199 replies to this topic

[738]

This is true and a breath of fresh air.

When i had my account suspended due to technical fault earlier i thought it was because i wrote Microsoft s##te but it goes to show that we can speak our minds here.

Kudos to Aerosoft!

[Matt_Smith]

Seems like Lockheed still is our best bet...... but they have the license problem :-(

Agreed, the only issue with the licensing is the 10 bucks a month or 500 bucks one off fee. But I guess that can be justified quite easily as it will keep me out of mischief for hours and quite possibly out of the Old Bailey

Want hear something great about FLIGHT? I just heard from two nephews (13 and 15) they downloaded it and they loved it. I showed them FSX a few times and they never got it.

And boy, do we need fresh blood in this hobby. Most our customers are as old as I am, 26²

Awesome I'm in the minority

[antoinebacker]

Mathijs, I heard you were planning to write a review of FLIGHT! and I was looking forward to that. Will you still do that?

[Mathijs Kok]

Mathijs, I heard you were planning to write a review of FLIGHT! and I was looking forward to that. Will you still do that?

Not by me. Angelique (chief editor of ASN) asked me but after I had to make a avatar (my teenager on crack), got a Coconut Bra award and found out that ALL the issue the beta testers complained about were not addressed (no AI Traffic, no serious weather, no ATC etc) I decided it was better not to review something that clearly is not intended for our customers and our readers. Right now it is game. And we don't do games, we do simulations. So it's ended up as a column on MSFS with some comments on FLIGHT

BUT it is a great game, it's a free game and it will get a lot of young people interested. Strange as it sounds, I like it. Already removed it from my disk, but I still like it a lot. In the end it will be good news for serious simmers as we get new people interested.

[Mathijs Kok]

Agreed, the only issue with the licensing is the 10 bucks a month or 500 bucks one off fee.

I think the price will go down and even then, $10 is very acceptable for a serious hobby. Just today a fine customer (our latest best friend in fact) ordered for $3900 in our shop. That 390 months of Prepar3D.

[Matt_Smith]

Yes it really isn't a whole lot of money, its what a couple of pints a month? People pay a lot more to go to a gym each month. Its a different way of paying for your hobby, us flight simmers are a bit hesitant when it comes to change lol.

[tempelhof]

I would like to add that things must be done to welcome our new simmer friends should they decide to arrive here some time.

That means: less RTFM-comments, more friendly tone when replying to noob-questions

Otherwise they'll head back to Hawaii.

[Mathijs Kok]

I would like to add that things must be done to welcome our new simmer friends should they decide to arrive here some time.
That means: less RTFM-comments, more friendly tone when replying to noob-questions
Otherwise they'll head back to Hawaii.

VERY good point.

[AlphaMike]

I love flight simulators; always have done.
The first one I used was on a Sinclair Spectrum 48k some time ago.... ok, it was not that much of a simulator but it was fun...
I'm sure there will be a market for Flight! and I'm sure a lot of people will really enjoy it. Great, but I'm personally not in the slightest interested.
I've jumped ship and am having great fun with XP10 and I am not looking back.
I'm having fun with the CRJ, SSJ, Pilatus, etc
There have been some great announcements recently with Aerosoft, PMDG, etc moving towards Xplane.
So in summary there is room for all tastes. Where's my ATR?

[Snave]

No, disagree with Templehoff. What needs be done here is to educate those new simmer friends that this is not the place to talk about a game, or `skins`, or avatars - or any of the childish baloney, it's a place where serious hobbyists come to completely ignore the written instructions and ask blatantly foolish questions for the gazillionth time.

Rather than welcome those kinds of simmers I'd rather they went and `Flight`ed. It costs nothing, so they can FOC off as far as I'm concerned...

What we need instead is a fresh influx of the keen students, the anxious-to-learners, who used to form the core of this hobby, those who realise the patheticisms of the new toy, but actually want to get involved in the business and pleasure of pilotage and migrate across precisely because it's a more adult location.

And if THEY have a better experience because of the absence of the pre-pubescents who are making machine gun noises or flying through fiery hoops for medals then everybody gains.

