FuzzyQBall1

I wonder if the experience points system will be a factor in delaying or preventing the introduction of jets. Last night I did a passenger transport trip to Honolulu. I don't remember where I started but I remeber the distance was about 84 NM. It took me about about 45 minutes from gate to gate and I earned about 8,000 XP (no skip, night, happy passengers). I did the trip on the Maule, which when I'm at cruising altitude I can usually trim it to get about 150 kts cruising speed. If MS were to introduce the Bombardier Challenger 601, that plane has a cruising speed of 459 knots (according to Wiki), capacity for 19 passengers and a max take off weight of 19,550 kg (43,100 lb). Going three times faster I could've done the same run in about 15 minutes. I'm going to assume I would earn the same XP as the XP should be baaed on how far you are travelling and what you're carrying (people vs cargo). If players in general can earn that much XP in that short of time everyone would reach max level in a week, which would kind of make the XP system kind of pointless. Never mind clandestine missions would be a breeze since you can outrun the cops unless they started flying F-16s. Therefore it makes me wonder if jets will ever be introduced at all. Just a thought.

Thanks, I think. While I am not sure what you are talking about are you saying Laminar is somehow preventing thrid party developers from releasing their product? Thanks MdMax. Much appreciated. Thanks carrotroot. An excellent blog. Thanks Greg. Anyone with a valid opinion is experienced in my book. I am in this for the long haul, so I'm more than happy to sit and wait for Laminar to improve, develop and release. However I also acknowledge I'm a little late to the dance, and there's a lot of content/planes/scenery available for X-Plane 10, so any guidance to root through the coal to get to the diamonds would be appreciated.

So I puirchsaed X-Plane 10 and I couldn't be happier with my purchase. I installed it about a week ago and have been fiddling with it to get the controls just right. X-Plane gives me that sense of realism that Flight wasn't giving me (keep in mind I'm keeping Flight and will purchase DLC for that program as I would like to see where that program is going). With Flight I feel like I was flying . With X-Plane I feel like a pilot (I'm not one in real life). What I would like to know from the expereienced aficianados here is what they would recommend to improve the scenery in X-Plane. I saw a paid add-on called Urban Maxx Extreme. Would this help the overall appearance of urban areas? I know purchasing/downloading scenery packs/airports will help specific areas but I was just wondering what people would recommend for a general application? Thanks for reading.

For me in order for something to be a sim it has to cover those basics that everyone in the real world experiences (the rest is gravy). While all pilots should know how to start their airplane (I hope!) not all pilots have to know how to fly a helicopter. While all sailors have to sail in various weather conditions not all sailors have to know how to properly tow another vessel. While all drivers have to know what to do at a stop light not all drivers have to know how to work a manual transmission. To me, however, there is one basic element of flying that Flight misses that allows me to say it's a sim: AI traffic. All pilots have to work with other aircraft. All sailors have to navigate taking into consideration other vessels. All drivers have to share the road with other vehicles. Without this one tick in the box Flight is just an aircraft operating replication program (with sightseeing capabilities), however it's not a flight sim. What Flight does it does well, however I really don't see where the incentive for MS is to take it beyond that.

I would love to see AI traffic in Flight, but I don't believe it's ever going to happen. In my opinion I don't think Flight was designed to handle it. I think all those lovely frame rates people are experiencing right now would drop dramatically if Flight had to calculate/draw the movements of air and ground traffic. I believe this is why it was never included in the first place. It's also why I think the Destination marker in Jobs exist: Now Microsoft doesn't have to bother with accurate real world navigation (or give you access to a map during jobs) since they've provided a work around. While I would love MS to prove me wrong MS has always been profit driven, not excellence driven (Vista, Zune or Windows Phone anyone?). Just my $0.02

While it's easy to dismiss the IGN review, keep in mind I have not seen any general advertisement for Flight. I read previsouly how Microsoft hopes to have 20,000,000 users eventually, however without any effort to tell the general public that Flight exists your average gamer's first exposure is going to be through sites like IGN which hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people follow and. most importantly, trust. While it's all fine and dandy to rebutt the review in this forum the general gaming population is not going to read it. You're basically preaching to the choir (even if some of the choir members are singing a different song). It's the general gaming sites that MS has to win over, however it appears they are failing in this regard. Most won't bother with the free download if the reviewers are saying, "Why bother?". These reviewers have to review what they are given, not what could be. Hopefully they'll review the expansions as well and update their opinions (and scores) of Flight afterwards, but the reviewers are under no obligation to account for future possibilities in the scores they come up with today. If that were the case almost every game released today would be a 9 or 10.

