You are sadly mistaken. FSX in general is a subpar product and there are many users who will likely never switch.
Wrong. FSX is a way better product compared to FS9, and this has bee clearly demonstrated by products made with FSX in mind, that wouldn't not be possible with FS9. They are just an handful of them, but even ONE product would be enough to prove how FSX can do, if programmed properly.
That's why most payware and freeware companies continue to support FS9 in general more so than FSX. FS9 provides almost double the performance of FSX and with the proper addons, even better quality.
Wrong again. FSX-native products have MUCH better quality AND better performances too, the new L-39 Albatros, which is an FSX-only airplane, made from the ground up for FSX, blows out the water of ANYTHING ever seen for FS9, both in quality AND fps.
The undeserved bad reputation for FSX performances, is MAINLY due to sub-par FS9 stuff ported in FSX, which is exactly what you are trying to suggesting we should do.
I don't understand why it would be difficult to offer two serials, one to an FS9 version, and one to an FSX version. Many developers use this method.
It's not "difficult", it's just WRONG becasue, opposite to what you are saying, everybody WILL eventually switch to FSX, even the ones that are saying that they'll "never" switch, because the product that it will make them switch hasn't probably released yet, but they'll switch sooner or later, be it because of something in FSX itself, or because Windows 7 and/or because faster PC will gradually go down in price, and everybody changes hardware, at some time.
People buy a scenery to get away from what is FS default and of course, what is custom made is almost 100% of the time better than what was made by Microsoft.
Wrong, in case of what we were discussing, which are mainly ROAD traffic, that is highly efficent in FSX, at the same amount of vehicle density (which is also user-controllable, BTW)
I have plenty of sceneries with animated ground equipment that have no FPS impact whatsoever.
And wrong with regard to animated ground equipment because, FSX here is A LOT better than FS9, because the vehicles are not dumb static animations, but are full blown simulated objects, with their own physics simulation and behaviour, like stopping in front of the user airplane, accelerating, turning correctly, etc. In this case, FSX default it's already way better than anything that was ever done in FS9.
And, of course, by "default", in this case, it's only referring to the simulation engine, but the vehicles can be of course fully customized, modeled, painted and even with custom-made positional sounds. Sorry, but FSX just dwarfs FS9 in this area, there's no comparison.
Which is why I'm comparing it to the rest of FS
Which is wrong, as I've always said, and as other users told you. JFK area is a bit of a special case, and everybody knows that.
The biggest factor in NY is not the city or the scenery but AI traffic, however there are areas with much more and yet better performance.
AI traffic is surely a problem. However, the NYC area is slow even without AI. We don't know why, but I think something very wrong has been made there. Funny thing, is not THAT worse in FSX. Not that it's "fast" in FSX, but while in FS9, your typical city area has usually very good fps, NYC area just collapse to at least half of the typical fps in cities. In FSX, you don't see much difference, it's all slower, but NYC area is not significantly slower.
The way the JFK ground texture was made seems to also have a detrimental effect.
First, they don't, unless you have a low-end video card with less than 512 MB, but nowadays every 512 MB card that works with FS9 can be bought for very low prices. And, we have a texture resizer avaialble, that would help with less VRAM.
Anway, the ground textures at JFK are the ONLY thing in the scenery that is made exactly like you would like we did all the scenery: they are MADE FOR FS9!
JFK (and KORD too) are the only sceneries we did, that have the ground made DIFFERENTLY for FSX and FS9, in the way that we did a specific FS9 programming for ground in FS9, while used the FSX native photoreal scenery in FSX.
We didn't do this for later sceneries, like KLAS or KFLL, that use a different method, were the programming was driven by the requirement to have rain effect on FSX, and this was ported verbatim to FS9, because having to do two version with two different programming methods was time consuming, and the native FSX photoreal could suffer from bluriness, if the user doesn't correctly set the resolution slider.
But, as I've said, this doesn't affect JFK and KORD, that are using a purely native FS9 method in FS9, and a different FSX method in FSX so, the ground it's not an issue.