If Flight can keep the neanderthals entertained, then it might truly serve a purpose for the flight SIMULATION fraternity. But it's bugger-all use to most of us here...

[Hiflyer]

The bad part is I have seen those young and eager to learn would be aviators. Somebody, or a number of somebody's yelled the forum equivalent of "You damn brats get the hell off my lawn!!" and they fled.

Hell, I almost fled, too.

Yes it would be more restful if rampant youthful energy did not run wild through the forum. But there is also a phrase.....

"Peaceful as a tomb."

[Francois Dumas]

Yeah, shit happens ;-)

[Hiflyer]

On a more hopeful note, I can pass on the information to those interested that ILS is available. Press "M" to open the Map, then click on legend, and it will open a panel on the right side of the screen. Place a checkmark in the "Radio Navigation" box to enable the map's display.

All navaids will now be displayed on the Map, and you can hover the mouse over the map's icons to see the frequency. At this time only the Vans RV-6 and the Maule have working nav radios and VOR heads.

[Eric Bakker]

And boy, do we need fresh blood in this hobby. Most our customers are as old as I am, 26²

26²?
Gee, you still look very good for 676 years old!

[Hiflyer]

26²?
Gee, you still look very good for 676 years old!

I had to use Wolfram Alpha to get that number!

By the way, an interesting review (warning, strong viewpoints) http://soldant.wordp...-flight-review/

[Baber20]

I maxed out Microsoft Flight on my new PC. Watch it here http://forum.aerosof...-core-i7-3930k/

[nbz]

.....and found out that ALL the issue the beta testers complained about were not addressed (no AI Traffic, no serious weather, no ATC etc) I decided it was better not to review something that clearly is not intended for our customers and our readers. Right now it is game

Let me respectfully disagree with a couple of things.

First, I would assume that when Aerosoft has a new product in BETA testing, which is very late in the dev cycle, you probably would not have added such a complex feature as ATC, or Traffic, upon the request of Beta testers yourself?

But my main point is, that I disagree that this "clearly is not intended for our customers". Considering that I am sitting close to about a 1 meter stretch of Aerosoft product boxes (some created by Aerosoft, some published by Aerosoft), I would say that I am definitely one of your customers. I have also downloaded Flight, and have already purchased content for it.

I am not writing this to argue with you, or to claim that Flight is "better" than something else. I like Aerosoft, like your products, and admire the open nature of this forum and the deep insights we get into developments, even if that means you need some extra servers just to handle the when-will-it-be-released-posts ;-)

But I would like to kindly suggest that you should not underestimate how Flight may very well take some of the users budget for paid add ons.

I am not into flying very complex planes. The limited time I have for simming is, for me, better spent on enjoying a variety of different planes, and I don't want to spend an eternity to learn to fly each of them. Mathijs, you have never met me but you know exactly who I am: I am the guy you designed the Airbus X for. Having a PMDG plane on the shelf that I have never flown. If I want absolutely perfect physics and a damage model that isn't even funny anymore, I go and fly one of my RC planes. I am simming for the experience, not the perfect sequence of every checklist. I breathe in the atmosphere of an airport, and look out of the window a lot while in flight. While this puts me squarely in the middle of Snave's definition of a neanderthal, it does not change the fact that I have spent quite a lot of money in the past for Aerosoft products, but with Flight, SOME of that budget may go into Flight from now on.

For the sake of a nice discussion, I will now enter devil's advocate mode...

Nothing speaks against using several products. Some have FSX and X-Plane, some have FSX and Rise Of Flight, etc.. I personally have FSX, X-Plane, and Flight.

Nobody forces you to fly "challenges" or hunt "aerocaches". Free flight is still there. Obviously missing things we all see as essential, like a flight planner, ATC and so on, but you are not forced to go through a game-like sequence of fly-inverted-under-bridges crap.

You say it's hard to add complex things like ATC later, but I would guess (and admit that I'm just guessing), that this thing was *designed* to be easily updateable. Modular. Since adding stuff is MS' only way to generate revenue on this, I would guess that this was one of the primary design goals.