Arghhh! No points tracking and no aerocaches for 3-4 days. Guess I can clean the house :Frustrated:

All I get is a message saying "The profile cannot be signed into Live. There may be a network problem or Windows Live ID service may not be available." Everything was fine yesterday.

As far as I know you get a bonus for not skipping when doing a job but there is no bonus for not skipping in a mission like the Airport Photo mission, so you can skip in a mission with no penalty. I can't imagine doing the Airport Photo mission without skipping. You'd need the patience of a saint to fly that far that (relatively) slowly.

Right, right. I get the two mixed up. I meant jobs that you pick up from the job board. That's where you get the no skip bonus. My bad.

You cannot access the map during a mission. I'm guessing they do this in order to avoid you accessing the map and repositioning the plane or changing the time of day (you get a bonus for flying missions at night where possible). It's either you fly the entire mission or you skip to waypoint. I'm guessing Flight doesn't have the ability to give you points for flying a portion of the mission before skipping. You either get the entire bonus for not skipping (which is quite substantial) or you get zero. It's too bad they don't have a version of the map that you can access in Flight where you can't touch your plane. Without this and without any other working form of navigation that I know how to use I need the destination marker to know where I'm going.

Anywhere you can land and not crash works. I've landed on the side of Mauna Loa and she was able to "go". Taking off from the side of a mountain was tricky but as long as you don't hit a tree you're good to go.

RoboRayAs far as I know, MS has not released any details about what, if any, aircraft will be included as part of the Alaska DLC and what will be released as purchasable DLC. If I had to guess I would say they would release some sort of float plane as it would be relatively simple to model and would allow the user to enjoy landing on the many lakes that are found in Alaska and reach some of the remote communities that can only be reached by float plane for missions and such. I would be surprised if they included more than one plane with the map. However this is all my opinion. I have no insider knowledge.

Figured it out: Parking brake was on. Before anyone laughs in my defence I would like to point out I am new to flight sims and I find it odd a demo would start you off at the beginning of a runway yet leave you to figure out the parking brake is on amongst the multitude of switches, buttons and dials.

Here's my take. According to Wiki Hawaii is 10,931 square miles. The Hawaii DLC cost $20. The Alaska expansion is suppose to cover 1.2 million square miles. Should the Alaska DLC also cost $20 I feel that Hawaii would be a bit of a rip off (especially considering a large percentage of the Hawaii map is ocean). Therefore I can't see Alaska costing the same as Hawaii. Alaska would require way more work on the part of the developers as compared to Hawaii in my opinion, so I really don't see how the Alaska expansion can cost $20. Just my $0.02. Thanks for reading.

Like any good drug dealer you keep the price low initially to get people hooked and then you jack up the price. I think people would rather pay $40 for Alaska than go through Flight withdrawal. :Sick:

I actually made a suggestion during Beta that when the scoring screen appears to have a small blurb at the bottom next to the Happy Passenger score to explain why you were scored the way you were (i.e. 'Taxi too fast' 'Flying too high/low" 'Rough Landing'). I guess it was another suggestion, like many others, that were ignored.

Hi MdMaxI'm using a Thrustmaster Warthog joystick. I did read the manual for X-Plane. Maybe it's a problem with the joystick? It seems to work fine with Flight but I'll see if Thrustmaster's site/forum has any advice.

I can think of several things on top of my wishlist (AI traffic would be at the top) which need to be addressed before Real World Weather becomes a concern.

So is MS going to release each State individually as DLC? If they are then even at $20 a pop this is going to turn out to be one expensive game!

