New Microsoft Flight Sim Announced

Looking at the previous notes experiences about FS being your introduction to flying shows the big gulf between your life and mine. I grew up in the town of Hounslow which is at the eastern end of Heathrow Airport. We later moved to Cranford which literally falls within Heathrows boundaries. My dad worked as a Baggage handler for BEA originally and then for Dunlop Aviation services, his job was delivering Tyres and other parts to various airports and airlines around the UK and as such my brother and I often went with him, We had access to almost all of the airports in the UK and grew up with close contact of many aeroplanes. My first flight was unusual inasmuch that dad was delivering to British Eagle Airways and was having his lunch in their canteen. We were invited to go up in one of their Britannias on a short  test flight, As you can imagine we jumped at the chance and were thrilled to bits as the Whispering Giant lifted off from Heathrow for a half hour flight !
Being so close to the airport most of our families worked there and at weekends all of us kids would spend hours on the now demolished Roof gardens above the Queens building and terminal 2. It was always packed and was a great family day out. watching all the big propliners and the Early jets coming and going. Life in the late 60s and 1970s was great and we got to see all the new stuff as it came out. We went to all the airshows, lItwas inspirational The first 747 in 1969 was a revelation and stopped the traffic whenever one appeared overhead ! Since that Britannia I flew on many occasions from various places and when I finally had enough money i started to learn to fly myself. Gliders, Microlights and fixed wing. However redundacy in the early 80s put paid to that and it was sometime before i was able to get hands on with aircraft again, I was back to spotting at various airports for a while.I then worked as a volunteer for Tony Bianchi at the Blue Max movie aircraft museum at booker airfield where I was part of the restoration team, We used to get the odd joy ride in various birds as a reward for our work
It was great fun and I was sad to leave when I moved to the coast 10 years ago.
So you can see my interest in aviaton was based around real life rather than computer simulations so I do have a completely different outlook on the situation. You can also see why I have a thing about old airliners !! Hope i havent bored you all but It was something I thought i,d share with you.

What free time? haha. In any case, I do a variety of flying and have purchased a lot of payware addons. Too many times has this happened. I purchase a good and realistic addon and I can't get it to run smoothly even with all graphics turned down. Mostly, I just want a realistic sim and a slideshow is not realistic. Also, I rather enjoyed making videos, but have given that up until I can get FSX to look nice. Mostly, FSX has given me the opportunity to do many projects and to learn a lot about aviation. To be frank, I've got FSX to thank for my aviation knowledge that I had before even beginning to work towards my PPL. Yes, it is essentially only a game, however, in my case and in the case of many others, it doubles as a tool. All in all, the uses I, and many others put it to make it entirely constructive.

dodgy-alan wrote: All this talk of new and improved this that and the other seems to have forgotten one vital thing. for many of us it is just a hobby. nothing more, Yes you could spend a fotune on it and get the latest thing. Failing that why not approach one of the airlines and buy one of their old simulators ! Its just getting out of hand. Right now I,m running FS9. I have a hangar with over 500 aircraft, A huge scenery file and have lots of fun with it. Its a release from everyday chores and takes up less space than the 2,000+ model kits I have stuffed in my back room in a huge pile of boxes. I rarely spend more than a couple of hours a day on the FS as the wife usually starts complaining that she wants to use the computer !  So therefore I cannot see the point of paying out thousands of pounds/dollars/rand/yen etc for what is basically a game! Ok some of you guys may spend your entire free time running FS and getting deadly serious, but hey, theres more to life than this. Unless you want to go industrial why keep changing things. I think If I was to spend any more money on this thing I'd be looking at a divorce. Thats one reason why a lot of my addons are freeeware. I used to spend a fair bit on learning to fly real aircraft. But then i was young, free, single and had a decent bank balance, Then I hit real life and the dream crashed ! Dont get me wrong, I,m all for people having fun and if you want to spend a fortune thats up to you. I come from the old school of "if it aint broke, dont fix it !" so long as my computer contues to run and the system still works then I wont be changing anything. At the end of the day its horses for courses and thats what matters. My mates think I,m a bit geeky and sad even now with this set up, god knows what theyd think if I turned my living room into a complete flight deck !! Anyway, thats enough from this old carmudgeon, have fun, fly safely.

