Ist Fly tot?!

[grossef]

Hallo,

nun hat sich R. Harvey bei avsim ziemlich eindeutig zu der (nicht vorhandenen?) Zukunft von Fly geäußert.

****Zitat****There has been alot of activity here lately, and some questions asking about the current status of Fly!. I felt it only fair to give everyone a status on what has happened since the beginning of the year.
For those keeping score at home, official funding on Fly! II ran out in April 2001. During the summer and fall of 2001, we attempted to pitch Fly! III to a large group of publishers. There was absolutely NO interest. We've seen light interest in combat flight sims, and some interest in "fantasy" flight sims (ala Crimson Skies), but absolutely no interest in GA sims. This became even more obvious after 9/11 -- no one wanted to be associated with a PC simulator where you could fly commercial airliners (we were even contacted by Time magazine, who did a net search and found a review of Fly! 2K where the author stated how much fun he had hitting buildings). This certainly did not bode well for us.

By the end of the year, the team was in a very bad state. We had already had to lay off a few key people to lower our payroll overhead (since we were eating out of our savings each month keeping the team together). By early 2002 it was obvious that there was little hope that Fly! III was going to be a reality, at least not in the next couple of years. Every publisher that did approach us were only interested in having us develop original console titles, not using our expertise in flight sims.

By spring, about the one-year mark since funding disappeared, we had to make a choice: either lay off the entire Fly! team or find another funded project to pick up. About two months ago, the team locked in to a funded project. While we are disappointed we could not find a Fly! publisher, we believe we gave it our best shot. I can't share info on this new project, but if I ever had a life calling this would be it. Fly! has been my life and soul, and I never thought I'd find a project that would affect me so deeply, but my new project could be the highlight of my life.

What does this mean? While we are still willing and interested to work with a publisher on a future version of Fly! (or develop the code base into another form of flight sim), if anything were to get signed sometime this year we would build a new team to do the development. I am producing our new project, so I would not be available as producer/designer (which may be a blessing, depending on your point of view).

I am currently working on a few issues for a future patch, as well as working on getting the Mac version patched to the latest 230 build. This is being done as it has been over the past 9 months -- at night, on weekends, in between work and family commitments, and when I feel well enough to work (I've had some health hiccups lately due to previous cancer treatment and will probably have another surgery in the next 2-3 weeks, but my cancer has NOT returned). Therefore, I can't commit to any dates because I have no idea when I will be done.

I am still trying to get portions of the Fly! code base available to the community so others can continue to customize or modify the core systems at will. This has been a problematic issue, because during Fly! II development we merged our code base back with the company code base, and some of our code requires proprietary code that I cannot release or share with the public. I'm trying to find solutions to this. If and when this happens, I will be sure to let everyone know.

Until then, I don't have much good news to report. Fly! effectively is a dead franchise until and unless a publisher decides to pick it up. I still hold out some hope, simply because anyone wanting to compete against MSFS simply can't do it effectively starting from scratch any more. It took us over 6 years and millions of dollars to develop our Fly! technology, and anyone wanting to get into this market would otherwise have to devote alot of time and money just to cover the basics. Maybe someone will want to take our foundation and begin a new chapter in flight sims. I certainly feel that there has to be at least two strong titles in the GA genre to keep innovation thriving.

Rich

****Zitat****

Dies war sogar avsim einen Eintrag auf die Titelseite wert. Was haltet ihr davon?

Frank