Despite all the missing things, and the world being dead in Flight, I find that nothing matches the immersion, the feeling of actually being there, as Flight does for me. Fly into one of the small dirt strips, with the sun low, so that the shadows of trees race across your plane, creating a fast flicker that is slightly disorienting for a second... that is just awesome. You are missing sound cones, I only realised that surround still works, brakes can be heard, and have you opened the canopy of the Icon with the engine idling behind you?

I have not seen anybody seriously claim, let alone prove, that the physics have been "dumbed down" so far. But I can not remember the last time I could spin MS' default planes.

I will still fly FSX a lot, in which I have almost all the German Airports, and every european airport I have ever been to in real life except 2 in stunning detail, and Flight will probably never get there. But for flying small GA singles, I see myself slowly moving over to Flight as more scenery gets added.

On my machine, Flight puts out much, much more autogen than FSX, while running at least twice as fast AND putting shadows OF everything ONTO everything. Obviously, FSX would be a lot faster if I turned off all traffic (air+road), but the new engine seems to be a whole lot better. (And it's still a round-earth thing... in the Beta, the top-down view could still be zoomed out as far as in FSX.)

Trying to get to some sort of a point, I would say that Flight may have little appeal to most of your customers, but for sure not all of them. And I feel that your very hard distinction between the GAME Flight, versus The True Simulators, may be in part related to the fact that flight for sure has no appeal AT ALL to an independent add-on producer and publisher like Aerosoft. From my little irrelevant layperson's chair, it looks like Flights product strategy (built-in store as the only channel to add things) seems to be very specifically designed to raise an ugly middle finger towards independent publishing as a whole.

On some well-known Forum, Flight was bashed so hard the forum got closed. That same forum now has lots of participants that have already forked some cash over to MS for content. I'm one of them.

To end this on a refreshing note, I bought X-Plane 10 just last week. Yes, the cool-metal-box-in-a-store edition.

P.S.: It was this forum that informed me of the apparent necessity to create a teenager-on-crack avatar. I have until now managed to use Flight without doing so.

_____

And for Snave: can I please get an exception from your neanderthal rule if I promise that I have zero game consoles, zero FPS shooters, and my only game that *does* shooting is Rise Of Flight, which I haven't used for ages?

[KarstenS]

By the way, an interesting review (warning, strong viewpoints) http://soldant.wordp...-flight-review/

Well, in some parts I agree with him. Especially the part about AVSIM. Although in the beginning the X-Plane parts were also totally over t6he loop, but in the mean time even members of Laminar obviously watch threads.

My opinion about Flight. Fpor a limited time it can give you something to do, but I am not really impressed. Especially without the Hawaian Adventure pack you would miss a lot of things.

The flight behaviour of the planes isn't really impressive too. IMHO X-Plane 10 is a better simulator if we leave the default planes from x-plane.

I can see that Flight can keep some people busy for a few days. There are a lot of challenges and missions but6 I am not sure about the long run. The weather is really a week point, and the world is beautiful but somehow dead. No road traffic, no trains or AI planes and the multiplayer options are at the moment senseless.

I don't even feel slightly tempted to buy the Mauler or the P51. I don't even know a new location that might interest me. I think some vacation spots might be interested to be presented especially with the aerocache hunt, but does it really hold the customers in the game. I think after a few days a lot of people will find other, more exciting things to do and it will be very hard to get these people back.

[Hiflyer]

The flight behaviour of the planes isn't really impressive too. IMHO X-Plane 10 is a better simulator if we leave the default planes from x-plane.

Turn off the Flightaids, do the RV-6 landing challenge #6 then come back and say that.

[Keld]

Now - If we could only combine Flight with World of Warcraft and sprinkle a little Battlefield 3 on it - We would have ourselves a game with flying tenagers on crack doing battle with orcs in tanks while running through hoops after goldcoins, to get to the flag.

[MightySmith]

That´s me, looks a bit like Robert " I like the smell of fuel in the morning" Duvall in Apocalyse Now.

Not fuel, its Napalm... "It smells like... victory"

[tempelhof]

@snave
Simon, I completely understand the point you expressed here and in your ASN column (which was a fun read btw). Of course there is some learning curve attached to the more serious sims and you should learn how to find answers to problems yourself. But right from the start? Wouldn't it be better to help people making that learning curve a little less steep?

So, instead of spoon-feeding answers to newbies: Why not replace "It's in the manual" by "It's in the manual, page XX section XX". If know where the answer is, it may take only a minute for you to find it, but hours of frustration for a newbie. IMO this encourages self-studying more than anything else.

This also applies to answers like "This has been discussed already. Use the forum search!". Again, if you know where the answer is found, it may take only ten seconds for you to pull the thread from the search and post the link. Searching the forums for answers is not very easy if you don't know the right key words. Also because:

• the search function doesn't really encourage its use (-->flood control when you are not logged in. hard to wait 20 seconds if you noticed that there is a typo in your query)
• if you use the search function in a particular forum (such as AirbusX), it doesn't return results from sub-forums (Flight, Systems, etc.)
• the search results are cluttered with topics that are answered with "Use the search!" (D'oh!)

Sorry for taking this discussion slightly off-topic, but this has been on my find for a very long time.

Recently I've had a very interesting discussion with Hiflyer regarding usability in flight sims. I share his opinion that flight simulation is heading in the wrong direction by continuously adding more realism, making it harder for new users to get into this new hobby.

Please don't understand me wrong: I do not want flight sims to be dumbed down, but the ultra-realistic features should be OPTIONAL, for those who do not want or understand them (yet).

[Mathijs Kok]

Did anybody notice that there is not even a moon or stars? Perhaps they are going to make that a DLC product?

[Mathijs Kok]

I wonder if the people who bought the Maule addon complained to Microsoft that the radios and autopilot do not work. That's a pretty big disgrace for a $15 add-on.

I still like the sim btw, it's a great entree for beginners and young people. But I totally fail to see how some people see this something that is going to replace what we use now.

[lindbergh72]

Mathijs, when will AS start working on AS2012 or 14 ? or should we start with XP10? I think AS can do better.

[738]

Did anybody notice that there is not even a moon or stars? Perhaps they are going to make that a DLC product?

[Matt_Smith]

I wonder if the people who bought the Maule addon complained to Microsoft that the radios and autopilot do not work. That's a pretty big disgrace for a $15 add-on.

Radios are an optional extra. They come the the SE version, complete with leather upholstery and extra cup holders All yours for an extra 15 bucks!

[Mathijs Kok]

Mathijs, when will AS start working on AS2012 or 14 ? or should we start with XP10? I think AS can do better.

For 2012 all our efforts are on FS2004, FSX and X-Plane 10. Next year could be different.

[nbz]

Did anybody notice that there is not even a moon or stars? Perhaps they are going to make that a DLC product?

No, because that is just wrong. Just had a look, moon is there, stars are there and stars.dat contains 9096 entries.

But I totally fail to see how some people see this something that is going to replace what we use now.

It won't replace what I have, but it may, over time, complement it. For sure not when I want to fly something like the Airbus X between detailed european airports, because it will probably never remotely come close to FSX for that. But for GA flying, it will be one of several sims for me to pick from. It's already the one looking best and running the smoothest. Of course, with a ridiculous land coverage, but that will change with time. For people focused on immersion rather than deep systems modeling, it is going to be an option.

[Mirko Gutewort]

Now - If we could only combine Flight with World of Warcraft and sprinkle a little Battlefield 3 on it - We would have ourselves a game with flying tenagers on crack doing battle with orcs in tanks while running through hoops after goldcoins, to get to the flag.

That's it I think since tested it since yesterday.
No AI Traffic, no ATC....I have high settings but looks not better.
And only 2 Planes, except the Stearman is the only One better....
Water Effects...Looks better with REX in FSX

[W.Skinner]

<p style="text-align: right">While Flight is no FSX I can that&nbsp;I mildly enjoy it. Its a change and yes&nbsp;it is a game compared to FSX but there is something about tossing that ICON A5 around that&nbsp;makes it fun.&nbsp;</p>

[Mathijs Kok]

No, because that is just wrong. Just had a look, moon is there, stars are there and stars.dat contains 9096 entries.

