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Microsoft Phasing Out ESP Simulation Platform?
Ian Lamont writes "Overlooked in last month's news about Microsoft laying off the entire Flight Simulator dev team is the news that Microsoft's ESP development team has been gutted as well, and the future of the platform is in doubt. ESP is oriented toward industrial use, and lets companies build 3D simulations for flight and other applications. Late last year Microsoft announced big plans to expand ESP to other verticals, such as real estate, city planning, and law enforcement. That looks increasingly unlikely. Even though Microsoft declined to comment on ESP's future, companies which invested in the product are angry, judging by some of the comments on an MSDN thread. As noted by one user, 'my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.'"
Not to worry, with their mind-reading abilities I'm sure they'll find new jobs in no time ;P
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.
It is as if I hear a million VB6 developers screaming all at once...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
The microsoft ESP wiki is a red link
I am also interested in knowing how long ESP will be available because my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform. It sounds like X-Plane is the way to go from now on. This is the last time I gamble a product's success on Microsoft. Every gaming studio Microsoft touches seems to sink like the Bismarck. http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
The X-Plane site itself is offering deals for the abandoned ESP customers:
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/esp_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html
I like the comment "X-Plane 9 (temporarily $39.00 to let in all the new MS users)."
Flight Sim WAS ESP. When the team behind Flight Sim - and therefore Flight Sim itself - were canned, ESP was part and parcel of those cuts.
The fact that anybody thought ESP still existed as anything more that a couple of my former coworkers sitting at desk and tying up loose contract and licensing ends... well, that's only because Microsoft carefully obfuscated how much overlap ESP and FS had.
ESP is dead and has been since ACES closed on January 23rd, 2009.
Stop whining, take the source code and hire your own devs.
Oh, you said MS?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
...that MS is planning on open sourcing the entire code base as abandonware, so customers don't have to worry.
It'll be released right after hell freezes over.
it would be a shame if MS stopped ESP for two reasons: their presence has driven down prices, and they provide a fair amount of content.
There are several alternatives though, such as x-plane, cryengine, vbs2, delta3d (open source), or the more expensive Vega Prime.
Well... if you don't know what ESP stands for, then why do you reply?
I reply because I'm getting tired of people expecting that the whole world knows what their 3-letter-abbreviation stands for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esp
ESP, in my field, is an Electrostatic precipitator. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft isn't working on cleaning up exhaust gases though. I guess it is the "Microsoft ESP - A visual simulation package produced by Microsoft", as found at the bottom of the 3rd (!) list of ESP-abbreviations on wikipedia.
Thanks.
It takes only a few characters to actually spell it out, and explain it, but it takes a minute to google it.
A bunch of people getting shafted by Microsoft after believing their promises? Say it ain't so!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
If you're looking for an alternative to Flight Simulator there is always FlightGear.
> "Microsoft is currently exploring options for the future of ESP and will announce details at the appropriate time," Sarah Tatone, a Microsoft spokesperson told The Industry Standard.
Why do software companies always fire the programmers yet keep the PR people and the executives which have served them so badly?
You invest in technology = you gamble; Main producer of technology decide to drop it = you loose;
Where is that point you getting angry? It was your decision to build upon commercial, closed source. Deal with that.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I Have a huge interest in this topic I`ll be cranking up some more pointers on how to tackle this issue , taking in account different use cases.
Audience Response Systems
I had Microsoft's Flight Simulator on my C=64, and even though it ran like a snail (1 megahertz), it was a very-detailed and surprisingly fun "game" to play (ditto Elite which was like a space simulator). It's a shame that, 25 years later, the FS software has come to an end. I wish Microsoft would not be so shortsighted as to kill a piece of computing history, just to save a few dollars. Layoff some of the webtv developers instead.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
... and leaved only AH in Windows Vista IPSEC?!
Seriously, please make acronym decryption while posting.
'my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.'"
Which is why closed is a gamble. If they had the source, they could hire some programmers to keep it ticking over (porting to new platforms etc), or pay some IT company to do it for them. You can't kill software when the source is free to all.
Well now, people are again starting to understand why people hate Microsoft. What, did you expect them to look after you rather than themselves.
Don't worry, next time they promise you something, they will really mean it, honest, you can trust M$.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
due to decisions' like this my company has decided to go with oracle as opposed to SQL server, in effect, all in (License's, OS, support etc) this has lost Microsoft around £4 million GBP, im a long time fan of Microsoft, but to be honest their decision's recently have been short term, fundamentally my colleges and me have no faith in Microsoft anymore, we can't say with a certainly that they or there tech will be around or relevant in the medium term.
Microsoft ESP is a visual simulation platform that enables organizations Reaching out and blending with real world, pulling or pushing out real world ..I took two notes during the meeting, the phase âoeImmersive Learningâ and the
Audience Response Systems
Do people still use the saying "nobody ever got fired for recommending Microsoft" to dismiss alternatives?
Too often I have heard the following argument against OSS - "You don't know when support will end or if the project will exist tomorrow." This is true. But you can make relative safegaurds against choosing a dead software package. How long has it been around? How much activity? How popular? How many participants? I can also download a sample several packages without pulling out my wallet. If support suddenly stops, I still have access to the code should I need to develop the product further.
With a proprietary package, it is take it or leave it with a limited amount of options.
Certainly both approaches (OSS and closed) have there pros and cons, but with OSS I am better able to hedge my bet against obsolescence.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Hey, don't worry. Unlike these fly by night open source people, proprietary software has a road map...
a blank page showing Bumf*kt Arizona and a tag, "You Are Here".
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Its not much good having the source for a project, particulerly a large one. You also need people who understand it. This takes time and costs money. Then, perhaps more importantly, you need people clever/interested enough to take the project forward. Again this is hard to acheive.
As Microsoft and other companies have learned, you can't throw people and money at a project and be certain of success. The people have to be motivated (money != motivation) and *wanting* the project to succeed.
There's probably just as much dead open source code as there is closed source code, just having the code available is never enough.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
What the hell is this ESP that Microsoft is or is not developing? Are we talking about mind reading, or is it just a clever marketing acronym? Being as it is associated with Flight Simulator, the latter seems more likely; but we are talking about Microsoft here.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Didn't they sense this coming?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Those of us who depended on Microsoft Xenix and had the projects we were using on dumped when SCO took it over were immunized against depending on anything Microsoft does decades ago.
Also overlooked was the death of Train Simulator 2, which was to be based on the FSX platform, i.e. ESP. ACES was also developing this. They had a fair bit of work done already, and were even hinting at doing a release by year end, though I think that was somewhat optimistic.
I'm sure the ultimate goal was to further ESP so they could sell it to railways. That would be where the real money would be made, because a train sim game probably wouldn't sell well enough. Maybe they realised that North American railways tend to be very conservative and aren't all that interested in changing to fancy software. I know - I used to write software for one. The only way we could get the field folks to use our app instead of the old text-based mainframe app was to take access to the latter away, and boy were they pissed!
I think virtually nobody outside of the core rail sim world knew Train Sim 2 even existed. It wasn't advertised well. Even the Flight Sim site didn't have a link. Personally I'd been following it for quite some time and was really looking forward to it, but now it's gone. I am all too aware that the chances of it being open-sourced or picked up by someone else are effectively nil...
Nobody was listening to RMS?
you had me at #!
Kind of a bad economic time to expand into buildings, eh?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This compares to companies that trust in open source... You never know when the company that's at the centre of open source development is going to go belly up, leaving customers with nothing more than the source code and the ability to support the product themselves for as long as it's important enough to them.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.