Now I’ll have to go to the company store and get a copy of FSX before it’s all gone forever.
Damn, seeing the original FS really took me back. I played that sucker on my Apple ][+ back in the day, age 12 or so, and I was EXCITED when the runway dropped below the level of the windshield (because I took off, snarkers, not because I drove off the end of it!).
That youtube clip was really amazing. For an old guy like me, it was a tour through my memories of computer gaming, and how things have progressed to a point we never imagined back in app. 1980.
It’s also a testament to the legacy of Flight Sim, and really causes me to mourn it’s potential demise.
MSFS sales numbers may be a drop in the bucket for the Redmond gang but they still dwarfed other PC flight sims on the market. I researched the sim’s NPD numbers for a PCG column I wrote in 2005 and found that FS2004 made $28.4 million from 677.3K units from its launch in late 2003 through September 2005 (North American point-of-sale figures only). Even more telling was that the sim consistently ranked in NPD’s monthly top-20 list of PC game sales (and, more often than not, in the top 10) throughout that entire run.
By comparison, Russian-built competitors like Lock On and Pacific Fighters moved a paltry 51K and 41K units respectively at North American retail over the same period (earning a measly $1.5 million apiece). Their European and online sales numbers were clearly much higher but NPD doesn’t/didn’t rank those.
In a niche market, MSFS sold like gangbusters.
That YouTube clip brings back memories - like others it mirrors my amazement at what home computers can do. For me Flight Simulator gave way to F29, Falcon and then at some point I stopped my virtual flight training alltogether (I think a trip between the Twin Towers in FS2000 in a Sopwitch Camel - the only plane I could fly without reading the manual - was my final foray).
But from that clip I looked up X-Plane footage and it looked pretty varied and amazing. How does that compare (I’m not going to pick it up, but I’m interested in the genre and would love a simmary without having to wade through webpages of information)
X-plane, out of the box (like FS9/FSX) is pretty hoo hum and in need of pimping with 3rd party planes and scenery. As to which is better, X-plane is noted for its fluid based physics thingamajig while the FS series is table based. Which is more realistic? Good luck finding an answer as there’s no general consensus and every argument devolves into a rivet counting pissing match. Personally I prefer the FS series as there’s a fuck ton of of quality pay ware and free ware addons available to tickle your fancy. FS leads the pack when it comes to fully functional, uber-realistic switch throwing realism when it comes to the heavy iron. See PMDG, Level D Simulations, and Flight 1 for example.
In the end they’re both simulators made to run on desktop PC’s and all simulations regardless of platform are approximations of reality. And of course there’s no substitute for the seat of the pants flying you feel with real planes.
The most appropriate thread I could find to bump…
There’s been some interesting recent developments in the civilian aviation sim universe. As Microsoft’s own “Flight” crashed and burned last year, Lockheed Martin has been quietly working on updates to the Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX) codebase (licensed to them by Microsoft) for their own training product called Prepar3d. They’ve release a few, fairly minor, iterative updates, and they’ve recently announced a fairly substantive 2.0 release due this year.
A blog post from Lockheed Martin details some of the features of their 2.0 release, including DX11 support and shifting much of the rendering load over to the GPU. A leaked feature list looks extensive, to say the least.
If you’re at all into the PC gaming ghetto known as civilian flight sims, this looks to be a fairly big deal. FSX has always been clunky and ridden with performance problems, thanks to an aging codebase, a lack of multicore support, DX9 limitations, and a dependency on CPU speed. Even seven years after it’s release, the bulk of FSX forum conversation is focused on how to make the flippin’ thing look and run better. Microsoft appears to be out of the civilian sim market for good, so getting the torch picked up and actually seeing some substantive improvements is pretty awesome.
Actually buying Prepar3d is a bit wonky, since it’s licensed for “training purposes”, but Lockheed Martin is being pretty generous about the extent of that license and have been pretty open and communicative with the hobby sim community. Home users have been able to jump in via a $50 academic license. Pricing for the 2.0 version haven’t been announced yet.
You know, you can actually start new threads rather than raising a 4 year old thread from the dead :)
There are a limited supply of threads. Please don’t use them up irresponsibly.
Very interesting, thanks for the post - Although, am I the only one cringing at the use of numbers instead of letters? Especially coming from a serious company like Lockheed?
Wonderful! Will you update this thread when 2.0 goes live?