Project Magenta: An Open Letter to the Sim Community
Hi Guys-
I'm sure all of you were as shocked as I was to hear Microsoft closed ACES studios and shut the doors (at least for the foreseeable future) on the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise. According to a blog from Phil Taylor, FSX's programming lead, everyone was given pink slips yesterday, their computer access revoked and given 24 hours to pack up, with the exception of 6 tech support people to close out the ESP platform, the commercial version of FSX. The remaining 6 will only be around for 6 months to close out the current contracts and archive the FSX code.
Luckily for us FSX was a pretty good product. As a member of the beta team for FSX, I was certainly proud of the sim. Sure it has its share of minor bugs, but overall it was a very stable release, but those of us that are cockpit builders should be asking ourselves "what's next". Most of us, especially in the commercial flight deck arena use Project Magenta with a recent version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. My Boeing 737-700 simulator (www.737sim.com) uses FSX and Project Magenta. I've often thought of changing over to X-Plane but what has kept me with the FS product is Project Magenta.
Currently Project Magenta only supports MSFS via the FSUIPC interface. With X-Plane being the only simulator being developed out there we need to encourage Enrico Schiratti to support X-Plane and I believe this will only happen with your help.
There is a perception out there that Project Magenta and X-Plane cannot be compatible because X-Plane changes its data structure from release to release. This is simply not true. A plugin was developed by Ben Supnik that is very similar to Pete's FSUIPC. This eliminates all together the data issue much as the same way Pete keeps the 3rd party apps running even though things change from release to release of MSFS.
Austin Meyer, the developer of X-Plane is a friend of mine, and I can tell you he has for a long time been interested in having Project Magenta work with X-Plane. I would encourage all of you to email Enrico at support@projectmagenta.com, and ask that he support X-Plane. The reality is that even if Microsoft decides to resurrect FS, a new release would be a minimum of 5 years off. X-Plane is the only simulator that is going to be in development for the foreseeable future. I feel the only way Enrico will change his mind about X-Plane is to hear from his customers. Please join me in this effort!
Regards
Matt Ford
www.737sim.com