How was the sim at its 10th year after launch? There was still a lot of bugs and issues like in begining? There was still regular updates?
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It was released in 2006, a couple service packs and one update in 2007, then nothing. So ten years after release it was exactly the same thing as one year after release. Think the Steam edition did some minor fixes and performance updates when it was released, thatās it.
Not really any game breaking bugs in FSX after the service packs as far as I can remember. Main issue was it took a couple years after release until it could be run at high graphics settings on pretty much any hardware.
Back in those days regular updates was not really a thing so there were no new features or performance updates. There was a new release every other year, but MS shut down that cadence after FSX. On the other hand quality at release time had to be a lot better since there were no regular bug fixes expected. And a completely stable platform for addon developers since there were no updates.
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Donāt forget that FSX was just Fs2002+++, with its development leading back to the 90ties. So by the time we had Sp2, Fsx was basically a decade + into development.
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Discontinued by Microsoft.
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I was reading an old āFSX launch - bug threadā on an old forum a couple of days back. Thereās a lot of similarity - pushing then hardware to the limit, and plenty of bugs but quite a lot of them nitpicking - doors didnāt open sort of thing. There was only one post I saw which was a CTD post though.
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Whatever the topic, it looks like itās almost impossible to talk about it without flood the thread with harsh complains. Yes we have CTDs, poor LOD, popping ups, etc. But my sensation is that this FlightSim is intended to grow and improve with time. So I would like to be part of a group that, starting from what we have, goods and bads, work together to make it betterā¦
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Please correct me if Iām wrong but Iām under the belief that the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise was born out of Bill Gatesā desire to make a Flight Simulator so that everyone could experience the joy of flying aircraft. I think the myth runs that he was inspired by the great Antoine de Exupery books. Again, if Iām not mistaken, a lot of money was ploughed into this project with the āAcesā team creating a great sim platform. Although I donāt suspect it was designed to lose money , it certainly did not seem to have that heavy drive to create a profit that MSFS has.
Yep. But sometime that involves legitimate issues.
I post a lot about cache/verify install and logging. Itās not a whinge, because I know how to do it, itās not hard and it would make a huge difference to those issues. The problem is not so much that it crashes, but that it is almost impossible to tell why and almost impossible to fix them if they arenāt MSFS bugs without reinstalling 160Gb.
Iād like to be able to help people who are having problems. But all there is at present is a fairly limited laundry list of ideas most of which many of them have tried anyway. I donāt expect magic but a clue would be nice. X-Plane has a perfectly serviceable log which is sufficiently informative and not huge.
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Fsx was just more expandable than Msfs2020 CURRENTLY is, thatās the bottomline here. It offered that to third parties in a more mature, more expandable and complete way, but thatās really where it all ends, ok, letās say the lessons were better, too, yes, and the world map details.
The weather was laughable, the terrain a complete and utter mess that could never be really turned into a satisfying experience, even P3D still blows in that aspect, no matter how many add-ons. The default aircraft were worse than what we have with fs2020, the flightmodel was nothing even close to what Msfs2020 can offer, default navigation and gps were just as basic and nothing close to where working title will take things (Not talking 3rd parties here obviously) and the weather injection was painful as was the view in the distance, and donāt get me started about the abysmal sound.
Buildings and autogen were a complete and utter mess as was general world accuracy, coastlines and landclass. And no, there werenāt just a few bugs, there were tons of them, and you know that, many even carried over to P3D for years. DX10 was never properly implemented and a half finished experiment.
My point is: letās not overglorify Fsx and act like it was everything that Fs2020 isnāt, thatās simply biased cherrypicking. Go check the archives from either Fsx or P3D related to bugs, you surely did, so you know the truth. Iām not even gonna start with the microstutters, crashes, on-rails flightmodel, reloading the map for weather or daytime changes, constant time spent tweaking instead of flying, nintendo like map scrolling, completely wrong groundphysics and HORRID performance, missing airports, laser cut runways and terrible default airport quality, floating buildings, texture flickering and so onā¦
That said, the SDK was more mature, yeah, the weather system open to devs because the default one was a joke. I understand your frustration with Msfs2020, but I respectfully have to say that youāre being disingenuous here and fail to see the positive aspects of the new sim, and there certainly are some, there just arenāt many high quality add-ons yet, and thatās where most complaints come from, but once avionics are there and IFR aspects are improved, we will be there.
