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Comment by dlojudice | Hacker News Reader

> Prepar3D furthers the development of Microsoft® ESP™ while maintaining compatibility with Microsoft Flight Simulator X, allowing many thousands of add-ons to be used within Prepar3D. [1]

Interesting. Microsoft ESP? First time I hear about this Microsoft product. Furthermore the simulation is based on Microsoft Flight Simulator X, 2006 software.

[1] https://www.prepar3d.com/product-overview/

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I worked on this product for a year back in the day. The cool thing about MS ESP was that we used the FSX Engine for the "1000 foot experience". Everything looked great from far above, but not close by. The solution to this was that MS Train Simulator 2 made tons of improvements for the "1 foot experience". The idea was to include a "world editor" with world-wide geospatial data, too. https://youtu.be/GXzE1Yb54xU?t=406 The physics models of the planes and the trains were great, but obviously to be a generic simulator you needed to include physics engines for other types of objects like Cars. So we grabbed the physics engine of Forza and included it there. These things combined were honestly beautiful - and add to that the backwards compatibility with all the 3rd party FSX plugins/adds ons. Bummer that this is exactly when the iPhone came out and the cloud-based strategies were taking over "classic" enterprise software. Re-org and bye bye FSX/TrainSim2/ESP. I had left before this happened, but was really a bummer not to see the full potential of ESP :-(

ESP was an effort to turn Flight Simulator into a general purpose commercial and military sim. They assembled a great team to do that, then shut it all down in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Balmer decided some part of Microsoft Game Studios needed to be shut down to save costs and the Flight Sim team had always been an outsider with the weakest political connections into the core of MGS, so even though the ESP business plan was much more sensible than most of the MGS products, it was the piece that ended up getting killed.

> Balmer decided some part of Microsoft Game Studios needed to be shut down to save costs and the Flight Sim team had always been an outsider with the weakest political connections into the core of MGS, so even though the ESP business plan was much more sensible than most of the MGS products, it was the piece that ended up getting killed.

Worse than that.

This was relayed to me by someone who worked on the flight sim team.

So flight sim wasn't actually part of Microsoft game studio, they were in the middle of transitioning over when the shit hit the fan. The head of the organization that they were a part of (I forget what it was called), blocked the transfer so he could keep the flight sim team around as that org's sacrificial lamb to be laid off.

ESP seems to be the commercial platform based off Flight Simulator X:

https://news.microsoft.com/2007/11/14/microsoft-esp-debuts-a...

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