Free-to-play Microsoft Flight released | Hacker News Reader

Free-to-play Microsoft Flight released

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78 pointsukdm21 comments

Better sims:

http://www.flightgear.org/

FlightGear appears to be what X-Plane used to be at version 5. X-Plane (which is now at version 10) is quite impressive and enjoyable indeed. I play it all the time.

Just to note, Flightgear is open source and free. It uses a pretty good flight dynamics engine and the basic aircraft are modeled accurately. The Cessna 172 handles just like a real one. For free, it's great. It's let down, if you can call it that, is the eye-candy is not as good.

Beware: Windows only. I know, it should be obvious, but it's been a long time since a large company dumped an .exe onto my downloads folder without even checking what OS I'm on.

I'll stick with X-Plane. It works on all major platforms and it's an awesome simulator. I miss the ease of use of the old MS-FS, though.

Windows only?!!! What did you expect from Microsoft? I don't see why it would spend time developing game for another platform and then give it awayt for free.

Is it obvious? My very first paid programming job was on a Mac (and Windows) game published by Microsoft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Combat_series

On the other hand, it's possible that the second one of those was the last Mac game published by Microsoft as well.

Dude, you worked on Close Combat? That's one of my all time favorite games. To this day, I still fire up "A Bridge Too Far" sometimes when I'm isolated with my laptop in some hotel room. :)

That's great! Unless you're playing it online you're not really hitting my code, I did the networking for both. CC2 had a completely rewritten network layer, one of the very few client-server RTS's I know of. I left part way through development of #2, but my understanding is they kept my network code all the way through #5.

Agreed, X-Plane is now the place to go for an authentic flight simulation experience.

Sad to see what the once-mighty Microsoft Flight Simulator has become.

Yeah, it's depressing that as computer and graphics power, multi-monitor, and eye tracking is becoming mainstream, realistic flight simulators are apparently no longer an interesting market niche...

Time to kickstart(er) a new project to prove them wrong, then ? Just like double-fine was being told by publishers that Adventure games were a thing of the past.

Nah, realistic flight sims are still a thing, and getting better every year; you just have to know where to look. X-Plane, DCS, etc.

Care to keep going there? ;-)

I'm mostly interested in the realistic WW2 online combat genre, which seems pretty dead. The only things around I know of are Warbirds and its cousins WWIIOL and Aces High. While all of them appear to be actively supported, they all date back to the last millenium.

Anyone know any others?

Well... I've been involved quite a bit with World War II Online, and they are not exactly growing by miles and bounds. The customer base for a hardcore sim seems a lot smaller than for more arcade-style games, so I don't know how you get funding for a large, complex piece of software with quite a limited payoff. I'd love to work on it, though...

Is that a comment about the free-to-play or about the actual quality of the simulator? If it's the later, carry on, I've not looked at it yet.

I think that free-to-play makes a huge amount of sense for simulators. Train Simulator 2012 [1] isn't free to play but if it were, I think that it would still be a money maker. Digital models cost real money at $19 for a locomotive (and some scenario type things). If you buy all of the DLC for Train Simulator 2012 you'd have spent $1,700.

I'm not a sim vehicle sort of person. I enjoy city building and SimAnt (so /r/OpenAnt's OpenAnt [2] makes me happy). But I can see the DLC model (which I hate) causing companies to invest resources into more modern simulators. I think free-to-play also allows younger players and unfamiliar players to be exposed to something that they could really truly enjoy.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/24010 [2] https://github.com/Rinum/OpenAnt

Does it still use parameter-based flight dynamics of MS Flight Sim, or does it use real, if crude, flight dynamics based on wing shape and plane model geometry, like X-Plane does?

It may be very basic by comparison, but the FS in Google Earth is a bit of fun and a good way to introduce kids to flight simulation.

Has anyone tried it already ? I'm at work and I have to wait till I'm back home before I can try it.

I haven't tried yet(still downloading) but others have... https://news.microsoftflight.com/blogs/news/archive/2012/02/...

Yes. It's running quite smoothly for me. Very enjoyable, simple little flight game.

I'm a bit disappointed by how little content there is. Including the paid library, it appears you can get the Hawaiian islands and five aircraft. As an FSX owner with FS2003 experience (teaching children via http://www.museumofflight.org/education/aviation-learning-ce... ) I'd like to see a drastically expanded library of locations and aircraft.

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