Microsoft Flight Sim X beta soon

[wlodi]

Yeah, I can confirm framerate problems.

Also, it's quite too complicated for me. Nah, flying with keyboard sucks.

 

[PvtRyan]

http://www.fsplanet.com/fsplanet_com_fsx.htm

Holy shit on a stick. No wonder the requirements are so steep.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

I have almost exact same setup as you Loke (You beat my processor by 0.2 GHz) and yea same problems :-\

I sort of gave up on this demo... Hopefully there will be a better one further down the road.

 

[Ridge]

P4 2.8Ghz and 2gb of RAM with a 512mb AGP Radeon X1600....at medium settings my frames are typically in single digits...

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Here is a blog of an MS employee on FSX.

http://blogs.msdn.com/tdragger/

I went home after work last night and monitored the forums to see who had a chance to download and try the demo--lot's of folks, it turns out. As expected reviews varied but I think they were mostly positive. What's been facinating to me reading all the threads is trying to determine what people were expecting because clearly different people had different expectations. More on that later. I have work to do.

However I do want to point out a few more gotchas that have emerged:

• Some people are complaining about the default graphic settings. There is a bug where AMD Athlon PCs get down-graded because of the way they report their CPU speed. AMD users check your settings.
• Problems with CH Products peripherals. A few last minute fixes (including a peristent 'Brakes' message for CH rudder pedals) did not make it in time for the demo. These should be fixed in the final release.
• Ground textures don't look hi-res. Two things here: first, we don't default to 1m textures except for very high end systems-check the Terrain Texture Resolution slider in your scenery settings; second, we have a bug where we don't render the ground detail texture when you have your water detail set to any of the Shader 2.x settings--try a 1.x setting if your ground looks blurry (this should be fixed in the final product)
• The virtual cockpits have some switches that don't appear to be hooked up. Yup--still working on those.
• Install problems with MSXML4. Hmm, gotta dig into that some more.

I also need to check out a pinned thread at AvSim where folks are recording their problems with the demo. Keep the feedback coming!

Well, the demo version is out the door and getting ready for it's debut on GameSpot later today. It's the first time we've ever done a demo and we made it even harder on ourselves by trying to do it while we were working on the full product. Not many teams can pull that off (or so I'm told), at least pull it off well. We certainly learned a lot and will apply those lessons in the future.

I'm excited to read the reaction to the demo, although I'm sure it will be far from universal praise. We know the demo is a little rough around the edges but we only had so much time to smooth them out. It was a tradeoff--wait until the entire project was done and release a demo mere days before you could buy the product in stores, or risk a (hopefully) small amount of criticism by releasing the demo early in order to satisfy the apparent hunger that exists in the marketplace. As a result, it has some bugs. For instance, a few times the aircraft in the demo have loaded with a black, opaque windshield--perfect for IFR training but not so great if you want to be able to see the awesome Sint Maarten scenery! Another bug causes the sim to appear to hang while loading AI traffic after flying a few missions (though you can press Esc, quit and restart). Since these didn't happen consistently we couldn't isolate and fix them and so I imagine they'll crop up "in the field" as well. Such is the nature of the pre-release demo business, I guess.

Of course our challenge was made even greater by the desire to fit the demo on a single CD (for things like bundling with magazines, tradeshow giveaways, etc.) when the full product will ship on 2 DVDs! We had to leave some stuff out purely for space reasons. (Remember that while you laugh at a car driving down the highway with no body, just a chassis. Oh, yeah, it's in there. <g>)

Releasing early also meant the demo lacks some of the final performance optimizations that people will see in the final product. In fact I just saw a check-in today that made we wish we'd had another day. Oh, well. I've been told that people who regularly download pre-release demos of other games take this in stride. I wonder if the Flight Simulator devotees, who probably aren't part of that group, will handle it. Mostly likely they'll try dragging the "sliders" all the way to max. My response? "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."