Years ago, and I probably mean 15+ years ago, flight simualtions were a mainstream part of PC “gaming”.

Back in the day, I even had time to dabble, and although I never really saw the point of the civvy based Microsoft offering, there were plenty of military simulations to absorb more than their fair share of your spare time…

Anyhow, riding has more than trumped indoor pursuits in terms of time and effort – and work and family commitments mean that spare time is less and more precious.

Anyone here take to the virtual skies?

briefly. I have a copy of MS Flight Simulator that I’ve used about twice.

more challenging to fly one of these:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXJCkItgnUA[/video]

Yay! Hekilopters!

Where’s Emma….? 😀

BiL used to have an RC helicopter. Fiendishly difficult to fly IIRC -and expensive to crash

Occasionally, the il-2 Sturmovik series is good and I think there is a new Battle of Britain edition released in a few days that I might just have to buy.

fiendishly difficult to fly IIRC -and expensive to crash

yes indeed. I can just about hover tail-in & turning a little from one side to t’other. Need More Practice

I still fly “Flanker” regularly. I have MSFS 2003 with loads of add ons, planes and scenary etc, MS Combat FS, Search and Rescue (Helo’s)
All great fun – I can loose myself in there for hours.

had flight simulator 98, 2000, 2004 (century of flight) and X.

they are great, although i havent played one in ages.

Used to play Aces High 2 a fair bit, don’t have the time for it now though… great game though!

I never fancied the civil stuff – whatever next, Account Simulator 4?!

Had a brief flirtation with Lock-on, mostly in the A10.

Got bored pretty quickly though (just before I committed to a HOTAS set up), I like the idea of them and feel like firing it up again just from reading this. I’ve been here before though, I don’t think I have the time or patience to sit for hours learning it all.

Need something that bridges the gap nicely between arcade and full on simulator.

Wings of Prey is good for for a bit of in between like a fier on steam I think. The new IL-2 Battle of Britain sim looks great.

Yeah time is a killer on AHII and I assume the other sims, 20min flight to get to a fight that could be over in a couple of minutes…

Played loads of F15, F117A and Gunship years ago. Had MicroSoft Fs 98 when it first came out. Then got into Delta Force on line.

Second the IL2 Series, but they are about to launch “IL2 – Cliffs of Dover” for which a whole new flight engine has been written. Although its il2 on the box, its basically totally new, and should be better. It basically is going to be the starting point for WW2 and what ever they plan, starting with the battle of britain in MkII spits, Emil 109’s.

Its going to be good – should be, the game engine for IL2 has lasted nearly 10 years? Goind to require a decent bit of kit to run though…

Lived and breathed Chuck Yeagers Air Combat Sim. Was ace (think 386 spec), graphically challenged of course but the combat and flying was most fun.
Then got x-plane, and built my own aircraft. I seriously enjoyed that, staying up late making scale spitfires etc (that actually flew too!) or making rockets that could hit whatever mach level and still land OK. Or maybe make it onto an aircraft carrier (I made a bi-plane that flew the same speed as the ship, easy!).
Anyway, new version/update came out and wasn’t compatible with all the aircraft I’d made but was way better – shelf time after then.
Now I have a PS3, so flight sims just don’t feature really. About limited to Battlefield’s helicopters etc…

Strange isn’t it since the days of Falcon 4.0 pushing pc’s to the limit we have gone to nearly no flight simulators with these new high powered pc’s capable of photo realism nearly/

I fly virtual model aircraft with
http://www.phoenix-simv3.com/default.asp

also sometimes fly these “real” ones:
[img]http://www.rc-airplane-world.com/image-files/parkzone-mosquito-flying.jpg[/img]

Well, inspired by this thread I thought I’d give Lock On another go.

Spent the whole of last night installing and patching it, finally got a flight at about 1am and promptly binned it on my first landing practice.

I’ll see if I can stick at it a bit longer this time around…

I don’t but a neighbor does.

He’s currently spending a lot of time building a replica cockpit in his spare room. He flies only 1 specific plane, I forget which, and often does real time flights to the various places.

This involves him basically sat in his spare room for 8 hours at a time.

Apparently there are also people who get off on being virtual air traffic controllers who manage the virtual airspace.

I think maybe I should report him to some authority of some kind.

So where is the best place to get a virtual conveyor belt? 🙂

I’ve been playing Jumbo since it came out. I can nearly land now.
I’ve also reached level 2 of Elite

I’ve also reached level 2 of Elite

I think I got to “Miffed.”

My poison was always the space-based “flight sims.” X-Wing and its many bretheren, the magnificent Descent: Freespace (which still has an active modding community thanks to Volition releasing the source code), Freelancer and suchlike.

