Flight Simulator 2004
FS2004 and it’s earlier sibling FS2002 both support the TrackIR. I didn’t test the TrackIR2 with FS2002, but it worked very well with FS2004 (although I thought head panning was slightly too fast for comfort). This is adjustable within the control panel of the TrackIR device which should be done if you want to play the game.
The TrackIR2 support includes enhanced mode. Basically the TrackIR2 pans in the virtual cockpit mode, the mode that most TrackIR users will find themselves again and again. The limitations of view that you see with the cockpits in FS2004 (the higher the resolution the better off you are) are still there. Some of the aircraft have the appearance of looking more at an instrument panel than out of the aircraft. It has been a complaint that I have had about the FS series for a long time — you feel like you are more in a panel with a virtual world behind it than actually in a virtual world. Of course the TrackIR doesn’t fix this problem but very little will IMHO. The virtual cockpit is an improvement with this artificial feeling and the TrackIR takes advantage of it.
The question I guess with FS2004 is whether the TrackIR is worth it for just FS2004. It’s nice, I like flying around and looking at stuff but this isn’t a combat simulator so the need to pan a cockpit isn’t as big for me as it would be for say IL2:FB. In fact, of all the games I played using the TrackIR2 FS2004 it was probably would be the least needed for effective gaming. This isn’t a slam on the TrackIR or on FS2004… its just that civilian sims don’t have the need for following some bogey like in other games.
So, if you have FS2004 and no other games that support mouselook, the TrackIR2 is a nice thing to have but not ‘life critical’. I don’t think that having it is a significant advantage in the game, unlike combat flight simulations. I like it, I certainly plop the old NaturalPoint hat on when I fire up FS2004, but if I had never used it with FS2004, I don’t think the experience would have been significantly altered.
