The site doesn't even render correctly in Internet Explorer. I really hope this was a mistake release to production for the Flight site, it still needs some love to be finished.
Not sure about this new edition but AoE does bring back some great memories. The second was awesome. Made me feel like trogdor burninating the peasants.
Not much information, but everything seems to indicate it would be more of a game than a simulator. I hope that it has as good add-on capabilities as the previous versions.
Ditching Flight Simulator was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft ever made. It's probably one of their best known games, with a hardcore user base.
Somebody I know very well was making small talk with Steve Ballmer and asked "So why did you guys get rid of Ensemble Studios, I have lost hours of time with those games and loved them". Steves response was: "who?"
The internal uproar when FS got dropped was deafening. I'm on several "social" distribution lists and at least 3/4ths of them had some kind of long thread wanting to know whose head the sender could chew off for making this "happen."
Naah ... their dumbest move was circa-1987, when they sold their license to market a product based on System V UNIX called Xenix to a then little-known device driver shop run by a father-son duo called Larry and Doug Michels, in return for a stake in their company. Who subsequently used Xenix to grow their start-up, the Santa Cruz Operation, into a $200M/year multinational.
(This was before the dark days in the late 90s when, having been spanked out of the desktop market, the board of SCO sold their IP and the company name to a linux startup from Utah called Caldera, who renamed themselves the SCO Group and went into the IP troll business. Thus indelibly blackening one of the names on my resume.)
If M$ hadn't sold Xenix to SCO and focussed on OS/2 it's possible they'd have moved wholesale into UNIX circa 1988 with the advent of the ia32 architecture. And the whole history of desktop OS development through the late 80s and 90s would have been unrecognizable ...
(Somewhere I have some old PC magazines, circa 1982-84, with advertisements by Microsoft promoting "UNIX -- the operating system of the future!")
I wonder if they'd have done better with that route, though, or if they'd have ended up just another UNIX vendor (i.e. getting their lunch absolutely eaten by Linux et al).
The problem that stopped SCO going head-to-head with Microsoft back in the days of Windows 3.1 and OS/2 was licensing encumbrances. AIUI, every time they sold a copy of Open Desktop (the predecessor to SCO OpenServer) they had to shell out $200 to various licensees. Sun got around the problem (at least as of Solaris) by forking out $BIGNUM on a permanent license for SVR4. SCO stuck at SVR3.2 -- because by the time they knew they wanted an SVR4.x license, AT&T were wanting eye-wateringly huge license fees per copy shipped -- but did some white-room cloning work so that by 1994 or thereabouts just about the only AT&T SVR3.2 code remaining was the copyright declarations in the kernel headers: OpenServer was effectively an SVR4.2 clone. (A year or so later they actually bit the bullet and bought an SVR4.3 license ...)
But rewind to 1990, in our time line. Until then, Microsoft were the junior partner in the IBM/Microsoft alliance. They'd promised to deliver a superior OS to MS-DOS, with a windowing system on top; the first couple of iterations of OS/2 were dismal, as were Windows 1 and Windows 2, but the plan was to collaborate on OS/2 2.x and then ship a next generation product, OS/2 3.0, aka "NT".
As it happened, Microsoft gambled on NT while IBM stuck with OS/2, thinking that they still owned the market.
But if we back up to 1987, before OS/2 1.0 shipped, the UNIX-on-PC codebase was clearly a better platform for a multi-tasking OS, and MS-DOS backward compatability could be supplied via VP-IX (if I'm remembering SCO's DOS-box's name properly). If we posit that Microsoft retained Xenix and decided to develop UNIX further, the only question is whether Bill would have coughed for an unlimited AT&T license, just as Sun did. And I think -- given MS's history of buying up the IP they needed in order to hit a marketing requirement (and remembering that I'm an outsider, so this opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it :) -- they might well have done so.
I'm interested, but that website really doesn't bode well for a good-looking game. For a while there, I thought they were bringing back the original version.
I've never used Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I've been very happy with X-Plane (http://www.x-plane.com/). It's cheap, available for Mac, Linux and Windows and has a very active community. And it lets you use your iPhone/iPad as a controller w/flight instruments.
I have used Microsoft Flight Simulator, quite extensively (all the way from CGA graphics up through DirectX 10).
And while it's a great program, and other than the nicely crafted missions in FSX... X-Plane beats it hands down. I haven't looked back, especially since I can run it flawlessly on Linux.
Shutting down MFS was the best thing that ever could have happened to X-Plane. If I remember correctly, until MFS went away, X-Plane was pretty much free.
X-Plane has always charged for a copy, although iirc they had multiple price tiers based on what scenery you wanted. With the announcement of MFS going away, X-Plane slashed their price and adopted a single pricing tier to help draw in converts. I'd been eying X-Plane for a while when the price slashing occurred, and jumped on opportunity, and I love it.
* Has Austin Meyer (owner/lead dev), who is a colorful personality, and blogs often about aviation and other miscellany: http://www.x-plane.com/pg_PIREPS.html
* Is available for iPhone and iPad
* Can use your iPhone or iPad as a joystick and to display instruments tied to the sim on your computer
X-Plane is a great sim, but it lacks several features that helped to make Microsoft's sim so immersive and popular. X-Plane 10 is rumored to add AI traffic so you won't feel like you're flying in post-apocalyptic airspace, but it'll still be a while before the XP dev community comes close to that of MSFS.
