HummusLord

Indeed. jcomm's passion was pretty steady while Flight was still in development. Ever since Flight's shuttering though I feel like I'm on a roller coaster ride when reading his posts. I know I don't have to read them but the drama as he seems to personally struggle with finding a suitable replacement draws me in.

IMO the movie is horrendous. But most book based movies are, especially the ones that deal with such a detailed universe as Dune. It could be that my opinion is colored because I didn't watch it until I (and the movie) was older and after I read the books.

Oh yeah, forgot how bad mirages can get on Dune. Also, apparently the ornithopters have a cockpit similar to a cub...interesting... :Nerd:

But I see water, so clearly that isn't Arrakis. ^_^

Here's how it went down for me: Got home from work, promptly downloaded the cubby, fired it up in Flight for a test run, thought it was the bees knees. Had dreams of MS providing more content for said cubby, logged onto AVSIM to see what others were saying about it. Oh what's this, MS is shuttering Flight?....awesome....shoulda saved my $15 worth of MS points. Although I really like what they did with the VC cub and think it is a cool plane, it is still on a platform with no future. I just have a hard time enjoying Flight anymore with this constantly nagging at me. Despite its shortcomings I thought it really had potential given the proper focus and time.

If they do, let's hope it has a cockpit. :lol:

Agreed, but that didn't annoy me so much. However, the poster I was quoting made it sound like all the missions were unrealistic with an arcade feel. Makes me wonder how many he tried before making such a blanket statement. On another note, the landing challenges will be sorely missed too, I just had to get that arcade gold cup.

I didn't find the missions in Flight all that unrealistic or "arcady". Sure they weren't as sophisticated as some of the more advanced FSX missions but I could appreciate what they were trying to do with Flight and some of the missions were interesting and educational like the one where you took a photographer through Pearl Harbor, etc. I was really hoping they would continue in this vein with Alaska, etc. because I think missions can make a sim pretty interesting, but alas...

You might find what you're looking for under the 'weather engine' section of 'configuration manager'.

FSX is what initially got me interested in simming a few years ago but I finished all the missions and some lessons and got bored with it. I couldn't run it too well either, but it was playable. Flight piqued my interest again but I was growing tired of the slow release of their content and the poor communication from MS but I thought it had potential. A couple of weeks ago I decided to reinstall FSX because I have a much better computer and can finally run it pretty smooth but it does need some addons so it doesn't look so blah. REX, GEX, UTX and an ORBX or two go a long way to breathe life into FSX. Doing the missions again is a blast because I can handle simulated planes better and actually know what I'm doing...mostly. The helicopters in FSX are pretty fun, make sure to get Acceleration with the new chopper and missions, they're challenging and sometimes frustrating but pretty fun.

Ah man, I come from enjoying the VC cub to this news. Makes me kind of wish I wouldn't have bought it, but I wasn't going to use my MS points on anything else so oh well...RIP Flight. I guess recently buying addons for FSX that give it new life wasn't such a bad idea. No more $ for MS, win8 can kiss it.

I bought FSX ~3.5 years ago and only recently I decided to reinstall (thanks to Flight reawakening my inner flying sim) and give it another go because I finally have a decent enough computer that it could run it at an acceptable level even thought it still struggles at times and can be annoyingly stuttery. And this is software that came out what 5 or 6 years ago? On older hardware it was a struggle to find the sweetspot between an acceptable framerate and level of detail and still is to some extent with modern hardware. I loved the hell out of FSX when I first got it; the tutorials, lessons, and especially the missions but stock FSX looks pretty bland in comparison to Flight. Because FSX is so bland I have recently tried 3rd party enhancement software (REX, GEX, Accufeel) and think it actually looks quite good (esp. REX) but that's more $ than I've spent on Flight so far, and those are just enhancements but they did inject life back into FSX and I've forgotten the missions enough that doing them again is pretty fun. It is fun having many planes, places to fly, a long list of missions, real-world weather, decent map, etc, which I'm sure will come with Fight in due time (at least I hope so) because I think it has a lot of potential.

When it comes to Flight I don't think even god knows why. :lol:

Perhaps. I thought that too but in that one there are six tents and no fire. Looks like they took to the time to keep a couple of tents make them better looking and add a fire for some reason. Could be nothing, or maybe something like an easter egg. In the first part of that mission you fly into Kahiltna Base Camp on the Kahiltna glacier, it took me a while to find the same spot in Flight, no thanks to Flight's cartoon map, but I searched and couldn't find that grouping of tents which were quite a few. So, if the tents are merely a remnant of FSX then I would expect there to be those too, otherwise why get rid of some but keep others?

In the original thread I couldn't figure out how to attach images in reply. They are at ~14k ft. In the shot below I'm heading towards Denali at ~30 deg. The arrow is pointing to the approximate location of the tents. It is one of the basecamps used for those attempting to summit Denali. Compare it to the picture with the routes and labeled basecamps. This is an interesting tidbit from NOVA of the area - Fourteen Medical This camp, a small village of tents, will serve as our Advance Base Camp, set on a large plateau at just above 14,000 feet. All West Buttress expeditions use this camp for acclimatization and as a staging area for the upper mountain. The National Park Service has a large medical tent here for their rescue and medical operations.

