FSX - Missions, ATC And The Rest By Andrew Herd (17 October 2006) have to admit that I missed the adventures when they were taken out of Flight Simulator. Okay, I agree that none of them were really exceptional and most were buggy and programming them was so difficult that even the most capable third party developers steered clear of them, but they did give this simmer some memorable moments and when I look at the Captain Keith sceneries and Misty Fjords and the GeoRender stuff, it always make me wonder what they would be like if they had some adventures attached. Well, adventures are back, only now they are called 'missions' and in the de Luxe version of FSX you get over 50, if you include all the tutorials. The missions have their own page in the FSX startup dialog and can be sorted by category or by skill level, which makes it easy to go straight to the group most suited to you. There are twelve tutorials, starting with 'first takeoff', then working through 'basics of flight', 'finding your way', 'ground operations', 'approaching the airport', 'introduction to mountain flying', 'introduction to soaring', 'transitioning to jets', 'helicopter basics', 'helicopter takeoff and landing', while the two last cover the more advanced chopper stuff. Before you fly each tutorial, or mission, you get to read an overview, review key advice about flying the plane, and have a chance to examine a map of the area you are going to visit; then, in traditional FS style, you are talked through a live flight by the commentator. The advice - both written and spoken - is concise, but helpful and the lessons are not only better conceived, but seem to work far better than they did in FS2004, which was cursed by a bug in one of the very early flying lessons. If I have any criticism of the lessons at all, it is that twelve isn't enough and that there are large gaps between the information in the learning center and the advice in the lessons which newcomers may not find easy to fill, but maybe that is what the FlightSim.Com forums are for? I flew a couple of the lessons just to check that they worked and they are fine, if some of them are a little simplistic - like, for example, 'finding your way' which serves as the introduction to the 'mission compass' and the 'mission pointer'. The idea in this lesson is for you to fly to three balloons in sequence and to save you having any trouble finding them, you get two aids, the compass at top left and the pointer, which is shown in the left hand screenshot only, at the end of the mountain flying tutorial. To begin with, I couldn't take the balloon mission seriously, hence the screenshot of me diving on the first one I found with guns blazing (before the emails start, I am kidding about the guns), but on second thoughts I can see that newcomers to Flight Simulator will find the aids helpful - you really can't miss that big green arrow! More experienced users will be pleased to hear that it is possible to turn either or both the compass and the pointer off using the FSX menu; while I doubt many old-timers are going to want to do the lessons, some of the missions are really absorbing and it is good to be able to turn all the visual aids off and fly as nature - or ATI, or nVidia - intended. The missions are incredibly variable and if you like that kind of thing, FSX is for you, because there are plenty of them and there are some for every level of ability, starting with finding the baby elephant, which is good for people who have trouble getting off to sleep, as nothing happens for 45 minutes and then you find the elephant. Don't get the idea that I have a personal vendetta against this mission by the way (-: Some of the other missions, like the Telluride approach in the Lear might well be in the beginners section, but make a good introduction to what FSX is all about for more experienced users and I certainly enjoyed it, even if there weren't any elephants to be seen when we landed. At the expert level, the missions definitely get tougher and most of them are paved with traps for the unwary. I flew the 'monsoon approach' to Singapore Changi airport, which takes you on a bumpy descent in a 747 - giving plenty of opportunity to admire the wings flexing in the turbulence if you switch to spot plane view. Your female first officer handles the radios and tells you what to do, which is good of her, because you are going to have your hands full on short final. Expert simmers will do exactly what I did, which is to fly the whole approach using the autopilot, checking the speed occasionally with the spoilers, but pay attention to the what the approach controller is telling you; if you figure out why the plane ahead of you has aborted, you will get down in one piece. There are heavy clues in the briefing and all, but the mission is interesting to fly and a good demo of what FSX can do. My favorite out of all the missions is the Red Bull pylon flight. Here you are set the task of flying the Extra between all the pylons on a tight course, with various compulsory intermediate maneuvers and a time limit to beat. This is one occasion where the mission compass and pointer come in handy, as do the blue arrows showing which way to go, but with all the aircraft realism sliders pulled to the right, this is not easy at all. I crashed several times and even making the first turn is a challenge. Perhaps the best thing about this mission is the laconic comments from the commentator - one time I brushed the grass with a wingtip and he reminded me I had to fly higher than a meter off the ground. You have to hand it to the guys who programmed him. Having