This post is a bit of a rant about the state of the Flight Factor 777. The views expressed here are my own, and may not reflect yours, or your enjoyment of the airplane.
First off two essential things to remember:
- I am not a pilot in any sense of the word, much less a type rated commercial pilot.
- I love Flight Factor’s more recent products and own all of their products. All of their planes were out when I started simming, except the 767, and their 777 was my first add-on aircraft.
The problem with the Flight Factor 777 is that it is horrendously out of date, especially given its price tag. At the time or writing the 777 Pro Extended Pack which includes all variants of the 777 (the product that I own) will set you back $84.95(USD). I’m not sure when it was released, as that was before I started simming. My understanding is that when it came out, it was a great airplane. Not a faithful simulation, and not 100% systems depth, but very good at the time. It was certainly before the game-changing graphics cards that we have available to us today. There are complaints that it doesn’t have the right number of fan blades and that maybe the physical model isn’t perfect. Those are valid complaints, but they are not my main point here. I’m going to compare Flight Factor’s oldest product with their newest, the 767, and in doing so demonstrate that the times have changed and that at the very least the 777’s price needs to drop dramatically, but what I’d much rather have is a new 777.
At $64.95 the Flight Factor 767 is better than their 777 in every single way. The systems depth is greater; the model is better, the only thing that I don’t like about it as much is that it has the Flight Factor flight attendant who nags and nags until you murder him by clicking the intercom button repeatedly until you are informed of his death.
Let’s start our comparison with the model. Here is the 777 with its ground vehicles and all of its doors open that you can open.
This isn’t bad, but it is a bit of a bummer that I can’t open the foremost and aftmost cabin doors, and the cargo doors are not operable. Doors shouldn’t be all that big a deal in a simulation, for example, I find the IXEG 737 perfectly tolerable with no door animations at all. I think what rubs me the wrong way here is that I can open some but not others. On the 767 the cargo doors work, and while not all of the cabin exits work, all of the important ones do.
My other complaint about the exterior of the 777 is that the APU flap is not animated, but it is on the 767 as demonstrated in the following screenshots.
The 777 with the APU running:
The 767 with the APU running:
The 767 with the APU off:
The exterior of the 767 has much better detailing, reflections, and animations. It is the newer aircraft and certainly shows all of the tricks that Flight Factor have learned throughout their development. For the 777 to be worth what they are charging for it, they need to start applying those tricks to it. Whether or not that requires a fresh start on the simulation as a whole is not something that I can speak to, as I am not a developer.
Let’s take a look at the cockpit.
The 777 flight deck is just not good. It has some added shortcuts that were well-intentioned, like the TOGA and AP DISC buttons on the glare shield, but I’d be much more interested in having these things hidden in click spots like PMDG did in theirs versus having buttons that do not exist in the real aircraft added to my simulation. The texturing here is nowhere close to modern standards, and it just isn’t pleasant to look at beyond a first glance. The other problem here is systems simulation. While I think they did their best with what they had at the time, it ends up being somewhat shallow. Lots of things work, but there is effectively one FMC and one ND because they are all tied together. Any change you make to either side is replicated on the other. This extends even to the clocks. While I always forget to start them in my videos, I do indeed prefer having a gate to gate time and a runway to runway time on the rare occasion that I remember to start the clocks.
Another major problem is that the lighting is not the right color, nor are the lights separated at all. All of the panel floodlighting is on one knob, and all of the backlighting is on another. There is no pedestal floodlight as there is in the real plane, you have to use a little bit of dome lighting to be able to see the pedestal. And the lights are green. Not just the backlighting, which I don’t know if those should be green or not, but the panel floods which definitely should not be green.
Over in the 767 cockpit, the news is much better. The lighting circuits are separated, and the colors seem to be more realistic. The panel floods are still a bit green, but I have no idea whether or not that is accurate.
The texturing in the 767 cockpit is much improved, as are the reflections. The real thing to note here is that there is systems separation. The FMCs are independent of each other, as are the NDs. I can have weather and terrain on different displays and different ranges. Even the clocks are separated.
What I have been doing with this comparison is tremendously unfair to Flight Factor, and you should keep that in mind. I am taking their first stab at payware aircraft development and somewhat ruthlessly comparing it with the pinnacle of what they have been able to achieve so far. I certainly hope that they are working on a new 777, but I can’t find any mention of it from any official source, although it is entirely possible that I missed something. I also haven’t mentioned the 777’s wing flex yet, so it is worth noting that no 777 anywhere has ever flapped its wings like a bird and yet the Flight Factor 777 certainly does so in defiance of the laws of physics.
Once upon a time, the Flight Factor 777 may have been great but the times have changed. It’s texturing is weak, its external model is poor, its wing flex animation is absurd, and it doesn’t even have a working APU flap. All of these things would be tolerable if it only cost $20, but it doesn’t. To get the base 777 package, you are going to have to spend $59.95 and to get the package that has the variants I want to fly you have to go all the way up to $84.95 which is absurd given the state of the simulation. You might have been able to call it study level and charge that price when X-Plane 10 was new but that was a long time ago, and now there are aircraft from Flight Factor themselves with far greater systems simulation which are much more deserving of the “study level” moniker. PMDG has released an aircraft for X-Plane but let’s not kid ourselves. They are years away from bringing any of their popular products to the platform if they ever do. I do think that with their experience Flight Factor is our best hope for a good 777, but they haven’t released it yet, nor even said they are working on it (as far as I can see). Flight Factor could release a V2 of the 777, and I would happily pay for it provided it had the same level of depth as their 767.
Flight Factor has no business charging $59.95 for the current version of their 777 after showing what they are capable of with their 767. Don’t buy this plane until they have significantly updated it. Get the 767. You’ll be happier.