Scam or amazing? What are your thoughts?
I really DO like the additional “purpose” that will be added to the sim. I really don’t like the not unlikely possibility that all that add-on money spent on the “old” flight simulator will be wasted.
In the most recent FAQ they did say that “virtually all add-ons that work in Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) today will function in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024”. So all addons should hopefully still work. How that’s gonna go with addons from third party stores, remains to be seen I guess. Would be a shame if they don’t work, because that’s where I got the majority of my addons.
But yeah, I’d be alot happier if the MSFS base game got lifted to this new version, and all the new content would be a paid DLC…
Others mentioned that already, and I hope that since they already started to go the “we release a new version every x years”, theat they do it like the Trainsim guys do. Everyone gets the new game engine and keeps his content that he already has. This would also mean that Asobo only needs to maintain one sim. Seeing how complex MSFS is, I would be surprised if they really want to maintain 2 codebases, but who knows. We will see next year of hopefully hear earlier in upcoming interviews with Asobo / Jörg.
How do train sim people handle breaking changes to the interfaces that add-ons / DLC use?
This is typically why add-ons break in flight sim: some part of the engine that the add-on uses, changes and thus the add-on breaks. The only way to keep 100% backwards compatibility is to not change anything, or to maintain every version of every interface forever. I.e. make sure that the v1 flight model still works even after changing your engine, as well as v2, v3, etc and test them all every release.
That is costly. That is why there are breaking changes and add-ons break in flight sims. Not because base game / engine devs want you to have to buy new add-ons, IMHO.
