FS2002: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

By Phil Colvin (6 January 2002)

or starters: I just don't get all the bruhaha about the better frame rates for FS2002. Seems to me, the unvarnished truth is that if you're going to set every slider to the max (and if you're not then what's the point in getting the new version!) then this game presents exactly the same requirements as did its predecessor: the very most powerful system that money can buy at the moment of its premiere. For FS2000, that was around a one GHz system. Now it's around two. My one gig P3 with 384 megs of sdram and a 64 meg Geforce 2 Ultra runs FS2000 very well, and FS2002 very poorly by comparison. One minute you've got a frame rate of around 30, then you shoot an approach in a jet fighter at a major airport, and as you get close to the ground and bank towards the runway it plummets to around 5! Admittedly that kind of flying is pushing the sim pretty hard, but that's what I like!

BUT: that having been said, I will also say the same thing I did re the advent of FS2000: this game is so potentially beautiful that upgrading my system has gone from a speculative possiblity to an absolute priority. In my review of FS2000, I said that compared to FS98, the planes and scenery in this sim were "laugh-out-loud gorgeous". I'll say it once again about FS2002! The following are some inital observations.

The Good

-Far better texture mapping and clouds (Flight Unlimited 3 still does mountains and clouds better, but not by much anymore) and far more accurate coastlines. Now Chicago's coastline finally looks much like it did when I rented a Bellanca Viking in 1973 and flew north along the beach.

-Much improved generic ground textures. The ground in the middle distance doesnt "sizzle" and "dance around" nearly as much as it did in FS2000 with the mip mapping off (and I'll never understand why anybody would want it on. All real-life pilots know that the ground doesn't turn into some smeared, blurry mess just because you're seeing it from a mile or two away), and the new Autogen feature fills the landscape with a sufficient number of trees and buildings that when you land at a small airport, it actually feels as though you've flown to someplace real.

-Improved "instant replay" feature. I was happy that FS2000 got rid of FS98's 60 second restriction, and am even happier that FS2002 improves it further by having gear, flaps, spoilers, etc. come up or down at the same time during replay as they did in your real-time flight, instead of leaving them wherever they were when you went into replay mode. This is not only beautiful to watch, but it's great for capturing screen shots. Oops - now you know a secret from a multiple screen shot contest winner!

-More and nicer detailed cities. Sydney, for example, is much nicer than in FS2000. I've only begun to explore this feature.

-Very cool water takeoff and landing effects in the Caravan floatplane. Nice wakes in the water, nice waves lapping at shorelines, and the way the plane bobs when it comes to a stop is cool.

The Bad

-As with FS2000, some of the clouds are just paper-thin, two dimensional "inserts" stuck in at right angles amongst the other clouds. That is tremendously irritating. Talk about ruining suspension of disbelief!

-There's a bug in the spot plane view that makes the camera angle suddenly lurch in gradual transitions mode, even if you're cruising straight and level and not panning the view at all. Hopefully some patch will address this.

-In spite of the hype about good frame rates, this game ups the performance ante once again. Sure, you can get better frame rates than FS2000 if you set the Autogen, visibility scenery density and special effects really low, but where's the fun in that? To get all possible eye candy and good frame rates out of this thing you're going to need the most powerful system currently available. And I wonder if for the time being even that will let you have it all in this game.

The Ugly

-Lots panels for the planes you import from FS2000 don't work in this game, evidently because the panel.cfg file wants to use default FS2000 gauges. For all I know there's a fairly easy way to fix this, but I'm far from expert and I'm afraid to try anything in the dark.

-Lots of planes for FS2000 and CFS2 won't work in this game, including some of my favorites! What happens with some of the FS2000 planes is you boot it up and almost immediately you get this darned window that asks whether you want to end or continue the flight, and this just happens over and over, rendering the airplane unusable. What happens with some CFS2 planes is that unless you keep the spot plane view zoomed in as close as possible, the models reverts to some primitive, boxy version that looks like it might have been used very early in modeling the airframe.

-The whole "unspecified" thing in selecting airplanes you've added into the game is a giant pain.

Three Helpful Hints To Improve Performance

Also: You may find it tremendously helpful to overall performance before playing each time to delete all the "cookies" in that subfolder of the "Windows" folder you'll find by selecting your primary hard drive icon in "My Computer" (Don't worry about not being able to delete the "index" file). Then do the same with the "Temporary Internet Files" folder. Finally, do a "disk cleanup" (each of these can get rid of stuff the others don't), which you'll find on the "system tools" extension of the "accessories" selection on the "Programs" section of the Start button on your taskbar. Surely there'll be some computer dummies out there, who, like me, didn't know this already.

Also: use the mouse (for icons on the taskbar) and/or the "ctrl-alt-delete" key combination to get rid of whatever might running in the background that you don't need to play FS2002.

Update - Good News!

Still another update: check out http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/flightsimvetclub/ for a different and very comprehensive FS2002 tips, etc. site.

Conclusions

Phil Colvin
res0mokx@verizon.net

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