Game Discussions Microsoft Flight Simulator

[Codger]

Here's my tale of woe.

After futzing around for a long time trying to get my joystick to work with the game, I finally was able to play the first 2 training lessons.

Framerates were all over the place. Taking off was a slide show.

At that point I was frustrated and decided to request a refund.

No dice, because I've "Played for 5 hours" which is more than than the 2 hour Steam limit, apparently.

It took me all that time just to set the game up. There was almost no playing!

Ah well, looks like I'm stuck with it. I'll wait for some patches, maybe fuss with it some more once my anger dies down.

Life goes on.

 

[Old Duck]

Here's my tale of woe.

After futzing around for a long time trying to get my joystick to work with the game, I finally was able to play the first 2 training lessons.

Framerates were all over the place. Taking off was a slide show.

At that point I was frustrated and decided to request a refund.

No dice, because I've "Played for 5 hours" which is more than than the 2 hour Steam limit, apparently.

It took me all that time just to set the game up. There was almost no playing!

Ah well, looks like I'm stuck with it. I'll wait for some patches, maybe fuss with it some more once my anger dies down.

Life goes on.

Normally I wait an entire YEAR before buying a game like this, one to save money, and two to allow time for serious patching. I did this with RDR2 (and I waited like 5 years before buying Skyrim). But FS is right up there with Elite when it comes to "I've got to have this NOW!" games, so I am willing to pay the extra cost both in $$ and pain. Don't worry, a year from now this game will be amazing, assuming this is your kind of game to begin with

 

[Codger]

Don't worry, a year from now this game will be amazing, assuming this is your kind of game to begin with

Yeah, you're probably right. I have a RL pilot's license (or I did, back in the day) and over 200 hours in light single-engine aircraft. So this should be my kind of game. That's why I took the chance!

It'll be fine. At least I figured out how the silly control setup screen works. Terrible design, just terrible.

I guess I shouldn't have deleted everything though. I'll have to re-download!!

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Here's my tale of woe.

After futzing around for a long time trying to get my joystick to work with the game, I finally was able to play the first 2 training lessons.

Framerates were all over the place. Taking off was a slide show.

At that point I was frustrated and decided to request a refund.

No dice, because I've "Played for 5 hours" which is more than than the 2 hour Steam limit, apparently.

It took me all that time just to set the game up. There was almost no playing!

Ah well, looks like I'm stuck with it. I'll wait for some patches, maybe fuss with it some more once my anger dies down.

Life goes on.

I believe the 2 hour limit only applies to automatic handling of refund requests - I'm sure if you would keep nagging Valve they will agree to a refund because they must be aware how the install "works" for FS2020.

Not that I think you should - unless your hardware is simply not up to the task, it does run fairly well with the recommended (high) settings for me, but I could probably tweak some settings to make it a bit smoother. Despite some niggles I have no regrets paying for the Premium Deluxe version. This is one of those titles that will remain installed permanently on my PC for years to come, just like FSX did. And FSX was a much more frustrating experience for me from a technical viewpoint.

 

[MYGUTFEELING]

I spent most of the day yesterday doing bush trips. The only issues I had were refuelling (had to bind a key to top up my fuel) and completing one of the sections by not landing far up enough on the runway.

I have high settings with textures set to ultra. My 980ti, although it was at 100% usage, handled it well, and had very few micro pauses within the game.

A largely decent experience overall

 

[Fishy]

Yeah, wasn't the Air France flight from Brazil affected by it (i.e. the icing sensors didn't work correctly or something).

I'm just amazed that they implemented it (seemingly) correctly in the game sim. I know that modern software has come a long way but still, it's the little details like this that make me rather giddy.

It's been simulated for a while to different degrees. XP11 has it (the physics at least, iirc you need a plugin to add the visuals), and DCS has some per-module simulation (Ka-50 at least, I think the Huey might, but I've rarely flown it in icing conditions). Not sure about P3D. Since we have pretty good models for the physics, computational capacity is the main limit these days (well, that, and actual specs for the aircrafts being modelled, which causes difficulties in DCS since military airplanes tends to have less publicly available data).

 

[Codger]

I've got a GTX 1060 6gb, a Core i7 4970 at 4.00 Ghz, 16 gigs of RAM. I should be good. But it ran badly for me yesterday.

I dunno.

 

[Juniper]

I've got a GTX 1060 6gb, a Core i7 4970 at 4.00 Ghz, 16 gigs of RAM. I should be good. But it ran badly for me yesterday.

I dunno.

Assuming you've installed the new drivers that Nvidia released for it on Wednesday, if you go into the Geforce Experience app you can set 'optimised' settings in the game for your card. Try that... and then dial up your settings slowly until you get to a compromise you're happy with.

 

[Old Duck]

I've got a GTX 1060 6gb, a Core i7 4970 at 4.00 Ghz, 16 gigs of RAM. I should be good. But it ran badly for me yesterday.

I dunno.

Have you tried the precaching option? I bet the world servers are being hammered right now.

Perhaps sometime today / tonight I'll finally be able to give it a try myself and I'll let you know how it performs for me.

