The Big MS Flight Topic

[petermcleland 96]

The real joy for me is low flying around the coasts of the islands over the most realistic coastline terrain and seawater that I have ever seen in any Flight Simulator. I am just loving it and find it the most exhilerating experience...I love GA...Airliners and Military flying, I've been there and done that. Microsoft FLIGHT is a very fine product with NO performance issues. I have everything maxed and 1600x1200 resolution and it runs as smooth as silk...FABULOUS!

Well Done Microsoft

[Sharrow 107]

But that means an add-ons for Alaska ($20), the Hawaii ($20) and an airliner (make that $40) as well. And then the only thing you can do is fly between those two locations. For $80. Without ATC or AI Traffic.

I don't say it will be impossible but I see a lot of bears on the route. If the $15 Maule is how they see add-on content things look very bleak indeed. Not even the AP works there. My prediction is that we'll get a part of Alaska just as Hawaii with some floater aircraft that is as simplified as the Maule.

In its current form it is fairly easy to look at Flight as a glass half empty. Only downhill from here and all that. Crowdsourcing forum-visiting simmers is also going to give you predictable results.

I see Flight in two ways, one short term and the other long term: In the short term it makes it much easier for new people to get interested in simulated flight (for free!) - as you rightly pointed out Flight will be your favourite game ever if it helps achieve this goal. In the long term Flight indeed has the potential to become a fully fledged FX11. And why not? Imagine 2 or 3 more years of development on the engine and the involvment of a select number of 3PD's who are willing to work with MS and it becomes hard to argue that the potential is not there.

[Hiflyer 129]

The more things change..................

Wonder how we will look back on this period and our behaviors a few years from now. I am betting mass amnesia sets in.

In the meantime this is super exciting news. I am not a fan of Alaska (does nothing for me, but I will likely get it anyway!) but its now obvious that MS has it sights set on more than just Hawaii.

Perhaps we can move forwards with a little more cautious optimism, now?

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Beside newbies or students with no $$ who's flying FSX default? I have spent in the $1,000.00 just to enhanced FSX because FSX default does not look like 3PD sceneries.

MS is doing what 3PD are doing right now, selling an enhanced FSX called Flight, they improved a lot of stuff in it, they offload the CPU to the GPU just to take this one.

You are indeed a good customer (and friend)!

But just imagine flying between Alaska and Chicago. In FSX you might have nice add-ons for the departure and destination, but in flight you got 250 meter pixels and 200 meter mesh. Without any autogen. It looks horrible. In FSX you got a very suitable scenery in between but in FLIGHT you'll have to get (buy?) that as well.

And I simply do not see an increase in GPU use, in fact GPU seems t6o be used as much as in FSX but memory load is way way lower (because the sim is so much simpler). I still have severe doubts if it will be fast when it starts to get close to FSX in options. We all know how much AI takes. Just check the sight lines in FLIGHT. How fast the islands are from view even in the best weather. It got short sight lines, you can't see far.

Now this will all work good for some users, but for me it just means I am trapped in a very limited game that pretends to be a sim.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I see Flight in two ways, one short term and the other long term: In the short term it makes it much easier for new people to get interested in simulated flight (for free!) - as you rightly pointed out Flight will be your favourite game ever if it helps achieve this goal. In the long term Flight indeed has the potential to become a fully fledged FX11. And why not? Imagine 2 or 3 more years of development on the engine and the involvment of a select number of 3PD's who are willing to work with MS and it becomes hard to argue that the potential is not there.

The problem with the long term view is money. We got a shit load of content with FSX, in FLIGHT you get one island, two very simplified aircraft and a coconut bra. If you scale FLIGHT up to FSX (okay bit silly but just play along) you are talking thousands of dollars. FLIGHT plus all the addons does not even compete in the same universe as FSX and with $40 it is already more expensive then FSX.

We are more then willing with work with MS (they refuse so far, let's keep that in mind), but our customers demand value for money.

[Sharrow 107]

If you were an MS shareholder you would likely have cause for concern if MS were not trying to milk the initial release of Flight (or anything for that matter) for all it was worth. $20 here, $20 there, $10 there etc. To experienced simmers, not to mention publishers, current Flight DLC looks both subpar and expensive. Obviously, look at what we are comparing it to. But to those who have never heard of FSX addons (or perhaps they like Abacus which is the same thing) then I'll bet the DLC is good enough. MS knows this.

