I always thought it was a great flight sim, especially when joysticks were more prevalent (I had the Mach 3). But after MFSX, the series just died off in 2006 (officially in 2009). Why? It doesn’t seem like anything replaced it.
X-Plane replaced it, sort of.
The same thing that happened with all Microsoft PC gaming IP, it got forgotten about when Microsoft entered the console biz.
Billions of dollars later, and barely out of the hole they dug for themselves with the original Xbox, now they are a distant second in that market place.
::slow golf clap::
It’s on Steam with 166 DLC add-ons available. I once added them all to my cart and it was $2400 of DLC. Funny thing is though, you can add all of them to your cart at once but there’s no option to remove them all at once.
MSFSX has been replaced by Lockheed Martins Prepar3d, which is actually built upon fsx. Most add ons for fsx also works with Prepar3d.
It kept crashing.
Interesting it’s only $199, I was expecting much much more. So there’s this statement on the product page: “Prepar3D is not to be used, offered, sold or distributed through markets or channels for use as a personal/consumer entertainment product.”
http://www.prepar3d.com/product-overview/prepar3d-license-comparison/
Do they actually enforce this? Can you only buy it if you’re taking lessons with a flight school? Their online store lets me add it to the cart and go to checkout but I didn’t go all the way through to see if it asks for some qualification info.
No, it’s not enforced. I’m pretty sure most users are just armchair pilots. As I understand it, it’s something they have to state as part of the deal with MS when they bought the code base. The academic version is the one you want for home use. That’s $60.
It just ran out of gas.
Chalk it up to one of many poor decisions that Microsoft made in the 2000s.
Anyway, X-Plane has better physics and is a better simulation. Flight Simulator was never particularly good at actually simulating flight.
There’s a new X-plane coming out too, right? Will probably pick that up at some point. Miss FSX.
Okay, correct me if I’m wrong on this because it’s annoying looking at individual properties and backdating/untangling when they were acquired by Microsoft.
I don’t remember Microsoft itself ever being a huge gaming presence in the pre-xBox days. I checked out the Microsoft Studios page and the only game there (other than flight simulator) with any real legacy is the Age of Empire series. And that was only published by Microsoft Studios, not developed.
This appears to be a list of games actually developed by Microsoft Studios. It’s pretty thin.
Of course, development isn’t the same as owning IP, but as best I can tell, Microsoft didn’t go hard into the gaming market until 2001. When they established the Xbox, they also began establishing their gaming wing in general as they started to buy up IP and studios. As best I can tell, their biggest pre-2001 get was when they purchased FASA Studios in 1999. That got them Battletech and some other properties. Can’t find anything else that’s significant.
X-plane 11 is already out although it may still be in late beta mode. You get free updates as soon as they are available no matter when you buy it. I have it and it is a very good, hard-core simulator. The graphics and user interface are better than FSX as well. The only area that it is lacking so far is the fun factor. It isn’t a game. I enjoyed the FSX missions but X-plane 11 doesn’t have anything like those in the base product. You can make your own of course but it isn’t quite the same thing. There are flying lessons that are very good but the number of them is very limited.
I think the biggest difference between MFS and X-Plane is, MFS does a better job with the “non-natural” terrain (buildings, bridges, etc.), while X-Plane does a better job with the planes themselves (plus there are any number of custom-built planes, which I don’t think could be done with MFS).
One “trick” I noticed with MFS: you can’t crash into the Statue of Liberty - you fly right through it. I assume it’s because, in order to get it to be something close to its actual color, they make it a color that the game interprets as sky. In earlier versions, snow-topped mountains had the same problem (they had to be the same color as clouds); it turns out that the mountains were hollow, and you could get inside them by flying through the top.
Assuming you haven’t turned collisions off, that’s not true at all.
That would have absolutely nothing to do with it. Games don’t do collision detection based on color; they construct internal representations of the geometry of objects and check to see whether the player is intersecting an object.
I’ve flown FSX a fair bit. I never really had any complaints about the physics of it, but it always seemed to be rather simplified in other areas. I could fly instrument approaches in the sim, but when I looked at real approach plates, or read about real instrument flying, there was always much more to it than presented in the sim. There were other things too. There were controls that were visible on the panel, but didn’t actually work; I never could start the engines in a 737 without using the one-click shortcut in the sim.
