I am a little late getting out of the starting gate with the FSX demo, which I sadfully found out about last night  !

My first impression is that Microsoft has given creators much better tools to work with to create a more realistic Flight Sim world both on land and at sea. But I haven't really cracked that baby in yet.

My first demo flight was at Princess Juliana. My first impression doing a day flight was the water didn't look as impressive when looking straight down into it. Howeever when skimming the waves you notice the reflections of the mountains rippling off it, which was cool. Any reason why it doesn't look that way from whatever angle you look at it!

Can you start importing some of the FS9 planes into FSX like the F14 tomcat and the F16 Falcon? I notice someone import a mig 29 although it didn't seem fully displayed in FSX.

The main reason why the water doesn't look that good in the demo is because of the way the light is reflected. In the demo, you can see that the light of the sun on one direction while the reflection of the sun is coming from another direction. This is just one of the typical bugs that comes with any demo.

Other than that, the water is perfect. In my opinion, it looks way better than FS9's water in terms of wave movement, self-reflections, and even how the aircraft float on it.

Just remember that in the initial screenshots released by Microsoft the reflection bug is fixed. However, the screenshots were from the "beta" version of FSX.

Speaking of demos and betas, I like to point out something. From what I have gathered in all of this discussion about FSX and progress, the demo [as some of us point out] is just an appetizer that Microsoft uses to draw feedback while the beta is a more complete and optimized version which represents the whole of FSX that Microsoft only gives to the official beta testers to see what "really" needs to be fixed.

Add to that the fact that Microsoft is now being so open to the general FS community recently [which comes as a surprised to me]. Considering this, I am pretty sure that the water you see will be improved and/or fixed by the time FSX is officially out on the shelves.

Quote:


You mean you aren't floating in molasses? Now that's an improvement.