4 ms·

Then they sold it, and the new owner is now pulling a Train Simulator and going for thousands of dollars of DLC on Steam, which will likely kill the entire modd

Then they sold it, and the new owner is now pulling a Train Simulator and going for thousands of dollars of DLC on Steam, which will likely kill the entire modding community that kept FSX alive once they realize they can sell it on Steam. Kind of sad to watch such a historical product be squeezed for the last dollars in slow motion. X-Plane 11 looks absolutely fantastic, thankfully. Might be about time to pay FSX a final salute, and nice to support X-Plane as a reward for standing up to patent trolls.

chrisper 10y ago
Can confirm. XP11 is amazing. Though be prepared to pay a lot for addons.
Macha 10y ago
There's actually two living forks. One is Dovetail Games' FSX: Steam Edition which you're talking about. The other is Prepar3d, sold by Lockheed. The license stipulates that it is "not for entertainment purposes", but otherwise it's basically just a port of FSX that works better in modern systems.
- tmearnest 10y ago
  > "not for entertainment purposes" That's kind of a weird stipulation: fun is prohibited.
  - Macha 10y ago
    The general consensus among the flight sim community is that their license from Microsoft forbade them selling it as a video game, to avoid them competing with first Microsoft and later Dovetail.
  - archon 10y ago
    Licensing is weird sometimes.
  - ThrowawayFS 10y ago
    There's actually a reason for that: Microsoft had a separate product called ESP [1] that was based on the Flight Simulator codebase that was marketed as a platform for doing industrial training simulations. Development stopped with the dissolution of ACES, the Flight Simulator team, but Lockheed acquired rights to continue to develop MS ESP, which eventually became Lockheed's Prepare3d [2]. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Closure_of_the_ACES_Game_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Clo...

chrisper 10y ago

Can confirm. XP11 is amazing. Though be prepared to pay a lot for addons.

Macha 10y ago

There's actually two living forks. One is Dovetail Games' FSX: Steam Edition which you're talking about. The other is Prepar3d, sold by Lockheed. The license stipulates that it is "not for entertainment purposes", but otherwise it's basically just a port of FSX that works better in modern systems.

tmearnest 10y ago
> "not for entertainment purposes" That's kind of a weird stipulation: fun is prohibited.
- Macha 10y ago
  The general consensus among the flight sim community is that their license from Microsoft forbade them selling it as a video game, to avoid them competing with first Microsoft and later Dovetail.
- archon 10y ago
  Licensing is weird sometimes.
- ThrowawayFS 10y ago
  There's actually a reason for that: Microsoft had a separate product called ESP [1] that was based on the Flight Simulator codebase that was marketed as a platform for doing industrial training simulations. Development stopped with the dissolution of ACES, the Flight Simulator team, but Lockheed acquired rights to continue to develop MS ESP, which eventually became Lockheed's Prepare3d [2]. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Closure_of_the_ACES_Game_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Clo...