I suspect that the publishers themselves were at least half the problem of why MS seemingly booted them out of Flight. There was clearly no suitable common ground for either side. Too early?

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I suspect that the publishers themselves were at least half the problem of why MS seemingly booted them out of Flight. There was clearly no suitable common ground for either side. Too early?

There was hardly any discussion, we got an NDA and did not agree with it. So in the end some of us in the office were beta testers but it never went any further then that. MS knows how we feel about it, if we can make money on add-ons with FLIGHT we'll gladly talk to them.

We will not however create add-ons like the Maule that sells for $15 and is castrated, lol.

[KarstenS 180]

Beside newbies or students with no $$ who's flying FSX default? I have spent in the $1,000.00 just to enhanced FSX because FSX default does not look like 3PD sceneries.

The problem is: These people were a big part of the customer base. In fact there is the fundamental problem with flight: For casual gamers the price of the download content is the real problem. Sorry Alain(?) but I think you fool yourself in several major points. On the one hand it is very obvious that you don't know anything about the programming in complex environments. You grasp the hope that they only locked functions, and they only have to unlock them and everything works. This is crazy!

The programmers had the problem that they had to rewrite the program without any real understanding of the code. While Flight has some members from ACES, they didn't have the complete team back and the code is years old. They had to define the features that they wouldn't need to have some breathing space. You can bet that they had to rewrite several of the key structures, that they in fact broke the old code.

But no programmer in his right mind would delete in this situation definition files and resources. some parts of the code that you don't want to touch might complain about it.

On the other hand you totally ignore the interviews and the behavior of the Flight team. This speaks a pretty plane language: Hardcore simmers don't matter. But if you look at the original behavior there is a clear change. In the beginning they were pretty interested in integrating external developers. The external people would have been no real problem in a Simulator of the whole world. They would have to sell their addons through the live marketplace, so Microsoft would always get a share of their earnings. But suddenly they broke the connection and the remaining Flight team was pretty cold. They simply realised that the earnings of these addons would be insignificant compared to the numbers that they have to achieve. They need much more than the Hardcore simmers to survive. But for gamers the addon prices are huge!

Someone who normally pays Add-ons has no problems with it (For me flight was cheaper than the CRJ-200 of X-Plane 10), but we don't really matter. On the other hand for gamers there is simply not enough game in it to make the prices acceptable. It is the same problem that FSX had. If they want to survive they have to add more and better gaming content, but this content wouldn't be agreeable for us. They have the problem that they have to take care of totally different user groups. Only with all these groups together. they have enough customers to satisfy their accountants, but I must admit I don't see how they can achieve this miracle.

In fact it is the problem of all Flight simulators.

[alainneedle1 32]

We will not however create add-ons like the Maule that sells for $15 and is castrated, lol.

Well, that's a business decision on your part, good or bad time will tell, see, one can say that any US Cities X without night texture is a castrated City.

Take me for example, I have a business (selling tattoo equipment for permanent make-up), about 7 to 8 years ago a company from Germany came in the US to show me a new machine, after looking at it as saw great potential for them and their machine BUT they had to modify someof the not so good stuff on their equipment, they did take my advice and the rest is history,

That machine is selling in the $4,500.00 range and they are selling them like hot cakes all over the world, it took time for the hard core user (nurses, esthetician and others) of the regular machine to get on board with the new one, change is always hard, some benefits on the new machine was the noise reduction, less complicated to operate and the look is a lot better.

So, my point is that a castrated Maule may not be the best solution for the hardcore simmers right now but it can always be modify with patch or update if the demand is there, the other side of the coin is like the US cities X, how many more cities will you sell if they had night texture, I myself would have bought all of them if I could have fly over them at night.

By the way, I always considered you as a friend also.

[alainneedle1 32]

Karsten, I should have been more precised in my earlier post.

What I mean by locked is this, MS started with FSX to build Flight, they are relasing small area only because they can't build the whole Flight's world as good as Hawaii in 2 or 3 years upgrading the engine at the same time.

Now (if the runour is true) they will release Alaska, if Alaska is as good as Hawaii details wise with good missions and new planes a lot of peoples will download it.

I can't see MS releasing the state of Texas if California, Arizona and new Mexico are not released first, how dumb will that be, or they may release the state of Florida and the Bahamas next so we can fly between them, who knows....

As far as 3PD and MS I can tell you for sure that the problem between them (some of them) is deeper, one of them tried to be the main player in this project, there is some peoples who can't accept to be told what to do.

