The early personal flight sims were marketed primarily as games: graphics were simple, and the demands on the low-powered computers of the day were slight. All that has changed. Today there are a number of full-featured flight simulation programs available. The in-flight graphics of today's programs are nearly astounding when compared with the early aircraft simulators for personal computers. As opposed to the early days of flight simulators, when there was really only a single product choice, now there are so many choices it can be difficult to choose the correct software for your needs. Below are four things to consider when shopping for the flight simulator that will meet your needs:
1.Does the airplane sim offer a high degree of realism? The early flight simulator programs had blocky graphics and only the barest hints of scenery outside the cockpit. Airports, buildings, roads, houses, trees, mountains...everything was rendered in basic tones of color swatche s and dotted lines. Although the basic cockpit layouts for the included planes were surprisingly accurate, with gauges, radio stacks, flap settings and more, stick response was negligible. The earliest flight simulator packages had "scenery" for four cities, including a few simple buildings, and fewer than 25 airports.
Today's flight simulators have incredibly detailed cockpits and scenery packages for virtually the entire world. Highways, airports, rivers, trees, mountains, metropolitan areas, rural areas: all are highly detailed. The sense of realism in the newest airplane simulator packages is truly astonishing.
And the realism goes far beyond just the cockpit controls and scenery. In today's flight simulators you can set the time of day and the weather, with everything from a sunny, cloudless day to a hurricane. One popular flight sim for both the PC and the Mac, ProFlight Simulator, has a default setting that reads your computer's clock, downloads the current weather from the Internet, and sets the current conditions in the area you're "flying" through. In other words, if your route takes you from Denver, Colorado, to Salt Lake City, it's 8:30p.m., and the current weather conditions are unsettled late spring rain showers, your flight display will show evening over the Colorado Rockies, and rain will be striking the aircraft's windshield. Now, that's realism!
Another realism component is in how the plane responds to the controls. With the early flight sims, there was too much lag between entering a control input and the aircraft response. Today's flight sims respond smoothly and quickly to pilot inputs, and the sense of aircraft control is greatly intensified. Just as with real planes, if you pull back on the stick and keep it there, the plane will stall...unless you're flying a military jet or an EA-300 acrobatic aircraft.
2. Will the simulator match your computer system's specs? All those graphics and quick response to control inputs takes a toll on computer resources, of course. Most computer games make heavy demands on the amount and speed of a computer's random access memory, or RAM, and flight sim packages are no exception. Plus many of today's flight sims require lightning fast video cards with their own collection of memory. As you can imagine, a graphics-heavy simulation that is moving quickly across your screen demands a lot more of a video card than does a simulation of a piece of paper in a word-processor, or an array of cells on a simple spreadsheet.
Experienced gamers tend to invest a fair amount of money in their computers, with high-end video cards, lots of RAM, hard disc drives that can read and write information rapidly, expensive monitors, speaker systems, and much more. But even when armed with fast hardware built expressly for gaming, some flight sim aficionados have been frustrated by the sluggish frame rates (the speeds at which graphics are refreshed) and the load times for the latest versions of Flight Simulator and other popular programs. Before you buy a flight simulator package, be sure you carefully investigate the requirements for the software. A flight simulation that advances in choppy jerks, or simply freezes when too many demands are made on the computer's processor chip or video card RAM, can be a discouraging flight sim experience.
3. Is the simulator expandable for external controls? Almost any flight simulator on the market today comes ready-to-fly out of the box using a system of keyboard controls. For example, the up arrow pulls the nose of the aircraft up; pressing the down arrow reverses the stick pressure. But, of course, pilots don't control airplanes with computer keyboards. If you become a flight simulator enthusiast, you're going to want to control the simulator with more realistic inputs. Make sure that the flight sim you're considering will take a range of control inputs, such as joysticks, yokes, throttle controls, and rudder pedals. Many of the controls marketed today come with USB inputs, but some flight simulators can still provide a struggle for configuring a specific control device. Check to see if the manufacturer recommends a certain brand or model of control input before you purchase the software.
4. Are updates available for the software? Finally, make sure that you're not purchasing a flight sim package that has been dropped by the software manufacturer. There should be updates of new scenery packages, additional, and other features such as air traffic control instructions and weather phenomena. For example, airplane simulator enthusiasts have been awaiting the next release of Microsoft Flight Simulator for more than four years. And that release may be a long time coming, because Microsoft disbanded the product's development team in 2009. If you experience problems with a flight sim package that turns out to be orphaned, you may not have any support group to turn to.
An airplane simulator can be a great source of flying knowledge. Flight simulators can provide hours of fun, learning to fly your own aircraft from the comfort of your own home. Look around at the various packages available, compare the features of realism, and benefits such as being able to load the program on more than one computer, and definitely check th e specifications.
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