It seems Acceleration has been a bit of a mixed bag - I installed it over a clean install of FSX and it does make the sim perfectly flyable for me. It's still not a patch on FS9 (geddit?
) but it's now good enough to warrant staying on my HDD. I did a little research before buying Acceleration and I already knew a lot of addons won't work with it, so to that end I have only put a few on that I know for sure work without any issues. I also had a suspicion for a loooong time now that the supposed DX10 update would be a big bag of shite.
You know I think FSX has been cursed with appearing at the same time as a new OS and DX10...
MS must have spent a huge amount of money on Vista, and they were clearly going to have problems prying people away from XP which is easily the best OS MS have produced.
Here's how the conversation probably went:
"Ok we've got this new OS that doesn't really offer any benefit over XP, how can we make people buy it?"
"Let's release a new version of Direct X, let's tout it as a revolutionary leap in 3D graphics...
...and let's make it Vista only!"
"Ok that's great, all the people who want the best graphics will have to go and buy our new OS!"
"Yeah, so let's get the marketing campaign rolling, what have we got in development?"
"Flight Simulator X"
"Ok, get the developers to make a sim that does great screenshots, and lets plaster them all over the Vista/DX10 marketing!"
"Yeah great, and by the time everyone realises it's all a load of bollocks we'll already have their money!"
Well, that's the cynic in me
I think the problem is Aces were clinging to a tired old engine, and adding on all the bumpf like extra autogen, bloom, bump mapping, self shadowing, blah blah blah.... the engine is just buckling under its own weight. Sure it can make some nice screenshots, and lots of people will go "OOOOH" and "AAAAAH" but at the end of the day it's been a disappointment for a great many and has polarised the community and caused huge headaches for payware developers. Hopefully FSX will be the straw that broke the camel's back, a watershed that will result in a totally new engine for FS11.
for a great number of there loyal customers! If they are not careful (as I predicted before) they may even kill this hobby!
as the flagship of our hobby.