I now seen the moon (not sure the moon phases are right though) but even though I am on max settings and clear skies I have not seen a single star. The night sky is just a solid black here.

[nbz]

That is weird, for me it was the other way around. Saw stars as soon as I switched to night time, but it took several times setting different dates and time-of-day to find the moon.

The stars seem to be a lot less bright than in FSX though, and don't seem to shine through clouds as easily as they do in FSX. And I also have no idea if moon phases resemble reality.

That said, I will now stop "defending" Flight here. Like everybody else, I would have MUCH preferred a new iteration of the Flight SIMULATOR over Flight. Open platform, all the functions, you name it.

My not-so-negative attitude regarding Flight roots in MS firing ACES. From that moment on, I did not expect *anything* from them anymore. I also have trouble understanding what sort of audience MS has in mind, for arcade the physics are too good, and for serious flying, too much is missing, and some stuff is uncalled for (floating yellow things scattered across the land).

But I am trying to look at what it CAN do. Of course there is a lot it can NOT do, and that is why FSX will remain my primary sim for a long time. (And yes, I will keep buying add ons for it, looking forward to the advanced/extended Airbus X for example.) But some things are really nice, and I will miss them when flying FSX. Wind sound racting to flap settings, or when gear is extended, is one of these.

If you ever do an Aerosoft Sim, I will order it before it's released.

[Mathijs Kok]

Mwrghhhh will keep looking for the stars then.

And don't be too sad about ACES, in FLIGHT! there is still a lot of code from them. Some people pointed to xml and other files and think they see options like better weather and AI traffic there. But these all seem to be files made many years ago by ACES and simply not removed. the first release of FSX had many files that were never called. These were removed in later versions.

[Bruce Hamilton]

Just today a fine customer (our latest best friend in fact) ordered for $3900 in our shop. That 390 months of Prepar3D.

Not only could he have bought a license for $500, but does he realize he prepaid for almost 33 years?

[Sharrow]

AVSIM's pretty comprehensive review of Flight is out.

[Mathijs Kok]

AVSIM's pretty comprehensive review of Flight is out.

Now tell me if you agree with the review.

[W.Skinner]

Now tell me if you agree with the review.

I believe that was a good, fair review. I do agree that we can not make a full judgement on Flight until we see more DLC from MGS.

[Aerobird]

Flight is just that, not a simmer, but may it play a role in reqruiting future dedicated simmers? Only time will tell that! Having worked as a highschoolteacher, I noticed how youngsters learn more and more visually, being frustrated if they don't understand instantly. MS have adjusted to this, but I have spent hundred of hours reading manuals and testflying and finally LEARNED to handle the plane (more planes to come I assure you). It is that ultimate feeling of achievement that creates a dedication to the simming hobby. I will keep my FSX, but I understand that an upgrade of my simming software will rather come from X-plane and Aerosoft than MS. It is a pity MS with all its resources has given up the simming area for a flightgame.

[KarstenS]

Now tell me if you agree with the review.

I don't. I think the rview misses a crucial point: costs! It is one thing what people want, and it is a totally different one what people want to pay.
IMHO Flight mises what Online Games need. They have to keep the player in the game. They have to return often so that you can show them what they could do with a little money.
But why do people return to flight? To raise their experience? It gets boring after a little while. In the begining all this lessons can get someone in to the game, but then they need something else. In my opinion it is a little to obvious, how they want to earn money. For most Jobs you need a Maule. To get a Maule you have to pay. IMHO the wrong way. It would be much better to say: You get a Maule for free if you win this price or reach level eleven. If this looks to hard or if you want to get the Maule noiw, then pay for it.
Another way to hold them in the game: Multiplayer. Several people must work together to win an achievement, train together or something like this. They have to return to have fun, nothing else.
The problem is: In one or two months there are other exciting games that will attract people, then the Window of opportunity closes for Flight.
When I made the decision last October to terminate FSX, I already decided to give X-Plane 10 and Flight a chance. But I don't now what Flight would have to offer to tempt to spend another 20 Euro.