Harry's Blog

If we're talking sub-fetishes, then messing around with Flight Simulators is my dirty little gaming secret. This is one of those realms where many a pale gamer fears to tread, these dungeons are just too dark. The world of Flight Sims is pretty weird too, the most popular websites dedicated to the genre seem to be stuck resolutely in 1995, with designs aimed at 50-year-old geezers in the Midwest who are still using Netscape 1.0 on their Pentium M.

It's these old guys that make Flight Simming unusual. Many of the them are real pilots or at least guys whose interesting in simming comes from their love of flying and aircraft rather than their interest in games. In fact you will often read their scoffing posts at the very idea that something like Microsoft Flight Sim could appear on something so evil as an Xbox 360.

To them then, Flight Simming is a hobby set apart from gaming, the two don't come together in their mind. Instead these are guys who set themselves up as virtual airline pilots and are strict with themselves about setting goals in their flights. They'd rather set up a transatlantic flight from London to New York and set an alarm to get up and perform the landing, rather than simply just set up the landing phase of the flight.

But I'm waffling here and what I really wanted to address was the kind of flaming and arguments you get on Flight Sim message boards. Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Flight Simulator the same thing happens. One bunch of old guys says they aren't interested and the last version was best (even though they did this when that version was released). Another set complains that they'll need a new computer to run the new version, which is unfair as their 386 runs Flight Simulator 98 just fine thank you.

Then there are those who piss and moan that the new sim doesn't work very well on their PC. They paid Dell a shed-load of money for this PC last year and by God it should run the new Flight Sim like shit off a stick. What's most amusing about these guys is that they know nothing about computers. They've bought some high-powered Core 2 Duo machine, with 4GB of memory, all the bells and whistles – but with Intel integrated graphics. You'll find these guys starting threads like "Why should I have to spend money on a 3D card Microsoft?".

That's not to say there isn't reason to complain. There are plenty of things wrong with Flight Simulator X. But on the whole it is a vast improvement over FS2004. Players of regular games might find the clunkiness of the affair – a graphics engine that appears at least rooted in the past compared to next-gen console software – for example. And the surprise that Flight Sim still can't do Head Up Displays without them looking like my dad trying to write HTML blindfolded.

It's actually the middle-aged non-tech savvy guys that I find most irritating and the reason I don't get involved with Flight Sim online communities very much. These are the kind of guys who pass round funny urban myth emails to the other guys at the golf club, install all manner of crappy third-party spyware-laden toolbars into their browser, write emails in yellow text on a white background and harbour the majority of the world's viruses¹.

And these guys really bitch when Flight Simulator doesn't run very well on their PC. Already forums are full of these guys bitching how the forthcoming Service Pack 1 for Flight Simulator X won't improve matters for their FSX performance. They've not even tried it yet. But to be honest they are likely right, FSX will still run crap on their machine. Not because of a problem with FSX, but because their PC is so full of spyware, malware, pointless startup programs and other crap – that it's a wonder Windows will even boot at all.

FSX will run very well on quite a variety of well-setup machines. I bought a new work laptop this week, which means I can be more mobile and still get work done when staying with friends and relatives. It is a Core 2 Duo based machine (the modest T5500) with 2GB of memory, but its 3D hardware is only an Nvidia 7600 Go – hardly going to set the world on fire (though it is making a go of it with my wooden desk).

Yet without autogen (which frankly in FSX, especially over European scenery is a hideous mess Microsoft) and all other scenery options set on full, I'm getting 40-60 frames per second. It's smooth as hell, looks gorgeous and is running at 1280x800 with anisotropic filtering on my modest laptop. Why? Because although I'm hardly a L334 h4xx0r, I know how to defrag my hardrive and say no to any websites offering me free crap that will clog up the arteries of my PC.

Mark my words though, in the next few weeks FSX SP1 will be released and once again those ancient-looking Flight Sim websites will become a flaming mess of people wondering why it still doesn't look great on their crappy spyware-clogged Dell.

¹_{The other group harbouring the rest of the world's computer viruses are single thirty-something women who delight in cute emoticons and would happily download cancer into their womb if it had a pink dancing kitten attached to it.}

_{Note: This post also appears on my games website, but I thought it is non-gamey enough for a run out here too.}