XBradTC

So, we’ve been a flight simmer for years, since back in the Win95 days. We’ve owned various combat flight sims dating back to Falcon 3 and whatnot.  We even had Flight of the Intruder on floppy disks.

Microsoft released a series of the flagship civil flight simulator, named, aptly enough, Flight Simulator. The last version released was Flight Simulator X (it was the 10th version) known almost universally in the industry as FSX. That version was released clear back in 2006, virtually an eternity in gaming culture. Microsoft did supply some support and expansion for a couple years, but eventually abandoned the flight simulator business as a distraction from its core business, and a poor return on investment. 

Still, one of the great strengths of FSX was its open architecture, meaning that third party developers could easily produce add on features, such as new planes, new liveries for existing planes, and even completely new scenery. Many fans of the community produces extremely high quality planes and scenery as freeware.  And of course, you could purchase payware airplanes that had an astonishingly high level of fidelity to the real thing.

FSX had some issues, however. First, it was (and is) a 32 bit program, which limits its ability in some areas to faithfully reproduce scenery. Crank the graphics up, and your frame rate will crater. Even fairly modest graphics on a mid grade computer would bog down into 10-12 frames per second. That makes the game visually “stutter” and add on scenery and planes could slow it down even more. Also, if you did get into using add ons, particularly freeware, you would very quickly become an expert navigator… of your computer’s file systems. Unlike most software that self installs, a lot of add ons had to be manually placed into the file system, and often multiple files in multiple folders. And woe betide you if you screwed up your .cfg file!

Still, it was a very flexible system, and you could make it do just about whatever you wanted. Want to fly a Cessna 172 around Puget Sound on a sunny day? No problem! Want to land an Airbus A380 on a stormy night in Berlin? Have at it!

In fact, the basic source code is so good that Microsoft licensed it to Lockheed Martin to use in professional simulations. LMT also has an agreement to release their own version, marketed as Prepar3D (P3D) to industry, individuals, and students.  Understand, this is used not just to simulate flight, but for generating an entire virtual world. Want to build a convoy simulator for training soldiers headed for Afghanistan? P3D can help you do that. In addition, there are other commercially available flight simulators, and even a free open source simulator.

Still, flight simming is a niche market. It has a very devoted (nay, fanatical!) fan base, but in terms of software sales units, it’s a small slice of the gaming pie. But gaming is extraordinarily popular, and big business. Games profits put movie profits to shame.  There’s a reason you’ll find game voice over work in a lot of actors IMDB profiles. That’s because it pays well. Flight simming, unlike most games, requires unique peripherals. That is, while a game controller is pretty much universal, for a flight sim, you pretty much need a joystick. You can get by with a cheap $20 one, or you can literally spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a yoke, rudder pedals, a throttle quadrant, communications panel, you name it.

So Microsoft decided to milk another tranche of money out of the program by licensing it once more. This time, they licensed it to Dovetail Games (DTG) makers of a popular railroad simulator. And to give DTG a chance to make money, it would be released over the wildly popular Steam gaming platform.

The game is still the basic FSX with all updates included, but DTG recompiles the program using VS2013, resulting in much better performance. Now even my relatively low powered laptop runs the basic sim with frame rates of about 60 or 70.

One of the nice things about the Steam edition is that you download it, rather than installing from a DVD. It takes forever for my slow internet to download, but if you have reasonably fast internet, it’s pretty quick and easy. And once you’ve bought it, it’s easy to always reinstall it. Which, if you start adding add ons, you’ll eventually have to do sometime.

If you’re new to flight simming, I’d recommend staying away from add on products until you get a basic grasp of flying. The program has an excellent series of tutorials that will teach you the basics of airmanship (in the simming world, at least) and navigation. Once you’ve mastered that, and the built in Air Traffic Control, you can start expanding your installation.

FSX:SE is available here.

The very first mod I’d recommend to simmers is to improve the scenery. Rather than going to the trouble of learning the ins and outs of freeware add on scenery that can be very hit or miss (and hey, look, time to do a full reinstall!) I’d recommend using the ORBX Global set. Simply adding that vastly improves the overall look of the sim for a very minor impact of performance. The much better scenery provides better ambiance even with a slightly slower frame rate.

Once you get hooked on simming, and want to try a more realistic aircraft, flying real airliner routes, I’d recommend the PMDG 737NGX. It features an extraordinary level of complication sophistication and features a functional Flight Management Computer to plan and navigate flights just like a real airliner does.

PMDG 737-800 on final to KSAN.

SWA 737-800 departing Denver for LAX.

Alaska Airlines arrives at the gate at Palm Springs International.

Finally, my other favorite add on doesn’t even operate within the sim, but parallel to it. Aivlasoft’s Electronic Flight Bag provides sophisticated flight planning support along with in flight moving map information. You can run it on your computer, or network it to another and run it side by side.