Also, I know "FAA certification" is an oft-touted feature of XP, but it's not certified as a simulator, only as a "flight training device" and at the level it's certified the bar is pretty low.
If you're looking to get sim time for an instrument rating, it's helpful but it's not as impressive as it sounds. XP's certification level is more about, "if the joystick is unplugged, pause the sim" than accurate aerodynamic modeling or flight model completeness.
Though you are right in that these are still only currently certified as FTDs, you can still fulfill, for instance, up to 50 hours of seat time for your ATP certificate. See FAR 61.159(a)(3)(i)
Ok, this probably is a really stupid question, but here it goes anyway: in case of an emergency, someone who plays x-plane (or flight simulator) has any chance of flying a real aircraft?
Sorry, but the chances of this are minuscule. However, there is a chance and it depends on their mental state, how much they've flown the simulator, what types of maneuvers they've practiced and how closely it matches to the actual aircraft. One thing that would vastly improve your odds is getting ahold of a flight instructor or another pilot via the radio.
One thing a pilot is never allowed to do, is give up (no matter what); and neither should you if caught in a survival scenario.
If this is a real concern for you, check out something like the AOPA Pinch Hitter's Course, which can teach someone to land an airplane during an emergency with only minimal flight training. See http://www.avweb.com/news/safety/183024-1.html
If your question is more along the lines of "does a simulator make an acceptable substitute for an aircraft?", the answer must be no. Simulators are really only useful as a supplement to actual flight experience and training.
I think it would make things a bit easier. You won't be greasing landings but familiarity with controls and instruments would be a plus.
One of the things I remember when first starting was the sheer amount of "stuff" going on in a plane that I had to worry about. For example taking off you've got maintaining the center line/winds (aileron position) checking engine instruments, radio calls, speed, and traffic. Having seen some of these components virtually may alleviate some of that head spinning that goes on. You'd know what flaps are, and when they are usually used, you'd know what a flare is (and that you didn't need 37 pieces of it).
You would also have exposure to various IFR procedures commonly used in the real world, most useful being ILS, which can line up your aircraft with the runway and put you on the correct glide slope, and even land the plane.
I would also suspect you would have a bit of a confidence boost (that is if you're optimistic), something like "I've put a 737-700 on the blocks hundreds of times in MSFS/x plane - how hard can it be?"
Of course this is all wild speculation, and the odds of an "Airplane" scenario are pretty small.
Patrick Smith (who flies commercially for a living, and writes the excellent Salon column 'Ask The Pilot') has issued an open challenge to any and all sim enthusiasts (with deep pockets).
He claims that any non-actual-pilot will be unable to land a commercial airliner in a full-motion simulator, given the controls mid-cruise. Whoever loses the bet gets to pay for the simulation time (ouch!).
If I had the money, I would take his challenge in a heart beat! I am open to accepting funding ;)
Does that challenge allow for landing the plane on ILS autopilot? Because I've done that multiple times in X-Plane using the highly complicated x737 addon package, and I would imagine that the ability to correctly operate the autopilot is far more important in that sort of situation.
First officers of larger aircraft do their training in a sim - it's just not feasible to do solo pattern work in a 737.
With enough time in a realistic aerodynamic model + cockpit setup, on a modern aircraft (that has a high degree of automation already), in favorable weather conditions and a long // wide enough runway I think it's probable you could fly the bird to a safe landing.
"inspired by the best-selling Flight Simulator franchise"
"bring a new perspective to the long-standing genre"
"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences"
So it's vaporware, bearing no resemblance to the original, without any of the original developers, which, if it's ever released, will be filled with griefers.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was such a genius product due to the number of add-on planes, scenery etc., that could be integrated into the sim due to the open-ended nature, SDKs etc.
I'm hope I'm wrong, but a diluted-down, closed game is going to disappoint many of the enthusiasts who've supported Flight Sim over the years, and even in the best-case, the likelihood is that much of the talent and knowledge that built Flight Sim X is gone for good.
37 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadBut it's pretty much without content at the moment (And I'm not just saying that because it's all Flash.)
Gives you an idea of how things are at Microsoft.
(This was before the dark days in the late 90s when, having been spanked out of the desktop market, the board of SCO sold their IP and the company name to a linux startup from Utah called Caldera, who renamed themselves the SCO Group and went into the IP troll business. Thus indelibly blackening one of the names on my resume.)
If M$ hadn't sold Xenix to SCO and focussed on OS/2 it's possible they'd have moved wholesale into UNIX circa 1988 with the advent of the ia32 architecture. And the whole history of desktop OS development through the late 80s and 90s would have been unrecognizable ...
(Somewhere I have some old PC magazines, circa 1982-84, with advertisements by Microsoft promoting "UNIX -- the operating system of the future!")
