MiGMan’s Flight Sim Museum

MiGMan’s Flight Sim Museum

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

Features

Features retained from previous versions
  • Worldwide scenery with accurate 3D terrain and auto-gen objects that fill in the world with appropriate buildings and vegetation no matter where you fly.
  • Jeppesen NavData database, including VORs, NDBs, ILS, low- and high-altitude airways, intersections
  • Approximately 24,000 airports worldwide (increased from about 22,000 in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002).
  • Flight planner to create realistic VFR and IFR flight plans and navigation logs
  • Flight analysis to play back a flight on a moving map that shows ground track, key flight data, and a vertical profile
  • Instructor's station--link two PCs so that one pilot can observe a Flight Simulator session, change weather, fail systems, and provide comments and help via a chat window.
  • IFR training panels for selected aircraft that include all key instruments, avionics, and controls in one window for realistic IFR flights.
  • Multiplayer capability over a local network or the Internet.

New features

  • Dynamic weather system based on realistic atmospheric physics, with true three-dimensional clouds that form and dissipate, and automatic real-world weather updates when you're connected to the Internet.
  • Weather "themes" that generate a wide variety of stunning—and challenging—flying conditions with just a few clicks of a mouse
  • Enhanced interactive air traffic control (ATC), including traffic at all airports around the world (including non-towered airports), altitude changes en route, pop-up IFR clearances, and precision and non-precision approaches to multiple runways
  • Interactive 3D "virtual" cockpits—tune radios and operate key aircraft controls and avionics by pointing and clicking in the virtual cockpit view.
  • Scenery improvements, including taxiway and runway signs, enhanced auto-gen 3D objects, more high-detail airports, and improved lighting and sky effects
  • Garmin 500 and 295 series GPS with color moving maps and airport/facility information
  • Improved full-color map view with terrain display
  • Improved support for 3D graphics hardware acceleration in multiple windows and across Multiple Monitors
  • Learning Center—a "Web site on the disc" available while the simulation is running that includes a Key Topics visual guide to the features in Microsoft Flight Simulator, direct links to flights and lessons, flight briefings, how-to procedures, aircraft handbooks, and more.
  • New and expanded lessons and ground school topics
  • Kiosk mode for unattended demonstrations

My comments

Some of these 'new features' were in there last time, in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. All of them actually. What I think they are saying is that all these features have been improved.
I am looking forward to point 8 - "Improved support for 3D graphics hardware acceleration in multiple windows and across Multiple Monitors..." and I hope it includes remembering the positions of windows placed on other monitors. It annoys me no end to have to replace and resize all those instrument views each and every time I crash... ... not that it happens often...
One of the most important new features was left off the list - it will ship with "missions". This, I think is the cleverest thing they've done yet and will surely get a much wider audience interested in the sim, and flight sims generally.
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