I posted this in the FlyTampa forums, I think it's very relevant for those FSX users who constantly belittle FS9.
Apart for the supposedly bad FSX performances argument, which is now obsolete, and our supposed "aggressivity" about dealing with this issue, which is of course wrong, since we are still supporting FS9, and we couldn't think of a smoother transition on our side (it's taking *years*, so much for "aggressivity"...) it's all looks reasonable, of course the market is always the main driving factor, otherwise we would have stopped on FS9 a long time ago.
However, it's always a question of finding the balancing point: it's one thing to take a standard FSX scenery and just "strip" features to convert it to FS9, but it's entirely different redoing it from scratch because, as it's being made, by just stripping features that FS9 doesn't support, it would look like crap JUST to serve the FS9 market, which is a minority right now BECAUSE, in the SAME time we rebuild such scenery from scratch, we could do ANOTHER scenery.
At a certain point, there are diminishing returns, and the time/effort it takes to convert for FS9 might become more than doing another product. We WERE able to keep the conversion time very low up to now, but this has held back our FSX development because we had to design in FSX to be easily convertible in FS9 right from the start, and this means lowering the quality in FSX and giving the out the wrong idea that than others that haven't discovered anything, but are simply using FSX to do what is supposed to do (even if all they do are sheds and cabins) are ahead of us, and this is just not right because, if we don't keep moving forward and improve, we'll eventually go the way of the Dodo without even realizing it.
There ARE technical issues which are creating us real problems, it's not a "political" decision, and we are STILL scratching our heads trying to find a way to make such conversion to FS9 possible, without losing too much quality, but it's not easy at all, and on top of that, there's a Cloud9 version which we sell that works well and looks quite good even today.
All of this, just to say that we haven't changed a bit our position on KLAX for FS9, since it was first announced:
- We'll try to do our best to convert it for FS9 BUT, if it will look like crap (meaning, worse than the Cloud9 version), it's no use doing it. No, we don't have any intention of releasing something that doesn't look right to us and let users decide, because it's always here that users will come for complaints and we have a reputation of quality.
So, regardless of what anyone might think, we still have NOT reached a decision about this, we are still at the phase of speculating HOW we might do a reasonable FS9 version, but the final decision will be made only when we can see something in FS9. Since the FSX version is not done yet, we haven't done any test on FS9 right now, it's all theoretical discussions we are having internally.
The only thing decided, is the FSX version will be released immediately as it's done, because it's just not fair towards FSX users holding back a release, just because we are busy with what might be a complex FS9 conversion.
The announcement whether there will be an FS9 version or not, will be made after the FSX version would go on sale and after we took our time to do all our tests in FS9. Up to that time, don't assume anything, and don't assume from all my previous post, that we might have already decided, because we haven't. As I've explained already, the one and only reason for those posts, was to EXPLAIN why it's so difficult for us to do an FS9 version this time.
And, don't forget we have different people working on sceneries at the same time, we might even find a somewhat compromise solution, which is keep supporting FS9 with one team only, even if we would eventually skip KLAX because, as I've said, the decision is not political or reflects any "policy" we have towards FS9, it's just a consequence of the specific technical issues we are facing due to how KLAX has been designed.
