

Microsot Flight Simulator is back - Garbage
http://www.neowin.net/news/microsot-flight-simulator-is-back-less-the-simulator

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joshwa
Key phrases from the press release:

"announces the development"

"announces the internal development"

"inspired by the best-selling Flight Simulator franchise"

"bring a new perspective to the long-standing genre"

"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences"

So it's vaporware, bearing no resemblance to the original, without any of the
original developers, which, if it's ever released, will be filled with
griefers.

~~~
Groxx
> _if it's ever released, will be filled with griefers._

> _"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences"_ and _"bring
> a new perspective to the long-standing genre"_

And "friends". And "points". Not that I was a fan before, but that seems it
would screw over anyone serious about it.

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motters
Ditching Flight Simulator was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft ever
made. It's probably one of their best known games, with a hardcore user base.

~~~
cstross
Naah ... their dumbest move was circa-1987, when they sold their license to
market a product based on System V UNIX called Xenix to a then little-known
device driver shop run by a father-son duo called Larry and Doug Michels, in
return for a stake in their company. Who subsequently used Xenix to grow their
start-up, the Santa Cruz Operation, into a $200M/year multinational.

(This was before the dark days in the late 90s when, having been spanked out
of the desktop market, the board of SCO sold their IP _and the company name_
to a linux startup from Utah called Caldera, who renamed themselves the SCO
Group and went into the IP troll business. Thus indelibly blackening one of
the names on my resume.)

If M$ hadn't sold Xenix to SCO and focussed on OS/2 it's possible they'd have
moved wholesale into UNIX circa 1988 with the advent of the ia32 architecture.
And the whole history of desktop OS development through the late 80s and 90s
would have been unrecognizable ...

(Somewhere I have some old PC magazines, circa 1982-84, with advertisements by
Microsoft promoting "UNIX -- the operating system of the future!")

~~~
glhaynes
I wonder if they'd have done better with that route, though, or if they'd have
ended up just another UNIX vendor (i.e. getting their lunch absolutely eaten
by Linux et al).

~~~
cstross
The problem that stopped SCO going head-to-head with Microsoft back in the
days of Windows 3.1 and OS/2 was licensing encumbrances. AIUI, every time they
sold a copy of Open Desktop (the predecessor to SCO OpenServer) they had to
shell out $200 to various licensees. Sun got around the problem (at least as
of Solaris) by forking out $BIGNUM on a permanent license for SVR4. SCO stuck
at SVR3.2 -- because by the time they knew they wanted an SVR4.x license, AT&T
were wanting eye-wateringly huge license fees per copy shipped -- but did some
white-room cloning work so that by 1994 or thereabouts just about the only
AT&T SVR3.2 code remaining was the copyright declarations in the kernel
headers: OpenServer was effectively an SVR4.2 clone. (A year or so later they
actually bit the bullet and bought an SVR4.3 license ...)

But rewind to 1990, in our time line. Until then, Microsoft were the junior
partner in the IBM/Microsoft alliance. They'd promised to deliver a superior
OS to MS-DOS, with a windowing system on top; the first couple of iterations
of OS/2 were dismal, as were Windows 1 and Windows 2, but the plan was to
collaborate on OS/2 2.x and then ship a next generation product, OS/2 3.0, aka
"NT".

As it happened, Microsoft gambled on NT while IBM stuck with OS/2, thinking
that they still owned the market.

But if we back up to 1987, before OS/2 1.0 shipped, the UNIX-on-PC codebase
was clearly a better platform for a multi-tasking OS, and MS-DOS backward
compatability could be supplied via VP-IX (if I'm remembering SCO's DOS-box's
name properly). If we posit that Microsoft retained Xenix and decided to
develop UNIX further, the only question is whether Bill would have coughed for
an unlimited AT&T license, just as Sun did. And I think -- given MS's history
of buying up the IP they needed in order to hit a marketing requirement (and
remembering that I'm an outsider, so this opinion is worth exactly what you
paid for it :) -- they might well have done so.

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snom370
I've never used Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I've been very happy with
X-Plane (<http://www.x-plane.com/>). It's cheap, available for Mac, Linux and
Windows and has a very active community. And it lets you use your iPhone/iPad
as a controller w/flight instruments.

~~~
ewald
Ok, this probably is a really stupid question, but here it goes anyway: in
case of an emergency, someone who plays x-plane (or flight simulator) has any
chance of flying a real aircraft?

~~~
sofuture
Patrick Smith (who flies commercially for a living, and writes the excellent
Salon column 'Ask The Pilot') has issued an open challenge to any and all sim
enthusiasts (with deep pockets).

He claims that any non-actual-pilot will be unable to land a commercial
airliner in a full-motion simulator, given the controls mid-cruise. Whoever
loses the bet gets to pay for the simulation time (ouch!).

If I had the money, I would take his challenge in a heart beat! I am open to
accepting funding ;)

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Does that challenge allow for landing the plane on ILS autopilot? Because I've
done that multiple times in X-Plane using the highly complicated x737 addon
package, and I would imagine that the ability to correctly operate the
autopilot is far more important in that sort of situation.

------
Setsuna
Age of Empires is back too <http://www.ageofempiresonline.com/>

~~~
cstuder
Who's gonna say the F-word first?

~~~
ugh
Filverlight?

~~~
cstuder
I was thinking 'Farmville'.

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bitwize
Microsoft Flight -- now under development by the Office Team! The easy-to-use
new "Ribbon" interface takes the complexity out of flying a plane.

~~~
nailer
Excel 97 had a 3D flight sim. Seriously.

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cstuder
The official website: <http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight/>

But it's pretty much without content at the moment (And I'm not just saying
that because it's all Flash.)

~~~
sosuke
The site doesn't even render correctly in Internet Explorer. I really hope
this was a mistake release to production for the Flight site, it still needs
some love to be finished.

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elliottkember
I'm interested, but that website really doesn't bode well for a good-looking
game. For a while there, I thought they were bringing back the original
version.

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ritonlajoie
I can't wait to see it. Flight Simulator is one of my favorite all time game.
Great news !

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jpr
Not much information, but everything seems to indicate it would be more of a
game than a simulator. I hope that it has as good add-on capabilities as the
previous versions.

