Flight Simulator Game
The genre of flight simulator game stretches back to the heyday of the gaming industry itself.
Incredibly, while simple games like Pong and Asteroids were the current hit makers of the day, several talented developers were already working on flight simulators which pushed the boundaries of what people thought games could be.
Click here to experience the best flight simulator game
Although technically inferior to today’s game, these early flight simulator games were still highly advanced for their time, and created the framework for future games to develop into.
As graphics technology continued to improve, the flight simulator game makers were able to more accurately represent the look, feel and detailing of both the interior and exterior of the different aircraft available, as well as the environments themselves.
Some games featured completely fictionalised areas to traverse, and others attempted to recreate small sections of the real world with varying degrees of success.
More important than the development of graphics technology, was the increase in memory and sheer computing power available to flight simulator game developers.
This allowed them to apply increasingly more complicated and realistic physics engines to the aircraft, which allowed them to better showcase the differences in how different aircraft handled.
This after all, was the hallmark of the flight simulator game genre.
As the genre grew in popularity, accessories tailored to flight sims became more available. Joysticks were a natural addition to flight sims, and as video game console style controllers became more and more popular on the PC, it was up to flight simulator game accessory makers to release new joysticks for use with the newest games.
Another innovation was pedals, which could be used with both flight sims and racing games. Then came yokes, which were exclusively used for flight simulators. Yokes usually feature dashboards with various displays, as well as levers and aircraft styled steering wheels.
As the internet age grew, so did the ability for developers to add online play to their games, as well as continuously update their games with new aircraft and regions via patches which could be downloaded online.
Online play has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for users, and will only continue to evolve in the future, as our capacity for ever faster connection speeds and larger bandwidths continually improves.
A persistent world flight simulator game, akin to a MMORPG, would not be at all surprising in the future.
While the PC flight simulator game genre was growing rapidly, the console system’s were going a different route, often focusing on combat flight sims, which didn’t necessarily have realistic physics, but were still enjoyable to play.
For true aircraft aficionados though, the PC was the only place to get true, high-quality flight sims.
It’s an exciting time to be a gamer, as well as a lover of flight sims.
Technology has advanced to the point where physics engines truly replicate the real thing, and modern graphics technology has pushed the boundaries of realism to the point where gamers occasionally do double takes at the newest games, not quite sure if what they’re seeing is real, or simply graphics.
There’s no greater example of the power of this new technology than in the flight sim game Flight Pro Sim, the current leader on the flight sim market.
With its large team of dedicated and talented developers providing constant updates and additions to the game, it undoubtedly will become the top game in this genre for a long time to come.