From your question, maybe there's a small misunderstanding about how this product is sold:
You can't buy the FS9 version or the FSX version or having to choose which one to buy.
There's only a product on sale, and that's Chicago O'Hare (the same is valid for Zurich). You can buy it either from FSX or from FS9, it doesn't matter from which sim you made the purchase, but as soon as you purchase one version, the other will automatically run as fully registered. Even if you haven't installed it yet, and even if you haven't yet installed the sim.
So, for example, one might decide to buy today from FS9, even if he has no plans to use FSX in the near future. But the license activation will be still valid, even if he decides to switch FSX next year, even on a different hardware.
So, to reply to your question, we don't know which version sells the most, exactly. We can only make a *wild* guesses, looking at the downloads.
For O'Hare is a little bit too early to have solid data but for Zurich, for example, before Christmas, the FS9 version was downloaded slightly more. From January on, we have seen an increase in downloads for FSX, so right now they are more or less the same.
About support. Yes, the FS9 version requires more support. But not because it inherently more flawed, but because the FS9 environment is full of 3rd party sceneries, modules, hacks, patches, so the chance to run into something that might create problems is higher. Some examples:
- FS9 has CD protection and there's has recently been the discovery of patching it to allow it up to 4GB RAM allocation. This, in combination, creates problems to our module, that we solved, but it requires us to maintain and keep updated two separate versions of our module. This increase the chance to make mistake distributing files in the installers. Most of the issues we had with FS9 are related to this, but now are solved. FSX doesn't have any of these issues in the first place.
- FS9 has plenty of 3rd party AI products that generate an amount of traffic so big, than it's easier to notice limitations in the AI engine, that in turn requires a lot of tweaking of the AFCAD. Having a look at the AFCAD discussions, it's safe to say the AFCAD for FS9 will always be a constant work in progress, because there's simply no way to accommodate every need and having a realistic flow of 200+ AI, without having to compromise somewhere.
- FS9 doesn't have a published official data access interface like Simconnect in FSX. There's FSUIPC, but it is most used for airplanes, we need other things for sceneries, so we had to create our direct data access interface, the Addon Manager that, opposite to what many might think, does a LOT more for the product than simply selling it... In FS9 a lot of this is made by using undocumented and unsupported techniques one might easily call "hacks". In FSX, the whole thing is way cleaner, and it uses documented official Simconnect SDK ways, when possible. Provided that Simconnect is running fine (it usually does, on a non-messed up FSX installation), we don't encounter as many troubles.
So, less "action" in the FSX section of the forum simply tells that FSX users are probably having less troubles in general, it doesn't necessarily mean everybody is using FS9.
About future plans: it's not secret we like FSX more. We said it many times, and it hasn't changed a bit. Unfortunately, with a market split in two, we also need an FS9 version to survive, so we finally found a way to develop the two together without going bankrupt in the meantime, but that doesn't mean everything is as good as it might be.
By doing this, we are *restraining* what we might do in FSX. And not only in simple things, like not going overboard with special texture effects in FSX that couldn't be reproduced in FS9. FSX has possibilities that no developer has fully realized yet, and are waiting to be exploited.
I keep hearing from other developers (especially scenery) that FSX has lost them the way to create interactivity in the scenery, that they can't do time-based or season-based events anymore, that they have lost LOD in SP2 so their scenery now performs poorly, etc. The truth, instead, it's that it's not possible to do that in the "FS9-way" (or, in some cases, the "FS8-way"), but FSX has way better ways of doing things related to interactivity, way more powerful, cleaner and with more freedom. The catch is that one has to learn how to *properly* use Simconnect to its fullest, and I don't think anyone has done it yet.
We already have such things, including working LOD in SP2, because of the way we use the combination of our Addon Manager, that calls into Simconnect to give us thes added abilities. No strange tricks here: just creative use of Simconnect to overcome what other finds to be major show-stoppers. The FSX version also has a very good fps (most of the users are finding it to be equal or even better than default KORD!!), because of this.
But unfortunately, we can't dig so deep into new FSX possibilities like we would, because otherwise we'll end up in a scenery that can't be back-ported to FS9 anymore. There is a project going on in the background we are waiting to finish, and that will open a whole can of works with interactivity in sceneries, but we need FSX to be more established to have it fulfilled.
We can only hope that, during the course of 2008, more people will finally have the hardware to run FSX satisfactory and, in addition to that, our FSX sceneries will finally offer some new things impossible to do on FS9, that might eventually convince even more people to finally move away from it.
