At first they eliminate the ACES team, and then they are going to release an arcade flying game with a name that suggests Flight Simulator is going to continue. I don't like the course they are taking. Reaching the casual user is a very bad sign for those who a serious with flight simulation. But, well, it's Microsoft.
I had two feelings when I heard ACES was shut down. They were in the midst of FS11 when they got canned, and the reason they were shut down is because they were basically building FSX+1, and were flat out ignoring what the bosses at Microsoft were telling them, and thus they did not approve of the direction they were headed, so showed them the door.
ACES had a mindset that I and a lot of us share with flight sim, and that is to make the thing a serious piece of software so you can get to reach as realistic as it can in terms of simulating various forms of flight. So that part is sad that they get shown the door and Microsoft seems more interested in creating an acrade game to take its place.
However, FSX+1 would have been very very bad. FSX does have its issues, but those issues really cannot be properly addressed with just a new version built ontop of it.
FSX needs to be able to use modern hardware better, utilize the massive GPUs that are now available and not be so reliant on the CPU for performance. It needs to work better with the new Windows enviornment. Default vanilla FSX right out of the box with no tweaks will always feel more at home and be more stable in XP. It takes some work and tweaks to get that stability in Win Vista/7.
FSX needs more flexability with internal nav data, be able to more easily and dyamically update the scenery such as the mag dev, the vors, the airways and waypoints. Granted all the big time hi-fi payware add-ons all just use their own internal navigation database and pretty much ignores FSXs database until it comes time to tune the ILS (which is too basic and needs improvement as well).
So I do hope Flight, while marketed as more of a game for laypersons, that it still can function as a true FSX replacement. And if can't, well the Ivy Bridge is due next summer, so with that beast of a CPU then maybe we can stay in FSX and finally get to run with killer visuals and solid framerates, hardware released no less than 7 years after FSX was. :facepalm:
