Flight Simulator X Deluxe Edition review

Look at the detail in those new 1m resolution textures.

If you were sat in cattle class on a BA flight to Los Angeles on May 7th this year you'd have seen one young chap clutching at the seat in front for dear life and shaking with fear for much of the 11 hour flight. That chap was me. It's ironic, I love all things flight related and have even had a flying lesson, but I am absolutely terrified of being a passenger in an aircraft. The lack of control, coupled with a major fear of heights gives me the screaming abb-dabs.

Thank heavens then that my wife is giving birth to twins just before E3 2007, that gives me an excuse to stay on terra firma, and thank heavens too for Microsoft's flight simulator series. I've been messing around with this series of flight sims since FSII on my old Atari ST. Since then the series has improved in leaps and bounds to the point where the whole globe is modelled in glorious Technicolor.

What's in the Box?

It's not just US registered aircraft - here's a British police chopper.

The latest in the series, Flight Simulator X, arrives in two flavours just as the sim did in its 2000 incarnation. There's a no-frills version and the deluxe model. There's no real point going for the lower-spec version as etailers such as Amazon have the deluxe version for £45. The Deluxe Edition features some enhanced functionality including extra aircraft featuring glass gauges, some extra details cities and the sim's detailed SDK package.

The sim comes on two DVDs and the total install is 15GB, quite a hefty install for a game. But remember we've got the whole globe here, with over 24,000 airports and more detailed terrain than the last version - FS2004. Thankfully the installation program is pretty efficient and I've had much smaller games take a lot longer to park themselves on my PC.

Culture Shock

High quality 3D cockpits in FSX mean you'll not use the old 2D panels very much.

My install of FS2004 was getting pretty massive. It featured all manner of scenery and aircraft add-ons. Moving on over to a brand new simulator was something akin to culture shock. Despite the upgraded scenery in FSX, it initially felt rather sparse compared to my version of FS2004 that had several of Flight1's Ultimate Terrain scenery packages installed.

The feeling of emptiness isn't helped by the low level of AI aircraft buzzing through the skies. Even on the highest setting, which will bring many PCs to their knees, large airports would only seem to to have a handful of visitors and you'd see few planes up in the sky.

Thankfully though it's easy to port over a third-party AI package. Although Just Flight intends to release a patch for Traffic 2005 to make it fully FSX compatible, I had no problem at all just copying my installation over from FS2004. Then my skies were full of realistic airline traffic, with airports so packed I had to back the AI level down somewhat so I didn't have to queue all day for a takeoff slot.

Man on a Mission

On an early mission flying the ultralite through the green gate above the moving ship.

Flight Simulator is such a huge piece of software that Microsoft's ACES team tends to tackle various aspects of the product each time rather than the whole thing. The past two versions have now left us with some decent AI behaviour, weather and air traffic control. So FSX hasn't tinkered with these aspects very much - though I'm glad to say the way FSX handles low visibility conditions is vastly better than FS2004.

The focus this time around has been on creating a living world, which I'll come to in the next section, and immersion via complex missions. Past versions of the sim have had scenarios with recorded voices and events, but the new mission system allows for much more complex branching missions to be created. I've flown around fifteen of these missions so far and am rather impressed. I've certainly enjoyed them much more than I expected.

Early missions teach the player the basics of flight, but later ones are much more detailed and feature dramatic events such as what happens if you're in control of an airliner over an oceans which starts to suffer systems failures. The missions supplied with FSX over a varied challenge for novices and experts alike and it's going to be very interesting to see what the flight sim community can come up with using the SDK.

Living World

Who says games have to be frantic. How about a relaxing sunrise over the English Lake District.

The other major improvement for FSX over the previous versions is that of the living world. What we have here is an attempt to take the AI plotting of the previous versions and apply it to other vehicles than aircraft. FSX now boasts moving traffic on highways, large ocean liners and tankers moving across oceans to schedule and coastlines dotted with pleasure boats.

Fly to Calais, Dover, Holyhead or Dublin and you'll see working ferry terminals. The world's many major ports and on the highest AI settings you'll see plenty of boats and large ships coming and going. It really does make a huge difference to immersion and makes over-water flights quite a bit more interesting.

The living world concept has been stretched to include animals too as a safari mission demonstrates. Flocks of birds fly around ports and I've seen cattle by the side of some airfields. These additions may seem quite minor and they do tax lower-end PCs, yet in making the world seem more alive I believe it makes the sim a much more involving experience.

Here the Maul climbs over an Alaskan winter scene.

The Simulator

Most aircraft feature new view options such as this great wing view on a jetliner.

