That was Flight Unlimited 2 and 3. The tower and ground controllers had some great lines in those sims B)

Yep like if you started taxing at KSEA without contacting ground he'd call you,then after that he'd start telling the other planes to watchout for this crazy guy who's not talking to him. I felt life inside of FU3 somthing that's still lacking in FSX. I remember the mission where you try to find big foot and when u land he's waiting for you growling,scared the hell outta me the first time.

No response yet from PC Pilot regarding those two articles. I was rather hoping that I would have been contacted by now :huh:

Hi Chris, I just dropped by again. FU III is still on my hard drive but there's a problem--since I bought a new monitor several years ago (and then an even bigger one last year) the aspect ratio of FU III (800 x 600) doesn't work too well. Today all we get is wide-screen. I'd love to run yesteryear's favorite sim in windowed mode but the tweaks and apps that I tried were not good enough. Today I'm an avid X-Plane flight simmer, and to some extent a developer. Still, if I could get FU III in windowed mode on a modern wide-screen monitor I would certainly spend some sim time along the northwestern coast of the US again. I still miss the ground handling of FU III aircraft as well as the general hard-to-define atmosphere of the sim.

 

all the best,

 

Hans Petter

Hi Chris, I just dropped by again. FU III is still on my hard drive but there's a problem--since I bought a new monitor several years ago (and then an even bigger one last year) the aspect ratio of FU III (800 x 600) doesn't work too well. Today all we get is wide-screen. I'd love to run yesteryear's favorite sim in windowed mode but the tweaks and apps that I tried were not good enough. Today I'm an avid X-Plane flight simmer, and to some extent a developer. Still, if I could get FU III in windowed mode on a modern wide-screen monitor I would certainly spend some sim time along the northwestern coast of the US again. I still miss the ground handling of FU III aircraft as well as the general hard-to-define atmosphere of the sim.

 

all the best,

 

Hans Petter

 

Hans!  A dev for XP10 ?  You in XP10 ??? Well, I will probably have to upgrade my PC and buy / re-install it again

 

What add-ons are you working on ?

 

If only we could have, in XP10, the weather ( frontal ) effects we had in FUIII...

 

Peter James, where are you ?  

Nice to hear from you, Hans B) I am a P3D user these days, although I have not upgraded from version 2.4.

I've been working on a Super Puma helicopter for years now. It will be uploaded eventually but I want to get the virtual cockpit finished first. Then I've made some custom buildings for a Chinese scenery (Hongqiao by Shane Montoya) and I'm about to finish some animated ships. They run a straight course at a speed of 20 knots and look good along any coastline. I've been experimenting with different approaches to making the wake look right--a large moving vessel leaves a conspicuous wake that's several times the length of the vessel itself. Semi-transparent textures help make it fade out.

 

FU III has transparency but does not support semi-transparency. The latter is useful for fading and can be employed to eliminate jaggies along the edges of a transparent region.

 

regards,

 

Hans

What would be that chances of replacing the current textures, that appear to be a low quality photo texture, with something more modern?

 

Edit: Hmmm..... was that already done?

 

(And I still think Aerofly would make a proper successor to this franchise)

 

Several of us worked on the FU III textures. The texture resolution of FU III allows way better textures than the ones Looking Glass provided. If you extract a sample of the stock textures you'll see clusters of pixels and quite messy transitions. What saves the day is the anti-aliasing that makes it look a lot smoother than it really is. Looking Glass used quite low res black & white ortho-photos and hand painted them. They used a few colors, far less than what the somewhat limited palette allowed. Evidently, these maps were freely available (probably USGS maps) and that's why Looking Glass chose to use them..

 

Google and Virtual Earth provide far better maps for most regions, especially if you take time to edit them. However, if you implement those and share the result you're in trouble due to quite draconian copyrights. What can be done legally is to look for better USGS maps (public domain) and hand paint them yourself if they're black & white. A better resolution, less sloppy painting and the implementation of a wider selection of color nuances should ensure a much better result. Bottom line, FU III provides a pixel resolution that will support a far more detailed ground texture.

 

regards,

 

Hans. 

Thanx for the quick reply!

A very nice "Hello all my old friends" around here.

Looks nearly like we are in the good old times > 10 years ago ? :wink:

I hope all of you are healty enough to finger precisely with all the Joysticks and key codes for our old dedusted stuff - still alive and around here...

 

Chris, Hans, I'm very happy to hear from my very near old firends of the old FU3 development times.

Puhh which hours we spend into that good old sim and which improvments we did all together.

From time to time I trapp in here - and just readed this nice thread from Chris.

 

By the way - also a nice and very big "Thank You" to Avsim, their mods and server capacity who still holds this community and aged simulators still alive.

Also on my HDD FU3 ist still working under Win7 64bit - and from time to time I fire it up.

 

With kind regards to all of you.

 

Ansgar Avermeyer

It's great to hear from you, Ansgar! What flight simulator are you using these days?

Hello Chris, 

as I wrote - no one of the actual newer sims. I've tried flightgear - not in any way compareable, later X-Plane a few years ago - but was not satisifed with it. The flight behaviour was - more or less - acceptable, but stability, usability, model quality - ages from what we had/still have. May be with professional addons it's getting better - but that I've never tried.

 

So as I said I ment it - from time to time FU3 - nothing else.

Incredible, but I somehow have to agree that Peter James and the team behind FU2 and then FU3, and let's not forget about the original FU95 !!! made this sim way ahead of it's time, until today :-)

 

Great to see you back!

It's just a shame that we hardly ever get to hear from the developers regarding their own memories of the Flight Unlimited series. I seem to remember Peter James making one or two posts, but I got the impression that he was not all that enthusiastic about it. I would really like to know why that was the case....