Well, I bit the bullet on this this yesterday. Figured I’d try something different before I bought the Orbx SoCal region on sale for FTX. Well! Certainly is different, and very refreshing to have a buttery smooth flight sim on my old machine , other than a few microstutters as textures load (C2D e3800 w GTX660TI 4gig ram). Haven’t bought the NYC DLC yet, so we’ll see how that does with so many buildings.
I was immediately taken aback by the control options …my trackIR just isn’t playing nice, as it seems the sim has an internal config for it which seems to be compounding sensitivity, and the translates axis makes my camera slide around the cockpit, rather than follow my movements exactly. Not sure what’s going on here but I’ve disabled the translate axis for now.
The flight model is really simplified, broken or dumbed down… I flung around the Sopwith Camel like a maniac and I couldn’t induce a stall or spin at any point. As far as I can tell, there are no realism options to be played with at all, no red/black outs, engine torque, etc.
Not sure why you’d give up another 65 gigs for the HD textures, since flying low is a disappointing experience unless you’re among skyscrapers or really big mountains, but even here the trees are oversized and some city centers like downtown Oakland are flatout missing.
But! And it’s a huge, huge but. Flying at cloud height or above is amazing. Just fantastic to see the real world stretch out below you, with a beautifully modelled and shadowed cockpit up close. It’s so immersive to see every landmark, tree, house and parking lot just as real life would have it. And the loading times are magic… jumping around all over the map, and up in flying is seconds. After the dread of choosing another location to fly in FSX and the related loading times, just this is enough to forgive the shortcomings of this game.
There are a lot of little easy things they can do to at least try to bring it on par with more fleshed out sims… Define water with a distinct material for specular highlights and reflections… add boat and plane traffic (even if it’s magical or on a loop)… create some more varied cloud formations… add cloud shadows. All these should be very doable, and before releasing more payware.
Harder would be to add car traffic, considering roads aren’t vectors but part of the textures, but surely the major arteries could be tagged. Night urban lighting, same, just pepper the urban areas with dots… anything.
And then, I wonder if bump or displacement mapping might give the ground some texture. It’s a basic thing in photoshop to isolate roads… if you displaced everything but them up , and say, also isolated darker dots which are likely to be trees, you could extrude those up and for free you’d have a pseudo-autogen solution for when you’re flying low to the ground.
Basically, the flying at height is so amazing, all the other shortcomings are all the more frustrating for it. I really hope they get the proceeds to push things along, because right now it does feel like just (an amazing) first half of a product.