But rewind to 1990, in our time line. Until then, Microsoft were the junior partner in the IBM/Microsoft alliance. They'd promised to deliver a superior OS to MS-DOS, with a windowing system on top; the first couple of iterations of OS/2 were dismal, as were Windows 1 and Windows 2, but the plan was to collaborate on OS/2 2.x and then ship a next generation product, OS/2 3.0, aka "NT".
As it happened, Microsoft gambled on NT while IBM stuck with OS/2, thinking that they still owned the market.
But if we back up to 1987, before OS/2 1.0 shipped, the UNIX-on-PC codebase was clearly a better platform for a multi-tasking OS, and MS-DOS backward compatability could be supplied via VP-IX (if I'm remembering SCO's DOS-box's name properly). If we posit that Microsoft retained Xenix and decided to develop UNIX further, the only question is whether Bill would have coughed for an unlimited AT&T license, just as Sun did. And I think -- given MS's history of buying up the IP they needed in order to hit a marketing requirement (and remembering that I'm an outsider, so this opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it :) -- they might well have done so.
And while it's a great program, and other than the nicely crafted missions in FSX... X-Plane beats it hands down. I haven't looked back, especially since I can run it flawlessly on Linux.
X-Plane:
* Has the most accurate flight model -- so accurate that some manufacturers use X-Plane to flight-test models not yet produced.
* Can be FAA-certified for instrument training
* Can be networked among multiple machines to power multi-monitor cockpit setups
* Can be extended via plugins, of which a wide variety are available
* Has an extremely active developer community-- plugins, aircraft, scenery
* Can be used to fly online with VATSIM (US) and IVAO (Europe) - where there is often live ATC and where griefers are kickbanned liberally.
* Has an awesome developer blog, talking about 3d graphics implementations at a very low level: http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/
* Has Austin Meyer (owner/lead dev), who is a colorful personality, and blogs often about aviation and other miscellany: http://www.x-plane.com/pg_PIREPS.html
* Is available for iPhone and iPad
* Can use your iPhone or iPad as a joystick and to display instruments tied to the sim on your computer
Also, I know "FAA certification" is an oft-touted feature of XP, but it's not certified as a simulator, only as a "flight training device" and at the level it's certified the bar is pretty low.
If you're looking to get sim time for an instrument rating, it's helpful but it's not as impressive as it sounds. XP's certification level is more about, "if the joystick is unplugged, pause the sim" than accurate aerodynamic modeling or flight model completeness.
http://www.flypfc.com/index.php?i_id=29
http://www.fidelityflight.com/newmotion.htm
http://rkaplan.hypermart.net/simulator.html
Though you are right in that these are still only currently certified as FTDs, you can still fulfill, for instance, up to 50 hours of seat time for your ATP certificate. See FAR 61.159(a)(3)(i)
One thing a pilot is never allowed to do, is give up (no matter what); and neither should you if caught in a survival scenario.
If this is a real concern for you, check out something like the AOPA Pinch Hitter's Course, which can teach someone to land an airplane during an emergency with only minimal flight training. See http://www.avweb.com/news/safety/183024-1.html
If your question is more along the lines of "does a simulator make an acceptable substitute for an aircraft?", the answer must be no. Simulators are really only useful as a supplement to actual flight experience and training.
One of the things I remember when first starting was the sheer amount of "stuff" going on in a plane that I had to worry about. For example taking off you've got maintaining the center line/winds (aileron position) checking engine instruments, radio calls, speed, and traffic. Having seen some of these components virtually may alleviate some of that head spinning that goes on. You'd know what flaps are, and when they are usually used, you'd know what a flare is (and that you didn't need 37 pieces of it).
You would also have exposure to various IFR procedures commonly used in the real world, most useful being ILS, which can line up your aircraft with the runway and put you on the correct glide slope, and even land the plane.
I would also suspect you would have a bit of a confidence boost (that is if you're optimistic), something like "I've put a 737-700 on the blocks hundreds of times in MSFS/x plane - how hard can it be?"
Of course this is all wild speculation, and the odds of an "Airplane" scenario are pretty small.
He claims that any non-actual-pilot will be unable to land a commercial airliner in a full-motion simulator, given the controls mid-cruise. Whoever loses the bet gets to pay for the simulation time (ouch!).
If I had the money, I would take his challenge in a heart beat! I am open to accepting funding ;)
With enough time in a realistic aerodynamic model + cockpit setup, on a modern aircraft (that has a high degree of automation already), in favorable weather conditions and a long // wide enough runway I think it's probable you could fly the bird to a safe landing.
"announces the development"
"announces the internal development"
"inspired by the best-selling Flight Simulator franchise"
"bring a new perspective to the long-standing genre"
"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences"
So it's vaporware, bearing no resemblance to the original, without any of the original developers, which, if it's ever released, will be filled with griefers.
>"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences" and "bring a new perspective to the long-standing genre"
And "friends". And "points". Not that I was a fan before, but that seems it would screw over anyone serious about it.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555857
I'm hope I'm wrong, but a diluted-down, closed game is going to disappoint many of the enthusiasts who've supported Flight Sim over the years, and even in the best-case, the likelihood is that much of the talent and knowledge that built Flight Sim X is gone for good.