The front end of the sim, with its multitude of settings menus has undergone an attractive makeover in FSX. And there are now many settings available via sliders where in the past you might had to tinker with the game's *.cfg file. FSX seems a much more friendly sim to use than the last version. The ability to alter the scenery library without reloading the whole simulator returns, which is very welcome for most users and I imagine especially welcome for scenery builders.

I'm rather impressed too with the way the Xbox 360 wired controller has been implemented. You may scoff at using a joypad rather than a dedicated joystick, but the ability to use the right-thumbstick to look around really does aid special awareness and I've founding my landings improved immeasurably. FSX also features a more comprehensive logging system that keeps track of how many hours you've spent in the air, logging separate IFR and VFR hours as well as the number of landings completely.

A welcome treat is the inclusion of screen grabbing and a photo album system. All the images in this review were grabbed by me while playing FSX. The sim stores the images as BMP files in your MyPictures folder, though the ones you see here I've reduced in file size and converted to JPG.

Aircraft and Systems

The Grumman Goose is my favourite new aircraft in FSX.

The aircraft on offer a mixed bag. Take the simple Cessna 171 for example. The plane has been radically reworked and is a real joy to fly, the new virtual cockpit and especially the night lighting, is excellent. The inclusion of a version with the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit (Deluxe FSX only) is very welcome despite it making for a performance hit. The G1000 isn't completely modelled, you have to use the inbuilt FSX flight planner for example, but it's much better than the awful old GPS system most of the other aircraft use. Let's hope RealityXP is able to port its very realistic Garmin GPS systems to FSX very soon.

Other treats include the DH Beaver floatplane and the wonderful amphibious Grumman Goose. The Goose is my favourite aircraft addition to the sim, it's a joy to fly and I'm really enjoying exploring and landing on various lakes around the world. The flight models in FSX feel much more convincing than FS2004 and are much more pleasant to fly, though it's up to real-world pilots to explain how well they stack up against reality.

Airports now feature moving ground traffic and jetways. Note the new pushback tug moving the 747 back.

Among the good, such as the ultralite, the two amphibs, the ski version of the Maul etc. there are some pretty lazy aircraft too. The Mooney Bravo, a favourite among many flight simmers is still the same shoddy model and cockpit as last time. Sure there's a G1000 cockpit version available, but the aircraft itself looks old and tired. The same can be said of the DC3 and the 747. Though we get more liveries on the aircraft than ever before.

I don't want to get too bogged down here with negatives. Many of the aircraft are really good and I'm particularly amazed at how good the reworked Cessna 172 is. The choppers are much better now too. In FS2004 you had to be a Jedi to take off or land in the Bell Jetranger. Now the choppers are much more manageable. The America-centric focus of the last few versions of Flight Sim is gone too with several aircraft featuring serial numbers and liveries from Europe and elsewhere. The British Police Bell Jetranger is rather attractive. And despite the strong focus on 3D cockpits, which finally come of age in FSX, there's a rather attractive new 2D cockpit for the Learjet.

Gorgeous World

A Grumman Goose again, bobbing gently on Derwent Water, where 617 Squardron practiced its Dambuster raids.

Clearly a lot of work has gone into revamping the scenery for FSX. Perhaps the biggest change for most users will be how sharp the ground textures appear on modest systems. Past sims in the series suffered from what we call "the blurries" where the engine would fail to keep up with the progress of the aircraft and draw low-mipmap blurry versions of the ground textures instead of sharp ones. ACES Studio has moved texture drawing to a high point in the software's operation meaning that the blurries are now rare.

But that's not the end of the scenery improvement. Scenery with a resolution of 7cm per pixel is now possible, though the default supplied scenery textures are 1m per pixel. This is still a vast improvement over FS2004 and at anything over a few hundred feet the flat ground textures appear to be extremely detailed and photorealistic. The textures are so detailed in fact that I've taken to turning off 3D autogen scenery such as trees and houses and relying on the gorgeous scenery texture tiles.

Not all the textures are great though. While the summer season offerings are rather attractive the European autumn textures are very ugly and rather inaccurate. Anyone who has flown over much of Europe in the autumn knows that the continent stays pretty green during the period, even over the winter. The washed out landscapes of FSX's European autumn textures really are quite a poor effort.

Scenery Problems?

The DH Beaver is one of the best new additions. Note the excellent water quality and the use of 3D autogen trees in the background.

If you've a PC that can handle autogen textures - where 3D buildings and trees are drawn on top of the textures - then you'll find much detailed and dense models on offer. On the highest settings, which are admittedly intended for PCs not even built yet, dense 3D forests are possible along with thousands of houses per square mile.

