Talk to me. After seeing some of the exhibits at the Sunderland Airshow (although the planes didn't fly cos of the sea fret!) I could right fancy a flight sim for my PC. I think the last sim I played was Lock On but theres not a lot else I know about in recent times. A quick look through the GAME flight sim section is a bit depressingly sparse and so would I expect to need to look at maybe mods or addons for what I want, maybe for Flight Sim X? Has to be military and preferably modern. I've got a proper joystick and throttle controller too and a decent spec PC - I love the sim aspect of things, but not completely at the expense of having a fun time. Looking for some recommendations from people. Stuff I've had in the past: F-22 ADF/Total Air War Il Sturmovik (when it first came out) Combat Flight Sims Lock On Falcon 4.0 Janes F-15 Thank you and goodnight - much love.
http://www.thunder-works.com/news.htm Dunno when it will be out though, Lock On + the upgrade was the last good combat flight sim released I think, flightgear looks good but the screenshots show no combat, FSX is also very good but none combatesk too
Looks a little amateurish, dodgy textures, but I guess it's still under development. Seems like an interesting idea, I don't think i've seen any full games involving a Falklands scenario before (I think there was a mod for operation flashpoint). The site said they might be producing a complete recreation black buck mission, which would be pretty damn crazy - one for the hardcore only, I think... mook : FSX is good, I personally really like it, although there are those who say that the physics/dynamics are wrong, and swear by X-plane. FSX has better gfx though, and not being all that hardcore I don't notice any issues with FSX. It's got loads of addons, both freeware and payware, covering just about any aircraft you could ever want, especially modern, military planes. Although it's just a flight sim, so there's no combat or missiles/guns. For stuff like that, I can't actually think of anything that's been released since Lock-on. It's just not such a big market anymore, a few years ago there were loads to choose from.
Yeah I've been looking and Lock On seems to be the last one really, which is a shame as I remember at one point I played flight sims non-stop for years as there was always something new out. Now all the new stuff is arcadey and really just a 3D shoot em up - Blazing Angels, Ace Combat etc. Even that new Tom Clancy Hawkz (?) game looks lovely but shallow as anything. What I want is another F-22 TAW - brilliant single player campaign, but mega relaxing to just fly about at night and enjoy the scenery. My worry about FSX is that as you say, it's a bit freeform when you go military. I'm actually tempted to try the most recent incarnation of Sturmovik to be honest - seemingly the 1946 version is worth a look?
http://www.thirdwire.com/project_woi.htm edit:btw there is a workaround to get it working in Vista & there will be an officially Vista compatible version out in the Autumn iirc. If you like doing a full startup sequence etc. a la Falcon 4 then it won't have enough switchology for you but it's a fun series with loads of community addons. There was also an update to Falcon 4.0, Allied Force & the team behind Lockon are doing a helisim http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/?lang=en
http://www.x-plane.com/ There's this too, again I don't know about the military side but X plane or FSX can certainly meet your requirement of a relaxing night flight in a military aircraft
Lots of good suggestions, thanks. I really enjoy the nerdy side of flight sims - the avionics less so, but loads of switches and stuff make me happy.
F22 ADF is hard to beat. Still play that, jolly good fun in multiplayer. I tried flightgear. It runs like a complete bag of pants on my PC. Seriously 1fps(8800gtx, 4 gig, c6600). Not sure if i had a dodgy install or something but i game up on that. YS flight ....Its really basic but its a wheeze when u get a server with loads of people on it. There is a sore lack of good combat flight sims just now. I hope theres something good out soon. DAM YOU D.I.D. for folding.
i can recommend x-plane, i used to have whatever version was new in 2004 on the mac and it was brilliant, good thing is the windows, mac, and linux ones are all on the same package. installing the full high res textures on the hdd was insanely huge tho and took over an hour. but when it was all on there it loaded up terrain very fast
FSX and FS2004 can be good fun on multiplayer just messing around, no guns and missiles of course but flying a Eurofighter while trying to crash into it with helicopters is just as good.
I can't endorse this heavily enough. There is literally no better flight simulator. X-Plane is so good that with a proper hardware setup, you can legally log flight time in it (a very, very expensive hardware setup and not something you'll be doing, but it's a great endorsement). Additionally, a full install is around 80GB, because it includes real terrain and texture data for a significant portion of the Earth. Of course, if you're short on hard drive space, you can skip the terrain and just get all the physics in a few GB.
Probably you have a dodgy OpenGL install... It runs fine on my laptop (Gentoo Linux, Pentium M 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM, i815 IGP...)
I was (still kinda am) a fan of the Flight Unlimited series. Flight Unlimited 3 was soooo much more enjoyable that FS98 or 2000, in some areas it still rivals modern flightsims (the seaplane landings/takeoff feel so much wetter than FSX) Detailed satellite photo and real elevation based scenery, realistic dynamic weather, full interactive atc, traffic and taxiing, proper crash physics, built in scenery editor, all last century. In fact, thinking about it, I must dig out the disks and see if I can get it working on a modern system. If you ever get a chance to play it, be sure to check out the flying lessons, they're a hidden gem. RIP Looking Glass Studios
Yes, I've flown Flight Simulator X, and was quite impressed. It's attractive and fairly realistic. However, X-Plane is even more realistic, at least equally pretty, and around the same price. I'd get X-Plane.
