Microsoft Flight Simulator 2019

Don't wish to rain on the parade, from comments made by some of the people that were on the cutting (bleeding) edge of the software development for FS in the 90's, they are very much underwhelmed by the latest MS announcements, they've been doing some research, and they are "suggesting" that there will be no facility for third party enhancements or add on packages with the new version. The scenery will be based in Azure, and there are concerns about the reliability, speeds and performance of that system, the following comment was made by one of the people I know, and his add on packages are still in use and being enhanced for FS and other packages,

The graphics processing is being done online by Azure AI. The sim is being developed for the XBox and then run in a container on the PC
(note: not ported, as I originally thought it might be). The completely closed environment rules out an SDK.

Azure is not brilliant; FSDeveloper took a very close look and the one thing I remember without looking it up is the AI slapping generic
trawlers down on top of luxury yachts in SFO harbour.

I sometimes forget that FSX dates back to 2006 and although P3D has built greatly upon this, the core engine is still being used.

Oh dear. I've been out of the simulation world for a long time, 9/11 did us huge damage, and one of the other reasons for moving out was that we could not get the flight model that was being used at that time to perform correctly for the heavy metal that we were working with, and something that looks like a 737-800 but has too many of the underlying characteristics of a Cessna 172 is not a good base to try and build on.

I would expect massive improvements to have come along with scenery, in that the global mapping that is now available should mean a much better rendering both in terms of the mesh size and the hardware performance, but if the underlying flight model has not improved, while there will be many people happy to see Microsoft returning to the product, they will be on the receiving end of a lot of criticism if the flight model has not been significantly updated.

Modelling instruments, analog or digital screen based is a lot simpler now than it was then, the advent of low cost micro processors like Arduino or Raspberry mean that it is massively simpler to interface than it used to be, and projectors or wide screen TVS are a fraction of the price, and being able to use curved 55" and larger flat panel displays is a huge advance on the 37" CRT's that were the only option back in the day if you couldn't afford the massive cost of a projector based wrap round visual system that was the only other option.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, there were some very capable and competent developers working in the Flight Sim arena before 9/11, but it became impossible to keep the projects alive, PC based systems were seen as "the devils spawn" by many training departments, and access to level D simulators became impossible unless you worked for an airline and were type rated, and the larger training organisations outside of airlines were reluctant to use simulators that were frowned on by their airline customers.

The one good thing that might come out of the resurgence of interest in simulation is that I might be able to sell off some of the flight deck hardware I bought in Mojave when we were expecting to keep things going, a complete centre console and flight control yokes from a 727 would go a long way towards creating a very acceptable dual control flight deck.