Fishsim - Virtual fishing on the PC !


If you are into fishing and have a computer then this application is a must have. For just £21.50 including postage you get a very realistic, interesting simulator. Yes a simulator, its not a game, it has complicated rules that dictate if or when you get a bite, if the fish is landed or gets away, and what type and weight of fish is caught.

This page is by no means complete, and I'm truly a novice at catching fish (both in real life and on the simulator) so I can't really cover all the aspects of the application. The good news is that there are loads of 3rd party add-ons, support forums and fan sites that can help out. You can even go on-line and join a match, either over a local LAN or over the internet.

So what do you do. Well having installed the application you are prompted to enter your name in the record book. You then go through to the main menu. Here you can set up two rods with loads of rigs, from float fishing to feeder and ledger. You also fill your bait boxes with a selection of hook baits, ground bait and loose feeds.

Once you have that set, you select the venue and the peg you want to fish from. All venues are real photographs of real locations, and whilst creating new venues isn't easy, it can be done using the application to produce the required files. This is great as you can take a picture of your local lake or river and (with some effort) be able to fish it when the weather or other things in your life make it impossible to go fishing in real life.

 

When you get started for the first time, chances are you'll pick a location that results in no fish, and you think its all been a waste of money. Don't give up, choose the Oriental Pond and set the rod up with an antenna float set at 5' deep, size 14 hook and 7 lb line. Now cast your line to the right of the lake where the reflection of the trees form an arc (as shown on the left). Sling out some ground bait and loose feed of hemp and maize, and have around 3 maggots on the hook. Now wait for the bite, it won't be long in coming :-)

Our personal best on this lake (at the time of writing its been two days since Fishing Simulator arrived through our letterbox) is just under 9lb, although plenty of double figure carp have got away, we have yet to land one !!

The best bit is that if you have a LAN you can set up a match and see if you can catch more fish in a given time than the others. This is taken a stage further and some sites host matches, and award prizes for the winning catch.

Like most things there are several forums and loads of 3rd party add-ons. From baits to tackle, its all available for you to get more from this application. There are also lots of support and the updates are free. I'll be listing several web sites that you might want to visit over the next few weeks. I'm not going to host any of the downloads as they are so numerous that it would take years getting permissions from the authors, and as most are centrally hosted I can't see the point in making a lot of work for myself ;-)

 
Venue Creation

Well my first venue is now available for download. Tingrith Fishery is a single peg venue containing some large carp and bream (plus perch and roach and some other silver fish)

The venue has been approved by the testing team on LB's forum and can be downloaded direct from my site using the link below, or via the main downloader on LB's forum (see the links page)

Creating a venue is a lot of work, and takes around three days of constant work, testing and checking before the files are uploaded to the testing team. It can then be a couple of weeks before being passed. My second venue has just been submitted and hopefully will be available for download by mid December.

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