For the pilots here, is that impression accurate? It looks like Prepar3d is trying to position itself as a more serious teaching tool. Does it capture more of the complexity of real flying, and how is XPlane in that regard?
FSX uses lookup charts to determine how different aircraft fly. I never thought it was that bad but it has its limitations. X-Plane uses laminar modeling in real time to dynamically model how a real aircraft reacts to whatever situation you set up using complex physics calculations. As I mentioned earlier, X-Plane 11 is not a game but its user interface and graphics are much better than previous versions. You can simulate just about anything from engine failures to thunderstorms. Everything is fully functional down to the last switch including the GPS.
I have never used Prepar3d but I am very familiar with FSX. Both have their strengths but I think X-Plane 11 has a more solid base because it is better at physics modelling and now has great graphics. The only major complaint I have with it is that it is a huge install that constantly gets upgraded (it just takes time but little effort). I was playing around with it tonight and it is a little too realistic. I already passed all the flight lessons and made up some ones of my own. The only thing left is a thorough pre-flight and the smell of avgas or jet fuel on my shirt.
I run it on a 46" monitor and it is about as real as it gets. The major annoyance is memorizing the keyboard controls because there are a ton on them. It isn’t a piece of software for the casual user. You could potentially use it to design real planes.
I am a private pilot.
FSX is greatly simplified in all respects - flight model, avionics, systems, etc.
X-Plane is pretty good with respect to the flight model. It uses a real-time simulation of the physics of flight and so includes a lot of subtle effects that are missing from FSX and contribute to the feeling of reality. The stock airplanes that come with the sim are decent, but there are truly excellent add-on planes from third parties too. In the few planes that I’ve flown both in real life and in X-Plane, the “feel” of X-Plane has been excellent.
X-Plane also has by far the best helicopter dynamics. I took a helicopter lesson in real life in an R-22 and was able to hover basically on the first try thanks to a few hours of practice in X-Plane at home (this was rather novel to my instructor). Helicopters in FSX are pretty easy to fly - not so in X-Plane and real life.
The avionics and navigation systems are pretty complete in that you have everything that you would need to practice for an instrument check ride, but they are a bit homogenized. In real life, every plane has different instruments from different manufacturers that might have a few extra features, or work a little differently, and X-Plane doesn’t really include those differences between planes other than maybe cosmetic differences on the faceplates.
Also, a lot of the complexity of real flying comes from dealing with ATC, which X-Plane essentially does not model at all.
Systems accuracy (by that I mean peripheral things like the electrical busses, cabin pressurization, hydraulics, etc.) varies between planes and is also a bit homogenized and simplified compared to real life, but is still orders of magnitude more complete than FSX. Some add-on planes have excellent systems models.
If you are interested in the most accurate flight sim I’ve ever seen, check out digitalcombatsimulator.com. They have a free module with a P-51 you can try out. The A-10 is excellent, as is the UH-1 and the paid version of the P-51. These modules model everything about those planes that it is possible to model on a computer (without a security clearance, anyway). The flight model and graphics are also excellent. Unlike in X-Plane, you can blow things up too!
Looks like a new iteration of MFS has been released.
Flight games in general died off. Flight games, especially combat ones, were once a major part of the PC gaming market. I must have played doens of them; Falcon 3.0, F-15 Strike Eagle, Gunship, Il-2 Sturmovik, Red Baron, Aces over the Pacific, EF 2000, MiG Alley, B-17 Flying Fortress, and on and on. “Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe” was so awesome.
For a variety of reasons, flight games just stopped being popular. They’re still around, but few in number. I’m not sure why; maybe they simply got pushed out by other game types, especially MMOs. Maybe the PC market was overwhelmed by the console market and flight games don’t translate well to consoles (who the hell would want to buy a fancy joystick for their Ps3?) Either way, MicroSoft didn’t stop making them for 13 years because they’re stupid. They stopped making them for the same reason most of the other studios stopped making them: because it didn’t make any sense to.