Aircraft and Environment
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A
Century of Flight - Part 3
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One more aircraft related item,
and it’s a "biggy". All the aircraft have virtual
cockpits now and lots of the controls can be accessed with
the mouse while in the virtual cockpits mode. It's a nice
feature and I really like it while doing "touch and go's"
in the visual pattern. Even though I have a good HOTAS stick
and throttle its much more immersive to do it this way.
Add-On Aircraft
I wanted to mention a bit here about
add-on aircraft. I have literally hundreds of aircraft in
my FS 2002 aircraft folder. I have tried a good batch of them
and for the most part they all work flawlessly. The only big
issues I appear to have at the moment are gauge problems and
gps related differences. With the new Garmin, things are set
up a bit differently and some panel configuration files will
need some tweaks to make them work without crashing. Overall
I have had very minor problems only in this regard and it's
usually easily fixed with a panel cfg edit or deletion of
a gauge. There are several of my add-ons in the screenshots
associated with these preview articles. Most of the large
"payware" developers are hard at work with their
add-ons to make them compatible so I don't see big problems
with that either. I do know that add-on sceneries will no
longer support .af type bitmaps. This will be a problem for
a lot of the freeware developed sceneries.
I won't get too long winded here,
go check out the links below we have provided to Microsoft
and see the full list of aircraft. Again, I don't want to
ruin everyone's fun. You need to discover some of this stuff
for yourself!
This concludes my three-part preview
of "A Century of Flight". FS 2004 promises to be
the most outstanding Microsoft Flight Simulator to date. With
all the enhancements and improvements it will be more immersive
than ever. After a few weeks with this press copy I can say
it would be a must buy for me. The visual improvements in
weather alone are enough that I would not think twice about
purchasing it. I highly recommend it to anyone interested
in flying, whatever type you like to do.
The Microsoft
Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight official
web site is here.
Video downloads showing different
aspects of Microsoft Flight
Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight are available here.
The Microsoft
Flight Simulator Insider web site is located here.
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