Game Discussions Microsoft Flight Simulator

[Ralph Vargr]

For a comparison, I downloaded my sale copy (got it for $10) of MS Flight Sim X from Steam.

The program still works. The flight model is quite acceptable. There are a reasonable number of aircraft available with the base game. Compared to what we've been dazzled with, the terrain modeling is horrid. I chose to fly night IFR locally in several aircraft, leaving out the terrain problem for the most part. Fortunately, The Arch was lit when I flew through it...

Shockingly (really), I could still fly. I tried everything from Cubs, to Lear Jets. The only real difficulty was learning the keybinds again. The best airplane was still the Cessna 172. It's also the only airplane I would trust myself to fly, nowadays. Or, a Sidewinder.

The program is $25 on Steam, now. Grossly overpriced, as are the aircraft and terrain packs. Worse, the program is now essentially a basic flight trainer.Modern gamers would not take well to the old graphics. As a trainer for basic flight, it works well. You just can't go out in the daytime, or go anywhere but the US. The glass-cockpit 172 is available.You just can't read anything on the displays...

As for MSFS 2020, it needs to go through it's teething trials. When it goes on sale, it should have most of it's issues worked out. I, of course, will be flying the 172.

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

I knew that my real time, real weather, 1:1 progression journey will yield it's first magnificent sights once I reach lake Baikal. and I wasn't disappointed... yesterday late evening was sunrise during my Irkutsk - Olkhon Island flight.

Spoiler: Lake Baikal Cruise

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

I think for me it's the sense of scale, and of course the dreaded 'mersion... ED is a truly beautiful game in VR.

The low resolutions are certainly an issue (I have an old Rift CV1 - there are many HMD's which improve upon that I believe), but to be honest the only time in ED it's a potential issue (for me) is making out landing pad numbers on planetary bases. Going in today and shooting a pirate lord I realize I've not been seeing the 'special effects' of my weapons on his ship, but that's it really, and I could happily live without that.

CV1 -even without rying other headsets- aged badly, as the novelty of VR wears off the bad quality of the image cannot be unseen (also, I hate Zuckerborg and FB), and it is actually a real issue when playing long sessions in sims. I've offloaded mine few weeks ago and I have a Reverb G2 on preorder.

However, I'm torn whether I will play this game in VR once I get my hands on it, as I think I will have to scale down those graphical aspects what make it outstanding - i.e. losing the fantastic clouds for VR.
Now the obvious answer would be to upgrade to one of the next gen GPUs, but I have a feeling that the initial offering will be compromised in many ways, and the sweet spot will be reached once Nvidia launches the second wave (super) 30xx cards...

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

I knew that my real time, real weather, 1:1 progression journey will yield it's first magnificent sights once I reach lake Baikal. and I wasn't disappointed... yesterday late evening was sunrise during my Irkutsk - Olkhon Island flight.

Spoiler: Lake Baikal Cruise

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One more thing, about how this sim can trigger memories... this is an image I took when I was there, see and compare the coastline on the last picture.
It is a humbling experience.
edit:wording

Spoiler: Olkhon Island

 

[Vasea Azure]

China looks indeed #1 today:

 

[Jaaba]

CV1 -even without rying other headsets- aged badly, as the novelty of VR wears off the bad quality of the image cannot be unseen (also, I hate Zuckerborg and FB), and it is actually a real issue when playing long sessions in sims. I've offloaded mine few weeks ago and I have a Reverb G2 on preorder.

However, I'm torn whether I will play this game in VR once I get my hands on it, as I think I will have to scale down those graphical aspects what make it outstanding - i.e. losing the fantastic clouds for VR.
Now the obvious answer would be to upgrade to one of the next gen GPUs, but I have a feeling that the initial offering will be compromised in many ways, and the sweet spot will be reached once Nvidia launches the second wave (super) 30xx cards...

