Fs2006

[moops]

              Hi, for years I've read the forums here but never made an account. Anyway sorry if this has been asked before but  when is FS2006 going to be released, what new features will it have, and what do you guys want in it. I want to be able to fly over the poles, better weather, working FMC, better ATC, new physics engine, and inflight emergencies engine fire, hydrolics failure, icing, explosive decompresion etc.  

[Eskimo]

Hi moops, welcome to SimV

[hbshawaii]

Do we NEED a FS 2006 right now?

I'm just becoming adept at modifying what we have with the freeware tools that geniuses have provided us, AFCAD, TTools and many others.

Until processor speed exceeds what we have already, why go there?

I'm happy with 2004 for the time being.

IMHO

H

[stiz]

Well you don't have to buy each and every version that come out ya now  :)

Stiz

[Bell206freak]

I'm actually kind of excited about FS 2006, if and when it comes out.

I hope it blows FS 2004 out of the water.  My main beef with it (FS2K4) is that it's not too terribly accurate as far as street grids go - and the major roads/highways that are depicted in FS2004 sometimes aren't even in the right place. For instance, U.S. Highway 101 in Shelton runs right along the eastern edge of Sanderson Field's (KSHN) green patch at the end of Runway 23 - in reality. In FS2004, the highway is placed about an eighth of a mile east of it, and it doesn't even follow the right direction throughout its entire journey south of Shelton towards Olympia.  They also forget a major access road (to the Mason County Fairgrounds) south of the airport that runs parallell to Runway 5/23 - not to mention that autogen scenery depicting neighborhoods is placed on the west side of Highway 101, when in reality the entire city of Shelton's city limits are east of the highway.

They also erroneously omitted a 35-mile stretch of Washington State Route 504. For some odd reason, they have it ending right at Hoffstadt Bluffs - at the position it was on the map more than 15 years ago. The highway was opened - along a long and windy path - to Johnston Ridge five miles directly north of the crater of Mt. St. Helens in 1997. And U.S. 12 was completely omitted - and it goes all the way from I5 north of Castle Rock - through Randle - east to Yakima.

I would also like to see shorelines take on a more realistic appearance - especially Hood Canal, Shelton's Oakland Bay, and Spirit Lake north of Mt. St. Helens. For example, the south shoreline of Spirit Lake in Flight Simulator should be a quarter of a mile further south and the lake should be a half mile wider at its southern edge.  If one is observant, it seems they used the same LWM data they did in FS98 - because the shoreline pattern of Spirit Lake is exactly the same in FS98 as it is in FS2K4.  And they forgot the mat of logs on the lake created by the May 18th 1980 eruption as well!

[Bell206freak]

--continued--

When I fly, I want to be able to see the landmarks that I'm familiar with, and see them as they appear in reality - such as Mt. Rainier (right down to the Mowich Face or Steamboat Prow) or Mt. St. Helens, or buildings such as KOMO TV's Fisher Plaza or a more realistic version of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (including the second one that'll be completed in 2007). Even the street grids of towns and cities should resemble their realistic counterparts, as well as major highway and freeway corridors.

I'd also like to see terrain mesh upgraded from FS9.1's updated 19 Meter mesh support to USGS SRTM 10 Meter terrain mesh support without a major framerate hit.

Better helicopter selection. I fly the default Bell 206B JetRangerIII in nearly every flight (mainly because helicopters are my most favorite type of aircraft), but even it gets stale. Microsoft did a fantastic job at the flight dynamics of the Bell 206 (having flown in one on more than one occassion, I can attest to this), but they need to add more helicopters.

I'd love to see a Microsoft rendition of the Bell 407, in variants such as TV news helicopters with their remote TV camera attachments and high-gain antennas to police or civilian units. Microsoft should also include the often-forgotten Cessna Skyhook helicopter - since the one available for download now doesn't have a virtual cockpit - which is the ONLY way I fly in FS.

I'd also like to see the helicopters have more realistic start-up and shut down sound systems, as well as a more realistic hover control system for all rotary aircraft.

With that, the virtual cockpit should be extended to include passenger views from both front and rear seating positions.

