So I'll try even harder to dispell these rumours and give a fair opinion on the FSX demo, at least from a punter's point of view.
Downloading it was a reasonable 200Kb/sec, considering the size this remained fairly constant.
On initiation of the app, egg timer was missing and there was some delay before anything happened. after a mandatory reboot the installation failed because a temporary file could not be found. A second installation cured this problem however some people say it won't install. I think they may be getting caught out because they think nothing is happening. It IS, just be patient with it.
I WAS impressed with the scenery, this really is a vast improvement from FS9. I had no diagonal lines or jitters.
In some ways the scenery actually looked as smooth (if not smoother) as what you can get from CFS2 textures on a modern machine maxed out. Well done MS for this.
As expected a fairly standard P4 did struggle a bit with frame rates, but to be fair this is bound to happen. Although the demo was still quite useable on this machine.
Here's the crunch: the Bombardier had no external view from inside the cockpit. The windows were blacked out.
The handling on both the Bombardier and Beech turboprop was to put it mildly, ABYSMAL! A quick check with AirWrench revealed the same old dumb trick: reference AND cog directly off the nose tip, giving a cog at about -6% mean aerodynamic chord. After years of writing dynamics for MS aircraft I am still at a loss to understand why they keep on doing this.
That said, I would give credit to the characteristics of the small ultralight. I enjoyed flying this around for almost a couple of hours.
Here in the UK there are loads of small private fields / strips which are solely for ultralight activity. usually on farm land. Multiplay with this sim could become very popular with the bird-men.
Overall however, the same old guff flight modelling tends to spoil it I think. Has MS got no one who can apply common sense to flight modelling? Really it isn't that difficult.
All said and done, I was at a cross roads in deciding whether to switch to X-Plane. Having installed the demo I think I would go with FSX despite a few shortcomings. In my opinion if FSX is given a chance it could be every bit as good if not better.
Certainly, FSX appears to have full accesibility. This is a deffinate strength.
Just a shame it is not a combat sim, if it were I am sure MS would have had an instant winner on their hands since this is X-Plane's major weakness. Our's is not to reason why I guess
I'd give this sim an 8 out of 10. Worth buying if you're into non combat stuff.
Regards
Jasper
) will pretty soon offer some alternative stuff.