 

[Juniper]

Have you tried the precaching option? I bet the world servers are being hammered right now.

You also need to set up your rolling cache (separate option, but next to each other on the config screen). By default for me that was set at 0GB, which effectively turns it off.

Pumping it up to ~20GB makes a big difference I find.

 

[Old Duck]

You also need to set up your rolling cache (separate option, but next to each other on the config screen). By default for me that was set at 0GB, which effectively turns it off.

Pumping it up to ~20GB makes a big difference I find.

IIRC, it takes all day for rolling cache to initiate... I might save that for another day, having waited multiple days just to download this monster.

 

[askavir]

It'll be fine. At least I figured out how the silly control setup screen works. Terrible design, just terrible.

I'm also a bit disappointed there's no way (that I noticed) to set deadzones on the axis controls... Hopefully it will be added later.

As for the experience, the install (and in my case the post-install) was indeed frustrating, but when I finally did my first flight and starred taking n the sights during sundown (was using real time and weather) and then returning the the airport at night, all was forgiven This game completely redefines the amount of awe a person can feel while approaching to land over a large city at night time. Absolutely amazing.

As bugs start to get patched, stability improves and the graphics glitches start getting fixed, this game will only get better and better.

 

[Juniper]

IIRC, it takes all day for rolling cache to initiate... I might save that for another day, having waited multiple days just to download this monster.

Took about 10 minutes for me (Ryzen 7 3.7Ghz, and a fast NVMe 4.0 drive). But it's your call.

 

[askavir]

IIRC, it takes all day for rolling cache to initiate... I might save that for another day, having waited multiple days just to download this monster.

I wanted to enable rolling cache so that the same terrain isn't constantly downloaded. I thought it would simply set a maximum limit to how much the downloaded terrain could occupy, so I set it to 1 terabyte... It locked the game, and took over an hour to complete... Apparently the game creates some kind of ghost file to make sure the space will always be there reserved exclusively for the game's cache.

That's the moment when I achieved max rage but then I could finally start enjoying the game and my mood improved a lot

Edit: I set the cache to use a standard "spinner" drive though, didn't want to use 1 terabyte of SSD.

 

[Juniper]

I wanted to enable rolling cache so that the same terrain isn't constantly downloaded. I thought it would simply set a maximum limit to how much the downloaded terrain could occupy, so I set it to 1 terabyte... It locked the game, and took over an hour to complete... Apparently the game creates some kind of ghost file to make sure the space will always be there reserved exclusively for the game's cache.

That's the moment when I achieved max rage but then I could finally start enjoying the game and my mood improved a lot

Edit: I set the cache to use a standard "spinner" drive though, didn't want to use 1 terabyte of SSD.

Yeah, that's way too high.

The point of rolling cache is that it's constantly updated - so 1) an SSD helps massively on this point and 2) you're not going to be flying over 1TB of data at any point. You're just wasting hard drive storage, because it pre-allocates the entire file. 20GB is more than sufficient.

Pre-cache is slightly different as that provides a bucket where you can download cities into - and they can get quite large (by quite large, I mean 10-15GB for the larger ones). So the temptation there is to use a really high ceiling - but again, no real need. For one thing, you can increase it later when you need to, and for another - mine is set at 75GB and I already have New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, London, Paris and Tokyo in there (so far) and it's not even half full.

 

[Old Duck]

I wanted to enable rolling cache so that the same terrain isn't constantly downloaded. I thought it would simply set a maximum limit to how much the downloaded terrain could occupy, so I set it to 1 terabyte... It locked the game, and took over an hour to complete... Apparently the game creates some kind of ghost file to make sure the space will always be there reserved exclusively for the game's cache.

That's the moment when I achieved max rage but then I could finally start enjoying the game and my mood improved a lot

Edit: I set the cache to use a standard "spinner" drive though, didn't want to use 1 terabyte of SSD.

Can you set this cache to be on a different drive than the install?

 

[Juniper]

Can you set this cache to be on a different drive than the install?

Yes you can specify any drive or directory you want for either cache. Your 92GB of data doesn't need to be on the same drive as the game is installed to either.

 

[Old Duck]

Yes you can specify any drive or directory you want for either cache. Your 92GB of data doesn't need to be on the same drive as the game is installed to either.

Just what IS this 92 GB of data? It's obviously more than just the game engine and plane models. There must be at least some scenery data (meshes, textures, etc) included in this download, correct?

 

[Para Handy]

I'm also a bit disappointed there's no way (that I noticed) to set deadzones on the axis controls... Hopefully it will be added later.
.............

Yes there is a simple interface for deadzone and sensitivity. Click the blue "Sensitivity" button when you have assigned the axes - then you see a graphic containing sections for each axis - deadzone slider at the bottom and sensitivity setting above - interactive graphic shows the slopes and you see your axis moving on the graphic - it was quite handy I thought.

 

[askavir]

Just what IS this 92 GB of data? It's obviously more than just the game engine and plane models. There must be at least some scenery data (meshes, textures, etc) included in this download, correct?

I'd wager that it's the planes, airports and all the assets (textures, meshes) necessary to "build" the 3D world on top of the sat data.