Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphagrep12345 | Hacker News Reader

Who is the target audience for flight simulator? Is it like a regular video game, or used by pilots who actually undergo training?

View on HN

It's a genuine flight simulator, not a video game - although there's differing levels of realism you can usually set.

You can take it all the way to having Virtual Air Traffic Control systems, staffed by other players - eg the VATSIM[1] community.

[1] https://www.vatsim.net/

That said, people can also presumably play it is a videogame, too. Nothing wrong with people having fun simulating something they'd probably never get to do in real life. At the very least for all the kids whose parents want games to be at least semi-educational, Flight Simulators will always have a niche in videogaming.

I hope it's not too "video-gamey". That was the downfall of "MS Flight". It was highly disappointing to hard-core simmers who had come to expect realistic flight conditions, routes, ATC, physics and a world-wide map.

I was part of a survey from MS about what I'd like to see in the next version of the simulator (this was after FSX went away but before "Flight). The survey asked a lot of questions about my thoughts on making the sim more goal/mission oriented (essentially, more of a game).

I made it really clear that I thought that was fine as an addition but should not replace the current real-world functionality. Give people the option.

I can't imagine my answers were that different from most long-time users - basically it needed to have all the features I mentioned above, plus an open SDK for 3rd party developers.

MS didn't listen and "Flight" was a huge disappointment - at which point I moved to X-Plane.

Hopefully, they've gone back to their roots with this new version because it looks absolutely amazing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com