hold of quite a few aircraft lately, that appear to be FS 98  or FS2000 that somebody has ported over kinda sorta, and never changed the gauges either in the panel folder so it'd work properly !  What do you think that does to somebody or new comers who really wan to get into flight simming, when they spend hours of frustration on forum boards asking for help, instead of flying ??? very frustrating, when all they had to do was TEST & Check before uploading the files to a site, which clearly isn't being done in some cases ! Don't Assume or guess - know ! Would ya want an Airline pilot to just assume there was enough Fuel to make it from Australia to Seattle without checking or looking ?? ::) ::) anyway, I said back in March or April that FLIGHT would be dead by August or September, and , we see what happened !!! It died a firey death of a fireball, down in flames, and exploded, all over the Taxi Way , don't bother to call Rescue tho, nobody really cares !!! :o :o ;D ;D

"According to an article on the Flight Sim.Com web site and an interview with some guy named Josh from Aces Studio's , the entire team of Aces has been let go, laid off, and Microsoft is NOT intersteaded in pursuing anything Flight Simulator related now, or in the distant future. If they choose to do so, it will be in the very Distant future, and most likely we'll all be dead, blind, in a wheel chair and or simply not breathing any longer ."

You got it a bit wrong though, ACES studio was laid off years ago when development for new FS was stopped. Some ex ACES guys were working on Flight though.

Quote:

Now all MS need to do is to make Flight Simulator 11, and I'll be the happiest man on Earth!

There is zero chance of this happening. Microsoft are out of the flightsim business for good this time.

Christopher Low wrote on Jul 30^th, 2012 at 8:52am:

Quote: Now all MS need to do is to make Flight Simulator 11, and I'll be the happiest man on Earth! There is zero chance of this happening. Microsoft are out of the flightsim business for good this time.

I've never tried xplane but it would be nice too see if the old group ended up there. Flight simming on tweaked linux kernels would be awesome imho.
My gut feeling is most will end up at LM though.  :'(

I tried X-Plane several times (versions 8, 9 and 10) but I don't like it.

Prepar3D, which is a different FSX, is very good and I have found it to be more stable than FSX. With some 3rd party addon developers already making their current ones compatible with P3D, that is the way I'm heading. In all honesty, I don't know which is easier to develop for, but P3D appears to be just some minor differences to FSX, maybe just as simple as redoing the installer for P3D. And you don't have all that BS about the gauges needing to be Trusted which is very annoying in FSX.

The Aerofly Flight Simulator look stunning as well, but like Flight, it only covers a small area. I am planning to buy it because I love the look of it.

The most interesting new feature of P3D for me will be the 64bit compatibility. I suffer from OOMs (out of memory errors) in FSX when flying in a handful of extremely dense scenery areas (eg. London with VFR London X and UK2000 Heathrow Xtreme at maximum detail levels), and it is annoying. This would be solved instantly if the simulator could take advantage of my 8GB RAM.

Yeah, currently what keeps me using FSX for now is FSpassengers addon which isn't developed anymore and doesn't work with Prepar3d... But one developer, ones who made Real Environment Xtreme are working on similar addon and probably it will be prepar3d compatible too, then I will likely move.

And yeah, I develop sceneries myself and at least in case of most sceneries you don't have to modify anything other than installer to make them compatible with Prepar3d.

No kidding about it? FSPX outdated, its a good news if someone working on this kinda addon!

you guys are scaring me, I can't believe that this topic would have anything to do with FSX.

as mentioned, Its been public knowledge since the release of FSX that MS was done with flight simulator and it was so obvious that FLIGHT was for casual gamers(I'm not one) MS made a venture, it failed, big deal...sorry.

I had a look at some screen-shots from Prepar3d and I have to say I wasn't impressed. The ones that stick out in my mind are of a 747-400 and it looked like a plastic toy :P it may run smooth but if the models look like that I'm out.

FSX is it imo for a long time...ya hear that Captain Sim? please don't go anywhere. :)

We will not ;)

"I had a look at some screen-shots from Prepar3d and I have to say I wasn't impressed. The ones that stick out in my mind are of a 747-400 and it looked like a plastic toy  it may run smooth but if the models look like that I'm out."

Prepar3d is just updated FSX and graphically its not any different from FSX. Maybe that picture was taken with Prepar3d ran on low graphics settings or just some bad freeware addon model, but sim itself is just more stable FSX at the moment.

So you can basically add all your addon aircraft and sceneries to it from FSX and they should look and work just the same way I believe, though some complicated addon airplanes could have problems, not sure.

Personally I am not going to switch to Prepar3d until it offers enough advancements from FSX and still stays compatible with most addons made for it.

Pvjinflight wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2012 at 6:06pm:

"I had a look at some screen-shots from Prepar3d and I have to say I wasn't impressed. The ones that stick out in my mind are of a 747-400 and it looked like a plastic toy  it may run smooth but if the models look like that I'm out." Prepar3d is just updated FSX and graphically its not any different from FSX. Maybe that picture was taken with Prepar3d ran on low graphics settings or just some bad freeware addon model, but sim itself is just more stable FSX at the moment. So you can basically add all your addon aircraft and sceneries to it from FSX and they should look and work just the same way I believe, though some complicated addon airplanes could have problems, not sure. Personally I am not going to switch to Prepar3d until it offers enough advancements from FSX and still stays compatible with most addons made for it.

I had to go and look again...from the prepar3d website...the FSX default stuff looks a lot better IMO.

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dbhally wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2012 at 11:07pm:

I had to go and look again...from the prepar3d website...the FSX default stuff looks a lot better IMO.

The Connie for P3D is done by another company, and it seems to be exactly the same as their FSX version. ;)
Sad, but true.

---

I have to add that the 747-400 I was looking at was from X-plane, sorry, please excuse my confusion.

:-[

Christopher Low wrote on Jul 31^st, 2012 at 7:57am:

The most interesting new feature of P3D for me will be the 64bit compatibility. I suffer from OOMs (out of memory errors) in FSX when flying in a handful of extremely dense scenery areas (eg. London with VFR London X and UK2000 Heathrow Xtreme at maximum detail levels), and it is annoying. This would be solved instantly if the simulator could take advantage of my 8GB RAM.

Now this makes me happy.

I have been saying for years that we've got 64-bit processors and no software. Unfortunately 99% of the population believe that all you need is a 64-bit OS. Finally a move forward from Far Cry2.