First time I played a flight sim was around 1986 when I was station in Germany. Buddy of mine had a Commandor 64 with some wire frame flight sim.
It was a lot of fun
I did not see another flight sim until I got out of the army and was going to collage around 1992. I had just bought my 1st PC for 'school'. A 286 with a turbo button to go from 8MHz to 12! Woot! But I have to admit I did more flying than studying on that PC. There was this game called LHZ, or something like that.. got me going, but then I found Red Baron by Dynamix.. WOW!
Over the next few years, early 90s, hay day of flight sim, I bought just about every one made.. AOTP, AOE, CYAC, SWOTL, etc etc.. As I started taking more programing classes at school I started hacking/modding games. My first was to mod SWOTL to add rockets to the P38. I also made a but load of mods for AOTP and AOE that can still be found here (search for Tagert)
http://acepage.beckament.net/aotp.html
That was all before 'online' was really an option.. Way before any Internet gaming. There was one flight sim that stood out for realism and online play
Air Warrior
You could join via your modem.. And the price was to play was only a mer $12/hr
So, as a starving student I didn't get a chance to play Air Warrior much online!
Than a little sim called Warbirds (initially confirmed kill) came out and the price was much better, can not recall what it was but it was no $12/hr! Played Warbirds for years! Than a whole new concept came about.. Free to play online! Which was led up by, yes you guessed it, IL-2. It took awhile, and what with the held of HyperLobby IL-2 soon emptied the Warbirds and other online arenas
I don't play as much as I did when I was a starving student, back than I didn't have much of a choice. But now that I have some 'extra' money I do a lot of the things you mentioned about, I even venture into a good FPS game (ARMA) from time to time, but my first love was and always will be flight sims
Anyway, enough about me!
I want to welcome you to the forums! For your very first post here I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to reminisce about my own flight sim path! I think you will find this forum very helpful with any of your CoD questions, all you have to do is learn to ignore the handful of people here who are dedicated to looking for any opportunity to say something negative about this sim.. Even if it has been said 100,000 times before, Even if the developers acknowledged it and said they are working on it, and Sadly Even if it is not true! Avoid them and I think you will find this forum very enjoyable