[alainneedle1 32]

Alaska look stunning if you ask me....

[KarstenS 180]

I can't see MS releasing the state of Texas if California, Arizona and new Mexico are not released first, how dumb will that be, or they may release the state of Florida and the Bahamas next so we can fly between them, who knows....

I think now you are thinking too much from the perspective of a Hardcore Simmer. While I can understand why they choose Alaska I have a really hard time to imagine how they should sell Texas to a gamer. Especially not under their current leader who thought 20.000 airports on the world were crazy.

[alainneedle1 32]

I think now you are thinking too much from the perspective of a Hardcore Simmer. While I can understand why they choose Alaska I have a really hard time to imagine how they should sell Texas to a gamer. Especially not under their current leader who thought 20.000 airports on the world were crazy.

That was just a guess from me, 3.79 million square miles is the size of the United States, MS may release the West coast, Central or the East coast of the United State in one DLC as they will be doing for Alaska, it does not have to be state by state...Alaska is a pretty big part of the US at 656,425 square miles, and the release from MS will cover 1.2 millions square miles....does that make sense to you?

[Hiflyer 129]

Honestly, I just hope it all works out. This whole thing has gone through stages, and a lot of speculation and misinformation has been given by both sides. Now we know the truth. Flight is here, its not just Hawaii, it looks as good as fsx, runs better (for whatever reason) and its not gonna go away.

The real question is: after all the drama fades, where do things go from here?

[KarstenS 180]

.does that make sense to you?

Yes and no. They would only get a very limited number of sales. With such a huge area it gets pretty much impossible to sell it to casual gamers. In fact I would probably skip it. This is the core problem of the whole concept. The more planes you have, the fewer people will buy plane or country.. It won't work. Casual gamers would always complain w3hy t6hey should pay for this huge area if they are only interested in a very small area. It is driven by the thought how do I have to segment the world to sell every area. To say it clearly: If they think this way they won't survive this year! You are always thinking about the flight Softwarem but they have to sell their decisions to the Microsoft Game devision. I can guarantee that there are a lot of projects who just wait for a weakness to get their hands on the budget of Flight.

Thiws is the problem in developing such a program in a huge company. They always ask for fast results and bigger profits.

They are not interested in how pretty the game is, or how huge the area is. How much money did you earn, from how many customers. You say if they sell a lot, then I can tell you a lot would probably mean several million planes.

I especially looked for reviews and opinion in none Flight Simulator formats, and what I found is pretty much what I expected. It is just to obvious that everything is based on selling content. After a few hours they are through with the free part and you can only go on by buying something with real money. There are very few DLC based games that are so obvious.

If you can't hold them in the game, you won't have a chance to sell them anything!

[tempelhof 44]

Yes and no. They would only get a very limited number of sales. With such a huge area it gets pretty much impossible to sell it to casual gamers. In fact I would probably skip it. This is the core problem of the whole concept. The more planes you have, the fewer people will buy plane or country.. It won't work. Casual gamers would always complain w3hy t6hey should pay for this huge area if they are only interested in a very small area. .

Sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. Why would the area being too large stop someone from buying it? I can imagine thousands of people who have never touched a flight sim will buy Alaska just because they have seen Flying Wild Alaska on TV and can do some real bush flying now with some interesting missions.

Not many of them will care for bush flying in Texas I guess.

[alainneedle1 32]

Agreed, but what if you can buy other missions after the initial release, including the planes for it.

Alaska as a DLC will contain some missions with other planes as Hawaii does for X amount of money, ok so what can you do after you played them all....well, MS can release other missions as a DLC between Hawaii and Alaska for example. let say cargo or peoples transportations including some danger to it.....the area to fly over can't be resold to you but new missions can, that's the beauty of it, you can keep the platform alive, is it not what 3PD did with FSX?

[Paul K 93]

Alaska look stunning if you ask me....

They still haven't got the water right, have they. An Atlantic swell in inland rivers and lakes ? Ludicrous. From that height, and in such sheltered shallow waters, you should barely see a ripple on the surface.

As for Flight in general, I'm looking to see where the developers go, and will be happy to follow. Flight isn't FS11, so its not the future for the hobby in the form we know it. Nor is it a fork in the road ( i.e. stick with FSX or go with Flight ) That fork in the road still lies in the future, and I believe the choices will be X-Plane, Prepar3d or a new sim altogether such as the one speculated upon by Aerosoft.

