mibmab

While I tend to agree with most points you raise, it is worth considering that the price for Flight School is very low, less than for many FSX addons. So I'm not too disappointed in having spent the money. I agree with you that the lesson are not suitable for absolute beginners as they do require a bit of background knowledge. The very basic "lessons" in MS Flight were IMHO much better in teaching the key basics of starting/landing and steering a plane. Graphics wise I'm quite disappointed. While it looks much better than stock FSX (the least one would expect) the frame rate on my average system is very poor, with occasional longer delays. It seems the graphics engine is still depending heavily on raw CPU power. When I look around the cockpit, the plane graphics looks very nice, but the movement "breaks up" the graphics and the bottom part is drawn with a delay. MS Flight was way superiour in this respect in terms of smoothness even on modest systems - and as a 32 bit app.

I just tried the first two missions of Flight School - so some first impressions. - It seems my slightly aging but not too shabby system (Core i5-2500 + Radeon HD 7700) is not powerful enough to provide smooth framerates in Flight School. Both MS Flight and stock FSX with some freeware addons work much better in this respect on my system and run smooth like butter. I suspect DX11, the adapted ORBX Global and the underlying FSX engine might require a more powerful machine/graphics card? - The whole user interface is reasonably well designed, but setting up or adjusting the controllers is not very intuitive. - I really liked the default settings for the XBOX 360 Controller in MS Flight, why did they not use the same settings by default in Flight School and use all control buttons? This will be the main controller many gamers will use on their PC/console. So - is it worth 15 quid, probably yes. Is there room for improvement - definitely yes... Though I still prefer MS Flight for simple bush flying. ;-)

Well, the flight lessons might be easy to pass for experienced simmers, someone like you I suppose. But you are not really the target market. And I'm sure an absolute beginner will take quite a while to pass them - certainly sufficient time to justify the modest price paid for Flight School.

Well - that describes exactly what was intended by DTG. They have made it very clear that those already using a flight sim are not the main target market for Flight School. It is the much bigger market of gamers - some of them maybe already familiar with other simulation games - who might see it on steam and think, well, they might give it a try for 15 quid.

In MS Flight the sky and some of the the clouds occasionally looked a bit purple-ish as well, depending on time of the day and weather. Here is an example: https://flic.kr/p/FAgnuh And to be honest it did not bother me, as long as it does not turn into a surreal painting :smile: .

I seem to remember that DTG plan to offer a migration function for the "career" from Flight school over to the full flight sim. So it sounds like any plans for further lessons will be kept for the full flight sim. I could imagine that there would be some more lesson missions built into that full sim from the start, while others might be sold extra as DLC maybe in combination with the respective more advanced DLC planes (e.g. teaching how to properly operate a turboprop or a jet engine plane). I guess much of this is not yet decided for the full sim, but (to stay ontopic in this thread) maybe Martin can comment if their thinking goes in this direction? I certainly would like an overall career/qualification-level function beyond succeeding individual missions in FSX. This was one of the features I liked about MS Flight.

This new interview with Mr Hood about DTG Flight School might be of interest: http://www.pcgamesn.com/dovetail-flight-school/onwards-and-upwards-dovetail-flight-school-and-plane-simulation-in-the-modern-era There are some new insights into the design considerations, for example he did not like the unrealistic hoop flying in previous versions, used to use FS 2004 - and grew up with early flightsims on the Amiga (I remember those well). I didn't particularly like the hoop flying either, but in MS Flight the Aerocaches search was actually quite fun following vague hints.

To be outraged would IMHO require that someone, in this case DTG, broke promises, or even worse a contract. And I don't see that. This will be new product and you'll either like it or you stay happily with FSX(SE) or one of the other alternatives. I guess if DTG see a medium/long-term economic potential in providing an SDK, e.g. widening the user base of the new sim or providing a pathway towards commercial development for the platform (from which they would have to benefit with a small share), they might consider it.

You first install the core game of Flight - and then use the flight toolkit to download required content.

It might well be that they decided quite late to add a third plane and the development with the two initial planes was already quite advanced. So they might just need some more time to test the DA42 and the associated lessons, hence the later release and "patch".

I can second that - my Samsung 850 EVO 1TB has been working superbly well since I did a fresh Win10 install last summer. The OCZ Solid 3 120GB SSD that I used before with Win7 initially needed firmware updates before it worked on my machine. In terms of price per GB, the Samsung 850 EVO 512GB is probably the best value at the moment, but if you can afford it, it's worth going for the 1TB version to have a bit more headroom. The Sandisk Extreme Pro has a slightly higher performance but costs a bit more. Regarding possible writing limits of SSDs - that's only a theoretical concern, but for regular backups and occasional archiving I still use conventional harddisks.

I think the texturing on steep grades is still there in the converted FSX files. A while ago I did a few comparison screenshots between FSX and Flight - if you look at the Grand Canyon shots you'll notice that there is not much difference between FSX and Flight rendering. In other areas there is much bigger differences in the rendering. https://flic.kr/s/aHskunZJs8 Oh, and to encourage you to try the conversion, have a look at these screenshots of various locations around the world in Flight :-) https://flic.kr/s/aHskxL5fZ9 On the shots from the alps you can also see the rendering on steep gradients in Flight using the converted FSX files.

