Microsoft Lays Off Entire Flight Sim Team

Dutch Gun writes "Microsoft has just laid off the entire Flight Simulator development team. This continues a long-running trend of terminating or severing relationships with game development studios, such as the Bungie split, FASA, or the closure of Ensemble Studios. While one would presume that core Xbox development is not currently in jeopardy after Microsoft spent up to a billion dollars to pay for Xbox 360 repairs and salvage its reputation with gamers, does this signal a reversal from Microsoft's recent focus on internal game development? And what are its plans for Flight Simulator, a twenty-seven-year product with an extremely loyal user-base and a multitude of externally developed add-ons?"

Comments

it was an outsourced product to begin with

[darkeye]

the MS Flight Simulator was initially the product of subLOGIC, and written by Bruce Artwick. It's just that MS chose to brand and market the product. After a while, they just 'took' the source code, and started to develop it in-house. subLOGIC struggled to release its own versions, but unfortunately they failed. (For this ugly business strategy, I chose not buy MS FS ever.)

Anyway, they might just chose to outsource again.

Re:it was an outsourced product to begin with

[DingerX]

They also 'took' Bruce Artwick to develop it for them.

Re:it was an outsourced product to begin with

[dfranks]

Your version of history is not quite correct. subLOGIC became an out of balance company with around 6 engineers and over 50 people on the "business" side. The two sides of the company were separated by a door, and there was an engineering staff member who (among other responsibilities) was guardian of the door. Bruce Artwick was the president of the engineering side, and Stu Moment was the president of the business side.
Tensions rose, and one day Stu Moment basically fired the entire engineering department (I never heard what the precipitating event was).
subLOGIC owned the rights to all products except Mac and PC flight simulator (this was pre-windows as I recall), but Bruce and/or MS owned the rights to MS Flight Simulator on the PC and MAC. Bruce then opened an office a few miles away (the creation of BAO) and since Stu had fired all of us, he hired us.
subLOGIC tried to take the code base for the Amiga, Atari, MSX, etc etc and form a viable product for the PC with limited market success. BAO produced several versions of Flight Simulator (plus Scenery and Aircraft Designer, Tower Simulator and a few other products) before Microsoft decided to move the development in house (or closer anyway). I was no longer with the company at this point, but my understanding was that they initially did not bring over most of the staff as they issued a "move to Redmond or here is the door" edict. Most of the staff decided to leave, but once MS tried their hand at development several of the key engineers were rehired and allowed to work remotely. At that point, FS source was 100% x86 assembler. While it was a high quality piece of code, it was extreemly complex and required talented developers to work with it.
I assume the original BAO people eventually left and went on to other projects, I have not heard from any of them in the last 10 years or so.
So, in summary: MS did not "take" the Flight Simulator source, it never belonged to subLOGIC. I assume that Bruce sold the remaining rights to MS at the breakup of BAO.

Dean

I still remember a question from the BAO pre-interview screening test, amazingly enough only 5 candidates (out of a very large number) ever got this right:

Write a small code fragment (language of your choice) to calculate the internal angle between adjacent sides given the number of sides of a regular polygon. As I recall, scenery and aircraft designed actually had code to do this calculation.

Re:Google Earth

[ps]

You mean like this?

http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html

ps

Re:I prefer X-Plane

[quacking duck]

If you're searching Amazon it seems you're only looking for paid or official products, but why? Most X-Plane add-ons are free.

The biggest X-Plane enthusiast site is x-plane.org, which lists over 2500 aircraft and hundreds of scenery/airport packages.

X-Plane also runs on Mac and Linux, not just Windows. A stripped-down version even runs on iPhone.