The flightmodel itself has immense potential and isnāt flawed per se as you always claim, many actual pilots disagree with you, people way smarter and way more qualified than either you or I have confirmed this, so itās not nearly as bad as many make it out to be. Matt from working title explained this in detail over at Avsim, and explained that the Msfs flightmodel can be more accurate than Xplanes in theory, just needs to be tuned well (you were in that thread, too, so you know).
There is a future for this sim for sure, whether some elitists agree or disagree with that wonāt change this. Ofc I write all of this with a civil and friendly debate in mindš I just think you have allowed negativity and bias taking over a tad too much, and that can mess with objective assessments of a situation, just to keep that in mind.
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I agree with your opening paragraph and just to add my two cents to this comparison , FSX at the time of release was a few years ahead of its release date in terms of you needed a high end system to run it on higher settings
What didnt break the sim though was 3rd party developers who made the sim better , like REX for the weather , flight one Ultimate traffic for AI traffic and GEX , for making the terrain better and of course Aerosoft and others for the upgraded detailed airports and PMDG for the Boeing 737/777/747 which was great and of course GSX and other addons as well.
BUT and a big but it had serious issues with Virtual address space and would CTD on Out of memory issues as it was only built on a 4GB VAS 32 bit i believe and it was a tweak fest to have to add certain things in the CFG file to make the sim work well so it was always a point of having to tweak this or that in the CFG file to make things work or prevent CTDās and i had plenty
did it work ok , yes , did it have less CTDās ā¦yes as you stated it was because the updates were stopped after acceleration pack came out and the developers made more add ons a s the SDK wasnt constantly changing
in short it was a good sim and didnāt have many problems when things were fixed as there was a loyal sim community like this one to help anyone having issues , so I suppose the similarities in the first few years are likely to be similar
sorry to be the pessimist but this is going to continue for a couple more years and i dont think without tweaking its going to resolve everything unless developers get access to an SDK they can trust
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Totally agree! Fsx was great for its time, also, during the time it was developed, we started having dual cores, and we had much less expansive frameworks and technical possibilities than we have today, the latter ofc also brings in new problems and complexities. What I meant to say, is that it takes time to get such a project to great place and we both agree on that.
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I could not agree more , thanks for highlighting this to our fellow simmers who may not have had FSX , it was tweak this and tweak that in the CFG file , one only has to google FSX to see the numerous forum discussions that were born out of FSX as there was not an official dedicated community like this place.
it going to continue for MSFS , just like it did for FSX for a couple more years IMHO
Great Post Wombatlemineur 
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Thanks for your valuable input! Happy flying, my friend!
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you too , lets hope we can all enjoy this potentially wonderful sim in the coming months , years
happy landings my friend 
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Well I started with Flight Simulator 2004 A Century of Flight - and it was perfect.
Later FSX was launched and that one was way to colourful for my taste, but after some enhancements with REX and OrbX it became my main simulator for over a decade.
Well first FSX had some minor crashes, some time later two service packs and an acceleration pack was released. LotĀ“s of third party developers like Captain Sim PMDG Carenado and Accu-Sim made the greatest add-ons ever made.
It ran flawless.
But so does the Flight Sim 20 since launch.
The thing I liked most was the force feedback on my old Logitech joystick, unfortunately no longer supported on Windows 10. The feel of the rumble on the joystick when you landed was very immersive.
FSX had more variety and features at launch - In particular the gliders gave me great pleasure trying to complete the mission.
