Peter's Blog

I needed a way to stretch The Beast. I was intrieged by the screen shots in Microsoft Flight Simulator X and further investigation found that it has high system requirements (odd for a Microsoft product). I haven't tried a flight simulator for about 15 years and back then realism was restricted to a screen that was half blue and half green. I never got into making a landing and was frustrated by the poor graphics making it hard to tell how far above the ground you were.

The Beast came with an NVidia NVS 285 graphics card which is a high end 2D card for workstations, no good for 3D graphics. After some research ended up buying an XFX 7900GS card: not the best available, a slight compromise. Plugged in, Just Worked.

Downloaded the flight simulator demo (800M file, not without some hassle) and had a play. The games loads up with reasonable speed on The Beast, I've played games that were more frustrating in the past (the original Half-Life springs to mind: I played it on hard and did a LOT of reloading).

First impression was that it was nothing special. Start off trying to drop flour bombs onto targets from a Microlight and it's pretty much impossible to control the thing using mouse as a yoke. Later I altered the sensitivity of the controls, turning them down and reducing the dead band in the middle and it was better but still very hard. It's like those driving games where the slightest touch of the 'wheel' sends you careering into a wall: totally unlike actually driving a car (at least the cars I have driven). Other aircraft were easier to control. Taking off in a Lear Jet was fun.

Being a demo it comes with no manual so it's a bit of a challenge working out how to drive it, a matter of pressing all the buttons to see what happens. You can go into the keyboard setup and look at all the assignments but you can't print them out.

I altered the display settings to make it more of a challenge. I turned up the auto-generated scenery and some of the effects. I turned off the bloom effect which is reputed to slow things down. I started a new flight (don't seem to be able to change settings mid flight) and it was better. Water has realistic reflections and sure enough there are little trees and houses all over the place. These were actually a little naff, all the trees look the same and as you fly along forests in the distance suddently appear, as if they grow out the ground as you approach. There were silly bugs like trees on the side of hills appearing to float with just one edge of the base touching the ground. It could do with more anti-aliasing as the trees were rendered with unrealistic sharpness. The frame rate with this was ok, very slightly juddery when banking but nothing to make me rush out for an SLI setup.

Later in the day I tried a flight and found it was night: it had looked at the clock and decided that because it was evening time I would get a night flight. I gave it a try but apart from being scary flying towards hills in the dark there seemed to be more bugs in the scenery with trees and houses floating in the air (or it may have been showing the ground under the houses/trees in the wrong colour, giving this effect). Does make me appreciate WW2 pilots though.

Overall I wasn't bowled over by it but I have bought a copy of the Delux version from an Amazon marketplate for £24 under what they wanted for it in town. I like the idea of flying around London, New York, Las Vegas etc but the demo only has a few sparse carribean islands. Also the full version has tutorials which would hopefully show me how to use it.

I've read that people set up virtual airlines and play at being pilots, maybe even wearing hats. Not sure I could get into that but this does seem like a nice diversion.