Even if Flight did become the stock platform for civil aviation sims, nothing I have seen so far entices me to spend money adding to it in the way I have FSX. And if all development of FSX add-ons stopped tomorrow, there is still a hundred and one existing products that await my credit card.

Come the day it offers the breadth and scope of FSX, along with significant capabilities and improvements in its coding, well then I might look again at it. For now, however, its just a curiosity.

Sorry this post is a bit disjointed; these are random thoughts early in the morning.

[nbz 11]

Honestly, I just hope it all works out. This whole thing has gone through stages, and a lot of speculation and misinformation has been given by both sides. Now we know the truth. Flight is here, its not just Hawaii, it looks as good as fsx, runs better (for whatever reason) and its not gonna go away.

The real question is: after all the drama fades, where do things go from here?

I agree with this line of thought.

My definition of "it all works out" would be to have third party devs taking part, on terms they can agree to. It seems this requires a move / change on MS' part.

I am therefore delighted that Mathijs is not ruling anything out, even if MS has proven to be an entity for Aerosoft that can not be planned with in the long term.

Where do things go from here? My gut feeling is, that all speculation is futile, because even MS has no idea how flight will look like a year from now. They probably have no idea currently about the demand for add-ons a year from now, and if they would see it beneficial to open the thing up, and create acceptible (or even good) terms for 3PDs.

On the beta forum which is still open, it has become obvious that MS is pondering whether to add ATC. They won't say yes and they won't say no, but are thinking about it. I guess they are "thinking about" a lot of things. Not having made any actual yes/no decisions on a lot of things.

I personally believe, that the people who primarily like the game aspects like collecting "aerocaches" will not find these things interesting forever. While, on the other hand, the people who mainly are interested in aviation itself and the actual flying, are the ones who get hooked in the long term. If I am right (and boy can I be wrong at times), Flight will reflect this move to a more aviation-oriented audience.

[Matt_Smith 1116]

They still haven't got the water right, have they. An Atlantic swell in inland rivers and lakes ? Ludicrous. From that height, and in such sheltered shallow waters, you should barely see a ripple on the surface.

As for Flight in general, I'm looking to see where the developers go, and will be happy to follow. Flight isn't FS11, so its not the future for the hobby in the form we know it. Nor is it a fork in the road ( i.e. stick with FSX or go with Flight ) That fork in the road still lies in the future, and I believe the choices will be X-Plane, Prepar3d or a new sim altogether such as the one speculated upon by Aerosoft.

Even if Flight did become the stock platform for civil aviation sims, nothing I have seen so far entices me to spend money adding to it in the way I have FSX. And if all development of FSX add-ons stopped tomorrow, there is still a hundred and one existing products that await my credit card.

Come the day it offers the breadth and scope of FSX, along with significant capabilities and improvements in its coding, well then I might look again at it. For now, however, its just a curiosity.

Sorry this post is a bit disjointed; these are random thoughts early in the morning.

Have to say I totally agree with you Paul. I wont even be tempted by it until it at least includes the whole world and has at least a Baron or any other GA twin!

[Hiflyer 129]

Yes and no. They would only get a very limited number of sales. With such a huge area it gets pretty much impossible to sell it to casual gamers. In fact I would probably skip it. This is the core problem of the whole concept. The more planes you have, the fewer people will buy plane or country.. It won't work. Casual gamers would always complain w3hy t6hey should pay for this huge area if they are only interested in a very small area. It is driven by the thought how do I have to segment the world to sell every area. To say it clearly: If they think this way they won't survive this year! You are always thinking about the flight Softwarem but they have to sell their decisions to the Microsoft Game devision. I can guarantee that there are a lot of projects who just wait for a weakness to get their hands on the budget of Flight.

Thiws is the problem in developing such a program in a huge company. They always ask for fast results and bigger profits.

They are not interested in how pretty the game is, or how huge the area is. How much money did you earn, from how many customers. You say if they sell a lot, then I can tell you a lot would probably mean several million planes.

I especially looked for reviews and opinion in none Flight Simulator formats, and what I found is pretty much what I expected. It is just to obvious that everything is based on selling content. After a few hours they are through with the free part and you can only go on by buying something with real money. There are very few DLC based games that are so obvious.

If you can't hold them in the game, you won't have a chance to sell them anything!

