Sure, but don’t let it stop you from playing it. I would get the demo, and see if you enjoy the general sensation of flight enough to warrant 40$ for a joystick. If you tell yourself you can’t justify the expense of a new piece of hardware before you’re sure, you’ll never play the game and might lose out on something you may really enjoy.
And really, a casual player will do fine with a $20 Saitek…
The computer gamer in me want to tell you that you would enjoy flying more with a joystick, but that you really only need it for landing.
The angry flight-sim grog wants to tell you that the flight models are so ridiculously easy and dumbed down that you only really need it for landing.
Does MS Flight Simulator IX actually have military planes like shown in that video? For some reason I thought it just had non-military ones. And what about Flight Sim X? Will it have military aircraft?
There are freeware/payware military planes that you can download but there’s no combat (firing of weapons) modeled in the sim.
shameless plug: Lock On:MAC has all the guns 'n missiles you want, and this 2004 system hog runs really nice on my new rig. Pacific Fighters has better water, but the terrain in LOMAC is both pretty… and destructible !
Stop the presses!!!
Did you say DX 10 is vista only? Is this initially or is this permanent?
Once games start requiring DX 10, it may mean you must upgrade to Vista. This is a not-so-softball approach to “stop using our old OS”.
Yeah, that’s pretty old news by now.
Generally I’d be all angry and stuff, but supposedly DX10 went hand in hand with Vista to rebuild the whole pipeline and make gaming more standardized. If it makes for less compatibility issues, increased efficiency and smoother gameplay then I’m happy they redesigned it from the ground up (rather than try to make everybody’s old hardware of the last five years barely work on the latest stuff it shouldn’t be able to play anyway.)
Thanks for the tips about getting the joystick. Likely if I went with FSX, I’d pick up the extra hardware anyway, simply because I like smooth controls in games and anything that makes a game clunky in any way will turn me off. I’d rather play it safe, and they don’t seem that expensive. Ah, memories of arcades those decades ago…
And yeah, one of the nice things about DX10 is getting rid of the cap bits. Now everything that is a DX10 piece of hardware is fully DX10 compliant. None of this, some features are supported some aren’t stuff. It either is or it isn’t DX10. On another note, there’s no need to worry over DX10 hardware requirements for a long while. I’d wait until the next expected upgrade for your system before switching to a DX10 card, for instance, unless you like being on the leading edge of new tech. Vista and every game that’s made for it for the next couple of years will be DX9 compatible. Afterall, any game in development now is being done on DX9 systems. That’ll fit right into the upgrade schedule of anyone who is a gamer, so no rush for upgrades required (and the Vista interface itself only uses DX9).
Hi. I’d like to introduce you to every Origin game ever made. And also Falcon 3.0. ;)
Seriously, even the really high end games of today run better on mere mortal machines than the blockbusters of the mid 90s. And the hardware cost a lot more then, too.
Yes, it’s vista-only. Vista features a totally different (better!) display driver model, and some of what they do in DX10 relies on that driver model to do effectively.
Of course, not many games will require DX10 for another 18 months or so. Probably not until at least a year after Vista is released. Most of the games will have both DX9 paths for XP, and enhanced DX10 modes for Vista.
This is not dissimilar to how DX9 is not available on Windows 95. I mean, WinXP is about five years old. You’re gonna want to upgrade to Vista, not just because it gives you DX10. Eventually, of course - some people will want to wait and get it with a new PC, some will wait to see how the security and stability shakes out, wait for driver improvements, whatever.
So DX10 is ‘all that and a cup of tea’ ? How is the DX10 API? Far better then DX9 or just slightly less cryptic?
Want DX10 info, take a read of this series of articles at ExtremeTech:
I feel very cautiously optimistic about it. I am still sure they will blow it though.
My biggest worry is piss-poor documentation. My experiences with DX9 have mostly been “Find some program that does what you want, and read the source code”. That is no excuse for documentation. It would be very nice is MS finally, for once, created a single compendium of everything you need to know about the DX10 API. Every function / object, every structure, every data type, every flag, and every property well defined with sample code.
That is what I really want from DX10.
This was linked in the “best videos” thread, but I guess it belongs here too: Hitler dismayed by the FSX demo:
no way… I thought that was an old wives tale.
Nope. It’s true. Unless that was sarcasm, in which case go away. ;)
Check out the Aero requirements down below on this page.
If you’re system has a core DX10 card will it switch?
No, it’s still a DX9-using interface. All DX version are backwards compatible, so using a DX10 card just means that it’s capable of running everything DX up to version 10, and it’ll run Aero using DX9 abilities. That’s why if you run the Upgrade Advisor, and have a certain level of DX9 card, it says that you are good to go with the Windows Aero interface.
If Aero also required DX10, you’d have a majority of Vista users unable to use even the main interface of the OS. It’s a good decision that MS decided to keep it DX9. They don’t even plan a DX10 upgrade to the interface that I know about.