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Good points all.
Indeed Microsoft had/has the money to have made an even better COF. What they don't have is enough talent. FS is a very small part of Microsoft, and by no means the sexy, high paying part. MS is always hiring, and yet never seems to have enough developers to go around. Great developers don't grow on trees and Microsoft has to compete for them as well as anyone else. Their Games Division which is a very small part of MS (of which the FS team is a tiny island) has been concentrating on XBox, which consequently is getting the lions share of the budget. Quite frankly I believe MS keeps FS going just as a local Pizza Parlor sponsors a local soccer team. Mostly PR and because some VP somewhere is fighting for it. Sooner of later the bean counters are most likely going to win and just do away with it. I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised. One thing I could see happening is FS moving over to XBox. That would remove a lot of headaches of trying to support all of the different hardware configurations out there. Careful what you ask for you just might get it. -- ....Carl Frisk Anger is a brief madness. - Horace, 20 B.C. http://www.carlfrisk.com wrote in message ... On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 11:05:34 GMT, "Carl Frisk" wrote: Thing is for $50 bucks FS9 gives you IMO a really great realistic flying experience. I have to agree with your statement here except that it provide a fairly realistic experience but then I wonder about what FS should be. FS has been around what 15 years? A long time anyway. There have been some good general aviation sims compete with FS. Pro Pilot, Flight Unlimited and Fly for example. All these sims took 1 to 2 years to develop from scratch and they were able to do as good and in some areas better than FS. Now my point is if those sims could be done in a couple of years from nothing should not FS be much, much better than it is? MS has an established cycle now of every two years coming out with an incremental upgrade. The same time it takes to develop a new sim and all they do is an incremental upgrade. Should not by now we have instruments that are as good as say, the Reality XP line. Should not the long standing default aircraft look as good as the PMDG aircraft, for example. Should not the aerodynamics problems/errors that one reads about in the newsgroups be fixed by now? Should not the ATC be at least as good as say, Radar Contact? Should not there be a flight planner as nice as say, Flightsim Commander? Should not the terrain elevations be at least as good as those provided by 3rd party developers? These are questions I think about when I consider how long FS has been on the market. MS opened up the door for 3rd parties to come along and improve it. Yes they do let some things out in their SDKs now and it is greatly appreciated by many. However, I still remember for years and years the sim community was asking MS for information about their aircraft and scenery structure. MS steadfastly refused to release or say anything. It took dedicated 3rd party programmers to figure out on their own how things worked. It wasn't until I believe it was Pro Pilot came out and encouraged 3rd party developers by providing an open architecture that MS relented and started releasing the SDKs. It seems it has been marketing pressures that have brought about major changes, not the kindness of MS. IMO we probably would still not have SDKs if it weren't for sims like Pro Pilot, Flight Unlimited and Fly to provide competition and actually encourage 3rd party development. Well, I'm done. Regards all Jack |
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