. The suggestion is: Why not make FSX/P3D addons freeware with last updates & features, such as Biz-Jets recognition, with the abandonment of developing, maintaining & updating addons for FSX/P3D? It would be perfect if you guys could continue developing, maintaining & updating addons for MSFS only, not for FSX/P3D.
Your suggestion is based on missing any solid data, since there are still users that buy GSX, today, for *FSX* and ask questions about it. What you read on forums are only the active users, the tip of the iceberg, the "elite".
The ones you don't see ( but we do ) are the ones asking support by email, and when you get an interesting quantity of people starting their email with "I just bought GSX last week, and I have a problem with FSX", it's clear that is will take a long while before *ALL* simulators other than MSFS will "disappear".
So no, we are doing exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting, and is:
- Continue to release free updates to the GSX CODE for FSX and P3D. That is the GSX "logic", the brains behind it. This is possible and doesn't costs us much, due to the flexibility of our scripting engine, which conceals to 95% of the GSX code which simulator it's running under. When we'll release GSX for MSFS version, which apart for an almost totally remade graphic, also has tons of small quality of life improvements and changes, all FSX/P3D users will get those at the same time, because the code running it's the same. Audio is an example: since we have out own audio engine, anything we do with audio is completely platform-independent and, in the MSFS version we added lots of new audio, like many more accents to the pushback/decide crew, or more sounds effects, or female voice variations, and all these will make it to FSX/P3D automatically, for free.
- We'll consider the idea of making a paid upgrade, to port what is possible to port of the new MSFS graphics back to P3D. FSX will be likely excluded, since the graphic differences are just too much ( no PBR ), but if there's enough request, we might do something like that.
And, most of all, we confirmed multiple times the FSX/P3D version will still be supported so, no backpedaling now. Obviously, the MSFS version will be the "main" version, and what MSFS can do ( or can't ) will drive what we'll add to the other versions. That's not news, and we explained so many times: we decided to abandon the Render To Texture for P3D V5, not only because DX12 it's incredibly complex, but also because MSFS doesn't have any form of Render To Texture, so it wasn't worth continuing to use that feature, if we couldn't use it in the MSFS, which at this time supports only standard multi-liveries, so that's what we reverted back to in P3D V5.