[Sneaky Snake]

I was over at the Macgamestore and X-Plane 9 looks good. The system requirements are quite do-able for most macs except it requires 60 GB of free hard drive space, lol. I might bust out my old school joystick I used for Falcon 4.0.


-Snake

[Huntn]

It must be all that terrain.

[digt]

X-Plane is indeed awesome. I just read Rob Griffiths blog a few weeks ago and was surprised how realistic it is (it's not just terrain)!

http://www.robservat...ght-simulation/

[DaveyJJ]

60GB if you want to install the whole world's worth of terrain. The US pack offer most of southern Canada including southern Ontario so that's the only one I installed to do my YYZ-SFO runs in my Airbus.

[Sneaky Snake]

How do they keep the game exciting during the cross atlantic flights? And i'm guessing there is no combat flying, right?

[Janichsan]

Sneaky Snake, on March 12th 2008, 12:49 AM, said:

How do they keep the game exciting during the cross atlantic flights?

They offer snacks and show a movie. And the flight attendants are quite a sport – if ya know whatahmean… winkwink, nudgenudge.

No, seriously: there's of course a time acceleration that cuts long flights short.

Quote

And i'm guessing there is no combat flying, right?

Yes and no. There is some dogfighting possible, but that is only meant as simulation (within the simulation). That means you can build teams of planes that try to shoot down each other, but actually don't. Basically similar to real-life combat flight training: you do the manoeuvres, but don't actually shoot down anyone.

[Sneaky Snake]

Janichsan, on March 12th 2008, 04:02 AM, said:

They offer snacks and show a movie. And the flight attendants are quite a sport – if ya know whatahmean… winkwink, nudgenudge.

No, seriously: there's of course a time acceleration that cuts long flights short.
Yes and no. There is some dogfighting possible, but that is only meant as simulation (within the simulation). That means you can build teams of planes that try to shoot down each other, but actually don't. Basically similar to real-life combat flight training: you do the maneuvers, but don't actually shoot down anyone.

lol,


so you would do all of the actual setting up for the kill and all the fancy maneuvers, lock on to the target, but you just wouldn't hit the button to shoot a missile?


-Snake

[Janichsan]

Sneaky Snake, on March 14th 2008, 06:49 PM, said:

so you would do all of the actual setting up for the kill and all the fancy maneuvers, lock on to the target, but you just wouldn't hit the button to shoot a missile?

You actually can fire missiles, but they just won't do any damage.

[Ari]

Janichsan, on March 14th 2008, 10:25 PM, said:

You actually can fire missiles, but they just won't do any damage.

Correction! You can shoot down enemy AI planes.
#1 You must have a plane that is equipped with weapons.
#2 You must assign yourself in opposing team from the planes that you wish to shoot down.
#3 You must arm your weapons before you can use them.
#4 If you want to use missiles, you must lock an enemy aircraft to be able to hit it.
#5 If enemy planes have missiles too, make sure you are carrying counter measures to avoid their missiles.

It's not a combat sim, enemy planes are not much of challenge, but you can still shoot planes down and be shot down.
A hit will just kill the engines. There is no elaborate system for damage modeling in X-Plane 'combat'.

[Janichsan]

Ari, on March 19th 2008, 09:40 AM, said:

Correction! You can shoot down enemy AI planes.

That's new. In X-Plane 8, nothing happened when you got a hit. (I haven't tried dogfights in XP9 yet.)

[Huntn]

It would not be hard to imagine in the future, that X-Plane will become a full featured dog fighting simulator if the author wants to make it so.

[QuantaCat]

..or not. I doubt that if he made a simulator for flying, he would "logically" progress to war situations, if he didn't do it nine versions long already.

[Ari]

Janichsan, on March 19th 2008, 11:23 AM, said:

That's new. In X-Plane 8, nothing happened when you got a hit. (I haven't tried dogfights in XP9 yet.)

You're right (just tested it): v.8.64 enemy aircraft just ignore you. In XP 9.0 you can definately get shot down.

[Janichsan]

Huntn, on March 19th 2008, 05:35 PM, said:

It would not be hard to imagine in the future, that X-Plane will become a full featured dog fighting simulator if the author wants to make it so.

Probably not. X-Plane Combat was actually already announced in 2002, but got shelved in 2003. I assume some connections to the Iraq War, due to the timing.

[Huntn]

Janichsan, on March 19th 2008, 04:28 PM, said:

Probably not. X-Plane Combat was actually already announced in 2002, but got shelved in 2003. I assume some connections to the Iraq War, due to the timing.

Not to sound argumentative, but why would the Iraq War effect the status of flight sim? There is definitely a desire for combat flight sims.

[Janichsan]

Huntn, on March 20th 2008, 03:43 AM, said:

Not to sound argumentative, but why would the Iraq War effect the status of flight sim? There is definitely a desire for combat flight sims.

From Austin's blog posts, I had the impression that he wasn't very happy about making what is basically war game during war time. An attitude very much contrary to GraphSim's "Let's make 'Iraq War – The Game™'" approach they took with their last F/A-18 game.