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Growing Pains

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With the official US street date now passed we're seeing more and more people trying to install and run FSX. Naturally the first thing we hear about are the problems. It's natural to want to overreact at first but until we know the full extent of any particular issue we just have to wait see. A good example is the report we got from Europe that suggested a bad batch of disks. It would have been very costly to send replacements, if that was what was needed. However after some investigation the problem turned out to be one of DVD issues I mentioned in another post. Now our support engineers can quickly help users with the problem.

 

We're also tracking install and activation errors and following up with the teams with the knowledge to understand what's happening. It's frustrating, of course, because we want every customer to have a smooth experience but in the PC Games business (with the infinite combination of hardware and software) that's not realistic. Internal testing and beta testing helps uncover some of the issues but even then the sample size is so small that inevitably things slip through the cracks and we need to address them after we ship.

 

So for now we're watching closely and trying to acquire real, objective data on the issues people are having. The primary conduit for this is product support since issues can be categorized and tracked. Browsing on-line sites is somewhat helpful but the posts are one-sided and often don't convey the complete picture. It's much better to have a two-way conversation about exactly what's happening and product support is the only mechanism we have to do that. So, kudos to any of you who have called in to try and solve your problems. I know that's not what you want to do after buying new software--goodness knows we'd rather you didn't have to--but it helps us to help you when we can really talk to you about your problems. Thanks!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
    I was one who called because I'm not seeing glass or advanced animations. Yes, they are turned on. You tech told in India me that my video card "Was not a good one" (even though it has 256MB onboard memory and is fully Direct X compatible, latest drivers, Nvidia geforce FX 5500) and when I asked which one to get he said "No hardware will run the game with all the features." I said "OK, which one to see glass and flexing wings?" He had no comment and blew me off saying he had no solutions for me. This was after being on hold for over an hour.

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
    Unfortunately, David, the FX5000 series was not NVidia's best effort. Wing-flex relies on Shader 2.0 support, which is poor in 5000-series and thus disabled by default. You can try to enable it by editing the DISPLAY.CFG file in the FSX folder. Look for this section: ;---------------------------------------------------------------------- ; NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 ;---------------------------------------------------------------------- [000010DE:00000326:nv4_disp.dll] Shader20Plus=0 And change Shader20Plus to 1. I can't guarantee the results, though. Your best best would be to upgrade at least to the 6000-series, which by now should not be too costly.

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 21, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2006
    Aaron, despite what many people at places like Avsim and fs.com seem to think they are NOT the core market. They are in fact a rather small fringe group, only a few percent at most of total sales. And as to your statement that most of these people are unhappy, that's incorrect. It's (as always) a small but extremely vocal majority that's complaining extremely loudly. I'm myself running FSX now on a midrange machine with quite decent performance on median settings. It looks pretty much like FS2004 with a load of addons and performs similarly too, while giving superior flight dynamics and overall feel. Is it a perfect product? Certainly not, but a perfect product is both impossible to define and impossible to produce (even if you could define it). It would run on any hardware, with any OS, give everyone the exact experience they desire at any point in time and space, yet cost nothing. Do I see some things I think should have been caught in testing? Yes, I do. But those things are certainly not showstoppers so maybe they were caught but deemed too minor to resolve given the effort required to resolve them (at least at that point in time). They're certainly not serious enough for me to rant about them on some forum or newsgroup and start calling people at Microsoft or ACES names (or worse). The only reason in fact I think they should have been caught is because they're blatantly obvious to even the casual observer (and thus the fact that noone else has ranted about them tells me people either don't observe even casually, are only looking for reasons to complain about performance, or think that these things are indeed not important). Overall I'm quite happy with FSX, it was well worth the wait (which also gave me the time to save up for the new machine I assembled in anticipation a few months ago) and will be something I enjoy spending my time with instead of buying other games (sorry, MS Games Studio :) ) for the next few years.

