Steam is legitimized data-mining.

But yea they have some cool stuff at reasonable prices. The real price you pay is giving them access to your data, personal information, etc. which they of course gleefully sell to everyone and anyone out there. Then again, I suppose they’re not much different than most online companies in that respect these days but it’s off-putting and makes me reluctant to use their products.

xPlane 11 is really nice - I use it occasionally with a yoke, rudder pedals and throttle quadrant setup i bought off of eBay for a couple hundred bucks.

Y'all should check out FlightGear. Free software (libre) as well as free (gratis), cross platform, world maps w/ accurate air ports, the possibility of multiplayer and ATC, planes from vintage warbirds up through modern jets, etc.

Really good system. I've been to a game dev conference and seen a set up using multiple monitors and a old arcade cabinet to make a truly immersive experience for flying a tail-dragger, complete with pedals and control stick.

I use the triple screen and trackIR with CH Products stick, throttle and rudder pedals. TrackIR lets me lean to the side on the tail draggers.

As a side note, nobody owns their own software, no matter how you buy it. Hasn't been that way for years.

I firmly believe in the right to offline gaming, but also understand the need to control major piracy.

(The gaming companies have lost their own revenue with trolling reactions to sjw content and environment imo. https://rottenwebsites.miraheze.org/wiki/GamerGate_Controversy. But I'm not aware of the entire situation..)

If Steam was just to verify legitimate installation I would be okay with that.
I suspect they track all purchases, usage, and then sell this information as customer profiles for advertisement.
That goes well beyond the stated goals.

So how much would a newbe have to pay for a mid-range flight simulator set-up?

mid range is a very big range....


I flew flight simulator 3.0 or on a 8086 with black and white and just keyboard
and every flight simulator form there on...

the new one will obviously need a computer with decent cpu, but above all SSD's and a ton of memory to load all the graphics and maps at decent speed.
it will work with less memory and normal disks, but you'll just spend more time on load screens.


Obviously the bigger screens give you more viewing pleasure
and a good GPU that can drive 3x 24 inch monitors on a good monitor arm is going to be nice to have.. That's pretty midrange.. more is possible and folks go nuts with oculus rift 3D at the higher end of midrange..


and accessories.. you can get a 100 bucks flight stick ,throttle and rudder... and get away with most things... or a something more fancy in the 5-800 bucks range like a thrustmaster warthog stick and throttle and cheaper rudder

But that's military, there are cessna like yokes as well..

It's really a question of how far do you want to take it..

like I said, there's a whole lot of range ot midrange..
"simple pc and simple stick" <> "midrange" <> "Convert your garage with s scrapyard Boeing 737 cockpit"



Most people will start on the left , and gradually upgrade the gear till they are at a point where they either stop or go to the local airport and do the ppl :D

Hence my vote for the Free and free FlightGear. You may not own copyright, but you have access to the source and everything else...

Steam will let you play offline. Ubisoft on the other hand, even a single player game needs internet access all the time.

X-Plane you can get as a digital download or on disk, just like MS.

I will have to grab Flightgear and check it out. How is the support for addon aircraft?

Not to parf this, but made a flight today from Mashhad to Mehrabad Int. Tehran is below. Landing on fumes.
The Caspian Sea is over the mountain range on the right.
That is where the latest tragedy occurred.

(edit: The outbound airport traffic looks to be completely hidden by those hills to the WNW.)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1579211598.jpg

A flight sim is an easy way to imprint the basics of an area: Where downtown areas are, where the freeways are, the mountains, the ocean, the forests etc.
I tend to learn a little better this way than from studying a stagnant map.

Somewhere down there in Seattle, virtual corgi is shaking his virtual fist at that damn pilot who probably buzzed his house. ;)
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1579212454.jpg

I remember a mission from a while ago in an F4-E. Landed with 60# left. I knew it would be close and jettisoned the remaining ordinance and was glad I did.

Yup, and ILS approaches and IFR flights.

Being a pilot and an airplane nut in general, my daughter and I like to do the full motion flight sims. From the simple ones like at WPAFB Museum (which incidentally uses the same combat sim we own) on up. The first time she went with me she was 6. I, being male, had to show off so I was flying low and inverted over San Diego in an F18 at m1.1 and when I pushed to gain some altitude I broke the plane. It was a violent, tumbling ballistic arc. After we got out two naval aviators shook her hand and asked if she was going to be a pilot, having survived that.

Fast forward 10 years and we are getting into an aerobatic sim with an Extra as the plane. The guy buttoning us in doesn't get the harness tight enough for her and she pulls on it. He tells her it doesn't have to be tat tight and she argues oh yes it does. They go back and forth a bit and she gives up. He is now telling me something about how the stick, rudder and throttle work and I look over at her pulling the straps tight without her help. I guess she still doesn't trust me. Anyway, he is saying full throttle, wait 7-10 seconds pull back gently yada, yada. I smile and thank him, he closes us up and off we go. Full throttle, speed in the green, a little time in ground effect and then a snap roll. My wife said the people watching all went "ooohhh" and grimaced. We did a bunch of aerobatics but couldn't get it to do a lomcovak.

At 18, she still tells people about when her dad broke the wing off the plane. I guess the other flights just weren't memorable enough!

Ho Lee ___ Captain.

That is all.

I once took the HS GF up for a Sweet 16 experience (okay maybe it was as much for myself). Pops and me both had acrophobia. She did not seem to appreciate it quite as much. This continued throughout our later years of relationship but it was an expensive experience (my misc hard earned work savings) which should have been memorable. That's when the personal flight bug started.

You've lived more than I have dreamed.

I used to work in a computer shop, building clone computers and repairing.. and they had a little second location in a shopping mall where they just had a sales guy and 4 computers and software to sell.

On saturdays the sales guy alway asked me to be there to do small repairs on the fly for walk in customers.
But mostly because he wanted me to sit on one of the demo computers loaded up with Flight Simulator 6 or 7, cant remember what version it was, it was in the heyday of W95-98..

All I had to do , was fly the Extra on the biggest Monitor we had.
And do acrobatics.. I had a Sidewinder pro with stick rudder built in.. And my piece the resistance was to to fly the length of the runway inverted, do snap roll, and yank the stick up for a nice vertical pull..let it come to a near vertical 0 speed, and do a hammerhead..


People would walk by the store and come watch.. kids would beg there dad for a computer.. dads would buy it.. but not for the kid but well the wanted the flight simulator for themselves :D

I sold a chit-ton worth of computers by playing MS flight sim

No TrackIR support. :(

(Not natively anyway)

We are supposed to have a birthday party for my daughters 18th this Saturday and part of the day is combat sims with a dozen or so computers all linked up. One of the guys is a big F14 and Top Gun fanatic. We asked if he wanted to join since part of the day will be air combat and I said he could even fly the F14. I thought he was going to need a change of underwear.

The only bad thing is you can lock onto someone 80 miles out and you don't know if it is the other friendly flight or an enemy flight.

No IFF ping?

Anyone in here fly Aces High, HiTech Creations? It is WW2 online flight community. Mainly air, but ground and sea as well. Been playing that thing for almost 20 years. I fly in a P-38 squad.

Aces High looks like a lot of fun.
-Is it 64bit?
-Does game play require a microphone, or are there sufficient com menus for coordination?
-Is it player vs player or is AI involved? Is AI any good?

I used to play the original Il-2 quite a bit on the Win7 computer..before Win10 killed that off plus all my other games.
(GPL, Legends of Grand Prix, OFP Resistance, etc) .