Posted: 12/22/2006 7:20:06 PM EDT
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| also are these pretty easy to fly or do you actually have to have some Know how on flying planes?? also are the microsoft combat series pretty fun?? and what kind of control set ups do you need?? can you get a joy stick and if so what is the best? sorry for the hijack and questions. |
I think they are fun and when I got FS2004 I didn't know anything about flight sims or flying. I think that was/is part of the fun. Just learning how to fly. Of course it's not exactly the same as true life flying but it is the closest I will ever come to being in control of an aircraft. Once you learn a little about the sim you will start adding addon aircraft, panels, secenery and loads of other things. Then you will probably get into repainting, panel creation, gauge creation and maybe even modeling aircraft. One thing you need though is patience. If you do decide to get a sim, don't buy FSX. Go for FS2004. ETA, anyone can learn to fly the sims and yes there are quite a few buttons but it's all good stuff. I'm still learning. I've only recently learned how to make ILS approaches and I am still learning all the stuff available and how to use a gps. I have one of the combat sims. I think it was either the second or third one from MS. i didn't much care for it. All I can say is try one. FS2004 can probably be picked up for $15 and will probably run well on a computer with 2ghz system with an 9600 pro. When I first picked it up it ran well on my 2.5ghz with an Nvidia MX440. |
You can just about learn to fly by playing enough MS Flight Sim. It is VERY VERY realistic. |
What is wrong with FSX? I ask because I don't know, I only play combat related sims, although that might change given that I think that I am going to start working on getting my private pilot certificate within the next couple of years and those sims are more applicable to what I intend to do. |
 From one of many variants of Falcon 4.0, which, if you keep centered on the F-16 as the type you fly, is the combat sim that is most accurate to the real aircraft in terms of flight performance modelling. And the dynamic campaign engine still stands apart from all others in all other combat simulations. The current version of Falcon 4.0, Allied Force, is for the most part on the same technical level as FS X. But it's far more tightly focused. Not so many aircraft types or as much terrain and buildings variety. CJ |
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Few things about MS Flight Simulator. Personally, I think it might be difficult for someone starting out fresh. It's been a long time since I started, but I know I first picked up MSFS 2000 and ended up shelving it because it was difficult. Then I decided after MSFS 2002 came out that I really wanted to learn the game and not to be discouraged. I slowly got into pay ware aircraft with MSFS 2002 and was fully into them for MSFS 2004. It's easy to learn as long as you go though the training lessons that come with it. Another thing that helped my flying and landing skills was a CH Yoke and Pedal system. www.chproducts.com/retail/yokes.html A joystick alone is something I find very frustrating and painful to my wrist. You have to twist the joystick to rudder and angle it for turns at the same time, so it sucks. Having the yoke allows me to use either hand and steer like in a car, so I can sit natural and use the pedals on the floor to rudder and brake. As far as keyboard commands, most of the necessary stuff is done with the mouse or main controller. Interaction with ATC is the only main thing I use the keyboard for. In all the years simming I've only used maybe 5 keys besides the ATC interaction. It's nothing like those damn combat sims where you have 300 combinations you're forced to use. As far as the actual game goes, a lot would find it boring because you aren't shooting or bombing or doing anything but flying (takeoff and landing is the only real excitement). However, the process of hand flying instead of using autopilot, navigating, learning different GPS units (pay ware mostly), flight planning, and handling complex pay ware aircraft can be fun and daunting. |
When I was taking flying lessons years ago, I would use my charts and flight directory with Flight Simulator 98... The approaches, airports, freq's, etc are all real world. It's good shit. |
+1. It has helped me tremendously with my flying lessons. |
It runs like crap. Terribly low framerates. It was developed for dx10. I could only get at max about 20fps at default settings and I even once got a framerate of 0.5. I was averaging about 10-12 fps. It does not support multi cpus, neither does fs2004. But on fs2004 running GEPro and AS6, which adds a lot of weather data and eye candy (textures, clouds), I usually get between 30-35 fps. All that is missing between FS2004 and FSX for me is the moving vehicles at the airports which I don't really care about. If I could average about 25fps on FSX, then I would be fine but I just couldn't get those results and I have not heard of anyone else getting those results. My feelings are that FSX will be able to run as well as FS2004 on computers that are coming out a year from now. |
It's a POS. All MS simulator products have their problems out of the box, but FSX is awful. MS's ACES team (flight sim development programmers) couldn't or didn't want to wait until DX10 or Vista to come out, so they released a product that really wasn't finished that's only written for DX9 and devoid of multicore support. This means it pretty much runs like shit on even the best computers on the market right now. No one is sure if it'll ever run great because new CPUs are having to use multicore technology to work faster and FSX can't utilize that speed. Even with the graphics turned down to FS9 standards, you're lucky to get stutter-free performance with nothing but default aircraft and they suck ass. MS also fucked up a lot of terrain in certain areas with incorrect textures (desert instead of green, ect...). All in all, it's a flop and full of bugs. They didn't upgrade any of the important stuff like ATC, navigational databases, or AI traffic. FS9 is the best way to go for now, and possibly until 11 comes out. |
Negative Ghostrider, the pattern is FULL. While you were cruising downtown Tokyo at mach 2.0 playing Jet... I was using out dated charts from the local FBO and running MS Flight Simulator 1.0 on my Apple IIc  The more things change, the more they stay the same!!! 
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I'm tempted to buy the Pro version, but I'm hesitant. This has been a trend with MSFS for pretty much the last 15 years. I started out with FS4. I never got into it. By the time I did, the graphics on other sims had far outpaced it. Christmas 95, I got FS5.1CD. Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Its full potentional wasn't realized until I also bought BAO's Flight Sim Flight Shop, Mallards SFO scenery, along with MS' Hawaii, Japan, and Carribean scenery. This is probably the point where I lost any kind of life outside of the computer I had. Flight Sim all day, all night. Joined a virtual airline, started building aircraft and scenery. If you saw all the mountain dew cans around the computer, you'd think I was playing WOW. But then FSFW95 (For Windows 95) came out. There was nothing special there. Just a port to Windows. FS98 came out, and it was awesome. FS2000 came out... meh. FS2002 came out... better. FS2004 came out... better still Now FS10. Now, the graphics look pretty neat. But I've seen people post shots of FS2004 that border on art. Check on Avsim.com. Go to the tech forums. There are people who are getting decent frame rates on mid level puters. Its all about dancing around config files. It'll take some time, and maybe some features may have to be turned down. But there will be a time when FS10 reaches its potential. So like I said, it seems like every other release concerning FS is a dud. I just wish Bruce Artwick and BAO were still making FS 
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