Flight Unlimited 3 memories

[nonflyingdutchman 40]

I remember the runway and taxi lights were great, fading in the distance...

[Christopher Low 5,352]

It's sad to see familiar names with "guest" in front of them now.....like ansgar, twsimfan, and staggerwing. All that remains are ghosts, and tumbleweed

[AnsgarA 9]

Hello Chris,

very nice to see you kidding and surrounding around here from time to time. :D

No "guest" in front of mine - still Ansgar - but with an attached "A" as footnote... ;)

As one of the basic founders of very nice time as FU3 free developer team you know the reason: It comes over us with the big HDD crash of avsim years ago.

Sometimes I also use my de-duster and start up our old nice baby with some of it's nice upgrades, or the "Reno race" - just to train my aged nerves .

Very kind greetings to all of you.

Ansgar Avermeyer

[Christopher Low 5,352]

Nice to see you again, Ansgar. I have not installed FU3 in over nine years, but the box still has a special place on my software shelf I am currently enjoying flying the PMDG 737 NGX and 747-400 around the UK and Ireland (plus a short hop across the North Sea to Amsterdam Schiphol), and I hope to add the PMDG 777F to my flight schedule very soon

[andy9164 0]

Wow some people still here and I'm still surprised i can remember by username and password.

I was clearing out some stuff off one of my old PC's a few weeks ago and came across a whole heap of FU3_UKS files and it got my mind ticking. I remember spending hours developing Lydd airport with a lot of help from Rob Driscoll and publishing it for other users, even though I had initially no idea what I was doing. After that I went searching and found 4 x CD's labelled FU3-UKS Base package .

I am tempted now to try and rebuild everything and start flying again but I suppose technology has moved so fast that it could be fraught with time consuming issues. I may try with FU2 and FU3 first and see where that goes and who knows maybe even try FU3_UKS if I have the patience.

It used to be a real pleasure to fly around on this sim, and one thing I remember was that most UK airports on the UKS version had Glidernuts hanger. Even Lydd had one half way down the taxiway to the runway. There was even one at Gatwick, in fact I think that's where you started.

Will come back and let you know if I managed to resurrect anything.

Happy Days.

Andy

[juvat 0]

Just had a pleasant little flight, Coupeville Nolf, with Flt3 on my win8pro64bit pc today.Then started challenge 'Hikers Misadventure; challenge ran fine, but my flying skills didn't. 

Running dgvoodoo2 v2.5 got Flt3 functioning and looking right good. Brought back such pleasant memories; Flt3 and the fellas here at Avsim.

you all take care,

jimb

[Kronovan 14]

My fond memories of FU3 began in the late 90's. It was around the time my nephew joined air cadets and I pitched in $ with my bro-inlaw and added lots of elbow grease to make him a virtual cockpit running FS 98. It was on one of my trips to local game and book stores while looking for FS addons and references that I noticed FU3 on the shelf of a videogame store. Later I sussed out reviews and read that it mostly covered greater Seattle, so decided it probably wouldn't be a game my nephew would enjoy. I'd been bitten by the flightsim bug while building my nephew's vc, so I'd just bought a CH Products stick and pedals and was looking to return to a hobby I hadn't enjoyed since the days of FS 3.1. That videogame store also sold used games and I noticed they also had a boxed copy of the previous edition of FU, which I'd read could be combined with 3 to extend it from Seattle to Frisco. I live in the Pacific NW, so that sounded very promising and I returned to snap up that FU2 box.

Shortly after on a trip to a book store that focused on computer books, I noticed a book dedicated to FU3 that was published by Sybex - a publisher I was familiar with for producing quality computer books. It looked like a sound read and was reasonably priced, so I snapped it up. When I finally got FU3 installed and running on my PC with my brand-spanking new Voodoo 3500, I was blown away by the visuals. I was even more impressed with the flight modeling which was a big step up from FS98. When I realized it had adventures that were a heckuva lot of fun to play, I deciced I also needed to get a copy for my nephew too which he enjoyed.