I don’t know either whether I’ll play this with my CV1. Have tried once the War Thunder and my stomach said ”Stop!” after less than one minute of flying.
i have no problems in iRacing except I cannot cope with the jumps on RallyX tracks. I know, perhaps I could be able to grow VR legs for flight sims but we’ll see.

 

[Fishy]

#firstworldproblems warning

Anyone else getting irrationally irritated with that stupid "Press any key to start" that gates loading step 1 and loading step 2? Can't just launch the thing and go away while it loads, you need to get back to press a key otherwise it just waits there...

 

[Para Handy]

Sounds like the bad outweighs the good at this point, especially with highly anticipated features like real time weather being bunk. Probably for the best that I'm unable to game until early next year.

I don't want to upset you because of your inability to use it until next year but - no, absolutely not the case. Yes there are niggling little things that annoy but when you compare this offering to the amount of work I put in to FSX, P3D and X-Plane to produce realistic terrain meshes; photorealistic scenery; representative, well modelled airports / airfields; cityscapes; landmarks and weather - MSFS 2020 is a peach. No doubt the actual game will get improvements and for sure meshes, airports, sceneries, etc will improve it even more but out-of-the-box (well, out of the broadband) this is a great simulator. I don't begrudge the £110 for one moment.

It is very evident though that a huge focus (sorry) has been on the graphics - just look at all the camera controls for example - the wow factor of this is evident even in this thread, not to mention in the press and internet sites.

 

[Fishy]

Icon A5 [...] It is very goofy looking

That goofy design has a point though, it's actually a seaplane. Wish I had a better picture, but you can see mine below (bottom right corner) floating in the bay of Hong Kong:

 

[Jaaba]

How to stream your instrument panels to iPad. I would interested to know if this is possible without having a second physical monitor.

Source: https://youtu.be/mZ1DB25NkQI

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

#firstworldproblems warning

Anyone else getting irrationally irritated with that stupid "Press any key to start" that gates loading step 1 and loading step 2? Can't just launch the thing and go away while it loads, you need to get back to press a key otherwise it just waits there...

In Steam there should be a right-click quick launch option that bypasses it, but I tend to forget about it.

 

[Fishy]

I don't want to upset you because of your inability to use it until next year but - no, absolutely not the case. Yes there are niggling little things that annoy but when you compare this offering to the amount of work I put in to FSX, P3D and X-Plane to produce realistic terrain meshes; photorealistic scenery; representative, well modelled airports / airfields; cityscapes; landmarks and weather - MSFS 2020 is a peach. No doubt the actual game will get improvements and for sure meshes, airports, sceneries, etc will improve it even more but out-of-the-box (well, out of the broadband) this is a great simulator. I don't begrudge the £110 for one moment.

It is very evident though that a huge focus (sorry) has been on the graphics - just look at all the camera controls for example - the wow factor of this is evident even in this thread, not to mention in the press and internet sites.

Yeah, that's how I feel too. The graphical upgrade is very very noticeable. I run on potato (medium) graphics, and the wow factor is still impressive. The satellite textures everywhere combined with the smart autogen are a massive upgrade compared to the rest of the genre. XP11 with ortho4xp is pretty close from altitude (though you need to bother generating the tiles yourself) but for low altitude flights, it's desperately flat. And if you add the autogen, even the smart one based on OSM, it clashes pretty badly with the ortho texture.

I feel as giddy as I did with FS2002 when we suddenly had the entire world mesh and a first 3d autogen. Yes, the installation is a mess, and there are some missing bits (no visual/sound feedback for structural stress for example, straight to black screen), but the out-of-the-box scenery is incredible.

 

[Old Duck]

So where are some of you getting your information about a huge world update coming soon? I've yet to see this in any official channels, just here in this thread.

 

[Old Duck]

#firstworldproblems warning

Anyone else getting irrationally irritated with that stupid "Press any key to start" that gates loading step 1 and loading step 2? Can't just launch the thing and go away while it loads, you need to get back to press a key otherwise it just waits there...

