peterb

Was an Alaska DLC pack confirmed? Is there a release date?

That said, the XP rewards are impressive...

By default there are various flight assists on that make it harder. You'll want to turn those off. I forget exactly where they are, but I presume they're in the options menu somewhere. As I mentioned in the discussion of my review, this is a completely arbitrary line. FSX is a game as much as it is a simulator as well. The developers of Flight have drawn a different line that you would have, but there's no magic point at which we all agree that without a manually set up visibility it's not a sim, but with it it is. It's primarily, in other words, simply a matter of taste. You just like a different sort of game.

This is a topic that I've written on at some length, although not with respect to flight simulators:http://tleaves.com/2004/11/19/realism/Your mistake is in thinking two things:(1) That japascoe was actually trying to make a strong claim that Flight is literally "realistic". (The fact that he pointed out that he's never flown a plane is a clue that, no matter what words he used, this wasn't what he meant.)(2) That literal realism qua realism is unquestionably the standard a flight sim game should be striving towards.The use of the word 'simulator' trips us up here, but my point of view in a nutshell is that most customers don't actually want flight sim games that are realistic. They want flight sim games that seem realistic - which has little to do with being realistic. The phrase I use in my article is "iconic verisimilitude". The ideal "sim" game (in whatever genre) makes you feel like you are experiencing all of the good parts of engaging in that activity while quietly cutting out all of the boring and expensive and stupid parts that you don't want to do.There are people who want the boring parts. There are people who don't. There's nothing wrong with wanting whatever it is that you want. But as someone who thinks about games a lot, I think it's very important that we explicitly call out this assumption that "realism" is actually desirable (let alone possible) and, where appropriate, question it.In other words, if your standard for judging a sim is primarily on the axis of actual realism, that's fine - but I believe that many players, if they actually stopped to think about it for a few minutes, would agree that when faced with a choice between realism and fun, they'd prefer the game that set aside realism when it conflicted with fun, rather than vice-versa.

It runs great with all sliders maxed out at 1920xwhatever on my 2011 iMac. But the mini is a different kettle of fish.

From an engineering standpoint, yes. It might not look that different in a static screenshot, but rewriting a graphics engine to run on the GPU instead of the CPU isn't a trivial task. And that's 90% of the reason that Flight's framerate is so good.

Thanks, Stephen!One thing that didn't make it into my review is that in the list of things that are now 'missing' from Flight, the most obvious to me (as an amateur) is the 'flight tutorials' from FSX. As far as I'm concerned, that's the single greatest loss.Obviously, people who are used to flying IFR or big-body airliners in their sim will have their own perspective. My perspective on this is very specifically skewed because I've spent years playing war-games, both computerized and otherwise. As the market for war-games has shrunk, the "detail oriented" folk became a larger and larger percentage of the market. One of the demands some of these people have is "realism". This leads, eventually, to SSI's The Campaign For North Africa which has so many rules that no reasonable human being can play it and still have fun (most-cited example: the game's Italian troops required additional water supplies so that they could make pasta).I view Flight as an attempt by Microsoft to intentionally and consciously reject the flight-sim-grognardy demand that flying a virtual plane consist of all the parts of flying a real plane, including the parts that aren't any fun. You can see that they're still trying to find the right balance - for example, I think the "Go through the checklist, or just press this button that does it for you" decisions are an example of where they're trying to split the difference. It sure doesn't feel particularly 'gamier' than any other sim I've played - but since I have never piloted an actual plane, my opinion on this issue in particular is probably not very useful.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I will try to restrain myself from writing angry forum posts from a position of extreme entitlement, yes.

This is a super-helpful tip. Thanks!

