A few preliminary questions about FS2004.

[BTilson]

Hello all,

I have not purchased this game yet, but I plan to as soon as possible. Hopefully within the week. I have been currently whetting my appetite by watching various videos, reading user guides, and checking out tons of screenshots. My computer won't be able to handle FSX, so I am looking into 2004.

I have a few probably very newbie'ish questions to ask about this program. I have looked around at various FAQ's but I haven't really found any answers to my questions.

1) Does it have the entire world? I know it obviously won't have every single detail, as that would be virtually impossible. Just curious if I could say, leave from Hong Kong and fly to New York, then on to Hawaii?
2) Is everything to scale? For instance, will it really take me hours to fly across the ocean?
3) Is a joystick really "necessary"? I will be buying one eventually, but for my first while I will just have keyboard and mouse.

Thank you in advance for any responses!

[therealzebraman]

Yes, it has the whole world (at once, you could fly nonstop round the world as many times as you like if you set uinlimited fuel on, if your that sad lol)
Yes, everything to scale, it's a simulator remember.
Not required, but I could never fly without a joystick.

If you did just use a keyboard and mouse, you might want to look into whether there is a setting where the controls return to centre after letting go, as if I fly with a keyboard at the moment, and press left, the controls will move left a small amount and stay there, which makes it virtually impossible to fly using a keyboard, which is why I've only really ever used a joystick. Bottom line is (if your system is good enough) get this game, you won't regret it if you like planes at all. Perhaps you could tell me your specs on your computer, I'm not the most experienced on these forums, but hey at least it's an answer, and I built my current computer (my first one made at age 14, a few weeks ago, I'm now 15 lol) so should have some idea of how it will run. Hope that helps your decision.

[garymbuska]

Welcome to Simviavation. There is no such thing as a dumb question here someone will be happy to reply.

As for your questions FS2004 does have the entire world in it provided you do the full install.
Now mind you you will not find every airport there is but you will find all of the major airports and a whole lot of the other airports as well. There are a ton of addons both scenery and aircraft that will depict a area in detail. As for times from one place to another they are very close to the real world times, so if a real world filght takes you 3 hours to fly in a B737-400 if you select that plane and fly the EXACT route it will take the same time.

No a joy stick is not necessary but it will make it a lot easier then using the mouse or the key board as the mouse and key board just does not have the touch needed to simulate flight  correctly.(MY OPNION ONLY)
Joysticks are not that expensive and is well worth it. You do not need one that has a twist control that you could use to cotrol the rudder, as all you have to do is to select the auto rudder option.
 But rudder peddles are by far the best bet.
All in all you can make FS as real as you want to by adding the better addons. There are a ton of them out there. 8-)

[alrot]

and you can play it as a game or use it as a simulator remember this simulators recreates a real life aircraft & aviation caracteristics you can have traffic(planes flying in the air)you can make a flight plan By VOR/IFR/GPS or you can fly without any of this things..

[Sir_Crashalot]

Hi and welcome,

With 23.000+ airports available in FS9 plus the thousands of freeware aircraft and sceneries you've got something to discover.

Crash (flying FS since version 1 and I still didn't see everything.....)

[ashaman]

Yes. It has all the world ever since FS 5.1

Yes. It's all in scale, flights from here to there take the time they take in reality, even if, once at level cruise you can accelerate the time of simulation up to 32 times (I never use it, but to each their own).

Not necessarily, but having a joystick (even a cheap one) helps immensely in enjoy yourself flying, instead to fight the keyboard all the time.

Welcome aboard. Please fasten seat belts. Flight Assistants, prepare for take off...

[BTilson]

Wow, talk about a helpful bunch of people. I was half expecting "Get outta here noob!" It's good to see a helpful forum full of people. Much better than some of the other forums for games I've played. (WoW forums come to mind...)

I really look forward into diving into this. I've been interested in flight sim games for a long time, but the last one I played was a really old DOS based one. It wasn't MS, but some other company. Don't even remember what it was called.

As far as my computer specs:

Athlon XP 2000+ (1.6ghz)
512 megs of ram
GForce ti4200

I have some upgrades planned for the near future as well, adding another gig of ram and a 256 meg video card. Hopefully that will help out some.

Thanks for all the helpful replies!!

-BTilson

[Sir_Crashalot]

Wow, talk about a helpful bunch of people. I was half expecting "Get outta here noob!" It's good to see a helpful forum full of people. Much better than some of the other forums for games I've played. (WoW forums come to mind...)

Hi again,

Whatever question you have there are always some people here, from all over the world, to help you out. So explore the forums and have some fun, you noob.

LOL.

Crash

[ashaman]

Wow, talk about a helpful bunch of people. I was half expecting "Get outta here noob!"

Sorry for the question... not meant to be rude, but... what kind of forums have you been frequenting lately.

If I went in a forum and was treated like that just because I'm a noob I'd... well, I'd do a lot of things I better not say here because I'd be banned.

Your rig is quite weak, but for FS9 is good enough, if you accept to hold back some with the detail cursors. If you are able at least to change to change the videocard with a more powerful one (almost all the videocards out there are) and bring the memory at 1Gb you'd be able to maximize everything beside the CPU intensive traffic (cheapest way to increase performances).

[beaky]

You have come to the right place... you may not always hear what you want to hear in these forums, but I think there is more than the usual respect and goodwill here.

There are no dumb questions... although a quick search is recommended, as most of the "noobish" questions have been asked and answered before. could get your answer sooner that way.

I have to chime in about joysticks: not only is a stick highly recommended (after all, real airplanes are not flown with keyboards... well, hardly ever), I must recommend a joystick/throttle combo, like the Saitek X45 or X52... very liberating, and more realistic if you are going to hand-fly anything (there are so many cool default FS9 aircraft that require proper pilot skills, as well as zillions of add-ons, many of them freeware).

[kliest]

Hello,

I bought fs2004 yesterday after hearing about it and that is was just $20. Installed it last night and flew around quite a bit. I was very impressed. But I have some questions.

1.  It seems there are patches for it, but when I go to the microsoft site using this link "www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/default.asp" , I get this error "We

[Hagar]

[quote]Hello,

I bought fs2004 yesterday after hearing about it and that is was just $20. Installed it last night and flew around quite a bit. I was very impressed. But I have some questions.

1.

[Sir_Crashalot]

And to answer your other question; No you cannot throw bombs or shoot guns in FS. For that you need a Combat Simulator.

Crash

[FSGT Gabe]

And to answer your other question; No you cannot throw bombs or shoot guns in FS. For that you need a Combat Simulator.

Crash

Well you can't drop bombs that blow things up but you can get bomb and gun effects...if you're interested i'll try to dig up the link...

- Kevin

[ashaman]

The newer FS9 disks come already with a v9.1 patch "inbuilt", so you don't need to download and install the patch from M$ site. Before trying to patch you sim, ensure in fact you're not already using a FS9.1.