I’d love a new game of this ilk, but it seems to be a bit of a dead genre. :sadface:

Funny you should mention this, just had a meeting with a client I’m doing a video for – they have three life-size flight sims and they’re pretty impressive tbh! It’s a proper cockpit layout with all the replica controls etc. 3 big screens and surround sound. Apparently they’re getting quite popular now. The messerschmidt one they have looks like fun 🙂

I can get my head around taking off, having a fly round and landing but I draw the line at;

1) 8 hour flights where they engage the auto pilot but still sit there watching the screen just in case the software simulates an emergency that they can then fly out of and carry on to New York or wherever

2) being a virtual air traffic controller – good grief, there’ll be people being virtual traffic wardens on google earth next.

Cougar – Check these out for space based stuff…
X3 – Terran Conflictfor single player
or
Black Prophecyfor MMO style.

There’s also Heroes In The Sky which is mmo air combat at its most basic level
🙂

Last night I was watching Harry Hill’s You’ve Been Framed. I was crying with laughter for about 10 mins after a clip came on showing a bloke about to launch an RC model plane when he said “here’s a tip – don’t make a model plane out of bits of old boomerang”. Sure enough – 3 seconds later it came back and hit him in the ear 😆

Cougar – Check these out for space based stuff…

Innnteresting. Is X^3 not strategy rather than flight-sim though? I’ll have a look tonight anyway, thanks.

Strange isn’t it since the days of Falcon 4.0 pushing pc’s to the limit we have gone to nearly no flight simulators with these new high powered pc’s capable of photo realism nearly/

Falcon 4 was the last sim that I spent much dedicated time with, but my PC wasn’t really up to the job. Have tinkered with MS Combat Flight Sim and IL2. Lock On etc since, but never really got the time in to get to grips.

The earlier EF2000 and Total Air War, (by DiD) were my favourites – such an immersive combat environment.

This thread was prompted by seeing Lock On: Flaming Cliff 2 and A10 Warthog advertised on amazon.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smvv3IkglvQ[/video]

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUu4SV3GjVw[/video]

Blue Max: Aces Of The Great War

It’s even available to download!

1.44mb of pixelated goodness from 1990!

Is X^3 not strategy rather than flight-sim though?

Depends how in depth you want to play it. I tend to just fly around taking missions protecting cargo haulers or space stations from pirates, but there’s assassination missions, police missions, and the usual cargo transporting missions. Further in gmae you can build a fleet up for fleet based battles, so there’s plenty of flying about killing stuff rather than total strategy…

Get some decent modifications for it too, and the game universe will turn into an ever changing and evolving battlefield…..

If you fancy flying one of these…

from the rusty old lady

against a bunch of these…

and these…

Then there is a new sim in the pipeline…

used to be a dab hand at after burner and g-lock in my time!

falcon4 still lives, falcon4 allied force was released a few years back and is very stable. for fancy graphics but a little less stability try freefalcon

still the same life devouring campaign engine underneath it all. how they managed to programme that over ten years ago to run on something with less grunt than my mobile i do not know, and it has still not been bettered

and x3 terran conflict rocks big time, just be ready to “waste” the equivalent of about a month playing it 🙂

I bought F4AF – specifically for that campaign environment, but it’s suffered from a lack of time to get into…

(An immersive environment, eg all the rest of the world going about it’s business, not necessarily fancy graphics, are sooo much more important than modelling all the nobs and buttons…)

Some of the Janes sims where very good, F15 and Longbow 2 in paticular. My brother in law used fo fly F15e’s out of Lakenheath and he said is was very accurate and all that was missing was the nuclear strike role.

I’ll have a look at X3 then. Snagging the “rolling” demo (whatever than means) now.

Some of the Janes sims where very good, F15 and Longbow 2

Yep – good balance between accuracy, visuals and immersion…

Liked the Janes USAF where you could fly a range of aircraft, including the F4 Phantom, across the Nevada desert / ranges

cougar

you can get the whole thing on steam for 19 quid. bargain 🙂

Heh heh…

Years back, a mate of mine signed up to a scheme: some daft bloke he’d never met was setting up a ‘virtual airline’. The idea was that you would get an email every week with your ‘jobs’ for that week- you flew the trips, and emailed him some kind of proof- I can’t remember exactly what. The bloke was serious about it, had paperwork, livery, etc.

Most of these trips turned out to be transatlantic cargo trips, and even with accelerating them, they took a fair amount of time.

So anyway, my mate missed a couple of trips.

The guy emailed him a severance letter, citing him breaking his employment contract!