Which led me to reflect: What is it that made this hobby click? Of course, the common denominator is the love for airplanes and flying. But I feel that there is something more than that to turn this hobby from just playing flight games, to one that has made a community among men from all over the world. Men who could possibly be in nations that are at war with each other. Men who may differ sharply or even violently when it comes to religious beliefs or political ideologies.
Our hobby has become an alternate, if not a parallel world to the one we live in reality. A virtual world is the technical term, I guess. But to me it is the world that philosophers, dreamers, and even idealists have long desired and preached. Where else can you find a place where everyone is an equal to the others? Where everyone is willing to share experiences, ideas, knowledge, to the extent that great computer programs have been made freely available in the interest of expanding this virtual world that we often visit.
All right, I may have exaggerated on the perfection of this world as evidenced by the recent unfortunate developments in the freeware side of this hobby. I guess there is bound to be revolutionaries just about anywhere there is man. But in general, everyone seems to be in complete agreement when it comes to flying in this world.
There are several civilian and combat flight simulators available everywhere, but there is one that stands out over the others. Yes, it is the Microsoft Flight Simulator series. In its several incarnations, the individual releases have received mere mediocre ratings in computer game magazines. In the ones that I read the reviewer always seem to find the version reviewed to be always wanting in something. It never gets the perfect score. It never even made the Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame.
Why then does it have so great a following? I think this is where the genius in Microsoft lies. I believe that Microsoft never intended the Flight Simulator series to be a perfect flight simulator product. If it did it would have gone the way of the other perfect flight simulators. Take the Flight Unlimited series, gone. X-Plane, still there, but no forum dedicated to it. Haven't even found a third party freeware program to enhance it. The combat sims. Many are good and doing well. But people only play them. They don't live in the world those sims have created.
In Flight Simulator, Microsoft created a world that seems to have everything ripe for the harvest but the inhabitants thereof has to work to enjoy the fruits that come from their efforts. As a stand alone program even Flight Simulator 2000 needs a lot of improvements. And improvements it gets. Not from Microsoft, their FS2000 patch didn't really improve the scenery or make the airplanes look more and fly more like the real ones. The improvements came from the so called third party. How many great aircraft and sceneries can you find anywhere? I don't know. I did not count and I wouldn't dare to count. I'd rather spend my time flying those planes in those sceneries. And for the other time I have left, I'd use on completing my own scenery creation and reading my forum.
I think there are a lot of airplane designers and scenery creators out there who are hard at work to make their contribution for the progress of this world. Oh, how may times have I been frustrated trying to solve those terrain problems in my scenery. Those bleedthroughs in my 3D objects. Even the taxiline in FS2000 became a headache. How I wished I could fly the local airline that I have just landed in on a recent trip to our metropolis. These would have become sources of mental stress for me if it were not for the forums that I often visit and the web sites that store great volumes of information about the successful works of the enthusiasts that help me succeed in my efforts and enjoy instead of curse flight sim.
This work that is needed to make the FS world a better place to fly in is what makes us all feel like citizens of our virtual world. If I may say, even FlightSim.Com's content is majority about MSFS. And so are the other web sites. There are some where it appears solely dedicated to MSFS even if is not really so. More and more people are migrating into this world. They have come to feel that they belong to this world because they have either given or taken something from it. Not from buying Microsoft's program but from the fraternity that welcomes you when you do get the program and step into Flight Simulator's world.
I wish I could thank all the people for their contributions to the FS world and that means I have to thank everybody, everyone who has come into this world.
Thank for your time reading this, best regards.
Manny Aquino
mannysby@yahoo.com
