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FLIGHT now available


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Thanks for being quick on the ball here Joe ... I thought MS might have released it Seattle time and I would download it later, normally I'd be all over an MS FS release like this, but I'll catch up with it later I guess.

The links are good, but they need you to log on to their domain for the download, I registered with them once and cant remember my log on details :) I'll sort it out later.

Would love to hear first impressions from non MS testers on Flight though.

I think Flight is either going to be utterly brilliant ... and most of us hardcore PC flight sim snobs (inc me) were wrong, or it is going to be the best thing since sliced bread, according to some very vocal MS PR and Flight supporters who tested it.

Its bite the bullet time for the suits at MS who are gambelling their MS history loyal fan base against the quick buck making mechanism scheme they have adopted now.

I know where I stand :)

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well the download and installation went well i got it at 11am eurotime as i cant say anything positive about it, i shall refrain from making any comment at all , needless to say at 3.30 this afternoon it was deleted, such a shame.

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actually i did see something positive, the portrayl of fog was much better than anything in fsx, quite realistic to fly through too especially at low heights

Encouraging, but I always thought Flight might have elements of the work ACE's started with after FSX, when Aces were scrapped and sacked, some of them were kept on to archive whatever work in progress had been done ... sadly I think Flight is it, but modified for the X-Box or X-Box 2 ... we just don't know it yet.

Seriously, there was a reason we all saw Flight demonstrated with X-Box controllers, its not because of compatibility or how this could be done too, its because its their vision of how it should be with new management.

At least we can all still use traditional controllers, but has anyone tested this game with more exotica like Saitek gauges and VR Insight gear I own?

From what I read the current ideology from MS means its a closed shop, and its their fault alone for being so secretive. If this venture falls flat on it face, I've no idea nor care if my £1000's of quids worth of hardware works in this new game any-more because at last I've found out this game is not for me.

And yes MS owe me nothing, but I don't owe them anything either, we're quits

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ok, so I tried it too. took the first lessons (truly awful), wanted to try the Stearman, created a live account, found that I needed a product code, which did not recognise my live account, and ended up in an awful endlees stupid MSlive loop. Gave up for now, so far, so bad. I'll try again next week, so far nothing to get excited about....

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Gave it a shot with an open mind and man - it is really dumbed down.

The fact that it forced you through the b.s. lessons just to get to free flight really annoyed me.

Once I was able to get out and fly around, I'm forced to agree, there's not much to see here.

For the first time in history, I shut of a new 'sim' from Microsoft within 30 minutes of trying it and haven't thought about it since.

Further to that - I can't even see the appeal for the market they're allegedly trying to appeal to - there's just nothing there. It all seems extremely unfinished.

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if i can make a few factual observations without starting a war,

1) my plane would not fly hands off it always slowly tuned to the left and there is no way of calibrating the joystick (that I could find)

2) the airspeed indicated on the guages at the top of the page did not match that indicated on the guages in the stearman , which initially one couldnt see at all, but by pressing L (good old fsx) they lit up there was at time as much as 18mph difference between the 2 sets of guages

3)at one point I headed south to try to climb above some clouds along the coast, to see how things looked from above the clouds, however despite flying for 30 minutes i never did manage to reach the clouds, and despite getting to 13k i was still trying to get high enough to get over the clouds, so gave up.

4) no matter how hard one held the stick back a stall was not forthcoming, the a/c simply mushed, even with full power, which if you do that on any real a/c the results can be quite violent so i dont think the realism is anywhere near as good as fsx and that when it comes to stalls fsx is pretty poor, i understand xplane is much more realistic from this point of view.

finally i have to take my hat off to mr. Feliz-Tirado who wrote the avsim review, he wrote more than 2,500 words without a solitary word of criticism, that takes some doing i think he should be given the job of the head of the press corps for obamas re election :))

it will be interesting to follow the sales of the aftermarket add-ons however i doubt this will become public knowledge, because i like rabbitc am having difficulty seeing who this game will appeal to and how many will be tempted to buy further scenery or a/c upgrades after having played with it for an hour or two.

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It's the whole add-on market, really, in both FS9 and FSX. I include the freeware producers as well as the payware guys.

 

The SDK was instrumental but a lot more was unlocked by those who dug well beyond the SDK. You also can't overlook the contributions of the greats like Swordy and Dowson, who opened so many doors. The SDK cracked the door - FSUIPC kicked it wide open.

 

John

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I got round to downloading Flight a few days ago and decided to buy the Hawaiian adventure pack and Maule aircraft too to get a proper taste for MS Flight, here are some of my random thoughts ...

