I would like to buy a flight simulator that is realistic and gives you a sense of actual flying an RC plane. I have only seen one or two and the scenery appears cartoonish and you can never seem to find your way back to the field. Does anyone out there have any favorites?
My favourite is Reality Craft RC Plane master. It is very easy to orientate with various 'landmarks' to guide. It is pretty realistic in that the models behave very similar to reality. They can easily be adjusted. It's also one of the cheapest! The scenery isn't 'photo-realistic' but it's certainly better thatn the cartoon scenery of some. The 'photo-realism' is all very good but it does take an awful lot of resources from the actual flying bit. One disadvantage of this sim is no helicopters. Free demo here
CM
HTH
Marc
amazing sim for both planes and helis, plus free upgrades.
| I would like to buy a flight simulator that is realistic and gives you | a sense of actual flying an RC plane. I have only seen one or two
Which ones?
| and the scenery appears cartoonish
You're probably not going to get away from that, though the modern ones are a lot better than things like RFG2.
| and you can never seem to find your way back to the field.
? You point the plane at you, fly until you get close, then fly in circles until you see your runway. It's not hard, unless you've gotten so far away that you can't tell what direction the plane is pointing, in which case you generally lose it in real life too.
(If you're flying from an in-plane perspective, then you're missing the entire point of a R/C simulator.)
| Does anyone out there have any favorites?
Of course. Ask five different people, you'll probably get five different favorites.
The current market leaders appear to be --
Realfight G3 Reflex XTR Aerofly Pro FS One
And all have web sites with lots of screen shots if you want to see what they look like.
There's a few free flight simulators out there, but they generally can't compare to the commercial ones.
Maybe, but their website demands Macromedia Flash. That automatically takes it off my shortlist.
Barry
I got tired of all the sites that have ads and such that use flash, the ones on ebaY being especially annoying. I found a little thing call FlashBlock
What does micromedia flash have to do with the price of cheese?, your missing out on a really nice simulator.
Absolutely nothing as far as I know. First time I knew we were discussing cheese.
Maybe, but there's several others that are also highly recommended, and they have websites that don't try to annoy their customers. What is the point of doing it?
See
...> Maybe, but there's several others that are also highly recommended,
Let them at least know.
As far as I am concerned, there are worse websites and techniques.
Marc
| The background and planes and helos are all "photo-realistic".
`photo realistic' is overrated with respect to the current batch of R/C flight simulators.
As for the plane, all (most?) of the modern commercial simulators allow you to see the control surfaces move -- which is very nice. You can also put `textures' (basically pictures) on the plane's surfaces which basically makes it look more realistic. Displaying objects like this in 3D games (with 3D hardware) has been `the norm' for several years now, and most (all?) of the current commercial simulators do this for your plane.
As for the scenery, several of the simulators give you flying fields based on actual pictures taken there. RFG3 calls this `PhotoField'. It's very pretty, but it's also rather limiting.
For starters, you can't even move. Since the pictures were all taken from one location, you need to be sitting at that one location and can't leave it.
Another problem is that you can't really `collide' with an unmoving picture that's right in front of your face, so there has to be a 3D world kept track of by the simulator in addition to that picture. The problem is that this 3D world doesn't always match up perfectly with the picture, or is very simplistic -- like a bunch of trees will be modeled internally as a simple wall (sometimes going all the way up too. I seem to recall crashing into the edge of the world in XTR several times!)
One advantage of this `picture scenery' is that it doesn't require much CPU power to display -- and yet it looks really good.
The alternative is having the simulator model and display each object individually. With modern computers and graphics hardware, this works out really well -- it doesn't look quite as good as the photo-based scenery, but it's really close. And more importantly, it's more functional -- you can walk around, even get the view from inside your plane. And collision detection is usually much better, since the model used for collisions matches the model used for viewing exactly, since they're the same model.
Also, that allows you to do things like edit the actual scenery -- you can add objects, perhaps change the weather (clouds, possibly rain?)
-- stuff you can't do if your scenery is simply a bunch of pictures with a blocky 3D model behind it.
| You can modify the planes' characteristics also, to make them fly | just like your real model.
Well, you can try :) (Though really, the current crop of simulators all have pretty good physics, and the planes fly reasonably realistically.)
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