Microsoft flight simulator 2002 ant download

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Cities at night aren't terribly obvious, appearing as blurry smudges with golden spangles and the roads could do with some work too. Some users report problems with loading of blurred textures, though this is not common and may to be due to a peculiar feature of the program.

The "Aircraft Texture Size" slider in the display settings affects scenery textures as well and scenery blurring can sometimes be solved by setting the slider to"Massive". But as you can see from the screen shots, FS represents a huge advance on its predecessor and some of the continental US cities are so good that I could spend hours flying around them without getting bored. Take a look at the photoreal textures in the Lear screen shot below and you will get an idea of what I am talking about.

While we are on the subject of scenery, we might as well discuss the graphics engine. FS can display up to x in 32 bit colour, with full 3D support, up to eight lighting sources, and bi and tri-linear filtering. With a good video card I would recommend a GeForce 2 Mx at the minimum , the effects can be spectacular, with subtle light reflections on aircraft surfaces, some wonderful sunset effects, proper volumetric clouds and fancy shadowing.

For those of you who missed it in FS, aircraft landing lights now shine on the ground, so you can see where you are going in the dark. All this eye-candy does not come without a few glitches and FS users will have to learn to live with a few oddities caused by the new mesh - for example, "elevated airports" like Grand Canyon Bar Ten, which stands on its own personal mesa in FS, making the approach far more interesting than it is in real life.

This problem is once again caused by mismatches between the DEM and Jeppesen data - on the whole the two go together extremely well, but every now and then you come across a funny. Given that there are more than 20, airports in FS, we can't expect them all to be right - and I guess that keen amateurs will issue fixes for for their favourite airports as time goes by, so keep watching the file lists.

Most of the planes you get in the Standard Version hail from FS and with the exception of the virtual cockpits, the panels haven't been upgraded very much, so don't hold your breath.

There is, however, a choice of liveries, you can open the doors if you are keen, and as a bonus, the Lear is flyable at long last, with none of the horrible twitchiness that it exhibited in the FS I am also pleased to say that all the visual models have been updated a great deal and if your system can support the biggest textures, they are worth using, because the level of fine detail is amazing.

If you want to see how much has changed, take a close-up look at the Bell in spot plane view and admire the reflections in the cockpit glass. Some of the planes even sport bare metal textures and given the sophistication of the new lighting system in FS, we are going to see a lot more because the repaint shops will find them hard to resist.

On the downside, FS suffers from the same fault that FS and every other PC flight simulator has in common - the default planes are too easy to fly. In real life you cannot get into even a Cessna and fly it around a circuit just like that and it would be good to see an option to make the flight dynamics a little tougher than they are at present, even in "realistic" mode.

I guess this slightly arcade-style handling makes the sim easy for beginners to use, but it would be good to see more realistic air files as an option for more experienced pilots, though no doubt the add-on market will supply alternatives before too long. While we are on the subject of flight models - watch the trim! I cannot work out whether it is a bug or a "feature" but on many setups the planes seem to load with the trim wound well away from neutral; in extreme cases it can actually make it impossible to take off or to control the plane afterwards.

The is a natural choice and it amazes me that it has taken it so long to make it into Flight Simulator, but now at long last, everyone can fly one. Much the same can be said about the , which is a popular club plane and will no doubt get repainted about forty two zillion times before FS arrives.

The panel is nothing special, bearing a strong family resemblance to the other default Cessna panels. I am slightly disappointed that the look of these workhorse panels hasn't been upgraded in this version, but so much else has changed that I guess it isn't such a big deal. The , on the other hand, has an extremely nice panel, as long as you don't spend too much time in virtual cockpit view - this plane wins my prize for worst virtual cockpit in FS and the way it flies on autopilot is hardly something to be proud of.

The Caravan is available in a wheeled and an amphibious version - while the panel is OK, is no great shakes visually and the 2D outside views are dire. The detailing of the planes is so-so, but the amphibian is great fun to fly, because if you take care it can actually be taxied down a beach into the water and then flown off, as long as you to take care to raise the wheels before you go.

The problem with the Caravan is the flight model. I would expect third-party flight models to appear for this plane shortly, because this behavior can be fixed without too much trouble. My other criticism of the amphibian is that it won't drift realistically in the wind, making docking slightly less interesting than it might be and denying any opportunity to "sail" the plane, the way the pros do. It is also a bit lively on the elevators, but who cares, because one of the real fun things in FS is that you can land the amphibian on any piece of blue water you can see, whether it be a lake, river or the sea.

This opens up huge new areas for exploration and explains my gut feeling that FS will trigger a bush pilot revolution in flight simulation. The Baron, by the way, has the best 2D panel in FS I don't know who designed it, but if I was Microsoft, I would get this part of the team to redo all the other panels for FS, assuming that the 2D panels make it that far.