First off, I never saw any option to choose my drive or directory folder so it installed it to C:\program files (x86) though there does seem to be an option in the menu later to choose where installed files go??? ... I might have missed something here, but I've found several bugs that should have been addressed before it was released ... reading between the lines I get the feeling someone at the top said "just get it out" even some beta testers on other forums were surprised it was pushed out so early, as I recall estimates for its release were around April this year.

I don't like the MS points system of purchasing, it seems you have to buy more points than you need for MS Flight add-ons (I've got 200 surplus now) I read last night that this system will be getting phased out soon and you can pay normally in the near future ... I think its a system that X-box live used? also too, you are assigned a daft gamer tag that you are allowed to change once for free, but I've read of folk who made a mistake and it cost them points to do it again ... mine is Stargazer M31, just finding an unused gamer tag I wanted was hard, not because there are so many in use in Flight but I think its the same data base X-box players use.

I've tried it with my Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS, Saitek rudder pedals and trim wheel so far, no problems assigning basic sim functions to throttle and stick and most button functions and the rudder axis works too, but as has been mentioned elsewhere the Saitek rudder toe brakes are either on or off and there is no repeat so you have to keep frantically pushing them up and down to get your aircraft to stop, this is due for a fix apparently and there is a workaround editing an xml file that I'm reluctant to do just now as it may interfere with any future update from MS (I could back up those files first I suppose) same with the trim wheel, no axis for it yet ... this game is supposed to be for newcomers, its fair to assume they shouldn't have to go editing xml files to make things work as they should is my thinking.

On to the sim itself, it loads quickly, I cant comment about flight models as I only have a few hours real flight time and in only one aircraft, but it feels a bit nervous in the air with perhaps a bit too much inertia, the ground handling seems hyper too, but perhaps this can be toned down once we learn to edit axis curves like we can in RoF?

The whole game world seems kinda sterile to me, I really never appreciated how little things like AI and even the moving ground traffic in FSX made the sim come alive, looking at the bigger airports in MS Flight and seeing all those empty jetways reminded me of that Stephen King film "The Langoliers" where you are the only person alive in a barren empty world. The Hawaiian island graphics are generally pretty good though ... the sea texture is not much better than what we had in FSX at higher detail levels IMHO.

Side Note: One of the Flight Beta testers was saying on a forum last night that he had read MS will shortly be making it official that they wont be adding ATC to MS Flight as it would be too costly to add and do it right ...this may or may not be announced now or maybe that beta tester was wrong? but if there is not to be any ATC its hard to imagine them adding airliners too?

As regards weather ... I've only tried a few themes, the general fair weather theme is not a patch on what REX can do IMHO, the clouds look awful, but the poor weather theme (I forget its exact name off-hand) is very well done, the internal cockpit shadows look great.

From what I've seen of the mission engine so far, its not as good as what FSX's could do or if its the same engine they are not doing their best with it yet ... I actually liked some of the more clever realistic FSX missions and am especially fond of Just Flights Rescue Pilot mission pack, but even the MS Flight find the missing Kayaker mission was extremely simplistic and easy to finish and I really enjoyed the FSX SAR missions ... I quickly levelled my self up to level 9 in MS Flight to try the observatory mission (I'm a bit of an astronomer) and see the comet once I got above the clouds, again I was pretty disappointed, perhaps we'll see better structured missions from the MS Flight team in the future.

These are my first thoughts on MS Flight, it is fun and I dont mind fun, it looks like it is bringing in newcomers to Flight Simulation (we're still in the honeymoon period for MS Flight though) and I initially never thought that would happen ... I still have my rich FSX with add-ons tailored exactly the way i like it ... so, I'm really not to bothered about how MS Flight eventually pans out.

I guess I'll fire up MS Flight now and again for a bit of fun in the same way I'll fire up Solitaire to while away the odd bored hour I suppose ... as for Flight DLC in the future, I'm not so sure I'll purchase any more (definitely not any cockpit-less stuff) MS Flgiht may well appeal to a lot of gamers but its definitely a lagging second place behind FSX for me.

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I got to choose directory during install, so unless there are different installers, there is no bug. I had mine installed on a different drive.

Yep, the point system is one of the "clever" components of Microsoft's DLC system. Shame on them, especially considering that Flight is targeting a young audience.

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The option to change install location is right there on the first installer screen, so I don't know how you didn't see it. I installed mine to D:\MSFlight.

