Flight Simulator 2000 was the second title I worked on at Microsoft. Each of the sim titles had a one year production cycle so we would alternate between Flight Sim and Combat Flight Sim to minimize down time. As the technical art lead I worked closely with the art lead on any process related issues that needed to be addressed prior to the production phase. As part of the airplane protoyping effort I modeled the Beechcraft Baron and Cessna 182S to help establish pipeline, tools and resolutions of models and textures.
Once the process for aircraft creation had been resolved, the production team could begin and I moved on to the virtual cockpit prototyping.
We did not have the polygon budgets to support modeled virtual cockpits on FS2000, so we devised an image based solution instead. I worked closley with the dev team on implimentation and led a couple other artists to develop the cockpits for FS2000. This was an especially tricky task since we had very little reference and each cockpit had to be 100% accurate. Here are some of the virtual cockpits I created for FS2000, you can click on any frame to see a larger image.
One of the last things I did on FS2000 before moving on to pre production for Combat Flight Sim II was to produce the title sequence for our "What's New" video.
This was still in the early stages of Microsoft's game development effort, so there was little thought given to time and budget for trailers and the like. I did the openeing and closing titles for this sequence in a couple of days using Adobe After Effects and then handed the sequence off to MS Studios for the video capture and editing segment. I shortened the capture segment in this example to shorten the download time.
To an outsider it would appear an easy effort to create a sim based game, but given the exacting standards we had to meet to appeal to the flight simulation crowd, it was far from easy to create content for FS2000.