So I succesfully downloaded and ran the X-Plane demo. It started with me in the cockpit of a 737 at the beghinning of the runway. I applied throttle but the rudder or whatever is being used to steer the plane on the ground seems to be stuck on hard right because the plane immediately statrts trying to turn right. As speed increases to plane starts spinning to the right until I decrease the throttle to idle. I checked the control setup but I can't figure out what controls the rudder. Either I'm doing something wrong or the plane has ben listening to too much Rush Limbaugh. I'm guessing the former. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for reading.

Thanks JasonX. Hard to believe 2 months ago I knew of only 1 flight sim, now it seems like there's 20 of them! :(

Thanks mad dog. Vive la revolution!

Here's my take: Some of you may be familiar with Miles Davis, but for those of you who aren't he was, IMHO, the greatest jazz trumpet player that ever lived. If he were still alive today and I went up to him and said, "Mr. Davis could you play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' for me? Here's the sheet music, and I don't want you doing anything different than what's written on the page, and I'll just set up this metronome so you only play at my preset tempo. Oh and I want you to use this student level trumpet.", I shouldn't be surprised to hear Mr. Daivs say, "This is bull****!", and he'd be right to do so. However if I say, ""Mr. Davis could you play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' for me?" and that's it, then Mr. Davis is free to either play the song as kids know it or he can play the song with all sorts of flourishes, solos, key changes, tempo changes and all the other abilities he has that made him the greatest trumpet player of all time. However should he choose to play the version taught to kids and that's it he can't blame the song for being beneath him and he can't blame me for asking him to play it, because he didn't choose to put in the effort to play the song to it's, and his, fullest potential. I feel the author of the review is expecting to make beautiful music without doing anything else than reading what's on the page. A game like Flight needs to be explored to it's fullest depth in order to appreciate it. However I will acknowledge just like Twinkle, Twinle Little Star you can only go take Flight so far due to it's simplicity, at least at this stage. Oh and because I can't figure out how to work it into my metaphor let me also say I hate how empty the world is. Thanks for reading.

HelloI was a Beta tester for Flight and am currently playing it (I've purchased the Hawaii expansion pack and have all the planes). If it wasn't for Flight I wouldn't be bothering with any flight sim at all. I've seen Flight Simulator X on the shelves at Best Buy but it's never called to me. Flight on the other hand was right up my alley, however after playing it for the last couple of months (since Beta) I have to admit I feel like I'm missing something. Flying around in Flight is nice and all that, but it feels like I've purchased an auto racing game where all you do is race around the track by yourself trying to beat your own time. No fans, no pit crews, nobody else, just you, the car and the track. While this might be fun for a little while it can wear thin after a while. I feel that is where I might be with Flight. Therefore while searching for information to help me understand some of the instruments on some of the planes I found this forum, and while browsing the forum I discovered about other flight sims, including X-Plane. If it wasn't for Flight I wouldn't be on this forum and I would have never known about X-Plane. This isn't to say I've purchased X-Plane, yet. I am curious about what else is out there and I have to admit looking at some the features of X-Plane (a populated world! hooray!) it does seem very nice, and it's also nice to see a developer that is supporting/developing it's product (as opposed to Microsoft and Flight Simulator) and not relying solely on the kindness of strangers. However X-Plane is a BIG program and seems pretty complicated on a certain levels (it's like going from indoor rock climbing one day to trying to scale Mt. Kilimanjaro the next). Flight is simple and gives us noobs a proper entry into the world of flying. Do I think Flight can become on par with X-Plane and Fight Simulator in terms of features? I don't know. The problem for me is Microsoft has always been profit driven, not excellence driven (Vista, Windows Mobile OS or Zune anyone?), and they have been pretty tight lipped about the future of Flight both short term or long term. They're just as likely to update the program with all the features that the sim community have been asking for, but then again they're also just as likely to spend the next year releasing individual states as DLC (fly exciting Idaho!). I'm not sure I have the patience to sit and wait, hence my interest in other flight sims. Flight is not Microsoft's only product (at this point it's probably a blip on the income statement), and they could drop it tomorrow without much impact to them (the same probably can't be said for Laminar who has a big stake in X-Plane). However until we find out I say let's celebrate Flight for what it is: the game which allows everyone a chance to enjoy the ability to fly. Thanks for reading.