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