It's been a few months since the release of FSX but this game doesn't get old so here are my opinions after many hours of flight.
Flight simulator is one of those titles that has stood the test of time very well and managed to almost annihilate any of it's competitors in the same genre for better or worse (more on that later)
Personally I always had a love/hate relationship with Flight Simulator but not a very usual one. The love was for FS and the hate was for the fact that there were so many other games out there that were so much more accessible and gave instant gratification and therefore took away from the time I was willing to invest into FS.
One of the reasons for this is without a doubt that FS has always been a bit behind the times when it comes to this instant fun to be had with the product and to some extent FSX is no exception although it does make the best effort to date when it comes to sparking an interest to newcomers to the genre.
You can come to FSX either as a veteran flightsimmer or someone completely new to the genre with a general interest in aviation and your approach and impression of the game will undoubtedly differ.
FSX classifies itself as a "Simulator" which translates into a massive effort by the game to simulate the experience of flight as close as possible.
Flying a plane is not something that is simple so inevitably there is a fair learning curve in order to simulate this experience. Newcomers to the genre certainly have to take this into account. This doesn't mean a bad thing as the learning curve itself is an interesting experience and the further you
get through it the more rewarding and enjoyable this experience will become.
the learning curve itself is an interesting experience and the further you
get through it the more rewarding and enjoyable this experience will become.
FSX allows you fly pretty much any genre plane of your choice, from a single prop engine like a Cessna up to the 4 Rolls Royce engines powering a Boeing 747.
Flying the latter however still requires you to start your piloting career in that Cessna as the essential flying skills is something you will be picking up through a series of included Cessna based lessons.
The lessons themselves do an OK job in teaching you the ropes but they sometimes still fill a bit clunky, given they are a direct port of FS2004 it's amazing that the MS development team did not take any feedback on lessons into account when launching FSX.
I remember playing FS98 at the time when a friend walked into my room at the time that I was just reaching the clouds and he went, "hey what's with the square looking clouds?"
Since that day I could not play FS again without those square looking clouds staring me in the eye.
Since FS2004 I have been very satisfied by the overall feel of realism produced by the quality of it's graphics, things are looking pretty real now and since FSX flying the virtual cockpit is the way to go and it certainly does a great job in giving you the feeling of being in the cockpit.
FS offers scenery in either a landclass or photorealstic format, landclass is where the simulator creates a random environment based on x amount of parameters, this then creates a scenery which albeit may not match the reality of real world, it still does a great job in displaying fields, roads and towns. The Autogen feature of the game then adds plenty of 3D trees and buildings as well but is an FPS killer.
Buildings have high resolution textures up to 1 centimeter, scenery resolution up to 1 meter per pixel, this does come at the cost of diskspace though, just having the UK in photorealistic format at high res is going to use 65 gigs of HD space, by default only landclass scenery is part of FSX, photoreal scenery is something you will need to get through addons.
Water looks extremely real now and reflects clouds and even your plane in the waves when close enough.
Water looks extremely real now and reflects clouds and even your plane in the waves when close enough.
Many other things are a welcome addition, moving cars on roads, boats, birds etc, it does increase the immersion factor which can only be a good thing.
So from a longevity point of view FSX has got many years ahead until we can run this at smooth framerates.
This however also where my biggest gripe with FS lies, it's ability to display all it's features in a way that doesn't impact the game's performance is where FS falls short, way short!
Andd even on fairly basic display settings today's most powerful hardware wouldn't even be able to set quality settings to 50% and get a good performance.
Now I like innovative game design and I strongly believe that developers should push the envelope to some extent at the expense of performance.
The problem with FS is not their lack of taking the experience to the next level, it's the fact that they are simply not taking advantage of today's hardware technologies at all, that's right there is no support for SLI, dual core CPU's etc. Now if SLI was a 6 month old technology you would be able
to forgive this but in today's world of gaming hardware sorry I simply find the lack of something like SLI support incomprehensible.
And it is a very frustrating experience to have poor frame rates at times knowing that the power you have under the hood of your PC could be doing a lot more.
There are rumors of a patch in the make to address performance issues by using these technologies as well as a DX10 patch but at this stage it's all wait and see.
Load times are typically also extremely long depending on how much detail you want in your scenery.
What makes it even more annoying is that during these load times, you get a black screen showing you a white status bar going from 1 to 100%, doesn't get any more boring then that.
This would have been an ideal time to throw some tips our way as after all there is a lot to learn here!
This is where the area of flight simulation would be very well served if there would be some more competition in the genre as it would be very interesting to see whether competition would have driven the graphics quality, performance and overall experience to even higher levels.
Fortunately FSX does have a very open nature about it allowing many 3rd party developers to develop addons
Fortunately FSX does have a very open nature about it allowing many 3rd party developers to develop addons
in the likes of scenery, planes and many tools that make the experience a whole lot better then the default one.
In a way you can compare this to what the mod community does for other games, a good comparison is what the mod comunnity does for fantastic rFactor racing sim does for cars and tracks.
But the interesting part here again is a prime example where consumer demand drives price, flightsimmers want realism and the default FS doesn't have all the world's airports in high detail, worldwide realistic photoscenery or a massive collections of airplanes to fly with, so that's were 3rd party addons come in.
Regretfully many of the high quality addons for FS are not freeware. If you want to have some highly realistic looking airport that matches the real thing, an aircraft with all the whistles and bells expect to pay some 3rd party developer for this.
No modders out there are able to sell their mods and addons for any other genre but in FS it has always been the way
Quite frankly if FS is your thing then get prepared to fork out cash for these addons, there is quite some freeware available too but usually (albeit not always) it's not at the same level as where the commercial addons lie.
But most hardcore flightsimmers probably won't complain as for a lot of them flightsim is what takes up 99% of their gaming time as flightsimming is not something that you can fully enjoy unless you really are willing to spend a lot of time and effort with it{/quotes} and the more of it you are willing to invest the more satisfying that final experience will be.
the learning curve itself is an interesting experience and the further you
