Using FSX as a ship simulator

[YannisP2004]

Quite a few gamers online seem to be asking for a Ship/Boat simulator.

In this post I will explain how to set up FSX in order to use it as a global boat/ship simulator using only freeware tools.

(1) REAL WEATHER — Activate FSX beta from Steam properties. If you already have FSX installed, activating the beta branch will only download an update of a few hundred megabytes, and you will then have real weather working again.

(2) BETTER SEA TEXTURE — Since you will be sailing rather than flying, you probably want a better look for the sea. Download the free FS Water Configurator, from here[flyawaysimulation.com], install it, run it, and chose any of the preset schemes (or set up manually a scheme of your own). Unfortunately, we don't get any waves with FSX, it's always a calm sea, so the look of it will help with immersion.

(3) TRACK SHIP POSITION ON GOOGLE EARTH — FSX has always needed a better map. The default map activated by TAB has no geographic placeholders and is too small for modern displays. To link FSX with the free Google Earth, download, install, and run FSX Google Earth Tracker from its GitHub page[github.com]. You only have to run it manually the first time, you can then set it up to start and quit automatically with FSX. When you run it, it places itself automatically in the system tray (Windows 10), so look for it there. By right clicking on its icon on the system tray you can run Google Earth, and in there you must locate and click on User Aircraft in Temporary Places in the Sidebar to go to your ship. The ship position refreshes automatically, so it's very nice to have Google Earth showing in a second monitor, if you have one.

(4) SUGGESTED BOAT — Since you will be sailing a huge world, and the speed of sea vessels is much lower than airplanes, I suggest you get a quick boat to do your sailing. One particularly nice is the free "SIROCCO GTX2 132 ft motoryacht" published by Deltasim Studio. It comes with a nice EXE install, so you don't have to do any manual copying of files. You may download the SIROCCO at a decent download speed from here[www.flightsim.com].

(5) COMPASS AND CLOCK — This is just a tip, but a useful one. Most ships/boats come with neither a compass nor a clock, which is unfortunate because you rather need both for sailing. A workaround for compass is to display the GPS (Shift 2, with the SIROCCO boat), which shows the heading in degrees (heading also shows in the map invoked by pressing the TAB key, but you cannot keep sailing while you activate the map). To see the time, you just chose World > Time and Season from the FSX menus, and the "Local time" that shows there is what you need.

(6) REALISM SETTINGS — This is just another tip: since you will be sailing rather than flying, I suggest that you go into Realism Settings and set the General all the way to realistic, and all the others (P-factor, Torque, Gyro, and perhaps Crash tolerance) to easy.

These should get you going. Let me know if this post is helpful.

Oh, and happy sailing!

[kalnon]

Thank you for this! I always wondered if it could be used as a ship simulator. You should consider making this into an actual guide.

The only problem is there's very few ships or boats to choose from that I can find. I know SimShack sells a few different boats and there's a couple free one's I've come across but that's it.

[YannisP2004]

Happy to hear my post was useful.

You may find over 10 free boats at https://www.flightsim.com/files/category/119-fsx-other-aircraft/ and all of them may be downloaded at a decent speed.

[kalnon]

Originally posted by YannisP2004:

Happy to hear my post was useful.

You may find over 10 free boats at https://www.flightsim.com/files/category/119-fsx-other-aircraft/ and all of them may be downloaded at a decent speed.

Thank you so much, I didn't know about these! I also see some cool cars and a hot air balloon, amazing.

[Daimo]

Vehicle Simulator is pretty good for sailboats.

[kalnon]

Originally posted by Daimo:

Vehicle Simulator is pretty good for sailboats.

I never heard of Vehicle Simulator before, I'll have to check it out, I love driving sims too. Btw if your looking for realistic sailing I found this (I haven't bought it yet): https://store.steampowered.com/app/794860/eSail_Sailing_Simulator/