Hi community,

I've been doing a bit of reading around various community forums, and been pondering where FLIGHT might be heading, and just thought I would drop a quick question and opinions to my friends here at SimHQ, to see if others feel the same way.

Like others here, I have invested a lot of time, and money in FSX. I've worked out my flying patterns, seem to be GA type flights up
to about 2 hours long, and airline flights up to a max of about 6 hours. This now leads me to the negative side of my post.

When all is said and done, I worked out that I had actually spent more time tweaking, modifying, and adding to the sim than actually flying it.....is this because FSX was a bad product? Not sure I would say that, but still.......
In the end, I had hardly anything that was Microsoft Default any more. All of my GA stuff was the likes of Carenado, and my airliners the likes of PMDG. My one saving grace that even kept me in this sim was the addition of an SSD to my simming rig.

I've been thinking of starting all again, but it appears that what I want mya not be possible.....I wanted to have 2 seperate installs on the PC; one optimised for GA, the other for airline flight, with thier own dedicated SSD's. Herein lies the problem......I am unable to duplicate both the required Windows settings, and make a copy of the registry settings. Seems I need to make 2 seperate installs on 2 seperate computers (I've looked into MANY variable to try to avoid this).

I do have some high hopes for FLIGHT; I think that many commentators have got it wrong....still, we will see in a few months I guess.

So, has anybody else suffered similar frustrations? Part of me wants to leave the simming alone. Shame after so many years.

AJ.

Isn't there a profile setting where you can set it up for GA and another for Airline? I seem to remember seeing this while playing around one day.
Perhaps it's a feature of one of my addons---i'll have to check and get back unless someone else jumps in.

Yes, I believe you can save the config settings within FSX's "customize" feature, see:
http://www.screenshotartist.co.uk/fsx_settings_config.htm

Another alternative is something that controls it during FSX launch:
http://fullterrain.com/product_fsxgo.html

I spend more time flying than tweaking, once I have the settings working ok I try not to mess with them, other than slight tweak to scenery/autogen from dense to very dense depending on how urban the area is I am flying in.

I am looking forward to Flight and XP10 and Prepar3D, but I expect it will be a while before any of them surpass my current FSX+addons experience which is pretty darn good.

I too bounce between GA stuff and Airliners, such as the pmdg NGX. I found that with each type of flying there are different graphic settings that become more important than others. For example, I have 2 config settings saved in my FSX setup. One I called General Aviation(for small planes at GA airports) and one I called "Airliners" for large jets at major airports. I load the setting profile depending on the type of flight I want to do.

For my GA profile, I have Airline traffic turned off and GA traffic turned up to %100. I turn airport ground traffic off. I turn the water settings up high, because I can afford to do so now that a lot of ai are off. I dont care about the large jets while Im flying around in a single engine piper or cessna. I normally stay within small airfields just as I would in real life, so I dont miss that traffic at all. Since Ill be flying low and slow, the water appearence becomes more important. I also have the cloud drawing distance down to the lowest setting ( I think 60 is the lowest) since I most likly wont be flying that high to notice how far the clods extend into the horizon. There are a few other settings, I crank up since GA flying seems to yeald higher frame rates.

For Airliners, I turn the watter down to somewhere in the middle. Ill be too high to notice it anyway. I turn GA traffic to off, since I wont notice them either at altidude and they dont frequent large airport much. This allows me to turn up the airline traffic to about %80, which with ultimate traffic 2, gives me a realistic flow of traffic at major airports. ( not too overcrowded and not too sparse). I turn airport ground traffic on to low or medium. I turn the cloud draw distance to about 100 miles since at higher altitudes, I want to see the clouds go off into the horizon and it becomes more apparent when they look like they are just under my plane and nowhere else. There may be a few more settings I adjusted, but those are the main ones.

Switching between these 2 profiles allows me to maintaiun a good frame rate and graphic settings for each type of flying im in the mood for at the time. I just have to remember to change the setting before I load the flight.