Well, having reached level 9, having bought Hawaii and most of the available planes, and having logged a few hours in the virtual air, I think it's time to give my perspective.There's a particular cry that goes out on gaming forums whenever any sort of sequel is released. The cry can be reduced to the phrase "They dumbed it down!" Deconstructing this, what it really means is "They changed some difficult or unforgiving aspect of the game such that more people will want to play it." It's the gamer version of "Oh, that band was really awesome until they sold out." In the music context, "sold out" means "has made music that more people want to listen to."With Flight, Microsoft has made a flight simulator that more people are going to want to play. They've made a flight simulator that more people are going to be able to play. I think this is a great thing.From a high level, here's what Microsoft has done with Flight compared to Flight Simulator X.The graphic engine is completely new. Usually this sort of change is evolutionary, but in Flight's case, it's revolutionary. Specifically, rendering has moved into the 21st century by being moved primarily onto the PC's GPU instead of being CPU-bound. This has a huge number of effects, beginning with "It looks generally better," continuing through "and runs at higher resolutions on the same hardware" and moving on to "with extremely high frame rates compared to FSX.Second, where FSX gave you the entire world, with comparatively low detail, to fly around in, Flight has taken another tack: they've started with the Big Island of Hawaii for free, and made the entire Hawaiian island chain available for download as a purchase. But the positive side of this tradeoff is that the islands exist in a comparatively fleshed out form. Even flying at extremely low altitudes, the scenery is detailed enough that it feels much better than FSX, to my eyes at least.LIkewise, where FSX gave you approximately 7,142,528 different models of aircraft to choose from, Flight gives you two (for free), and makes 3 more (at present) available for purchase.Flight is structured in a very game-like, as compared to sim-like fashion. Yes, you can fly around on your own with no restrictions, or you can run 'missions'. Some missions require particular aircraft (this, by the way, is what some people complaining about the aircraft choice might not have noticed. The Maule, for example, has a price tag not because of the bitmap of the plane, but because it's effectively selling access to the cargo missions.) The missions I've run so far have run the gamut and have been fun and engaging - I particularly enjoyed a coast guard Search & Rescue mission to find a lost kayaker, for example.Furthermore, taking a page from Grand Theft Auto, Flight has a large number of 'aerocaches' hidden throughout the islands; finding them awards you with experience points, the occasional achievement, and bragging rights. The aerocaches are a good way to engage in some virtual tourism, since many of them are located at interesting sites around Hawaii.In what's an interesting decision for a flight simulator, you can get out of your plane and walk around. The world - at least so far - is fairly sterile, so this is more of a curiosity than a major selling point. But it suggests obvious areas for further expansion if Flight takes off.The user interface is quite streamlined, working best with a flightstick but also being perhaps the first Microsoft sim to be plausible with a mouse and keyboard. This will no doubt infuriate purists. But they can get off my lawn. Flight also bravely steals the best ideas from non-flightsim games. For example, there is a "Fly to next waypoint" shortcut that jumps you straight to the next interesting thing in a flight. This is not something one would want to use all the time, but it's nice to have it available when you need it. (Compare this, from a user-interface perspective, with FSX's pretty-much-unusable time compression feature, and you can see how much more thought went into usability).Obviously, this usability comes at a price: I seriously doubt that anyone is going to be learning to fly a real airplane by playing Microsoft Flight. But that's clearly not the market they're trying to sell to, and as a kibbitzer I can't say I disagree with their decision. In the long term, I don't want to be confined to just Hawaii, and for me personally the success or failure of Flight as a platform will hinge upon the extent to which new areas to explore are rolled out.To those who feel that the existence of Flight is somehow a personal affront, all I can say is Microsoft is in the business of selling software. The existence of Flight doesn't take away your functioning Flight Simulator X Microsoft doesn't "owe" you FS XI, XII, or MCMVII. No one is forcing you to buy Flight.

(1) I'll point out that a lot of the silly internet rage against Flight is because people are mortally wounded that they have to "buy" new scenery. Why is it any better if I have to buy that scenery from a third party instead of Microsoft?(2) I'll risk invoking even more internet rage by saying that I like being able to buy the stuff in-game. Every time I dealt with an add-on in Flight Sim X it ended up being, frankly, a pain in the butt.(3) We'll have to agree to disagree about the FSX scenery. As far as I'm concerned, the default scenery was all garbage. The best thing you could say about it was "Well, it exists. Barely."

As a user, I don't really care whether it has 23.4% more polygons or whatever. What I care about it is that it looks better. On my very high-end system, Flight looks much better. I have to believe that that is because of effort put into making Hawaii feel plausible. Whether that was done by changing the models or simply by having the visual designers focus on topology more, I don't particularly care.

It's not a "scam" because you know what you're buying ahead of time, and if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it.For me personally, I'd rather pay $20 for terrain, in an area that I care about, that feels fairly bespoke than $60 for an entire world of flat, boring, featureless junk. And yes, I consider the FSX included scenery to be mostly junk. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

The short version is "On the Internet, everyone hates everything."I think it's a charming successor to FSX, especially when you consider that the alternative is "no successor to FSX at all." But some people just hate and fear change.It's certainly a lot less 'simmy' than FSX was. But fundamentally I think it's reasonable to assume that if this succeeds, and if there's a market for more simmy features, Microsoft will add them.If, on the other hand, there isn't a market for them, then it's pointless to complain about it.My $0.02.