MSFS2020 Left for dead?

[Sonicviz]

@PaulRobson8096

It’s not a new simulator. It’s the same old simulator with a new hat. It’s largely an excuse to charge again for it. Personally I’d prefer it if they were just honest and charged (say) £30 / year to play it. Being able to cancel a subscription might focus on bug fixes as well.

@PaulRobson8096

No, the theory in the forum from someone who has been programming for 45 years is that it has to be largely the same code as there simply isn’t time to do anything else however many developers you have.

And he also has some idea how difficult it is to make something backwards compatible with something 4 years old (actually more like 20 years old). If only it was a simple as you think it is. Ever reverse engineered any code ? You’d be amazed what developers do.

And has also heard Microsoft make the same claim repeatedly when it’s the same code base. New Product. All the versions of Windows except NT1.0 and to some extent 95 (arguably). All the versions of Office.

All “calling it thin client” means is that they will reduce the size of the initial downloaded code and download it on demand. You don’t think it actually means thin client ? MSFS is going to run as a remote graphics terminal to a server ? When a full modern PC barely copes with it ? How does that work then ; if you are still dumping the same polygons at the same rate the data has to come from somewhere, how does doing remotely and sending it over a link work better ? Aren’t you limited to the speed of the link ?

And they’re going to pull things off the main thread. Well whoopee doo. It’s going to be running the same code, the work is making sure that there isn’t an implicit synchronisation issue in the original code.

I have decades of experience as well, and have to disagree here.

It’s totally possible to change the engine (or major components of it) under the hood and keep the interfaces stable for backwards content compatibility, while extending them based on new capabilities.
Is it easy? No. Is it possible? Totally. It’s called architecture and design.

That’s not “the same old simulator with a new hat”.
It’s a new plane, with the same (and improved) interfaces.

They haven’t just started this project. It’s been going a while. They are doing it.
They already did it once, they can do it again.

It’s quite obvious MSFS 2020 had compromises made due to time/resource constraints, you can see that just in the SDK. But they’ve had 8+ years of development including ~3 in production to learn and understand what they need to do for the next version. It won’t be perfect either, but it will be better than V1 of the new generation of MSFS.

They’re not stupid, they know what is at stake. Is it possible for them to “blow it” and produce something worse? Sure, happens all the time in IT/Games etc. But I don’t think anyone on the Microsobo side is phoning this job in, they are invested in the aviation simulation space. Complex job, as if that wasn’t obvious already!

Biting the bullet to fix the compromises they made in V1 + applying the knowledge from production (priceless experience) deciding to rebuild was the right decision.

We’ll all get to see how well they pull that off in 6 months to a year or so.
If they have to push the release date (TBD atm, for obvious reasons) I’ll be fine with that too.