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.
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 its not as if a bridge was laid
down with the normal bgl type code for scenery.
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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