Flight Simulator X Hands-On Impressions - New Features, New Audio Experience, and a Hint at DirectX 10 Graphics

For 25 years, the Flight Simulator brand of games has offered a realistic model (or, as realistic as current technology allowed) of civilian flight for aviation enthusiasts all over the world. The next game in the series will attempt to offer even more of what has made the series so enduringly popular among its fans, as well as add in many brand-new elements that will expand the experience for newer players and enhance the game for veterans. We sat down with ACES studio manager Shawn Firminger to discuss the direction of the next game, then strapped ourselves in for a quick flight of our own.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Flight Sim X is the way it looks. The game will not only model the entire globe (broken up into 23 distinct zones to fly in) but also let you pull your camera view out 100 million feet away from the planet, to see Earth in full view bounded by 10,000 stars placed in their real-world locations. So, for the real hotshots, Flight Sim X will let you navigate by way of the stars--though as Firminger suggests, the fan community may end up taking this outer-space view and doing some interesting things with it. A little closer to the ground, the new game's environments look tremendously better than those of Flight Sim 2004, since it offers a ground resolution of up to one meter per pixel (though players with insanely high-end computers might try squeezing in an even higher resolution) and lush environments populated by ACES's auto-gen technology, which automatically draws thousands of objects onscreen, including trees, mountains, and the game's 24 million roads.

In the interest of providing a realistic and immersive experience, Flight Sim X offers...even more impressive numbers with lots of zeroes after them. For instance, the game will model about 24,000 different world airports, and according to Firminger, "you'd be hard pressed to find [an airport in the world] that isn't in the game...and if you did, we'd find a way to put it in." Of these, about 1,200 will be gated airports, though many of them will have ambient ground traffic (such as fuel and luggage trucks), as well as other flights coming and going at the same strip. You'll even be able to listen to realistic air-traffic-control (ATC) chatter while you're parked at the gate. When you're in the air, you'll experience the game's dynamic weather system, which pulls data from 5,000 different weather stations and lets you fly through real-world weather conditions more or less as they're happening (with a 15-minute delay). But if you don't care for the weather, you can change the in-game conditions to whatever suits you.

The game will model five different yearly seasonal conditions, as well--the usual four seasons we're used to, plus a "hard winter" season in which heavy snow will blanket the ground. And although the game will now launch in advance of Windows Vista (since the operating system was delayed), it will ship with full DirectX 9 support, and a free update later on will make the game compatible with the upcoming DirectX 10. We saw a concept image comparing a real-life photo of a forested Montana mountain range to a clean screenshot of the same area with a DirectX 9 renderer--a good-looking image but nothing amazing. We then saw a comparison to a prototype artist's rendering of the same scene in DirectX 10, which featured an exceptional level of detail on its stencil-shaded trees, as well as detailed whitecaps and sea spray modeled in the river below using particle effects and advanced shaders. It was admittedly only a still image, and admittedly not final DirectX 10 art, but whatever it was looked impressive, and we hope graphics using the final version of DirectX 10 can look that good.

Interestingly, Flight Sim X will offer single-player missions (the kind you might expect to see in a combat flight sim, such as IL-2 Sturmovik or Falcon 4.0) for the first time ever in the series. The game will offer 10 tutorial missions and 50 missions in all, scaled in difficulty from beginner to intermediate to advanced. These missions will range from lightweight, easy jobs to the insanely dangerous Red Bull Air Race, in which thrill-seeking pilots strap into light racing planes like the Zivko Edge 540X and, throttled up to top speed, attempt to fly through scattered pylons in an obstacle course at altitudes of only 50 to 100 feet. Also, you'll find more dramatic missions, such as being tasked with landing a commercial 747 airliner that has just blown an engine, as well as some "fun" missions like flying Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation (JANET) shuttle flights from Las Vegas to Area 51--a flight that may end in a few weird goings-on once you close on your destination.

While the missions seem interesting, an even more intriguing development for Flight Sim X is the game's brand-new shared skies multiplayer options, which include support for up to 16 players in a single online session. You and 16 of your friends can fly in 16 different planes...but you can also use the new cockpit system to fly a plane in multiplayer with a friend, divvying up duties as a captain and first mate and switching different controls to each other on the fly. If you care to, you can even play as a tower controller in multiplayer and manage takeoffs and landings using modeled radar equipment. To manage all the chatter, Flight Sim X will ship with support for voice-over-IP chat, so pilots and any players taking the role of controller can share direct chatter without talking over all the other pilots (interestingly, you'll be able to talk directly with other pilots' planes only when they're within radio range).

After covering the game's intriguing new features, we sat down for a brief hands-on session and had a chance to experience the game's interface and redesigned audio. Flight Sim X will have an optional sound setting that lets you direct radio chatter and ATC reports through your headset while blasting you with engine roar and ambient noises through 5.1 surround sound. With a good set of speakers, the effect is remarkably like sitting in the cockpit of a plane in flight.

The mission we played was one of the beginner levels, which put us in the cockpit of an ultralight glider to drop flour bombs onto floating, seaborne targets. Because we were flying in a glider, the flight model was a bit more forgiving than that of a fighter jet; we were able to make gentle corrections to our course by nudging the flight stick in the appropriate direction (though the game will also support Microsoft's "universal controller" setup for the Xbox 360 controller) and used a keyboard shortcut to manually drop flour bags below. The mission included built-in, flashing waypoints (which are optional, but useful for beginners) to help direct us to our destinations, though the game will have optional 2D and fully 3D virtual cockpits that will let players who prefer to fly with instrument flight rules (IFR) focus on their control panels if they don't care to see their plane in flight. (Fortunately, there will also be external 3D views for those who want to take in the scenery.)

Though it's unfortunate that Flight Simulator X won't end up being the flagship Vista launch game it was perhaps positioned to be, from what we've seen, the game should offer plenty of the open-ended sandbox-style gameplay that players have come to know and love about the series, as well as some intriguing new options in the single-player missions and multiplayer mode. The game is scheduled for release later this year.