I needed to go into Settings and configure my CH yoke and pedals, since the default settings didn't make much sense. I haven't configured the Saitek TQs since there doesn't appear to be support for multiple engine controls right now (the only planes available are single engine too)

I've only gone through the first few tutorial missions, which I'd regard as fair. I was never a big fan of missions in FSX, so I can't really compare them. But getting full marks was pretty easy. The Stearman seems nice enough, although the Icon is a horrible plane IMHO. I definitely like how you can now walk around the aircraft.

The scenery seems nice enough, and pretty dense without straining my PC, even in triplehead mode. Speaking of which, the TH2GO only really works well full screen. If you try to run it windowed, you'll really only get the centre panel - stretching the window causes the button graphics not to align with the click spots, and other wierdness.

Haven't bought the DLC.

The biggest downside I think is the lack of traffic - the world is empty, and that takes away a lot of believability. I don't bemoan the lack of ATC - It's awful in FSX and I don't use it anyhow (much prefer VATSIM and its real controllers). If Flight had an equivalent of VATSIM, that would be great.

FSX made the world a desert. Flight made the world deserted.

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Thanks guys, I thought I might have missed the choose install path option ... I'll need to look into the options to back up any saved progress I've made and do a fresh install soon ... to be honest I missed the option to choose install path when FSX first came out too :whis:

The other note I made to myself playing it the last time was there was no push back option that I could see, and with the lack of properly functioning toe brakes just now this made turning around at the end of the smaller surrounded by tree's runway tutorial missions a bit of an extra challenge ... at least they have good tree collision detection :)

FSX made the world a desert. Flight made the world deserted.

LOL, very true Tim ... I think its this aspect that is one of the worst I've found with MS Flight so far, you can of course fly the missions in multiplayer mode, but this too detracted from the two more serious missions I tried in MS Flight, you can close down the voice chat box of course though.

Meant to say too in my random thought post ... I tried it with all flight assists off right from the start.

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To be fair, they don't exactly go out of their way to make the option obvious...

Haven't tried it, but I wonder if you can push the plane in Walk mode (the A5 anyhow -- the Stearman may be too heavy for one person to push)

I think I'm going to trademark that phrase!! LOL

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I see on Avsim the next scenery pack for Flight has been announced, Journey to Alaska by X box live chief Major Nelson.

http://majornelson.com/2012/03/05/a-preview-of-xbox-360-kinect-arcade-and-windows-phone-games/

Scroll about half way down, the gist of the info is ... This Spring, fans will be able to purchase the Journey to Alaska Pack, the second in a series of expansion packs for the game with over 1.2 million square miles of captivating scenery, additional missions and new aircraft.

Will be interesting to see how they handle this DLC and the adjoining land scenery outwith the DLC content, they could get away with it in Hawaii ... also be interesting to see what extra aircraft we will get.

MS need to get their pricing right for this one, already many including me think they are charging a bit too much for current DLC ... for sure I'll wait for a good few trusted reviews before even considering this one.

I also hope that they fix some of the outstanding bugs in the current release before releasing anything else.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just a quick update ... I mentioned earlier in the thread that I'd missed the option for install path for MS Flight, well I un-installed it again and tried a new download this afternoon, what it does is download a small installer that offers to let you choose your own install path and this time I chose F:\MS Flight that is my 240 GB SSD (I prefer to keep game installs off my C:\ drive) I was wondering at this point if it would remember my settings and two purchases, the Hawaiian adventure pack and Maule Aircraft ... it did at least my account did and even my old progress in the game ... before I did this I'd backed up my original MS Flight folder on C:\ and compared to the new one on F:\ ... exactly the same size ... what I'm thinking is, this was a mistake dir install on my part originally but it could have been a HD crash and I had to install again, so unless I'm missing something once more, there is no once only download for MS Flight content to save you downloading again ... you have to re-download each time ... about 2.3 GB this time, not so bad now, but what happens once you have downloaded much more MS Flight DLC for future proposed content?

I don't think anyone's touched on this yet?

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Yep, seems the only file you can download is the installer, then everything needs to be redownloaded.

Even worse IMHO is that your game stats can't be paused/edited/deleted. Gold rush missions are equally valued as the serious transport missions. So everything is arcade and there is no way to use Flight as a "serious game". If you let someone try it on your computer to show it off you're stats will be updated with the actions of that guest as well.

But I'm signing out of the Flight forums. No reason to keep wasting my time on a game I don't enjoy playing. Maybe the next Flight will have something to offer a more mature audience...

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