had a lot of requests, I spent some time flying with FSX's built-in ATC and apart from the interface, it doesn't look as if much has changed. The ten pilot voices all have US accents, three of them female and the rest male. It didn't seem to matter where in the world I flew from, the controllers all had US accents and the ATC patter was resolutely American, so while it will always have some things in common with other continent's ATC usage, will always sound a little strange outside the US. Interestingly enough, there are European voices to be heard in the missions, so Microsoft must have done some extra recordings, but they don't seem to have made their way into the FSX ATC engine just yet - maybe in the next version? Another thing that hasn't changed is that FSX isn't smart enough to work out that you have loaded the plane on the threshold and are just pretending you are taxiing about the airport, so readers who find ground navigation boring can relax. Sooner or later, though, some spoilsport at Microsoft will notice this failing of the sim and fix it and then we will have to do it the hard way, but I am glad to say that time seems to be at least a couple of years off. Perhaps the biggest change in the FS generated ATC is that the window now shows a reasonable amount of 'history' so it is possible to recheck an IFR clearance if you forgot what was said in the heat of the moment. I'm not certain that the colored top bar of the ATC dialog is an advantage, but with the Aero interface it may well look much better than it does in XP. As a final comment, take a look at the Lear and CRJ VCs there - isn't the new night lighting great? The major effort on ATC in FSX has gone into the online area and readers who own the de Luxe version are in for a treat, because if you own a headset, join a multiplayer session that is appropriately set up, and enable the voice communication host options, not only will it be possible for you to talk to other pilots, you will also be able to act as a tower controller. One of the options worth knowing about here is that if you have two sound cards fitted in your PC, it is possible to enable 'voice-only audio' on your headset, by selecting one sound card to play back all sounds other than voice and the other to play back voice only. There is a good explanation of how this should be done in the multiplayer air traffic control section of the learning center and given how cheap SoundBlaster Audigys are these days, it is an attractive option. As for how good the multiplayer ATC experience might be, well, I guess your mileage may vary. One of the attractions of organisations like VATSIM is that at least the controllers are always reasonably good at their 'jobs', but FSX more or less opens the floodgates to any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wants to try his or her hand at air traffic control and the result won't always be pretty - but in a properly managed group session, it could be tremendous fun. The tower controller gets a radar screen (something you don't see at Fishburn, where sometimes the guy on the radio can't even see out of the clubhouse because the windows are steamed up), which has aircraft datatags and even history trails, so that you can see where a plane is coming from. After that, it gets really funky, because it seems to be possible to set up sessions with multiple towers and multiple controllers, so some exciting times await - but don't forget that your first move will have to be logging onto GameSpy to get an account there. All of this is explained in the learning center, so check it out. I have finally figured out what the 'best' setting for FSX are on my system, so for what it is worth, I will set them out for you, but bear in mind that what I want out of the game may not be what you want, and if you can't do without AI vehicles on the roads, you will need to make some alterations. Using these settings FSX gives me 15 - 20 fps most of the time on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium D with 4 Gb of RAM, although I get more like 12 - 15 fps flying over areas with lots of custom objects and occasional sub 10 fps rates in the busier areas of complex airports. First of all, a newly booted system that hasn't had any other applications loaded is a good start - it is a tremendous help if you have a fully defragmented hard disk and swap file too. The default XP defragged doesn't touch the swap file for some reason and this apparently innocuous feature can cause trouble with everything from games to compiling video, so I use O&O Defrag, which is payware but worth every penny, having solved numerous problems for me without bringing any in its wake. FSX runs faster full screen than it does in a window, but running it full screen leads to delays when task switching. With the settings below I find I can run FSX in a window at reasonable speeds on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium D. The route into the other settings is from the 'settings' menu item on the FSX startup dialog, or from \options\settings\display on the menu bar once you have started a flight. Before I go too much further, don't forget to go to \settings\realism and pull all the sliders over to the right, check 'enable gyro drift', check 'display indicated airspeed' and 'uncheck enable automixture' and 'autorudder' if you want the most realistic experience of flight in FSX. Beginners may find it easier to start with the sliders to the left, and to enable automixture and make sure gyro drift is unchecked, or they will wander all over the virtual skies. Okay, so back to the main display settings page - down the bottom is a button labelled 'customize', go ahead and click that. This takes you to a multitabbed dialog which lets you set up screen resolution among other things. A lot of experiment confirmed that it doesn't make that much difference what resolution you run FSX at as long as your video card can handle it, the best advice being to run at the native resolution of your monitor. Under the 'graphics' tab, select bi or trilinear filtering - trilinear is best as it kills the marching ants phenomenon in some sceneries stone dead. Uncheck antialiasing and enable it on your video card if it supports it; how to do this varies depending on what card you have, but the key message is don't let FSX handle the antialiasing, because it wastes a lot of valuable processor cycles on it. Set global texture resolution to 'high', or 'very high', uncheck 'lens flare' and 'light bloom', but leave 'advanced animations' on, or you won't be seeing any wings flexing, or any elephants for that matter. Target frame rate can be left at 20 unless you have a processor with a lot of grunt, which means dual or quad core and faster than 3.5 Ghz (I assume you are reading this in what will be the future). Under the 'aircraft' tab, you can choose whichever default cockpit view you want, but make sure you uncheck both aircraft shadow options. 'Aircraft landing light illuminate ground' can be left checked, or night flying will involve a lot of guesswork. The scenery tab is more difficult. In the end, I compromised and set the 'level of detail radius' to 'large' to get the smoothest possible ground display, but I probably only got away with this because I have a 512 Mb graphics card and the 'medium' setting might be better. I have 'mesh complexity' at 65, 'mesh resolution' at 76 m, 'texture resolution' at 2 m (although setting it at 5 is worth a couple of fps), 'water effects' at mid 2.x and 'land detail textures' unchecked. On the other side of this tab section, I have 'scenery complexity' and 'Autogen density' both set to normal, 'ground scenery shadows' unchecked and special effects detail set at medium. On the weather tab, I left the cloud draw distance at 60 miles and used detailed clouds with coverage density set to medium. If you love tough IFR, set it higher, but there is a frame rate penalty. Under the traffic tab, I run most of the time with 'airline traffic density' at 50%, 'general aviation traffic density' at 20%, 'airport vehicle density' at none, 'road vehicles' at none, 'ships and ferries' at 25% and 'leisure boats' at 25%. The last two don't really make much difference and I will probably increase them before long. Not much left to talk about, really - apart from answering the question about whether FS2004 addon aircraft can be installed in FSX. The answer, as Derek Palmer's evocative Handley Page 42 (shown in the right hand screenshot above) demonstrates, is a qualified yes. Qualified is up there in lights, because I haven't had that much time to experiment, but it does seem that FS2004 addons can be made to work and as far as I can tell, the flight models work OK too, although the aircraft previews didn't appear on any of the planes I tried. Just be aware that the \aircraft folder structure has changed completely, as detailed in the last piece, so that all the old rules about software installation no longer apply; and do not, on any account, attempt to install addons which come with automatic installation routines designed for FS2004. If you take an addon with an auto-install designed for the older FS folder path system, it will spray files all over the new FSX system, with unpredictible results, but unless Microsoft have introduced some code to handle the legacy folder system, the one thing that is gauranteed is that the addon won't work. Finally, recommended hardware specs - which is 'how long is a piece of string' stuff. Given that FS2004 was only really comfortable on a 3.0 Ghz processor or better, with at least a gig of RAM and a 64 Mb video card, that would be my starting point for FSX, although if you are prepared to forgo a lot of the eye candy and pull most of the sliders back towards the left, a 2 Ghz system would be just about acceptable. However, if you are planning to run any of the ritzy new add-ons that will undoubtedly be coming out, faster processors, more system RAM and better video cards will be needed, because Herd's law of FS add-ons is that the good ones always need more power to run properly than the default planes do. If you are looking for a new video card, my starting point would be a GeForce 6600 GT, or an ATI Radeon X1800 GTO, although with these cards you will not see some of the more advanced visual effects. The next step up is the GeForce 7600 GT, although for a few dollars more, you could have an ATI Radeon X1900XT, which outperforms everything else in the price bracket, or a GeForce 7900 GTX, which gives much the same performance, but is also more expensive. After that, well, you can spend as much as you want, but the Gainward GeForce 7800 GS+ Silent 512 is generally held to be the fastest graphics vehicle around. As far as I can tell, 256 Mb of video RAM should be ennough, but FSX throws lots of textures at the screen at once, so 512 Mb may be a better bet. And that is it, I am going fishing... Andrew Herd andy@flightsim.com Order FSX here Review: FSX Preview Review: FSX Scenery Review: FSX General Aviation Aircraft Review: FSX Jets And Choppers Review: FSX Missions, ATC And The Rest [ Back | Home | Main Menu | Logout | Help ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2006 by FlightSim.Com. All Rights Reserved.
