Interview with our program manager...
... is located here. A lot of great stuff mentioned in both videos. In particular, our new shader pipeline (2.0 and 3.0 is mentioned as well as possible DX10 support and shader 4.0), the new structured gameplay / mission system, the completely reworked multiplayer system and hey, wait a minute, isn't that an Xbox 360 controller he's flying with. What's up with that? I could go into all of that further, but honestly I want to see the forum reactions first. "What?! Structured gameplay and the 360 controller? What kind of sim is this!? M$ clearly doesn't care about the real simmer!" All I can say is don't worry, we aren't replacing functionality, just adding it.
There's a lot of great bits in the DX10 video as well (by the way, Chris is a director of developer relations and not an actual Flight Simulator developer). One of the key things he talks about that is really interesting is the difference between PC and console. Consoles being a snapshot of hardware at a given time, PCs being an ever evolving hardware canvas to work with. This is part of why we release a product that will max out the highest end hardware at the time of release. We know that two years later, users will still be discovering new stuff via hardware upgrades.
