Pretend your holiday wasn't cancelled from next month: Microsoft Flight Simulator cleared for take-off While many fleshbags won't trouble the inside of an aircraft this summer, Microsoft has thrown those on unplanned staycations a bone with the confirmed release date for its latest Flight Simulator: 18 August. It has been 38 years since the debut of the virtual cloud-botherer and a year since the company teased the faithful …
I'm assuming it will be a bit shit on the consoles?
Back in the day, due to lack of squawk all the modders would add their own so alot more airports had it than they would. You could listen to the AI squawking each other if I remember right. Assume that won't be possible on consoles due to lack of modding options.
It depends if they follow the "Microsoft Flight Simulator" or Microsoft Flight" model - the former allowed all sorts of user- or 3rd party-created addons but Flight... well, let's not look too deeply at that. It was a reasonable flight simulation game with very limited scope (unless you paid a lot of money for add-in aircraft & 'scenery' - you were limited to Hawaii in the base version!), but it was NOT a Flight Simulator...
"Flight" was very limited even if you paid for adds-on because they had to come from Microsoft only, only a few were released, and you were bound to fly only within the relatively small areas supplied.
Previous version of Flight Simulator gave you a whole world to fly within even if only few places had detailed airports and scenarios, but even away from them it was still acceptable for the time. Still you could get many others from third party companies, and planes as well. A full SDK was supplied with the game itself (some third party tools made it easier to use).
This new iteration looks to be much more alike the "Flight Simulator" model, it looks they understood from the "Flight" mistake. But it will take some time for 3rd party contents to be ported - I do not yet know if there is some form of compatibility with FSX 3rd party software or not. Still even what will be auto-generated doesn't look bad.
What keeps me from ordering it right now it's the software house behind it - it doesn't look to have ever delivered something so complex and realistic. Flight-simmers don't look for a game, no matter how the graphics are wonderful - they look for a simulator as much realistic as possible. I will wait to see what early adopters say of it, and if MS nailed it, or made another expensive mistake.
That's a little unfair. The mute button on my plantronics headset often doesn't work correctly. Frequently it will unmute the audio device whilst simultaneously muting the Teams application itself, or vice versa. The only fix is dig up the Teams window from the bowels of my desktop (because it's buried under the other stuff I'm doing at the same time. Y'know, actual work.) and click the "unmute" button there to get things back in sync. It's infuriating.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
