The first thing I got from the demo was a better feel for the aircraft than in FS9. The VC and gauges were very smooth, and it seemed to me to be a bit easier to judge the transitions in flight, although that may be the VC...I haven't done a lot of VC flying. All in all, the VFR flying seemed to be improved a bit from FS9. I do have a quibble with not being able to see a windsock near a runway...I was hoping that there would be something a bit more visible.Secondly, I played around a bit with the weather. Themes are still the same as in FS9, and most of the weather effects appear to be pretty close to FS9 defaults. There might be a touch of improvement in overcast conditions, but you still get clouds that are a bit see-thru. The big difference here was the wet taxiways/runways. It looked pretty good, but seemed to be a lot of water, and all evenly textured. I like the fact that the pavement is wet now...it's a good touch...but I think that puddles as opposed to a flat wet texture might be more realistic. *shrug* Opportunity for 3rd parties?Next, nighttime flying. The stars look spectacular. Clear sky agrees with FSX here...I think I see why the dev team has been stressing the stars in FSX...they look great. Runways also look very good, with the lights just right and with good distance fading. I didn't get a good chance to look at landing lights, although I suspect they won't look so good (that darned time limit). My slight beef is with the ground night textures...I am glad that there are a lot more lights there than in FS9, but they seem to be perhaps a bit overdone to me (could be a graphics setting issue, too...I'll play with that). The contrast between lights and darks spots on the terrain textures seems to be like the ground is lit by yellow klieg lighting everywhere.From what I've seen so far, FSX is going to be a significant improvement to the VFR pilots out there. The feel of the plane, the visibility afforded by the new cameras and the mouselook, and the improved scenery all add up to a great product for the VFR crowd. For the IFR crowd and the airline pilots...well, not so much. It is still a worthwhile update...the approaches will look a bit nicer, and it seems like hand flying the aircraft will be a bit more instinctive, but there really aren't any OMG features that the demo showed off for IFR pilots. I still think that FSX will be worth the $70 investment, though...I've paid almost as much for FS9 payware that added as much improvement, and FSX looks to me like a very ripe platform for improvement. I would love to see what the scenery folks do to the 1m/pixel limitations now.PS: Love the new Orbit livery...I may not see it once traffic addons start hitting the market, but the livery artists did a great job on it.

I am look at FSX it this way. I have spent $50 on ONE single addon. This to me is just another really BIG addon for the same price.From what Ive seen so far, if each improvement was sold individually and sold by addon makers I am looking at $500+ worth of payware here.Lets face it, people buy water,sky color,roads,AI,autogen,runway textures,sounds. $50 for FSX is a #### of a deal.Its really what I cannot see that Microsoft has enabled/added feature wise that the developers can utilize.Cause Im sick and tired of the "its a limitation of fs" line.However I seriously doubt Ive heard the last of it....

It does look fairly nice. The water is awesome (once you turn up the slider). The land is ... well, pretty good, but perhaps I'm not seeing the great textures I should be seeing. I'm a bit disappointed in the auto-gen; it doesn't seem nicely arranged on the textures like I've seen in some screen shots (and like I get with BEV).The Beaver looks great. Window reflections, nice smooth gauge movement, all of the things I'd expect in a middle-of-the-road payware plane. It may be my imagination, but there was also a bit more of a sense of inertia when flying. Perhaps it's just because the VC is more immersive than before.Performance is pretty bad on my machine. Doesn't really matter how much I fiddle with the settings. I'm lucky to get 15fps. Very slow loading as well. I expected as much, but thought I might do better since the demo is in a remote area.After flying FSX I loaded up FS9 in the same area with one of my favorite payware planes. Ran will plenty of scenery upgrades, 1680x1050, sliders nearly full out, etc. at around 60fps. Controls were crystal smooth. It actually got me excited to do some flying again after having left FS9 for a few months.So, based on this admittedly early demo I am in no hurry to upgrade to FSX. Perhaps I'll wait until Vista and the DX10 cards and then upgrade my system. I'll just get frustrated trying to fiddle with this new version when I have FS9 running so much better.

Got it, flew it, deleted it. Too much like a beta for me.

I definitely felt better about flying VFR. I think there are subtle camera movements in the VC that help with that inertia feeling.I made a smooth little landing with the Ultralight, and then later found an award in my Pilot's Record for my first landing. For a 26 year old, I was waaaay too jazzed about that.I'm starting to get a good feel for what graphics settings I can have turned on. All in all, I love it.

Only spent about 20-30 min in FSX so far but here's two, new, items that i like so far:1) Head movement added to the VC when climbing/decending, turning, acceleration and braking.2)Improved progressive taxi...Nice touch!My computer is pretty out dated (for now):-- 2400+ Athlon, 1Gig DDR PC2100 mem, Gforce 5900SE 128 MB --So I'll leave the, max graphics, judgements to others but from the screenshots so far it looks great! I'm going to max it out once, can't help myself, just for fun. At the very least I can sit back and enjoy the "slideshow". At the medium, medium-low settings level it seems to perform as well of better then FS9. Okay, now back to the sim....-Thad

WOW! For me FSX has far exceeded my expectations. Water, mesh, dynamic scenery density, coastlines, roads, and the settings, they are a work of art by themselves.I dont know if I can fly fs9 anymore.

I have Islands of the west Indies and know this area very well. A great place for a demo because the fps in this area are higher than any other Ive flown. Lots and lots of water with small,sparse islands.If this were any other area,say LA,Miami, New York, there is no telling how it would run but my guess it pretty bad.At least we have more sliders and options to keep us busy over the next few years.

After about 20 minutes so far....-LOVE the new water. It looks much better, even at lower settings. Huge improvement.-Road traffic is very neat. Moving the slider more to the right makes it a little TOO dense, for my tastes, so many people will be pleased with this feature. Traffic is NOT on two-lane roads only, as some had said.-Head latency in the VC works well. Nice touch... glad it's included.My only nit-picks so far- autogen trees are still scaled way too large. Still, I'm sure some freeware developer will "fix" this ASAP.-the ground vehicles move too fast. It looks like they do 100mph at all times. Something tells me we'll be able to modify this, somehow, so I'm not too worried about it.Overall - EXCELLENT impression so far, even on my modest system (Athlon 2400+, 1.5 gigs RAM, 128 meg GeForce 5200)Thank you Microsoft!

I love it!!!!!!!:D Here are my pics http://www.fs2004.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=86184&st=0

Im not to wild about the demo it's is very unstable.

max speed settings are in the configuration file - in the folder for each vehicle / model.

Ok some people are still working :-roll I'm confused. I can't see any mention or screen shot about the cloud shadows???

I too tried it for 1/2 or so and am on the fence.I think we need the full package to get the feel of it.Froma pure flying perspective it's the same as FS2004 (setting things like gfx and such aside).As well full sliders chokes my system. It was much better when I made some adjustments.

First impression:Good demo. In it's beta and untweaked state it takes a little longer to load a scene than FS9, and it has more blurries. Frames are not a problem, even with sliders up.Good overall.System Specs: 3700+(@2.4 ghz), 2 gigs Corsair XMS ram (3-3-3-8), 7800GT (77.79 driver)etc. etc.Rhett