I picked up on a discussion elsewhere about MS abandoning Simmers etc and where to now and guess what?

Lockheed Martin (Yes the aircraft manufacturer) has taken over and I think now owns the rights to FSX. The program is now called PREPAR3D and is fully compatible with FSX which it replaces having by the look of it upgraded lots of bits including the internal menus look and feel.

So there is life after FSX and it will continue but in completely different ways and ones that will focus in my humble opinion on aviation as opposed to being merely a game and a software sideshow where it ended up at MS.

The news gets better , you can add in or add on all FSX SP2 compatible models, scenery and other sort  of addons, and they feature the Captain Sim C130 on their web pages as an example of a a high quality model being used in PREPAR3D. Also in partnership with Lockheed are ORBX, FTX and REX who make all the good stuff for scenery and weather etc. It seems the ACES team is not dead either and are now working in partnership with Lockheed.

It seems they have a number of nifty tools to let you add in a lot of stuff, scenery add ons, place objects etc and have upgraded the whole thing to let you do stuff and make what was FSX a lot more flexible and user friendly. They also claim to have upgraded the world scenery to current standards and improved many other things that were left hanging by MS when they shut it down.  :)

This is the most exciting news for flight simmers not only because it finally frees us up from MS clutches but alas it is only offered to Windows OS and will not be ported across to Linux or Mac systems. The offer full access to SDK's and developer tools to allow us to do the sort of stuff that simmers have always done make a diverse and rich environment.

Go check it out at: http://www.prepar3d.com

I will get my copy at the end of the week and starting adding in all my favourite CAPT SIM stuff plus lots of other bits and pieces. As I see it the future for simming is assured and can only get better now.