I mentioned a short time ago I would let y’all know what I thought of several flight sims, especially with respect to IFR practice. I’ve done some playing, so here is my feedback.
X-plane - has some nice features and an excellent flight model, and generally superb performance. However it has a few bugs, and suffers from the fact that it is the product of one very talented individual, whose ego gets in the way. It’s also reverted to $199 at which price it is no bargain. Runs on the Mac, unlike most of the others.
FS2000 - quite the opposite of X-plane; a huge, slow product of a huge, slow organization. Maybe on a 1GHz Athlon it might perform ok, but frame rate is way too poor to be usable, IMHO.
Fly! - not quite as accurate a flight model as X-plane, and lacks the ability to (easily) design new planes. User interface is a little clunky. But overall, it has a polished feel, performs quite well on reasonable hardware, has good IFR support (including a hood and a custom IFR panel) and is cheap! An absolute bargain at $19.95. Fly!2K is also available at $29.95, but I have not tried it.
Of these I’ve settled on Fly!. At the price it can’t be beat, and has the great advantage for me that it runs well under Win2000.
Fly is also available on the Macintosh.
I mentioned a short time ago I would let y’all know what I thought of several flight sims, especially with respect to IFR practice. I’ve done some playing, so here is my feedback.
X-plane - has some nice features and an excellent flight model, and generally superb performance. However it has a few bugs, and suffers from the fact that it is the product of one very talented individual, whose ego gets in the way. It’s also reverted to $199 at which price it is no bargain. Runs on the Mac, unlike most of the others.
FS2000 - quite the opposite of X-plane; a huge, slow product of a huge, slow organization. Maybe on a 1GHz Athlon it might perform ok, but frame rate is way too poor to be usable, IMHO.
Fly! - not quite as accurate a flight model as X-plane, and lacks the ability to (easily) design new planes. User interface is a little clunky. But overall, it has a polished feel, performs quite well on reasonable hardware, has good IFR support (including a hood and a custom IFR panel) and is cheap! An absolute bargain at $19.95. Fly!2K is also available at $29.95, but I have not tried it.
Of these I’ve settled on Fly!. At the price it can’t be beat, and has the great advantage for me that it runs well under Win2000.
X-plane - has some nice features and an excellent flight model, and generally superb performance. However it has a few bugs, and suffers from the fact that it is the product of one very talented individual, whose ego gets in the way. It’s also reverted to $199 at which price it is no bargain. Runs on the Mac, unlike most of the others.
The X-plane web site says that the $99 sale price lasts until May 16. Would you tout it at that price? Or is Fly! still the wiser choice? I am sick of the elephantine ponderousness of FS2000.
Thanks for your User reporting.
Agreed… FS2000 can’t get out of it’s own way & turned out to be a DOWNgrade from FS1998.
Pls advise any Version# and where to order “FLY”
it sounds like it’s worth a try.
The X-plane web site says that the $99 sale price lasts until May 16. Would you tout it at that price? Or is Fly! still the wiser choice? I am sick of the elephantine ponderousness of FS2000.
Hmm, elephantine ponderousness - isn’t that kind of redundant? But I know what you mean. To answer your question, I bought both. X-Plane does have some nice features, so at $99 it’s not a bad buy. And you do get free upgrades for the rest of the 5.xx versions, so the bugs might get fixed.
Some of them, though, are fundamental design problems, e.g. the world model in X-plane is not round or WGS-84, it’s a set of flat plates. This means that in some cases the instrument approaches don’t line up quite right with the runways. I’ve not had that problem, but I’ve seen it discussed on the x-plane-tech mailing list.
With Fly!, one minor problem is that the instrument panels are absolutely realistic, but this means you can’t see the whole panel at once, and panning around is a nuisance. You can switch to an “IFR” panel which compresses all the stuff so it all fits on the screen. But this is only available in the 172.
So, while X-plane is still only $99, you won’t go wrong by getting both. But Fly! is still better value.
Pls advise any Version# and where to order “FLY”
it sounds like it’s worth a try.
There’s only 1 version - 1.0 (or 1.01, but patches are on the web site). There is also Fly!2K but I haven’t tried it.
The web site is http://www.iflytri.com/www.iflytri.com and I think it will tell you where to order. I bought from a local store.