TC

I downloaded flightgear, thinking how cool would it be to finally have found a free flight sim that was fun and easy to use. Unfortunately, flightgear was not it. I double-clicked the app icon, (this is on a Mac G5) and it told me that it would not run properly if it was not put into the apps folder. So, I drag it to the apps folder and start it up. It takes around 30-45-60 seconds for it to start up (it varies for some reason) and I see the interface. Looks decent. Pretty simple looking. Pick a plane, and a place to fly. I start out with the default airport and plane. Takes around 1:30 seconds to load. My first impression is, the graphics are crap. I have them on their fullest rendering settings, and the screenshots on the internet are no comparison, completely different. I go to the tutorial to learn the controls. “Press Shift-B to release the parking brakes, and put the throttle to full.” Well first of all, HOW DO I PUT THE THROTTLE TO FULL?! They NEVER give you an instruction manual?! Then, I realize, I had to go to the Help toolbar to look at the vast amount of control buttons. I search for 5-10 minutes and finally find the throttle. “PgUp-PgDown.” I press page up, nothing happens. Ugggggh! This thing sucks already!! A controls don’t work and the graphics suck?! Can this get any worse? Yes, it can. I choose a different plane. Maybe the control scheme is different. “Loading Scenery Objects”……………………….10 minutes later, “Loading Scenery Objects”……….. 10 more minutes later, STILL LOADING THE FRICKING SCENERY OBJECTS. I give up. I’m sticking with GOOGLE MAPS FLIGHT SIM, WHICH IS MUCH BETTER!!!!!

I’m using WinXP Pro, 2.60gig Intel P4, Intel82845G, and I’ve tried the numerous suggestions on the FG forum abount cmd file changes but no luck.

Anybody got a clue?

Thanks

I’m running a vintage (3 yrs old now) P4 3Ghz Dell machine, 2.5gigs RAM with ATI Radeon X300se with 128Mb video RAM.

It ran great the first time I installed it. Although scenery wasn’t displayed properly, all I had to do was update my video card driver and wohoo! Awesome. I was getting about 60 fps, not too bad at all.

Microsoft flight sim has too many restrictions. Difficult to create your own models. Flight gear has many models available and lots of people to help you make your own model. Not to mention the myriad of tutorials available to grind your way through to a finished model. It takes a bit of digging but it’s there somewhere, and if you can’t find it people are glad to help you out on the forum.

I’d also like to say that Flight Gear has aerospace engineers and physicists who have worked and are working on the flight models for flight gear, I can’t say as much for microsoft they have deadlines to meet so people come and go as projects finish up (not to mention some layoffs at the microsoft flight simulator team in Jan 2009 resulting in cancelled and delayed projects). That can’t happen with FlightGear, it’s open source !

The worst thing that could happen is you try it out and you don’t like it. No problem! It didn’t cost you anything. Besides if you didn’t like it, post what you didn’t like. Developers are always looking for improvements, or maybe add it or contribute to the project yourself if you can.

I stand by the review of the product I reviewed (version 0.9.8) at the time it was written. The review was never intended to apply to future versions – which is in fact quite silly to assume. For instance, to review Office 2003 and then have people telling you that your review sucks because Office 2007 is terrible just doesn’t make much sense.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 9 and 10 are both good flight simulators; in fact, I own both of them. This review was intended to point out that there are other decent alternatives to paying for the Microsoft product. I’m sorry to hear their developers have let a good program slip; but do not think that I’m a “fanboy” because I wrote a review of a decent program almost 4 years ago.

The game itself is nice, and it’d be great if it ran smoothly. The terrains and aircraft are well-made and when it isn’t choppy it responds very smoothly. For me, though, having to land at 0.1fps is just too stressful. I’m going to the store today to buy a copy of MS Flight Simulator. At least if that doesn’t work, it’ll give me an excuse to climb onto the bash Microsoft bandwagon.

I ran flight gear v1.0 on a dual processor Intel Xeon machine (which shows up as 4 cores in the task manager due to hyper-threading), a graphics card with 256mb on-board memory, and 1gb of ram. One would think that this would be enough for a low end flight simulator, but one would be wrong. Flight gear was incredibly choppy as each frame took about a second to render even on the lowest setting. Flight Simulator X on the other hand runs smoothly on the machine. Why?

I’m a programmer myself. I can think of at least a few things that could’ve gone wrong behind the scenes, but that doesn’t excuse the crappy behavior in the end product. By giving an enthusiastically positive review of a bad piece of software, you are not doing those who wish to switch to open source a service. If anything, a bad experience will steer them away from open source for a long time. Add to that the fact that if one wants the scenery to go with the simulator, one has to donate money ($50 for the whole package). For that price, one could just as easily buy Flight Simulator X, which runs smoothly, has better cockpits, more realistic flight models, better looking terrain, fantastic shading, and a buttload of other sweet features. Either that, or go with X-plane, a simulator whose physics has been FAA approved.