Yes indeed, FS9 can be all you need. I'm still at school, so I have the same probl;ems- not much time, no free quantity of money, and an older computer...

Vista is alright for me, but XP seems the way to go for FS9 - everything works there. CAll me a technophobe if you like, but it's best that everyone does what suits them. Those who need to stay at the front of technology must do so with Flight - you can reveiw it for us who still run FS9 and FSX.

I hope the new Microsoft Flight works on my 2 core Vista ..

Come on guys.. We are talking about Microsoft... They won't let us down.

I know nothing more than this thread and the taster video but my two cents would be I agree with others that whilst the loyal FS fraternity is relatively small the market for a fun to fly game which doesn't have the option of shooting anyone is non existent. So surely (hopefully) this is a true simulator akin to FSX but with a new engine.

Regarding the wishlist stated near the start of the thread I don't wish that it will offer all these bells and whistles (these are best left for add-ons) but just that it's stable, reliable and offers an attainable level of performance with a reasonable complexity of visuals. Several years on from the release of FSX I have what would generally be considered a high-end machine but I still see OOM, fatal errors and find myself throttling back the graphics sliders. Infuriating.  

Transport Steve wrote: Forgive me, but, as a noob to flightsims, wasn't FSX supposed to be a new game engine, Cheerz.  Transport Steve.

Nooooo!!! We want wild speculation and conspiracy theories!!!

Where's Pointy when you need him??

MartinW wrote: why, having spent money on FSX and add-ons galore, can't I play it on a future release. If they now use a new game engine, this will then irritate those who've spent time and dosh in acquiring content,   Then run your add-ons on the platform they were intended for!!!! You don’t have to wipe the old sim from your system.   The point is that flight sim is dated, it's archaic software. And at each new incarnation, Microsoft bolted on fancy new bits, thus burdening it even more.   You can't keep doing that forever.   You can't simply update the existing sim, and expect it to do all the fancy things the new hardware allows, plus provide great performance, super smooth frame rate etc.   I believe Phil Taylor himself made this point. If you want a sim that’s fitting in terms of today’s hardware then you can't have backward compatibility. Aces have taken flight sim as far as it will go. Any further and you'll have even more to moan about than you did when FSX was released.   Backward compatibility requires compromises to be made, limiting what can be done with the sim. A brand new engine doesn't require compromise so you can run your old add-ons.   So waht do you want?   A few more cows and birds, a few tweaks to the VC, weather a bit better, maybe a few extra default planes, autogen a bit better.... and even more burden on frame rate.   Or a whole new sim, coded from the ground up that looks like it belongs in the 21st century, and makes use of todays powerful hardware?   And don't forget, in terms of the later, it will be a base code  that can indeed be updated for a good few years before it too will require starting from scratch.

Forgive me, but, as a noob to flightsims, wasn't FSX supposed to be a new game engine, it is in essence Flight Sim 2010, which is the new sim for the 21st century, why did they not upgrade that then, why do we all have to wait for MS Flight, and wait for how long, 1 year, or, two, it has only been announced that the game will be released, but, didn't say when.
I appreciate that old game engines deserve to be put out to pasture, and I quite agree with you that tweaking it with just a few extra bits and bobs periodically will cause more problems with frame rates and possible lag from low-end computers.
I've only just obtained FSX, I'm certainly not going to ignore it, my leisure time is NOW, not in a few years time, if I cannot run my add-ons on this new release, then so be it, if we can, then that's great, but, with MS, they do have a habit of pulling the carpet out from under your feet.


Cheerz.  Transport Steve.

P.S.  It doesn't look like it slopey, according to the press statement the new game will be devised for online PC gamers, probably to take into account the new Windows 7 release by Microsoft. I don't think xbox consumers will be entertained on this score.

Slopey wrote: @Concorde.... Read closer: " Reinventing these iconic franchises with social, shared experiences" This isn't about giving loyal flight simmers what they want, this about getting joe public flying with their mates. I'll eat my hat if there's no console tie in, as Xbox and Kinect are squarely at the heart of M$'s social platform.