Microsoft Flight beta applications now boarding

Microsoft FlightBeta applications have opened for Microsoft Flight, Microsoft's follow-up to the classic Microsoft Flight Simulator series. Lucky pilots accepted into the beta will get to take off in January 2012.

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Beta applications have opened for Microsoft Flight, Microsoft's follow-up to the classic Microsoft Flight Simulator series. Lucky pilots accepted into the beta will get to take off in January 2012.

Head this-a-way to apply for the beta. If you're wondering whether your PC is snazzy enough for you to even bother applying, Microsoft has released some very tentative system requirements.

Microsoft is hinting that Flight will be more accessible than the Flight Simulator series, but insists it still "retains the full fidelity simulation longtime fans have come to expect."

There's no firm word yet on when Microsoft Flight will take off, destination PC, powered by Games for Windows Live.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    December 2, 2011 6:15 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Microsoft Flight beta applications now boarding.

    Microsoft FlightBeta applications have opened for Microsoft Flight, Microsoft's follow-up to the classic Microsoft Flight Simulator series. Lucky pilots accepted into the beta will get to take off in January 2012.

    • reply
      December 2, 2011 7:22 AM

      Microsoft is hinting that Flight will be more accessible than the Flight Simulator series, but insists it still "retains the full fidelity simulation longtime fans have come to expect."

      So why not just call it Flight Simulator 2012 or something? Might be a good reason but it just seems odd.

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        December 2, 2011 7:29 AM

        If I were microsoft, I'd want to distance myself from the last iteration of flight simulator. It was one of the most unoptimized games in existence.

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          December 2, 2011 7:38 AM

          They did distance themselves, by shutting down the whole studio.

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          December 2, 2011 8:52 AM

          One of the big dings I hear about FSX is that it doesn't use 3D accelerator cards at all. It's like 100% CPU driven. FSX enthusiasts have to build systems with extremely overclocked and cooled CPU's.

          Which makes me wonder - FSX is probably derived from the FS2004 codebase. But how far back does that codebase go? Could there still be shreds of code from the old DOS-based FS games in FSX?

          In which case the only way to make the FS franchise competitive would be to rewrite the whole thing from scratch for modern 3D accelerator cards. Which it looks like what Flight is.

          But then why rename it? And why can the FS team instead of task them with making the new 3D accelerated version?

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            December 2, 2011 8:56 AM

            The thing is, 2004 was outstanding in terms of framerates, modability, and user support.

            FSX trying to 3d the cockpits just killed everything in terms of performance, bugs, and preventing additions.

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              December 2, 2011 9:00 AM

              That was them responding to the community. All of the major add-on vendors were doing 3d cockpits and were wanting more controls for (virtual cockpits is what the sim pilots call it) them. So Microsoft gave them what they asked for.

              The problem with FS 2004 was when in development, they were expecting single-threaded fast CPUs to continue. That's what Intel was telling them, so FS2004 is not threaded well. It was designed for the future of processors that never came.

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              December 3, 2011 3:00 AM

              FS9 had 3D cockpits too... it's the CPU limited engine that did it. Also look at games like DCS A-10C too that are pure 3D cockpits and run great. It's the crappy engine.

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                December 3, 2011 3:05 AM

                Oh and also they didn't do a hardware cursor, this is huge one - the game does very involved math to translate the 2D cursor's position into the 3D world - watch with a high end addon plane, you can see it lose about 10-15 FPS as soon as the cursor is made visible.

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            December 2, 2011 8:56 AM

            Don't know much about the team but in my mind I imagine a bunch of greybeards writing in assembly.

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            December 3, 2011 2:59 AM

            The FSX codebase actually goes back to FS98 at the core.

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