Mit FS9 geht es weiter …

Hat der FS9 doch eine Zukunft? Eine überaus interessante Mail des Ex-FS2004-Entwicklers Alex Johnson hat uns erreicht: er und ein paar seiner damaligen Kollegen wollen den FS9 wieder auferstehen lassen.

In einem mehr Brief als Pressemitteilung erläutert Alex Johnson ausschweifend, warum und wieso er sich mit ein paar Ex-Kollegen zusammengetan hat, um den FS9 wiederbeleben zu wollen.

Zunächst bemängelt er die falsche Ausrichtungsstrategie des damaligen FSX Developements. Wenig neues, dafür viele Bugs seien in den FSX eingearbeitet worden um am Ende nach zwei vergeblichen Servicepacks letztlich den Addonherstellern die Aufgabe zu überlassen, den FSX zu dem zu machen, was er eigentlich von haus aus hätte sein sollen.

Mit P3D V1 kam Johnson auf die Idee, solch radikale Umstrukturierung, wie Lockheed Martin das tat, auch mit FS9 zu versuchen. Ex-Kollegen sprangen mit auf den Zug, ebenso kam viel positives Feedback von Addonentwicklern, da deren Szenerien sich von FSX an den FS9 relativ einfach anpassen ließen.

Kurzum, mit dem erworbenen FS9 SDK wird der “Alte” nun á la Prepar3D runderneuert und erste Ergebnisse wären “vielleicht sogar ein bisschen besser als der FSX”. Und das Ganze anscheinend als Freeware!

Die ganze Mitteilung im Original nachfolgend:

“Hello,

my name is Alex Johnson and I am the CEO of Virtual Cloud Engineering. Back in 2002 when FS9 was developed, I was part of the development team. Basically, I was responsible for some little things, the main part was done by several other developers. I always loved flight simulation and I really loved and still love the good old FS2004. Not only because there’s a little bit of my work included, but also because it is simply great. The performance is great and the graphics were as well back in days. When FSX development was started, I left the team very early because it went into a completely different direction, the wrong direction in my opinion. There are many issues which haven’t been resolved yet and I simply didn’t want to waste my time there. After I left the team, I worked for many other popular game studios using newest technologies. When FSX was released back in 2007, I was a little shocked after I tried it. Compared to FS9, this simulator was full of bugs, not even the two Service Packs could solve them. Only years later, other developers started releasing add-ons which improved the FSX experience to what it should have been years before. I’ve always sticked to FS9 and fully understand other community members who do so as well. Sadly, the majority uses FSX now so FS9 suffers from a disease which will kill it slowly.

I fully understand developers who won’t develop for FS9 anymore. It takes a lot of time to convert a FSX scenery for FS9 and it takes even more time with aircrafts. Sadly, there weren’t any attempts to update the FS9 SDK so a port-over would have been much easier.
When Lockheed Martin announced Prepar3D, I was very curious about the result. Even the first version showed some improvements and I was wondering if I could do this for FS9 as well. I jumped on this idea and asked several developers I worked with before. To be honest, the first answers were like: “Go home Alex, you’re drunk” or “You’re completely out of touch with reality”. But the more people I asked, the more positive answers I received. Furthermore, I asked several big companies which developed many FS9 products in the past and nearly every of them replied and a very positive way. If it would be easier to port over sceneries and airplanes made for FSX using the FSD SDK they would love to release FS9 products again.
After I recruited some other developers who love FS9 as much as I do, we started thinking about what we need. The main point was better graphics, indeed. But we wanted to keep the great performance. It was clear we would need to upgrade the whole engine to make this possible, but I did this before for other software so I was sure I can do it.
The second point was updating the FS9 SDK so it would be very easy to make FSX products compatible. This should ensure more products coming for the good old flightsim in the future.
We asked for the license and as the FS9 software is very old, we were able to afford it for not too much money and for only non-commercial interests, in other words, we could only publish as freeware.
So while I upgraded the engine, Brian who is our lead texture artist took some great aerial images using his Cessna – he is real life pilot – and started creating new ground- and autogen-textures in high definition. I can tell you, they look great, definitely as good as it’s possible in FSX if not a little bit better.
We are still working on the new SDK and it will take some time until it’s finished, but I’m proud of what we did in such a short time.
By the way: You might wonder about the fact we send this press release to German websites first. The reason is simple: In Germany, there are the most FS9 users so we wanted to share this message in your country first before releasing it to the whole world some days later. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

virtualcloudengineering@gmail.com”