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Hey Chock, how is the P-40? It looks amazing.
Do you think you could give me your thoughts on it?
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I only took it for a quick fly around when it arrived, because I'm waiting for the official pilot's manual of the thing to arrive (which I re-ordered the other day, after having ordered it from somewhere else and them waiting two weeks to tell me it was out of stock - mmm thanks for that). It does come with some excerpts from the real manual (as do all Shockwave's aircraft as far as I'm aware), but I wanted to check it all for authenticity so that I could give it a fair review. Nevertheless, my initial impression was that it flew very well and I couldn't resist buzzing the tower a few times in it, it's that kind of fun aircraft. It's certainly very well done as far as looks and sounds go, with an animated pilot based on the owner of the real aircraft which was used for the reference and sounds etc, stuff like the engine getting louder if you slide the canopy open - that kind of attention to detail. So I think Shockwave may have outdone even themselves on this one, but I cannot say for sure how accurately it flies in comparison to the real thing until I get hold of that manual. It's much easier to fly than their bf109, that's for sure, and it does drop like a rock if you let the speed get too slack on approach, which I know the real thing also did. So, initial impressions are pretty good. This all bodes well for Shockwave's forthcoming Flying Tigers flight simulator of course, which sounds like it could be fun.
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So far all I've found is FSX but I just need to look a little harder. If I find it used is it supposed to come with a manual or any extras ?
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You can find FS9 (i.e.
Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight) on sell-through at most computer shops (or at least you could last time I looked). It does come with a small paper manual, but like most recent versions of Flight Simulator, there is a massively comprehensive manual built into the software not unlike the sort of help stuff you get with DTP applications. It has a search facility and index and can teach you pretty much everything you want to know about flying an aeroplane, and all recent versions of Flight Simulator come with tutorial flights where you are accompanied by a virtual instructor, so it's easy to figure it all out even if you don't know one end of an aeroplane from the other! so even if the paper manual was missing, it would not be a really big deal.
One big difference between FS9 and FSX however, is that FSX has much more capabilities where adventures and missions are concerned, and this means that FSX does offer more potential for learning stuff to do with real aviation. Developers are starting to catch on to this, for example, two people can be in the same aircraft online in FSX, and you can run a server as an air traffic controller - stuff like that. Also note that there are actually two versions of FSX - a standard one and a DeLuxe version, the fancy version has more default planes a few more detailed airports around the world and it includes some developer tools to allow you to customise it and create missions, so if you think you might want to get into that, make sure you get the DeLuxe version if it's FSX you go for. There's only one version of FS9 as far as I'm aware, so it's not a problem if you go for that. With regard to extras, I'm fairly certain that FS9 comes with GMax on one of the disks (the 3D design package), so you can build your own aeroplanes and scenery, that has built in tutorials too. Even so, I think GMax can be downloaded for free anyway, so it's not exactly a major freebie!
Chock