Dear developers,
I received the June issue of FlightXPress, a German language (actually THE
German language) language journal on Flight simulation
(http://www.flightxpress.de/) today.
To begin with: I've been reading FlightXPress for 2 years now and judge it
as a quite fair journal in general (contrary, for instance, to Computer
Pilot, who seem to write good reviews for good money). (The only real
shortcoming of the journal is bad final correction resulting in way too
numerous misspellings.)
This issue has a one page review on Flightgear written by a Marc Stoering
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) who seems to belong to the editors (not sure about
that). The test was done under Suse Linux 8.0 (which btw., gets good marks.)
Unfortunately the review on FG as such is negative. This are the main
points:
- Old-fashioned overall appearance (4 screenshots delivered, including KSFO
+ C172 panel), not to be compared with state-of-the art simulators
- Very few functions compared to other simulators
- Cockpits "from yesterday"
- Some good 3D effects (sunset...)
- Bad flight characteristics (sometimes planes react too sensitive,
sometimes too sluggish), much worse than X-Plane
- comparatively good frame rates
- Weather + Scenery disappointing
To be fair, they refer to the project as being free, open-source, multi
platform and sketch the way development is done.
Their summary: FlightGear is for a minority of technically advanced simmers
who are prepared to go into programming only, but not for the normal simmer.
Please: So far this was only a quotation. Don't beat me for it!
To add my personal impression as a user: First, I thought it was a bit
unfair to compare a project run by a handful of enthusiasts to a commercial
package produced my several dozens of paid full-time programmers with the
backing of a company like MS and their ressources. However, I recall a time
when FlightGear was in some respect quite close to the then recent MSFS (and
in some respect even better than it). I think this was around 4 years ago.
It's a matter of fact, that MS has created a real hit with FS2002 on the one
hand side while we might have lost some momentum.
This said, we might perhaps be better off re-thinking a few prorities than
just spitting on the guy who wrote this.
Okay, now you can beat me.
Regards, Michael
--
Michael Basler, Jena, Germany
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.geocities.com/pmb.geo/
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