The flight simulator

The history of the PC flight simulator can be traced right back to the early personal computers of the 1970s and 1980s where they were some of the first games to be developed, albeit in a crude form.

Programming a realistic 3d virtual world has always presented a unique challenge to games designers, and the flight simulator has accordingly always been at the cutting edge what is possible to create on the hardware available.

In recent years flight sims have become almost photo-realistic and the in-game physics have been refined to the extent that individual airplanes' flight characteristics can be modelled almost perfectly. Veteran WW2 pilots, for example, have been reported as stating that the planes they originally flew in the war have been modelled almost perfectly in Ubisoft's Il2 Sturmovik series.

Today, the emphasis is on immersion - making the whole experience of using a flight simulator as close to reality as possible. For the serious sim fan a bewildering array of hardware is available in addition to the joystick and screen combination of old. The internet has also opened up a whole new level of possibilities allowing simmers to fly in multiplayer environments and also with real-time weather and traffic updates.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of flight simulator on the market:

1. The arcade style simulator - such as the Ace Combat series and Secret Weapons over Normandy.

2. The combat flight simulator - Such as Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator series, Ubisoft's Il2 Sturmovik series and Lock-On Modern Air Combat, and the legendary Falcon 4.0 by Microprose which is now developed by the user community.

3. The Civilian Flight Simulator - such as Microsoft's Flight Simulator series, X-plane and FlightGear. Additionally there are a number of civilian outer space simulators available within Flight Simulator and X-Plane and a stand alone space sim called Orbiter

Most serious flight simmers don't consider the arcade type to be a genuine flight simulator since the emphasis is on gameplay and action rather than authenticity. True flight sims, although they usually have scaleable realism/difficulty settings, require a degree of commitment to learn how to fly well - much as you'd expect if you were learning to fly a real plane!