Yes. I'm also not impressed that Microsoft is wasting valuable hard drive space for a bunch of movies (dudes, I bought the game, no need to try to sell me on it) that could be dedicated to more cache

 

[Fishy]

Taking a look at Hanoi, and gaaah! Those helipads are so teasing me:

Spoiler

 

[Revenant69]

Will they be able to sync up real time weather in the game? From everything I've heard that isn't working so hot.

 

[Para Handy]

So where are some of you getting your information about a huge world update coming soon? I've yet to see this in any official channels, just here in this thread.

Well the official word from Asobo is that their next "Development Update" is on 27th August - that is just an update to their information page I suppose but elsewhere (yootoob and fora) the word is that this will also provide game update - there is a twattter thing about "Windows Insiders. The new update Build 20197 has resolved ..." - I am not on the insiders program so don't know if that is the same thing.

August 20th, 2020 Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator

Thank you for all of the amazing support and feedback we’ve received since launching MSFS on the 18th! The team is currently working hard to provide a patch update to address issues that have been…

www.flightsimulator.com

https://twitter.com/x/status/1297009734256533504

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFS_Support/status/1297009734256533504

 

[Juniper]

So where are some of you getting your information about a huge world update coming soon? I've yet to see this in any official channels, just here in this thread.

There was a dev Q&A stream last week. It was mentioned then. Here's some highlights (21:55 for the stuff about world updates, but it is mentioned earlier too)

 

[MYGUTFEELING]

Surprised I managed to get this running on my laptop with just a 4gb GPU. 25FPS at medium settings, with the odd pause when flying low over built up areas.

I can play high end with textures set to ultra on my PC however, with its 6gb 980ti

 

[askavir]

I don't want to upset you because of your inability to use it until next year but - no, absolutely not the case. Yes there are niggling little things that annoy but when you compare this offering to the amount of work I put in to FSX, P3D and X-Plane to produce realistic terrain meshes; photorealistic scenery; representative, well modelled airports / airfields; cityscapes; landmarks and weather - MSFS 2020 is a peach. No doubt the actual game will get improvements and for sure meshes, airports, sceneries, etc will improve it even more but out-of-the-box (well, out of the broadband) this is a great simulator. I don't begrudge the £110 for one moment.

It is very evident though that a huge focus (sorry) has been on the graphics - just look at all the camera controls for example - the wow factor of this is evident even in this thread, not to mention in the press and internet sites.

Yeah, that's how I feel too. The graphical upgrade is very very noticeable. I run on potato (medium) graphics, and the wow factor is still impressive. The satellite textures everywhere combined with the smart autogen are a massive upgrade compared to the rest of the genre. XP11 with ortho4xp is pretty close from altitude (though you need to bother generating the tiles yourself) but for low altitude flights, it's desperately flat. And if you add the autogen, even the smart one based on OSM, it clashes pretty badly with the ortho texture.

I feel as giddy as I did with FS2002 when we suddenly had the entire world mesh and a first 3d autogen. Yes, the installation is a mess, and there are some missing bits (no visual/sound feedback for structural stress for example, straight to black screen), but the out-of-the-box scenery is incredible.

I'm pretty much on the same page as you guys, yes there are a few hilarious graphical glitches but compared to how much the scenery / weather / comms / etc is so many light years ahead of the competition, and how many things are really superb in this game, it's mostly nitpicking really. And I'm confident this will improve further with time.

The only "real" things where some improvement is really needed IMO is the overall lack of feedback / "feel" from the airplanes, and landing is also far too forgiving. I quickly got the feeling that landing was a bit too easy (I tend to shorten the approaches so many times end up coming in too hot) and since I have intentionally been pushing harder and harder on landings and I'm pretty sure I long passed the point when any landing gear would have been completely smashed to pieces by now... I understand the game wants to accomodate people of all skill / experience levels with flight sims and I personally think that's great, but I would really like to have an option for more realistic collision damage.