FSX-SP2(DX10) delay factors

This has come up multiple times, including in the comments of the SP2 post, so I want to cover why there is a time delay from when Acceleration will be available and until the download for SP2 will be availble.

Yes, there is a reason for the delay, even if bits for SP2 are done.

Just because Acceleration English RTM'ed and the bits are frozen does not mean they are ready to release.  Since Acceleration and SP2 are separate products; that means completely separate efforts are required for setup, test, and international release efforts.

Now that we RTM'ed English Acceleration, we are not done since we ship in 8 languages, English+7 more. So we still have to get thru those for Acceleration before we can even get onto SP2. And we have 1 Test and Release team, so the Localization, Test, and Release activities are not fully parallelizable activities.

So once we get thru the International releases, we can then focus on SP2.  We have to finish setup for SP2 and its associated SDK. And we have a single setup dev. So with Acceleration that is 4 setups our single setup developer has had to create for this fall. So that activity is not parallelizable at all.

And then we have international for SP2 all over again.

Our setup, test, and international teams are busy, very busy, and will be for a while.

So there is a reason for the delay. It is not as easy as it appears from the outside. You could argue we should have done SP2 first, but that is not realistic if you think about it. And do note, by putting SP2 into Acceleration we got additional test coverage on SP2. So not having SP2 in Acceleration would actually delay SP2 even more since a larger test pass would be required.