The reason I am hinting that 2D panels may disappear is because of the debut of the new virtual cockpit, seen in the screen shot below. FS aircraft had virtual cockpits VCs , but they were static bitmaps which served the narrow purpose of providing a backdrop while you panned your field of vision around.

In FS that has all changed and the virtual cockpits - where present, the Lear doesn't have one - now have working instruments. This is a huge step forward and many people are very excited about the possibilities that it offers; for example it is now possible to do an approach using the VC and to monitor the airspeed in many planes.

The VCs have been massively extended and you can near enough inspect the entire interior of the plane if you alter your point of view and use a hat control. One downside is that it isn't possible to adjust any of the instruments using the mouse in VC mode, unless you have a hardware panel. My other criticism of the VCs is that the graphics are blurry and in addition it is difficult to set the point of view so that you can simultaneously see all the instruments you need to and fly the plane, but this is partly the fault of the aspect ratios of the monitors we use.

The full set of commands now is:. Move eyepoint up - shift-enter Move eyepoint down - shift-backspace Move eyepoint right - ctrl-shift-enter. Move eyepoint left - ctrl-shift-backspace Move eyepoint forward - ctrl-backspace Move eyepoint back - ctrl-enter Reset eyepoint - space. While this is very good news, it does provide a trap for the unwary on approach, because it is possible to spend so much time adjusting your VC view to get it just right that you end up doing a controlled flight into terrain.

Don't forget that pressing the spacebar orientates the VC view straight forward for approaches - so remember to hit the bar when you flare. While this isn't quite the same view that a real pilot gets, it is near enough for simulation purposes and anyone who is having trouble with landings might like to try it.

The POV can now be moved forward and backwards as well as up and down, but Microsoft have yet again failed to address the fact that it is fundamentally wrong in the 2D view. If you sit on an international airport runway in a real Cessna , you feel real small, I can assure you, even without a looming up behind you.

Allowing for the fact that much of this effect is due to peripheral vision, applying a zoom factor of 0. Moving outside the cockpit, again for reasons which are unclear to me, Microsoft have gone and altered the mechanics of the spot plane view.

I can't see why they didn't just stick with the FS method, but in FS everything is geared towards you using a hat control. If you have such a thing you can pan all around the plane to your heart's content - if you haven't, you are stuck with eight fixed same-level FSlike views, tagged to the numeric keypad, and this quite rightly infuriates many users, who can't see what was wrong with the FS system, although in FS the sudden shifts in viewpoint can be minimised using the "gradual transitions" option.

Another big change is that it is no longer possible to fly the plane using the mouse, which is bad news for disabled folk who can't use joysticks. The instant video playback feature is a huge improvement on anything available in FS and I have spend many narcissistic moments watching myself executing difficult approaches thanks to this ace piece of programming I just love the bang when you crash. The one thing that would really put the icing on the cake would be an option to pack the instant playback into a "video" that could be emailed to stun and amaze your friends.

I don't see that this would be so difficult to do, assuming that the recipient had a copy of the same version of Flight Simulator. Presumably the sim uses coordinate data to reconstruct the flight. Flight data swapped like this could be very useful for VA flight training, but the best thing about the instant video is that you can swap from cockpit to spot plane view at will and I used it to take many of the screen shots here.

Nice one, Microsoft. The autopilot has also been "improved," to the consternation of many simmers. While in many ways this makes it behave more like modern passenger jet autopilots, it is very different to the FS autopilot and this has caught a lot of people out who have become used to engaging alt hold and then hand flying the directional axis, but there is a work around:.

The other problem with the autopilot is that capture of the ILS is nowhere near as good as it was in FS and capturing the localiser can be extremely tricky, especially in the jets. Over the years I have reviewed a number of ATC add-on products and none have had either the simplicity or the intuitive nature of the interface Microsoft have designed. In my judgement, even a beginner, with no experience of ATC whatsoever, should be able to navigate his or her way through the menus and the "auto-tune" feature means that you don't even have to worry about the radios.

As you can see in the panel screen shot, ATC choices are shown in a translucent overlay on-screen. When you select a choice that involves communication, you hear your pilot talk and the controller reply, backed up by text scrolling in the ATC window. On the whole the ATC is reasonably realistic, but it has its limitations - you are stuck with the flight level you filed in your flight plan and neither can you ask for an alternative runway - so we can look forward to it being improved by third party add-ons.

My favorite feature is "progessive taxi" which you can request after pushback; a pink line appears and all you have to do is follow it to get to your runway. Sure, it isn't the way things work in real life, but when you bear in mind that some international airports will turn taxiway lights on and off to guide you, it isn't totally unrealistic, either.