In a way flight school will be a good opportunity for them to do a test of the core technology for the full flight sim coming later, even if they will do more work on the engine since then - e.g. regarding shadows. They can see in flight school how the core engine performs on a range of systems of a large user base without the possible interference of plugins or DLC.

DTG Martin answered this one in the other thread - and confirmed that this won't be included in Flight School, but that it's being looked at for Flight Sim: http://www.avsim.com/topic/483642-ask-dovetail-games-about-dtg-flight-school-flight-simulator/page-17

It's an alternative world map providing more detailed topographic view than the default map - and covers, as the name suggests, the whole world. You can find more information in this old thread: http://www.avsim.com/topic/454973-ftk-menu-world-world-map/

On my core i5 the conversion takes less than 20 minutes if the source folder is on my data hd and the destination folder on my ssd.

Hi Jim, while the global graphics of the converted files are a vast improvement in quality compared to the stock fsx graphics, don't expect it to be as good as in Alaska or Hawaii. But it's certainly worth converting. Then try getting the Maule off the ground in stormy weather in the highlands of Bolivia ;-) I use the following lines in a batch file to run the conversion. If you but it in a batch file (text file with the ending .bat) the advantage is that you can rerun it if required or if there is a new version of the converter: MkDir FSX-SE_Base "Flight Toolkit\ContentConverter" FSX /l:fsx_se_conversion.log /i:"d:\Program\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX" /o:"FSX-SE_Base" Pause Here are two examples how the converted files look like - Lisbon and London: https://youtu.be/tCmYCn03tXQ https://youtu.be/ZlOcB2yZlIE

It might be easier to simply install flight toolkit and then use the Flight Addon Manager to install the Alaska Wilderness Pack. This also provides a good overview over what is installed for Flight. Oh, and if you own FSX or FSX-SE, it's well worth converting the global scenery using the toolkit.

If you need a translation into German, let me know...

I think, the green arrows you refer to were not in Flight but an option in the missions of FSX. And yes, Flight had those silly arcade game style ring catching challenges. But for example the Aerocache hunt was quite fun and for the more difficult ones quite a good detective challenge finding them. Also, it's worth remembering that MS Flight contained some great ILS landing challenges with the Maule and the RV-6A. I think they were part of the Alaska package. So, it would be great to see similar challenges in the new Simulator. I guess such gamification elements are frowned upon by some serious simmers - but to appeal to a wider market, they are IMHO necessary, and actually quite fun.

I actually had to buy Windows 10, as my Win 7 Enterprise provided from work for my desktop did not allow the free upgrade. So I did a fresh install also because I needed to move from Win 7 32 to Win 10 64. And it mostly works very well. Some details are really useful in Win10, for example showing recently used files when opening explorer window. Both FSX-SE and Flight (with the FSX world converted to Flight using stonelance's superb toolkit) work very well. One minor concern is that the major updates so far (similar to the Service packs on previous versions) reset some of the settings like file associations. Also, I had to manually edit the registry after the Win 10 install so that the ancient Cisco VPN client we use for access to the work network would not crash. These registry settings were also reset, so in the end I had to turn to Shrew Soft VPN. On my Win 7 laptop I used the free upgrade option. Initially it did not work properly because of conflicts with the installed Comodo firewall. So, I would recommend removing all such tools like security software before the upgrade. Even my ancient netbook, upgraded to 2 GB RAM, starts quicker and runs much smoother with Win 10 after the free upgrade from Win 7 Starter. So, is it worth upgrading from a Win 7/8 64 bit system which runs without problems? Maybe not yet. But it's no harm doing the upgrade now if it's planned anyway at some point.

I agree that graphically MS Flight was (and is) very good out of the box, and performing very well even on average systems with a "slick" and "smooth" interface. As was discussed elsewhere already, it was probably a pragmatic decision for Dovetail to build on FSX rather than Flight, particularly as they were already familiar with the FSX code from working on the SE release. Considering that even with a few freeware addons, graphics of the standard FSX can be vastly improved, it should be possible for Dovetail to produce a good upgrade on that 10 year old standard, even if the scenery and mesh are mostly based on the FSX standard, with a few updates.

Hi, Auf Zeitonline gibt es einen kurzen Artikel mit dem Titel "So landen Sie eine Boeing 737" - mit Kommentar zu einem entsprechenden Video: http://blog.zeit.de/teilchen/2016/02/16/boeing-737-landung-anleitung-ryanair/ Koennte fuer einige neue Interessenten an Flugsimulatoren sorgen :-)

In a way DTG Flight School is kind-off a BETA for DFS, because they'll be able to see how the core of the engine performs on a diverse range of hardware/systems without the possible interference of addons or other modifications, so they can fine-tune the core of the programme for DFS. I hope both Flight School and DFS will be as rock-stable as MS Flight was (and is). Flight only crashed once on my machine - as for FSX... well... much more frequent crashes, though FSX-SE seems to be more stable.

It's a bit like that historic win of VHS over Betamax. Though the latter was the superior system, VHS won :-) I guess given the limited time frame DTG had for developing a new flight sim release, it made economic sense to built on the FSX base, also considering all those FSX add-on producers who may now be able to upgrade their add-ons with relative ease. Well - Flight still exists... I might just fly a round now :-) Andreas