For me, its hard to see anything in the gaming forums. As soon as anyone mentions flight, Some FSX fan (and rowdy buddies) shows up and goes into a rant. (usually screaming @#$%^ you Microsoft!!!)

The conversation then degenerates into groups of people singing the FSX national anthem, and jeering at anyone mentioning flight. (Take a look at any flight related videos at YouTube for an sample) Heck, they are even attacking XP10 in droves now, so it seems like this whole thing has loosed an unguided missile to take out anything that is not FSX.

In more out of the way gaming sites, where the FSX crowd is not represented, the opinion seems to be that flight is not bad (but not spectacularly good, either)

And that some of the FSX crowd is off their meds!

As to just flying the free content and quitting, I am sure it happens, and probably quite a lot. But like any small niche business, if you can position yourself where there are a zillion passerby, you only need a few to walk through the door to make some money. That word "free" on the initial offering is pulling an awful lot of people in the door.

Only a percentage have to remain to provide MS a possibly viable market. (even more-so if free Flight! dvds start appearing at the checkout in enough stores)

Its a gamble, but I am sure they did their homework.

[meshman 15]

As far as 3PD and MS I can tell you for sure that the problem between them (some of them) is deeper, one of them tried to be the main player in this project, there is some peoples who can't accept to be told what to do.

Nice to see this opinion thrown out. First time this year I have agreed with Alain?

Life can be great when you are a big fish in a small pond. Then some will not accept being a smaller fish in a much larger pond. Darn egos seem to get in the way...

[KarstenS 180]

Sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. Why would the area being too large stop someone from buying it?

That should be clear. If you make the area bigger and maintain the level of detail you need more time or more people in other

word it costs more, which means that you have to raise the price. Even if the materiald oesn't add many details and the price stays the same, people will think that they would have sold to a lower price, without this material.

If you look at Flight right now you see a program that doesn't really knows what to do. On the one hand the Flight models concentrate on the hard core market, onh the other so stupid maneuvers like catch the loops that even gamers can only laugh about. The missions on the other hand train the users how to fly the plane, which could help beginners.

I don't know if even the Flight team realizes it: They can only sell the content to a small fraction of people, that really concentrates on flying.

But you won't find millions of people there.

And if you look at the details that they will have to put into the program for Bushflyers they might have at the end of the year at least one hundret airstrips. What's the difference to the 20.000 airports in FSX?

[PatrickZ 300]

For me, its hard to see anything in the gaming forums. As soon as anyone mentions flight, Some FSX fan (and rowdy buddies) shows up and goes into a rant. (usually screaming @#$%^ you Microsoft!!!)

The conversation then degenerates into groups of people singing the FSX national anthem, and jeering at anyone mentioning flight. (Take a look at any flight related videos at YouTube for an sample) Heck, they are even attacking XP10 in droves now, so it seems like this whole thing has loosed an unguided missile to take out anything that is not FSX.

In more out of the way gaming sites, where the FSX crowd is not represented, the opinion seems to be that flight is not bad (but not spectacularly good, either)

I think once this word is being spread throughout the forums, it goes from bad to worse. Wether the accusations about Flight are true or not doesn't matter, it's about what's being written. People read somewhere that it's a bad product and believe it without even trying. And then when the next conversation about Flight is popping up, they immediately reply that Flight sucks (eventough they got no experience with it). But so the ball keeps rolling.

For MS, once a product has a bad name it's almost impossible to get rid of that bad name. They can improve the product as much as they want, but they can't change the general opinion.

[KarstenS 180]

As to just flying the free content and quitting, I am sure it happens, and probably quite a lot. But like any small niche business, if you can position yourself where there are a zillion passerby, you only need a few to walk through the door to make some money. That word "free" on the initial offering is pulling an awful lot of people in the door.

Only a percentage have to remain to provide MS a possibly viable market. (even more-so if free Flight! dvds start appearing at the checkout in enough stores)

This in fact the core of the problem that many people miss. Microsoft, like other big companies have a very big problem with niche markets. A smaller company can achieve more with half as many people. Smaller companies simply work directly together without an administrative overhead and they can react much faster to even small demands. The bigger company is slower and has higher fixed costs.

If Microsoft sees that they only reach a niche market, they scrap the project. They can achieve much bigger profit margins but only if they can effectively reach a lot of people. They can fix much more complex problems in a shorter time but this doesn't help in a niche market.

They can simply use the money for other projects with a bigger potential.