Flight Simulator

I've finally gone back to my old love Flight Simulator recently. Probably got something to do with the fact that I've now got a PC that can actually run FSX at more than 2 frames a second.

Joy. For the first time I can really appreciate what FSX can do. To enhance my experience, I bought three enhancements: Traffic X, REX and my favourite aircraft, RealAir's SF260. I'll deal with each in turn.


First up, Traffic X. Wow. One of the problems with FSX, even on my rig (i7 2.67, 4 gigs of ram, Vista 64 bit, GeForce GTS 250), was the lack of AI traffic. No more. With Traffic X I get full traffic at all major airports, at the same AI traffic settings in FSX. But I also get a lot more: more varied AI traffic types and liveries, military aircraft and a Traffic Control Centre, to name but a few.

Next up REX, or Real Environment Xtreme, to give it its full name. This add-on includes, amongst other things, a weather engine, a flight planner and new sky, water and airport textures. For me, the jury is still out on this one, but I do certainly appreciate the new textures, which are a serious improvement on the default textures, and which do made a noticeable improvement to the sim.


Lastly, we have the SF260. This really needs no introduction, as it has long been one of the best add-on aircraft for flight simulator, and the FSX version is no different. If you appreciate excellent small aircraft, then buy the SF260.


To celebrate my new purchases I recently did a trans-USA flight in the SF260. I started at New York and went to San Francisco via (amongst others) Niagara Falls, Chicago, Denver, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Great. My flight simulator experience has truly just gone up a notch.

I don't like to finish this post on a low, but I have to mention Micro$oft's apparent recent decision to discontinue the series. What the f**k were they thinking? Everyone hates Micro$oft, but Flight Sim was one of their few titles that was truly loved. Whether it made money for them I don't know, but it certainly gained them some much-needed goodwill. Now, they are hated by the flight sim community as well, especially as they don't appear to be prepared to release the code to others who are prepared to continue the franchise (remember, Micro$oft bought the series themselves, from Bruce Artwick's subLogic). Still, hopefully Aerosoft will take up the reins, as mentioned in this post.