Flight Simulators - The state of the Market

hamster

Hi,

Would any flight sim fans care to tell me what they like these days?

I recently tried a freeware advanced simulator "Orbiter 2005" and I was blown away by the quality. This is more of a space sim but a flight sim nevertheless. http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html

FlightGear is another one. A freeware competitor to M$ incarnations.
http://www.flightgear.org/

What do people think of MS Simulator 2004 / 2002 ? I hope to get a new spanking computer by the end of the year or sometime next year and get myself a good 3D card / joystick to boot. My trusty P3-800Mhz is starting to groan when faced with 3D (great for everything else mind you!) Would you recommend MS Simulator 2004? Time and patience I know. But what is it that makes these sims so enjoyable. Anyone here with some virtual flying time under their belt?

In the past I have played EF2000, Flight Unlimited 2 but wow things have come on a big way.... Generally I love the feeling of freedom and space generated by these sims.

Balfa

I think Falcon 4.0 and IL-2 Sturmovik are pretty much as far as the market has come. Although Oleg Maddox, the creator of IL-2, has just released another game, which has probably replaced IL-2 as the pinnacle of historical flightsimmery, but i can't remember the name of that new one.

The Falcon 4.0 mod scene is unbelievable, but rife with political intrigue and espionage. Pretty confusing to find out what you need to get the most out of it though.

One of my favourite flight sims is Aces High, an online-only massive flight-sim in a persistent world. There are three different forces in a constant battle over an island (usually) and there's a whole supply and logistics system in place so you have to prioritise what to attack. You can even control some tanks and carrier fleets, too. It's like Battlefield 1942, only on a much bigger scale, and much more serious. You can download it and play a free trial for like a week or something.

Oh, and getting a fully loaded 70,000lb Lancaster off the ground and circling for 45 minutes just to reach your cruise altitude before heading off across the map to level a little town you'll barely be able to see is more fun than it sounds

Players can organise special sorties as well, where they plan a route and assign several slots of certain planes with certain loadouts, and other players on the team join the sortie and pick a slot, then they all take off together with a big purpose in mind. I usually fly the goonie bird with paratroopers in it and hang back until everyone else has cleared the way for me to drop the lads in

stevenmu

It got pretty bad reviews when it came out but I enjoyed Lock On:Modern Air Combat for a while, never really got into it fully but the various training missions were fun and informative. I've seen it in Game for under €10 recently.

X-Plane is a good general aviation sim, and I really mean general, it has all the standard military and civialian fixed wings, some helicopters, I think even the V22 Osprey hybrid, Hanggliders, even the space shuttle (which you get to do a full simulated landing from orbit in ). I think it's kinda open source-ish, not quite free but there's huge amounts of freely downloadable planes and terrain etc. Oh, and you can fly around Mars in it too.

Azza

IL2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles along with the Ace's Expansion Pack and Pacific Fighters (patched to version 4.01m) is the best flight sim on the market. Look for hyperlobby if you want to play online. Its a excellent game I be certain its the best but I heard Falcon 4.0 is good too.

Peteee

Lock on tbh.

Can be picked up cheap, and theres an expansion pack out for it too.

Kintarō Hattori

FlightSim 2004 is excellent, as you say the freedom to go where you want isd great.
It has the best mod scene of any of the simulators, there are tons of free aircraft and secenery available for it, someone has even done a higher res version of Dublin.
Whether you like military, light aircraft such as Cessna's, passenger planes etc, it has it all.
Some links:

http://www.avsim.com
http://www.simviation.com
http://www.flightsim.com

As people have mentioned, Lock-On is great, very very in depth, you won't pick it up and fly inside of 10mins. Vey enjoyable.