Yes, the cooling down of flight simulation is something I have always predicted. The reason are new planes, fly-by-wire and the boring cockpits with two big screens.

Simming is about enjoying a challenge, like how people got amazed at visiting the cockpit because of all those instruments, knobs, lights, etc. Today a modern cockpit doesn't impress people anymore...

Once people understood what GPS does for their lives, be it in a car or in a plane, everything is pretty much the same. Before their was curiosity with navigation, vor, ils...people wonder how planes went from a to b. Pilots were heroes. Captains were God. Stewardess were pop stars. That is what made a flightsim so popular in from FS4 in an IBM PS2. The magic of flying.

There is no magic anymore, just programming GPS, FMC, and inputing painlessly data on computers within your computer. We are just simulating computer data filling. That's not fun.
Do you know why we don't simulate cars riding along streets? Because its a pretty straightforward process that even my granny can do it.

Captainsim will be one of the last ones because they have kept around the classics, but again this niche is small. I read some guys here never saw a Tristar, just by internet pics. The thing is the Tristar is not that old, I flew in some in the 90s. Imagine about the other models.

Xplane is overrated, when come to facts, when you sit in a cockpit, even a payware, you feel like in a drawn cockpit, it doesn't feel real.

A DC8 would be welcome, its the only plane from the golden era that lacks a good CS quality addon. The future will allow for continuous services for the current planes, or relaunches when technology allows better cabin interaction with moving people, but not in this platform of course.


CoastalDriver wrote on Sep 9^th, 2013 at 1:51pm:

Ah well guess I will just have to keep playing around with the other mobs L1011 in the meantime. Yep and some fixes for some bugs in the other stuff would be nice too. It seems the downturn in other places and worldwide is starting to bite in the flight sim world, there are a lot of dead sites and a lot of the community freeware effort has gone now as I am sure the cost of maintaining sites etc is too much for some and not enough bums on the seats for others. Then again there was a lot good stuff done in FS2004 and it seems the changes in modelling systems etc and lack of compatibility has meant for many it has just become too hard and who can afford it anyway, so they have given it away. Starting to see the same trend in some simmers who just cannot justify upgrading PC's etc. Then again if you look at the real world of aviation you can hardly get excited about a B787 or Airbus A350.