BIG Birds are one of FS2000's strongest points! What other simulator gets you inside a Boeing 747, or a Concorde?!
San Francisco bridge as seen from the insides of your personal weekend plane :)
Sun goes down in REAL TIME! And there is real time lighting, applied to the scenery!
When I first tried to run Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2000 [FS2000], months ago, with a regular TNT video card, on a P3 @ 450, I was smashed by its lack of playability. Unless I made an option for very low graphical details, the simulator presented a too big challenge for my hardware, running at a pace that simply was not enjoyable at all.
I remember writing that FS2000 was demanding hardware that would only be available in one year time. Well, some 4 months later, I still insist on that, but with a twist...
Running FS2000 on a GeForce 256 DDR + P3B @ 600, does allow superb flying sessions, yet you still can't push all the details to the max... if you do that, frame rate will drop, and I am getting more and more demanding about that.
Today, the problems I can identify in FS2000 are not hardware related. Most things I don't like, are about screen resolution and the windows' management: #1) when I try to run the game [in Windows 2000] in full screen mode, refresh rates drop a lot; #2) the game doesn't memorize the windows' positions and sizes.
The first problem (#1) has nothing to do with my monitor. I regularly run my 22" Mitsubishi @ 1600 x 1200 @ 85 Hz... meaning that the flicker is caused by FS2000 forcing lower vertical refresh rates [59 Hz, as I checked]. But why?!
This problem is easily "fixed", if you just run run the game on a maximized window, so I am not that annoyed about it.
The second problem (#2) is a pain, and it does bother people! I sometimes spend minutes, moving the instruments' window to some place on the desktop... and resizing the cockpit view... and docking an external camera to spot the plane... just to have it all go down the drain, each time I reset / restart the flight! This one is a strange omission on FS2000's interface. There should be a way to memorize such settings.
OK, since I am really a novice, for now I'll just say that FS2000 can look astonishingly good with the right gear. I've been playing it @ 1600 x 1200...
I leave you with some pictures, taken from Microsoft's website. I was unable to capture my own FS2000's screen shots when using Windows 2000, but I can assure that the game looks even BETTER!
Tomorrow, I will write much more about it, with my own snapshots.
The weather effects are another FS2000's originality! Thunderstorms are great fun!
Fog forces you to fly using nothing, but the instruments... and you can't always trust the values they read, if you decide to play on a FULL realistic model.