I still have that FU3 book, the 2 CD-ROMS, all the box inserts and the flattened game boxes buried somewhere deep in storage. I'm currently only flying FSX:SE for GA flight simming, but also fly Strike Fighters 2 and occasionally Falcon BMS, IL-2 CLOD and DCS. I'm tempted to reinstall FU3 just to play some of those adventures again, which IMO haven't been surpassed with anything available for FSX. Kudos to MS and the Aces dev team though, for embracing in FSX the potential Looking Glass Studios had tapped with FU3 adventures. I'm thinking it won't be easy to get it to work on the Win7 64 OS I run on my gaming rig. I might be disappointed for all the effort too, as fond memories of such games are usually viewed through rosy-tinted glasses. I did reinstall it about a decade ago on WinXP, but got a weird graphical line or 2 fouling up the cockpit display. I'm going to browse some of the threads here to see what other's experiences with resuscitating it have been like.

My absolutely fondest memory of FU3 is flying that adventure where you land on skis in a parking lot at Mt. Rainier lodge and rescue the park ranger - or was it a civilian.  😉 

Edited August 27, 2019 by Kronovan

[Christopher Low 5,352]

It's nice to see someone talking about FU3 after all these years. It has a very special place in my heart, and it always will ❤️

[Tomi 0]

Hey, my username and password still work! 😁 

I don't know how but it just came to my mind to see if this forum it still alive. It is funny to see familiar usernames, after so many years. I dont even dare to think how long ago it was when my FU3 career was active... 

I still have all those flightsim packages sitting on a shelf, including the FU series, just waiting for me to reinstall them. Too bad I dont seem to have time to do that.

But after reading you guys running it on Win10 I think I'll install it some day, dig out all those gameport-connected flight controllers from somewheren in storage and give FU3 a go!

Tomi

Edited February 21, 2020 by Tomi
typo

[willisxdc 0]

Flight Unlimited 1 was my favorite sim for just going flying. No messing with setup and addons. The flight dynamics were amazing in FU1. Was a great way to waste a Sunday afternoon.

[Dave Morgan 68]

Ten years since I played seriously with FU3, and I think three since I used it at all.

I recently had a new PC built for me for running FS9 on XP (very frustrated with newer sims and with Win 10) and the first thing I did was... well, actually the first thing I did was install Nvidia Inspector... but after that it was extracting my FU3 backup and have a go at landing on that ribbon of nothing at Diamond Point.

There were two challenges I couldn't find though. I think they were both made by John Lewis aka Glidernut. One was called Tak off Backwoods (typical Glidernut spelin), rather like this but backwards, and the other was a tiny ten-foot strip on top of a knife-edge ridge where you had to land like this.

Any ideas what the packages were called?

Edited April 10, 2020 by Dave Morgan

[patrikmore 10]

Hi everybody,

I'm going to be as short as possbible:

FLIGHT UNLIMITED is working with Windows 10.

For the game itself, don't worry, it's now abandonware. You can find easily FU2 and FU3. Do not forget the 2.0 patch. Installation tricks: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Flight_Unlimited_III

The big trick is to download and install (just put DGVOODOO2. (Just put ddraw.dll, D3DImm.dll and dgVoodooCpl.exe in the game directory). DirectX settings: put 64 mb of vram and fast video memory access. Also force anisotropic 8x. Nothing more.

Playing as administrator, in my case I managed to play the intro video. I replaced the EA_LG.AVI file by the one from Flight Unlimited 2, changing the name, because it is more spectacular.

In this link https://library.avsim.net/index.php?CatID=lgfu3&Sort=Author&ScanMode=1&Page=1 you have Ansgar Avermeyer AI Package, and a few more planes to install directly, as one Boing 747.

Christopher Low has uploaded Seattle 2006 and SanFran 2006 to my MediaFire account. You can download them using the links below.... Seattle 2006 http://www.mediafire...j59kocbuja241tn SanFran 2006 http://www.mediafire...mdoiqam8o6127y7

Manual is here: http://alfozavr.wdfiles.com/local--files/fu3-downloads/FU3_Manual.pdf

Play it in 1024 x 768, with 3D acceleration driver activated. On settings push all sliders to the right except distance clipping. Haze and gamma as you like.

[patrikmore 10]

I've just found that "DDrawCompat experimental release" https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases works even better than dgvoodoo2 !

Great, great, great. More stable, opens full screen every time, less lag, D3D output (smooth sky), with just one ddraw.dll file in the game folder. All this on Windows 10. Remember in options 1024x768, and 3D accelerated driver.