As for Flight, I hope they optimized it enough that I wont have to do this anymore. But my feeling is, flight will run much better initailly, but down the road after many addons, come out, it will start to bog down like FSX does. Hopfully hardware changes will keep up with it.


Rob

Well I think your hopes for Flight will be faded by now, or getting close to that point. If you want just casual GA flights around Hawaii, Flight might be your thing. There will be no airliners or additional scenery at launch though.

if you have ANY hopes for flight at all, let me go ahead and dash them all for you right now. From first hand experience i can tell you without doubt this is NOT the simulator you've been waiting for. This is not even a simulator it's an island with a cash shop built in and no flight model resembling anything realistic. It's a smartphone game basically. Quite frankly i've never been so pissed about anything in my life, thank god they didn't put the MS flight sim name on this. If you are expecting ANYTHING whatsoever similar to FSX you will be sorely and i mean SORELY disappointed. Yeah there's an NDA, but i'm sorry, this game is going to infuriate the flight sim community, i have no idea who they even made this game for and my beta feedback has reflected that so far.

It sounds like a game I wouldn't have minded making. A kind of Test Drive Unlimited game with airplanes. No more no less. It's close to something I propsed in SimHQs dev roundtable a couple of years ago. A game of its time. Flight Simulator XI it never was, they said from the day 1 announcement it wasn't going to be, they dropped the world "simulator" which said everything you needed to know.

It might infuriate parts of the flight sim community but it's not made for them nor is game production a democratic process. It's excruciatingly expensive.

"These are the games you're looking for" *waves hand*

The free markets are actually very democratic, and I'm sure MS will be hearing their reply shortly. MS just turned away many of those who pay thousands for add-ons to their long-running franchise. Given their new Freemium model, scorning those who would have been shelling out the bucks for top-flight content seems ill-informed.

Plus, from what I've seen from CombatHelo, I'm not too worried about there being too much cross over between your work and the flight teams. I actually want to play CH


...Thin it'll be out before flight?


Also, I doubt Flight will feature airliners, at least REAL ones like what we see from PMDG. Airliners are built to cross oceans, not putter around a few islands. A fast, high-flying airliner would expose flights weakness and lack of scope.

I'm not saying free-markets are not democratic just that game development and movie making isn't a participatory process. You don't get to choose actors or content. You're expected to shell out your money and eat your popcorn.


I was really shocked at the complete lack of 3rd party support, or plans for 3rd party support. When Fred emailed me a bunch of topic links yesterday my jaw was slowly following the force of gravity.

You can see why it's an advantage to lock down your environment if you want to create a consistently positive end-user experience. However that's not something I associate with Microsoft LIVE! which is (to put it brutally from my experience) bloody nasty, ugly, intrusive, bloated, ignored where possible, and this is the store front of choice. *scratches head*


As for what I've seen and read about Flight as a simulator, well I take it with a pinch of salt. It's beta which is dev speak for "if you don't like then it's your fault for trying it too soon". People have been doing total flight model replacements in MSFS for years, FSX is a framework for rendering scenery and nothing I've read about Flight says it's any different in that respect. If anything the early design comments suggest it's capable of more. Looking over peoples comments, their main issues seem to be down to tone, content and 3rd party policies.

To which all I can do is shrug. I quite like the tone (front end stuff), content will come I guess, early days.

Not sure what people were expecting from Flight that they didn't already have thanks to the dedication and work of thousands of people that kept FSX and FS2004 going as long as it has. They will continue to do so for years to come so long as dedicated enthusiasts support the market. I suspect Flight will surprise us down the road, I applaud the idea of the micro-transaction model in principle, it works well in eastern markets and MMOs. It would be nicer if it was open to ALL 3rd parties who wanted to sell content throught like the Apple store, with Microsoft taking a little bit of the pie. With user content rating that would work well.

*edit* As Dave just commented, I wonder if MS will offer their next OS for free, but make you pay for all the apps like Calculator and Paint?