Microsoft Announces FS2004 Update

[Chris_]

Hi,
Microsoft Announces FS2004 Update, see FlightSim.Com front news:

http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds/mai...4/msft0921.htm

Microsoft do care about their users! :-cool

Regards
Chris

[newguy]

Holy #####...
that is good news.. Truthfully i could care less if there is a patch or not...the game is good...but it is nice to see that they put forth the effort to address the simmers issues. Way to got Microsoft flight sim team.

[newguy]

just read that...will make some people happy for sure.

[Chummy]

Wow, this is pretty cool.

Tackling the frame rates issue, adding content; that 19-meter resolution terrain has really got my interest, too.

[Tony G]

X mas in October this year! Who woulda thunk it...

Tony

[JimmiG]

I'm happy that they are fixing the default.xml autogen accumulation bug.

On the other hand, I needed this patch 1 year ago, not now. Back then I was struggling to figure out why framerate was so low that it was impossible to land. I spent 2 months trying to figure that out and with the help of others pinpointed the default.xml file and terrain vector objects as the source of this problem. I *told microsoft* about this bug some time in September last year but my bug report was ignored...until now :)

Sure, we'll get the red barns back now - but I won't get back those 2 months spent tweaking FS9 and editing every concievable .cfg file...

[NonCon]

Well I'll be the first, maybe second to say I was wrong. Never thought they would do this.

KJ

[Sherm]

>Wow, this is pretty cool.
>
>Tackling the frame rates issue, adding content; that
>19-meter resolution terrain has really got my interest, too.


Yes, but I think people might be confusing what this means. I saw one poster intimate this mean't we would actually be getting 19 metre mesh from Microsoft. I'm sure that instead, it actually just means that if mesh is compiled at 19 metres, it will work, whereas before, 76 metres was the lowest resolution. Commonsense suggests that to cover even moderate area with 19 metre mesh would constitute a massively huge download way beyond most people's connection capability - so I am sure it won't happen.

But it could well mean that third party developers who inititally downsampled their source data to fit in with the 76 metre limit can now recompile their products at higher (probably 38 metre) resolution. Unless of course they had 19 metre or lower data to start with.

[Sherm]

I'm not too sure they had much choice to be honest. The product has been demonstrably unstable under repeatable circumstances, even though those circumstances did not occur terribly often - they still happened as is evidenced by a large number of complaints. Although users did come up with "fixes" of sorts, they all involved to some extent either the disabling or compromising of specific features and capabilities that specifically existed in the FS2004 version of the game as opposed to the previous version.

It also needs to be remembered that Microsoft sells millions of copies of this product, yet the online "communities" constitute less than 1% of all owners of the product. It is highly likely that the vast majority of users would not have bothered to dig so far into the inner workings of FS2004 to provide temporary fixes to these problems as we have. But those same people are far more likely to simply go to the Microsoft website and download an official patch and be done with it.

[tdragger]

Well, you're half right, but only because MSFT was wrong. <g> FS2004 actually supported as high as 38m mesh while FS2002 supported 19m. The patch corrects this but does not include any additional content. It's just so third parties that shipped 19m mesh for FS2002 can do it again.