I upgraded my processor and motherboard today. (Well, Andie did. She is better at fiddling around with electronics than me.) It was a painless process, so naturally I had to test it out with some Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was the reason for the upgrade, after all!
It runs way better. No more stuttering! Frame rate is a little variable at times, but that's expected for this sort of software, plus my video card is a few years old now. That'll be the next upgrade, then, but not for a few months.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share some pictures from pissing about in the simulator this evening. These are all taken at Medium detail level, if you were curious.
I flew into London to see how my new specs would cope with a "busy" area, and the answer is "just fine". I'm a little below 30fps there, but it's still perfectly playable.
One of the best things about Microsoft Flight Simulator is the combination of Active Pause, which causes your aircraft to stop dead wherever it is, and the Drone Camera, which can be freely positioned. Wanky artsy photos ahoy! This is my Cessna, as seen from the roof of the Tower of London.
I attempted to fly under Tower Bridge, but discovered in the process that Microsoft Flight Simulator appears to treat this as an entirely solid object, even if you turn crashes off. Consequently, my Cessna became a boat for a short period.
Undeterred, I tried again. This can be filed under "photos taken moments before disaster".
I then slewed the Cessna up to 20,000 feet, because that's what you do in Flight Simulator. I managed to get down to a safe altitude without ripping the wings off or anything.
By fortunate happenstance, my slewing north of London had put me in the vicinity of the small airstrip near where my parents live, so I landed there. I then taxied onto the road and decided to drive the Cessna into the village to see if I could find my parents' house.
It is indeed possible to drive a Cessna on British country roads, though do take care not to send your wings slicing through someone's lounge windows.
Since the ground detail is based on satellite photography, bits of road that are obscured by a canopy of trees can prove troublesome. I got a little lost here.
But I safely found my way home just in time for my Mum to put the kettle on. Okay, the house is wrong and the detail is blurry as all hell, but I wasn't expecting anything more for a little rural village like this. The fact that there was just enough detail to pick out my parents' driveway and the cars sitting there is impressive enough to me.
I sent out a drone to survey the surroundings and discovered on the day the satellite photography for this area was taken, someone from the local gliding club was obviously up in the sky. Now they are immortalised in the texture for this field.
And we close with a nice aerial shot of where I grew up. This is fun!
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