Remember this interview with Josh Howard a few months back - "TA: What other “fixes” or mods are coming that you can talk about? JH: We think of extending Flight in many different ways, including by addressing issues that need to be fixed (it’s no shame to admit that Flight has some bugs), as well as by adding more content (planes, places, and things to do), and bringing in whole new features or capabilities. We have begun talking about Alaska, as our next expansion, but are still not ready to talk about the ways in which Alaska expands the Flight experience beyond just having a very different kind of geography to fly over. We will start discussing those details soon, though. But even beyond that, the team is hard at work already on the expansion after Alaska, we just don’t want to spoil the fun and reveal too much too soon." http://forum.avsim.net/index.php?app=ccs&module=pages&section=pages&folder=%2FAVSIM+Pages&id=8 This was back in March I do believe. My take is that the Alaska we have is mostly what we're going to get as far as terrain/scenery goes, with maybe a few updates to fix bugs etc. Yeah, Alaska isn't perfect or as good as Hawaii but some areas can be pretty stunning and detailed, especially flying around Denali.

To all the naysayers that say Alaska (and Flight) is devoid of life! :P Could this be a future SAR or other mission? FSX had a similar mission to this area.

Maybe it's different with Nvidia users (doubt it) but I've found with Flight and AMD xfire that there is no discernable difference between one or two cards.

I have an i5 3570k (ivy bridge) OC'd to 4.1Ghz with 6950's xfire and still can't max out Flight even though I can max out the current most graphically demanding games (BF3) which stay mostly above 60fps. Once playing at 60+fps anything lower is pretty noticeable, especially if it dips into the 30's. With Flight in Hawaii I can max out everything but scenery density, or have scenery density maxed while scenery quality is on high. With Alaska I found I have to lower both scenery quality and density because in some areas it slows down quite a bit especially with weather. Even with V-sync disabled I can't put everything on max, plus the screen tear is somewhat annoying. In most instances Flight is very smooth and looks great even if it isn't maxed out. Here's to hoping Flight gets some multi-GPU love. From what I've read Ivy Bridge does perform better than Sandy Bridge, but probably not so much to justify getting it if you already have a Sandy Bridge setup. I think I ready somewhere that Flight is supposed to take advantage of Ivy Bridge in some way, I think it is with the integrated GPU.

I've noticed some frame drops at times, enough to be annoying, using the same graphics settings in Alaska that I used in Hawaii (all at their max setting except scenery density which is at high). Maybe it's all the pine trees being rendered in certain scenes but my computer is no slouch (i5 3570k @4.1Ghz, 6950s xfire, 8 gig) so I don't know why I'm getting frame drops other than it being related to Flight unless I have overestimated my system. It would be nice if Flight could take advantage of multiple GPUs though, I see no diff between xfire and single card usage. Other than noticing a substantial increase in propeller torque effects most of the planes seem to perform the same but the Maule does seem more difficult to land softly.

Landing the Cub on the sand bank in 45 kt winds (landing challenge) was pretty fun and reminded me of the Hawaiin Maule landing challenge at the observatory. Are these sorts of landings done in real life? I tend not to think so because it would seem that real winds are more variable and could cut out at any time and slam the plane into the ground.

Is there really a mosque in Fairbanks, AK? After a little searching I found there is one in Anchorage but not Fairbanks. It looks like a mosque but maybe it's something else.

I have a Logitech 3D pro but started using the mouse the past few days to see what it was like and found that it's actually a pretty good way to fly if you don't want to bother with all the trimming. It is less realistic but pretty convenient especially when looking around, which is much better with the mouse than with the hat switch. I did an Alaska RV-6 landing challenge yesterday strictly using the mouse which had 17kt crosswinds. I made the approach as I normally would with a joystick by pointing the nose off-center of the runway into the direction of the wind and that seemed to work since I got gold. I also did the Maule ILS with the mouse, got silver but the Maule seemed a little more unruly to control with the mouse.

Nice. I somewhat remember a mission in FSX similar to this where you had to land a plane with skis and pick up an injured hiker. It looks very familiar to your pics so I think it was probably the same place. It would be nice if Flight had missions like that with the planes to do them in. Here's to hoping they do something like that in the near future but I'm skeptical.

Windsocks would be nice but what is really needed is some sort of ATIS or something that tells you the wind conditions at the airport you're flying into even if there is no tower. I just barely got done flying my first time in Alaska...it was a blast. I did a passenger job from Kodiak to some smaller airport with only a grass strip using the mixed weather theme. It was raining the whole trip but when I got to the destination airport there were 68 kt crosswinds! After being thrown around a bit (and making my passengers sick) I had to restart from the checkpoint because then I knew how to tackle these conditions after figuring out the magnitude and direction of the wind through trial and error. The HUD wind indicator didn't help much (I fly with it off 99% of the time) since the wind was blowing a different direction a few nm from the airport. Landing at that airport reminded me of the Maule landing challenge atop Mauna Kea with similar wind conditions. I floated in almost to the parking area and thought I set it down rather softly but the whiney passengers apparently didn't agree. If that was a real life landing and I was a passenger I would be happy and amazed that a plane could land like that, who cares if it was a little rough.