Flights of Fancy

This entry is about a curious passtime known as flight simulators.
Flight simulators are a kind of computer game that share a common trait: they all put the player in the pilot's seat of an aircraft of sorts.

Flight simulators have been around since the dawn of man (well not really, more like since the dawn of computers). Long before they evolved into games for home use, they were used by the millitary to train real-life pilots. And as everyone knows who's ever been or felt like an eight-year old boy, that's where its at. The cockpit of a multimillion dollar jet that is. But most of us have glasses, large feet, small brains or falling disease, which disqualifies us for the envyable job of steering huge amounts of aluminum at ridiculous speeds.

Enter the pc.

Ever since Personal Computers have found their place into homes (mostly the homes belonging to geeky wearers of strong glasses with a passion for most things technical) there have been programs that attempt to make the user believe he is a cool, sunglasses-wearing hotshot pilot. In the early years it took an incredible amount of imagination because mountains were represented by white lines forming pyramids and the horizon was a single white line on a black background.

But things have evolved.

The white lines gave way to coloured lines, and so on.
So now millions of once eight year old boys all over the world sit at their pc's thinking they are driving huge amounts of aluminum at ridicilous speeds.

War and Peace

There's two kinds of virtual pilots:
First there's the pacifist kind, who incidently also have a huge boredom threshold. They take their virtual Boeings and Airbuses on flights across the virtual atlantic and get all excited when the have to deviate from their course because of some virtual thunderstorm.
Many of them also like to spend enormous amounts of time making their own new plane models to fly or swapping them using the internet.

Then there's the less peacefull kind. They want to be fighter jocks. They want to have huge ego's, gorgeous women, and gay innuendo play with their wingmen. They have huge glasses, no women, and fast pc's.
A small part of these virtual fighter pilots are very purist in their taste, and demand their programs resemble the real thing as much as possible. That means it has to be so complex it needs a 600 page manual to describe all the knobs and dials. These manuals are often referred to as The Good Book or The Scripture within their closely knit communities. The rest is happy with everything that has that warm cuddly best-of-the-best atmosphere that comes with guns, guided missiles, speed dials and altimeters. As long as the planes look purty and the bad guys explode in a satisfactory manner, they are happy as eight year old boys playing top gun.

Unlike other computer game genres, like shooters and puzzle games, flight simulators are almost exclusively PC-driven. Consoles just can't handle the complexities of aerodynamic calculations and stuff like that.

Why people spend days figuring out a game

There's a certain satisfaction to be gotten from knowing that if the pilot would get an heartattack while you and your family are flying to that sunny destination, you could put on a heroic smirk and yell "I'll put this baby on the tarmac safely, don't you worry my dear, I have over a thousand hours on the simulator!"

The games people play

As a final note to this piece I would like to name a few of these remarkable programs and give them small descriptions, so that you can use a search engine to locate further info on them.

Please consider the fact that at the time of writing these were very hot, but that as all things PC it is a fast changing world. Because many of the games named stem from a long line of similarly named predecessors, future iterations will also have similar names. Take the example of Falcon4.0, on the 486 Falcon3 was the ultimate in virtual pilotage, and it's to be superseded by a game named Falcon V.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 -> THE simulator of everything devoid of guns and rockets. Easily customizable.

Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator -> MSFS2K's less peacefull brother. No guided missiles though.

Flanker 2.0 -> A rather detailed simulation of a good looking russian fighter jet. Difficult.

Falcon 4.0 -> A virtual american fighter jet. Features a huge amount of detail in its virtual world, and an equally huge amount of bugs.

Eurofighter Typhoon -> For the more european inclined among us. Not very detailed, but action packed.

Enemy Engaged Comanche Vs Hokum -> A virtual helicopter. Guns and war to fight included.

There's many more, and virtual replicas from every era of aeronautical history can be had, often with active environments to go with them. There's a small catch though. Flight simulators are because of their very nature always in need of more expensive computers to run them. That is because their intended audience always crave more detail, and have never let a new program drop just because there wasn't a PC in existence powerfull enough to run it. Also, due to their complexity, flight simulators tend to contain a lot of bugs (programming errors) and almost always require a fine tuned PC.

The upside to this is the fact that flight simulation enthousiasts, or simmers, tend to form online communities, urging developers to fix bugs, teaching eachother how to get them to run and sometimes even fixing errors themselves.

Into the wild blue yonder

So, are you up to the challenge? Do you dare invest most of the household money in new computer hardware? Are you ready to spend many a night fiddling with drivers and settings? Are you ready to study that 600 page manual and learn it by heart? Then enter the world of virtual pilots. Get yourself one of them huge sunglasses and take pride in the fact that you now have the right to use cool slang like "Tally ho, bandits at four o'clock" when watching the birds in a pub.