Other memories: Being able to have an inset window with a different view, the replay worked well for me, never had a CTD or any significant bugs that I remember, the in-game manual was excellent (what a difference in FS2020!), and the community was just as good. At least one of the Aces development team was active on the forums (named āTaildraggerā).
FS2020 is certainly better visually, but I reckon I got more enjoyment out of FSX on release than I have done with FS2020.
Biggest thing for me is that FSX was STABLE. I modified the shart out of that thing (literally 1000ās of airports and AI aircraft) and never did I cause a CTD. It did have rare CTDās but these were predictable, e.g. using GPS too much.
You can just look at MSFS sideways and bangā¦ CTD.
Also FSX had an auto save function/addon so in the rare occurrence it did crash I could load up the flight immediately and continue on. MSFS is just missing things that I took for granted in FSX and personally I canāt believe that it was ever released in such a poor state
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No. A fellow called Bruce Artwick wrote a flight simulator for his thesis in the late 1970s, this became Flight Simulator 1 (TRS80, Apple 2), and was further extended to the famous Flight Simulator 2. Flight Simulator 1, Microsoftās first product, was the version of Artwickās code licensed for the PC (FS1, and especially FS2 were on more than one platform). I have no idea what Gatesā motivation for it was. This https://ia802806.us.archive.org/12/items/AVersatileComputerGeneratedDynamicFlightDisplay/A_versatile_computer-generated_dynamic_flight_display_%20May_1976_text.pdf is the parent.
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OveralI I liked FSX, I must have because I used it for years!
That said I donāt have rose tinted specs eitherā¦ it took a PC upgrade or 3 to get decent enough performance and numerous add-ons and tweaking to get it to a reasonable level.
What of course we then ran into was having decent enough hardware to run FSX with add-on scenery, textures, weathers engines and good third part aircraft, only to run into issues with OOM crashes. Not to mention that the ACES team was disbanded and Microsoft flight sim dropped by MS altogether.
Now they are back with Asobo. Things have moved on considerably in many areas, while some areas are little different and other features simply not implemented just yet. There are notable on going issues with unresolved issues and things breaking during updates etc. Quite frankly it is a frustrating sim to support as a user in so many ways.
However, there are some really ground breaking aspects to this sim that have considerably changed what flight sims have offered us for many years. Despite its current flaws there are many things to like about MSFS that provide a great sim platform with great potential for the coming years.
The out of the box scenery is for the most part pretty phenomenal compared with what ships by default with any other sim. The new clouds/weather while not perfect, really are quite impressive in capturing what you may experience in RL. Personally I have also found the lighting to be considerably better than any other sim.
There are several steps that are still needed and unfortunately all of these are going to take some time to matureā¦
- Serious show stopping bugs and issues - these should be everyoneās top priority to be fixed and resolved.
- Additional features that Asobo/MS have committed to implement, e.g. proper support for helicopters a solid SDK for third partly developers.
- Additional content, e.g. continued world updates.
- More for the future - revisit and improve upon existing features, e.g. handling of controllers for different aircraft, historic weather, improved world map for planning etc. Interactive ATC using voice commands.
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FS9 was issued on four CDs. I still have mine in the original release metal box. The initial version had memory leak issues and the city of New York was missing some prominent bridges. So MS released the 9.1 downloadable patch. This repaired the memory leak and added the new bridges. Of course, the exe was wrapped in code that require disk four to be in the optical drive in order to run. So a āno-CDā cracked exe showed up on several sites. Some forums banned any discussion about it because it could be used to pirate copies of the sim. I was a moderator on one such site (still am), and I used that crack. The (very real) concern was that you either had to keep your disk inserted perpetually, or subject it to constant handling that would eventually render it useless. When that happened, MS added to the problem by not replacing the 4th disk, and instead telling people that the just had to buy another copy of the sim.
All that said, once you had the 9.1 patch installed, you had a very stable sim. Since the only time it connected to the internet was to get a snapshot for the Real Weather option, there was never any connection-related issues. It operated completely offline. The only thing that could drag your frames down were some of the complex addons that were available.
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