Alas the whole scenery system is looking a little old though in the way it integrates vector objects - such as roadways with moving traffic, along with city textures that feature drawn roads. This hasn't seemed too bad in FS2004 due to low texture resolution. However now that we have gorgeous photoreal textures, it seems very odd to see streams cutting through them, or a low-detail vector highway drawn over them. This system perhaps has had its day and ACES needs to find a way of integrating the vector scenery with the textures for the next version of the sim.

There are some odd building choices for European towns/cities.

Another excellent 3D cockpit, this time the Grumman Goose.

Another problem with the scenery is the quality of the data it is based on. Sure there's a vast improvement on the correct roads and coastlines in some locations. Thanks to Navteq and other data suppliers Microsoft has much better road and rail systems in most countries with more detailed ports. Move away from the major cities though and it becomes how poor much of the data is, or at least Microsoft's implementation of it. The landclass data, which stipulates whether a patch of land is city, forest, desert etc. is just plain rubbish in many locations.

There are also some really dumb errors in the scenery data. One could understand this in areas of Siberia where few people go or are likely to have checked, but London is full of problems. Follow the river upstream and you'll see a real mess made of the river under the QEII bridge where Moses seems to have parted the water, you'll see similar errors further to the east in the heart of the city.

Upgrade Cahoots

Ten minutes from Las Vegas we come to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.

It's problems such as these that do make me wonder at some of the dealings regarding the creation of many aspects of FSX. Microsoft has said it is eager to work with the many third party companies working on add-ons for its simulations. By all accounts it has done so, but has this gone too far?

Take the autumn European textures for example. They are just awful, and I find it hard to believe, given the criticism last time, that the company didn't know that it had got the colour scheme completely wrong. The cynic in me imagines that MS is deliberately making some aspects of FSX rather shoddy to open the door for third-party developers. And in my mind that hardly seems fair.

Okay I could be totally wide of the mark, but when you look at how poor and uninteresting the cloud textures are for example it's easy to wonder why MS couldn't have found someone to do a much better job, or wonder if the poor job was deliberate. Hopefully some enterprising artist will release some free and much more attractive cloud textures within the next few weeks.

Performance Issues

Exploring the Grand Canyon.

While I'm having a moan about things I should also address the issue of performance. Don't expect to get the similar performance of FS2004 with the same settings in FSX. The game is much more of a system hog than that. As ever though, Flight Simulator is designed to be very scalable and to provide some amazing eye-candy for next year's PCs. Many of the new features are worth the performance hit, the new reflective bump-mapped water is completely gorgeous and I wouldn't want to be without the sea traffic now.

However some settings seem to be hogs for no good reason. Using the bloom shader results in way too much of a performance hit. The game's inbuilt anti-alias option is once again a system hog and you're much better relying on settings from your videocard for sorting out the jaggies.

The snowy wastes of Alaska in a ski-version of the Maul.

That being said, after spending some time to tweak, most of you will get decent performance out of FSX. As I said earlier, the new 1m textures are so convincing that I've saved plenty of FPS by switching off the 3D autogen trees and buildings until I upgrade my graphics card.

The best advice I can give is to set a frame rate lock just above a figure you really want. Then put all the sliders at the minimum. Go for a flight and start increasing the settings on the features that matter most to you. You can keep increasing settings until you can easily achieve the frame rate you want in the type of aircraft and location you want to fly in. And remember, FSX is going to look amazing on next-year's machines.

On Final

Some FS2004 add-ons such as Just Flight's Traffic 2005 work great in FSX without updates.

FSX is another fantastic addition to Microsoft's Flight Simulator stable. From the surprisingly fun missions to the new living world we've got a sim that's taken on another great leap. Of course we won't really see the full benefit of this sim for a year or so, when all the third-party developers get to grips with the new scenery/missions and connectivity options. For the moment though it's clear that FSX offers a great platform for others to add to. And now we can go much higher than 100,000 feet (1800 miles I think the limit is) we should see some really amazing uses of rockets and rocket planes.

Even on fairly modest systems, I've just got a AMD64 3000+ and Geforce 6600GT, FSX looks much more attractive than FS2004. Just take a look at all these screenshots. All were taken on my own PC. Avoid the initial temptation to set all sliders at the right and you will soon be able get to grips with the great looking sim.

The bloom shader may be gorgeous but it comes with a significant performance hit.

The real bonus for this version of the sim comes from pilot immersion. The focus on high quality 3D cockpits instead of 2D panels combined with some excellent new default aircraft with convincing flight dynamics makes for a wonderfully engaging experience. And while some may grumble at leaving behind their favourite add-ons until they are ported over, I for one have decided to wave goodbye to Flight Sim 2004.

FSX is a very strong release that gives you the whole world to play with. Whether exploring at low level, practising skills you use in real world flying, or ferrying 300 holidaymakers around in a virtual airline - there's really no limit to what you can do. FSX seems to be a landmark release