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2006
    I have anticipated this release for some time now. Just prior to the release I purchased and built a new PC. You can imagine my disappointment when I fired up FSX, and found with any of the eye candy enabled, even to the lowest setting my machine came screeching to a halt. I can't image what hardware could possibly run this game any faster. I love the game, and I will continue to play it because I see it's potential. However, I am still feeling disappointed that my new rig which I spent upwards of $3000 building just isn't up to running FSX. What hardware did ACES have in mind when they released the game? Can I expect to see a big improvement with Vista and DX10? Intel Core Duo E660 2Gb DDR2 800 PC6800 Paired Memory ASUS P5N32 SLI MB with a 1GHZ FSB 2 300GB Drives in a Raid Array My Video Card is what really kills me. I thought this card would just have FSX screaming Nvidia 7950GX2 with 1GB of Memory. I've tried the various tweaks etc, but have not been able to find a happy medium between eye candy and performance.

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2006
    Michael, there is something amiss here.  I have the same processor less video card than you and I get wonderful performance. That doesn't make sense.   Admittedly in the cities I'm down to 10-12 fps but its smooth and stutter free.  I choose to have fps that low, cuz it pegs at 20 with my sliders way to the right unless I'm down town Seattle. I have all sliders right, no bloom, traffic of all kinds at 50% and autogen two clicks left of full right. Love it. Best, Bob

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2006
    The updated for FSX Nvidia 91.47 drivers got me 5 FPS more. Strange they didn't change the driver number. Ken

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2006
    I like it. I've had no problems that I didn't expect, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it'll do as the hardware catches up with it. See ya, Rob

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2006
    I've been an avid flight simmer since the days of the Apple II and monochrome screens.  This latest release has to be, for me, the most disappointing.  Aside from the extreme frustration of being unable to activate this $90 CDN piece of software, the short period I am allowed to fly it without activation has shown it's performance on my 3 MHz, 1 GB RAM, 300 GB HD PC to be less than lacklustre.  My computer is only one year old and the frame rates from FSX are far far below those obtained from FS9.  I'm not a happy camper.

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2007
    All is well, love the effects and flight characteristics. Have one problem thus far --- After making a flight video, the playback does not illustrate the gear or flaps movement. Gear stays in extend and flaps stay retracted even though they did react in the actual free flight mode. Previous versions of Flight Simulator did show gear and flaps response in the review flight mode. Has that important aspect of viewing the flight been ommited from this latest issue???

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2007
    And here we go again. I say this to all my fellow flight simmers. Microsoft, and the team who worked on this new FSX versions, had no concern for the voice of customer. I think we got a total of 2 things in FSX. Better looking water, and reflections. Here's a quick list of what they missed.

  1. Ground effects. Are you telling me that when I come down in a 747 at 100 ft nothing happens?
  2. lights on airport traffic.
  3. Landing possible on all sea vessels
  4. Something actually happening when you taxi to the     gates.
  5. A co-pilot sitting next to you in missions
  6. Frozen lakes
  7. Mayday, or emergency landings (ATC responds     accordingly)
  8. Missing highways all over the place. Good luck VFR   flyers.
  9. When the aircraft crashes...it just stops. I don't want to seem too negative, but it's important to realise this is FSX.. if you can't work out all the bugs, then a new project team needs to step in. (check out the current one on fsxinsider.com. They all look like they can barley handle incorporating satellite textures.

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2007
    Downloaded some default repaints, but when I try to save the cfg files, it tells me it can't create the file. Can anyone help me? Thanks Gerald

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2007
    Downloaded some default repaints, but when I try to save the cfg files, it tells me it can't create the save file. Can anyone help me? Thanks Gerald

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2007
    I have used this software since I was a young kid. FSX is a major dissappointment. I built a computer that should handle just about anything. Asus A8n-SLI Deluxe MB 2GB Corsair XMS pc3200 Ram 250GB WD hard drive Soundblaster XMS Fatality Sound EVGA 8800GTX video card The game played ok for a week with rather slow performance. I then downloaded the patch. Now it crashes all the time, sometimes it locks up when loading. Is there a way to get refunds on this software until Microsoft gets their act together? For all of the problems that are being posted, I have not seen any updates from Microsoft to at least show that they are working on this. PLEASE DO SOMETHING. I did not spend all of my money to upgrade my computer to be stuck flying an old version. I keep hearing people complain to me from Microsoft that I do not know how hard it is to write the codes for this which seems to be their fall back position in the flight sim forums I enter into. My reply is that they don't know either as they have released a product that shows as such.