I'd also like to see a more user-friendly way of modifying or resizing the gauge clusters in the virtual cockpit - since I only fly using the Virtual Cockpit option. FS9 doesn't let you resize gauges in virtual cockpits without them appearing distorted by a preset ""X Y placement grid." Adding a GPS unit to the instrument panel should be an option too, instead of it having its own "view window."  This is in hindsight due to the fact that the Bell 206B JetRanger III that Hoffstadt Bluffs Helicopter Tours uses has a completely different panel. Same secondary gauge layout - but your "Primary Six" (Altimeter, Airpseed, Attitude, Horizontal Situation, Vertical Speed, and VOR) on the Hoffstadt Bluffs helicopter are replaced by two very large LCD GPS displays

[Bell206freak]

--continued--

Someone said on another forum that you should be able to exit your aircraft and walk over to another one and fly it. I love this idea, since it adds a more realistic "simulation" of actually walking to your aircraft rather than selecting it from a menu.

I'd also like to see cars and ground traffic on roads. and side streets. This makes for a more immersed and more realistic real-world simulation - and if they ever added news helicopter variants - one could become a virtual "traffic reporter" so to speak.

Better northern lights effects. The default and freeware add-on Aurora Borealis effects for some reason only  activate at high altitudes (around 17,000 feet), which is unrealistic since they're often viewed from the ground. Instead of appearing like colored sheets of light, they should resemble the more curtain-like auroras we're all familiar with. And there should be the option to simulate a solar storm where the auroras are visible more further south as well (for instance, in mid-to-late July and August 2004 and Halloween 2003, there were a series of several historic solar flares on the sun sparking vivid and bright Auroras that were visible as far as the equator).

I'd also like to see blank template paintkits available for all aircraft, and all aircraft textures should be mapped to include both sides of the aircraft instead of one. It gets a bit unrealistic to see your text and graphics showing up backwards on one side.

Time travel. A weird subject, but I would love to be able to fly around Mt. St. Helens and its awesome Fuji-esque symmetry as it appeared before its devastating May 18th, 1980 blast, or see the Seattle Skyline before Qwest Stadium or Safeco Field were built. I'd also love to simulate what it was like flying around Mt. St. Helens when it blew on that fateful Sunday in May.  Or include the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge that blew down in November 1940.

And one of my biggest beefs is the difficulty of mastering XML.  Instead of using a MS-DOS command line to compile XML into a scenery file, a new SDK could already create the file (be it a building, bridge, etc) using GMAX or a similar 3D modelling tool, and use a "drag and drop" method using the FS Global Map.

These are just some ideas.

[Woodlouse2002]

I hope your joking.

[Bell206freak]

lmao.

Why's that?

[BiggBaddWolf]

Hey I know....How about if we crash in FS2006, we really end up in the hospital, or even worse...Sheesh it is a simulator...who cares if it dont have every bridge, road, landmark, river, lake, house......

[Bell206freak]

I didn't mean to start a flame war, guys.

Like I said, they're suggestions to make the world of Flight Simulator more accurate and realistic.

[stiz]

Good suggestions but the work invloded would be huge and take years.

Also with some of them you'd be able to make and add them in yourself. City tiles with Ground2k, cars and stuff you could make them an aircraft and just change the air file then just make thier flight plane follow the roads.

Stiz

[Bell206freak]

Good suggestions but the work invloded would be huge and take years.

Also with some of them you'd be able to make and add them in yourself. City tiles with Ground2k, cars and stuff you could make them an aircraft and just change the air file then just make thier flight plane follow the roads.

Stiz

I've edited some of the landclass (using EZ-Landclass - one of the only user-friendly apps out there), but when it comes to apps like Ground 2K, Cooastline, or LWMDraw, I cannot get it to work, no matter how hard I try. It seems as if no matter what I do,

[JBaymore]

Hey moops..... your thread has taken on a life of it's own  ;).

best,

......................john

[RollerBall]

Hmmmmm

There are probably about 10 million people reading this who would like the area around their house to be perfect in the sim - which is why it's an impossible task.

Personally I couldn't give a toss about Washington State but I'm really pissed off that the row of shops at the end of my road in south-east England has been missed out - and the street sign they have included is in the wrong place and American, not English, looking.

I'm not trying to be vindictive - just to show the futitility of comments like those.

This is why M$ have done the only thing thay can do - they've created an environment and an engine and provided some tools to let you change things into the sort of sim world that you want. And that's surely the main point. What we all want out of the sim is different - in some cases VERY different having seen the comments in previous threads about this.

So you take the tools that M$ and many other very clever software and scenery gurus have created for you and you convert your little corner of your sim world into your own little sim paradise.

But for goodness sake don't expect me or anyone else to necessarly like, want or want to pay for the same as you, because your idea of paradise is probably just the opposite for me and lots of other people.

Nuff said.