Flight Simulator arrived! I spent much of the day installing it from its 10 DVDs (and then the 16GB download it also needed), but it is now safely installed on my computer and ready to fiddle around with at a moment's notice.
So far I've taken a thoroughly unprofessional flight from Southampton Airport (my local airport) to the tiny grass airstrip in the village where my parents live. I didn't crash or anything, though the Cessna I was flying was getting battered around a bit while I was up in the air — I guess it was a bit windy. The whole thing took about an hour and, in theory, was rather boring, but I enjoyed myself.
It was fun looking out the window and trying to identify the areas I was flying past — I subsequently discovered you can turn on on-screen "city markers" to assist with sightseeing — and, when I finally set down on the grass strip, it was also enjoyable getting out the Drone Camera and flying off into the village proper to try and find my parents' house. I think I found it, though the detail is a little lacking in rural areas like this, so it was only a rough approximation; by contrast, my own house is completely recognisable — you can even see the big tree on my driveway and our extension out back!
My PC is only around the "recommended" specs for Flight Simulator (as opposed to the "optimum" specs) so it doesn't run amazingly on my machine. There's a bit of stuttering when it's streaming stuff in as you reach new areas — particularly if you're low to the ground — but once you're in flight things work perfectly fine. I have to play on "Medium" detail, but it still looks very nice indeed. And, having grown up with earlier versions of Flight Simulator, I'm very much accustomed to janky performance at times. I still just marvel at the fact it does what it does so well.
It's exciting to live in an age where something we looked forward to back in Flight Simulator 5 is finally a reality. A fun gimmicky feature in FS5, which was the first of the series to feature texture-mapped graphics based on satellite photographs, was the fact that you could zoom the "map" out so far that you could see the whole Earth from space. The game didn't model the whole Earth in detail — in areas where there was "no" scenery it simply had a generic patchwork texture — but the fact you could zoom out that far and the, in theory, go anywhere on Earth was an exciting possibility. Now, it's finally here; the whole world really is in this game, and you can go anywhere.
I'll write more or make some videos or something in the near future; I need to spend a bit more time with it first of all to get my head around everything it's doing. The daily Landing Challenges are fun, though!
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