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from the don't-forget-your-preflight-checks dept.
How Microsoft Flight Simulator returned to the skies:
Let's play a quick game of word association: Microsoft — Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers. But for me, for a while in the '90s at least, I would have immediately answered "Flight Simulator." Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on a computer, sat on my granddad's lap as we soared across blocky landscapes together with a Sidewinder joystick. It is one of Microsoft's all-time iconic brands.
It's also a brand that the company has more or less ignored in the past decade-plus. The last release, Flight Simulator X, came out in 2006, and a few years later, its developer, Aces Game Studio, was closed as part of widespread layoffs at Microsoft. A 2012 free-to-play spinoff called Microsoft Flight was less than well-received.
In just a few weeks, though, Microsoft is releasing perhaps the biggest upgrade to the series in its 38-year history. The new title, developed by French studio Asobo and simply called Microsoft Flight Simulator, is an ambitious attempt to leverage Microsoft's Bing Maps data and Azure-powered procedural generation technology to render our planet in unprecedented detail.
I've been playing a pre-release alpha version for a couple of weeks, and it's frankly astonishing. This is a full-throttle effort from Microsoft to re-create the natural world and the magic of flight. And while it carries the weight of an iconic series, it feels like it came from nowhere. Why is Microsoft reviving Flight Simulator now?
So my dear Soylentils, how many of you have played Microsoft Flight Simulator and if so, what did you think?
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Tuesday August 04 2020, @05:08AM
Many, many moons ago, we had what I still consider the best flight sim I've ever experienced.
It ran on Sun workstations, back around the transition from SunOS to Solaris, so I'm not sure if it ran on one, the other, or both.
Aircraft were detailed models, and the terrain was from USGS databases.
Air-to-air combat was included, but it was a bit uncomfortable to discover that the "pilot" of whatever you just shot down was your boss.
My second favorite was "Strike Aces" on the Amiga. Detail was a lot less than what the workstations did, of course, but the mission planning (load-out, route, ...) was spot-on and the difficulties completing the missions wasn't exaggerated. Still, fast as an FB-111 is, unless I was willing to discard mission-critical ordnance, I was never able to shake the adversary F-14s.
Given the capabilities of even a PS 2 or XBox, much less their successors, I was never able to find a satisfactory flight simulator for them.