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Aircraft and Environment
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight - Part 3

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A New World

Microsoft has done wonders with the way the sky looks. I can't say enough about how much the shading, the haze effects and the colors of the sky combine to really enhance the feeling of flying. I won't go into the clouds in detail, but they sure have come a long way. My copy did not have all the cloud and sky features enabled that the later releases have and it still looks much better than the old sky in past editions. The sky changes color with the time of day and as you change altitudes too. Its a very nice effect and contributes greatly to feeling like your in a whole new world.

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Along with the sky colors have come some marked improvements in the autogen, the terrain textures, and of course the weather effects. It's just about impossible to capture the new lightning show in a screenshot, but boy what a show it is! It lights up the surrounding clouds and is very dynamic.

Along with the weather we see very nice improvements in the texture of the autogen and also the building types and colors. There are some fun new buildings and objects to look at and I won't ruin everyone's own fun by showing everything here either! The new roads now actually cut into the terrain and lie flat, as they should along the hillsides and steep terrain. Along these roads you will see streetlights and telephone poles. This coupled with the seemingly more abundant trees really improves the low and slow experience in flight sim. VFR flying at low altitudes and speeds is really more enjoyable now. Also new to this version are high-tension power lines. You will see the paths in the terrain and along these paths are some nicely done high-tension towers, which don't appear to do much to the frame rate. Another nice feature is what I call auto bridge. Wherever a major road or railway crosses a large enough body of water a bridge is displayed. They even have light poles along them! This is apparently done with the code and it’s not as if a bridge was laid down with the normal bgl type code for scenery.

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Great strides seem to have been made with the look of the textures, which now cover the improved mesh. The textures look a bit more natural in color and seem a bit more appropriate for where you are on the planet. The textures coupled with the new mesh really make it a more believable picture. It seems to me that the mesh has a bit better resolution than the default in FS 2002. Other folks who have the pre-release copies also echo this. Dig through the screenshots accompanying this article and a lot of what I have been mentioning is evident.

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