• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

I now believe MSFS really is "as real as it gets"

DragonflightDesign

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No it's not. It's a brilliant piece of eye-candy with flight models that need to be buried six feet deep and left there. Try flying the Grob which in r/l is an ab-initio trainer - it behaves much, much more like an Extra 300 than a trainer. I used to fly GAT-115s which are a similar aircraft, so I'm not some armchair pilot spouting out about something of which he knows nothing.
 
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unitedstates
No it's not. It's a brilliant piece of eye-candy with flight models that need to be buried six feet deep and left there. Try flying the Grob which in r/l is an ab-initio trainer - it behaves much, much more like an Extra 300 than a trainer. I used to fly GAT-115s which are a similar aircraft, so I'm not some armchair pilot spouting out about something of which he knows nothing.
Very true, but you cant deny that this sim (apart from the aircrafts) has a tremendous amount of potential to come. When it sorts out bugs like the very inconstant weather system, incorporate actual precip information for 3rd party aircraft, and high quality 3rd party aircraft actually start to become available, It would finally live up to the expectation that I expected it to in February 2020.
 
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unitedkingdom
I'm not some armchair pilot spouting out about something of which he knows nothing.

So then, what IS the most realistic flight-sim on the market at the moment in terms of flight-modelling etc?

And which flight-sim on the market DOES accurately represent the flight modelling of the Grob trainer in your opinion?

Also,
which sim do you currently "fly"?

Also, have you actually 'flown' the A32NX plane featured in the video I posted. If so, how do you rate it's flight model compared to the real-world A320?


[I'm genuinely interested in answers to the above questions btw)

I'm happy to hold off buying MSFS-2020 for now if you reckon the flight modelling is that bad. But Ive seen numerous reviews of MSFS over the months from real-world pilots (Squirrel etc) and from actual Airbus pilots - one of which regularly posts MSFS2020 videos on youtube - and they all rate MSFS2020 highly and feature it regularly in their training videos.

So I suspect its early days for MSFS-2020, and that the flight modelling simply needs refining and tuning as the sim evolves.

...And lets face it, there's always going to be somebody with a gripe - even with the 'best' flight-sim in the world. ;-)

I hope I'm right since I dont really want to continue with good old FSX and X-Plane forever ;-)

Quote:

"The potential within the A32NX project is extremely promising and its future is bright in the task of bringing the aircraft to a level of high fidelity."
- Dan, Real Airbus A320 Pilot

"Flybywire A32NX Update V0.6:
- A New Experience! With a Real Airbus Pilot"
.

 
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unitedkingdom
I thought I'd post these "Paro airport Landings" by way of comparison with the original MSFS2020 I posted above

'FSX - PMDG 320 Landing Paro, Bhutan - HD'
.


'X Plane 11 - The Infamous Paro Airport Approach - A319'
.

 
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DragonflightDesign

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A lot of the big development houses are being forced into producing MSFS2020-compatible stuff because that's where the money has moved to and money=survival. As a developer I rarely fly anything that I'm not developing these days and also as a developer, I refuse to go anywhere near MSFS2020 until Asobo sort out the miles-long list of problems and release a v1.0 SDK that has proper documentation. I took part in the beta program for MSFS2020 but as it went on and the releases got worse instead of better, I abandoned it. It's a mess with some great potential, but at the moment it's still a mess.

Flight models? I can't give a meaningful comparison because I don't have MSFS to draw upon for a test.
 
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unitedkingdom
I abandoned [MSFS2020]. It's a mess with some great potential, but at the moment it's still a mess.

Can't say I've noticed any 'mess' while watching MSFS2020 over the past year (apart from trees growing in roads in downtown New York ;-).
Generally people seem happy with MSFS, if not blown away, and developers seem to be churning out the goods no problem. Sure MSFS isn't perfect (what is?), and some developers have gripes. But for an ongoing project that's barely a year old, it's certainly impressed a lot of people, including pilots and professional pilots, as the following article mentions.....

----------------------------------------------------------
"Take it from me, Microsoft Flight Simulator captures the joy of real flying
- by Oliver Holmes"
The Guardian newspaper (UK)

-For four decades the game has tried to recreate how it feels to fly. Now, writes qualified pilot Oliver Holmes, it has succeeded


".....the world in this game doesn’t just appear real – much of it is real. Using satellite images and photogrammetry, the team has made a true representation of the earth, so accurate that you can probably find your home. If you wanted, you could then chart a route to your friend’s house by following the roads you usually drive. What this means for aviation enthusiasts is that for the first time in the simulator’s four-decade history, pilots can virtually fly and navigate how they would in real life – by spotting landmarks. That might be a lake known by its unusual shape, train tracks...." etc
-------------------------------------------------------------

[So what was once termed trivial 'eye candy', now turns out to be MSFS2020's greatest asset - to both armchair pilots and real-world pilots alike, namely the ability to identify accurate landmarks in flight].

 
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rhumbaflappy

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I like MSFS. I also am aware it is the future for developers as the number of simmers far surpasses anything else. But for developers it has been something of a nightmare.

Every month there is a major update, with hot-fixes in between. Little documentation of the sim's components and little documentation of the changes to core components of the sim. Take biomes for example. There is a sample biome. That's it. No documentation outside of comments in the xml file. And the core does change without notice. What worked before, may or may not work now... or next month.

For a commercial developer, this is terrible. You have to constantly retest and rework your project. And to make matters worse, some PCs tolerate projects while others do not.

But it is a pretty sim, and the market will force developers to enter it or be left without customers.
 
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unitedkingdom
I don't know who Oliver Holmes is, or what his qualifications are, but I am an ex-military and airline pilot (Hawk, Hunter, C130, B747, A330, A340, among others, and a total flight time of well over 20,000 hours), and I'm afraid I don't agree that MSFS 'captures the joy of flying'. It certainly does allow a reasonable stab at VFR flying techniques in a light aircraft, but as yet none of the aircraft types I've tried in MSFS give a convincing analogue of their real counterparts. The developers here will be far more qualified than me to say why, but I can state that the flight experience is far short of reality. Is it better than other sims? In some aspects, yes - particularly visually, as has been stated many times.

P3D gives a better experience of IFR flight - markedly so when using some of the study-level aircraft available. XPlane gives a better 'feel' of handling light aircraft (I'm not so impressed with its simulation of heavies), DCS gives by far the best simulation of fast jets. P3D and XP aren't as pretty as MSFS - though I think MSFS has regressed, not improved, since its release. The current HDR graphics I find somewhat cartoonish compared to the original photorealism. But it's a lot better than is available in P3D or XP, especially without expensive add-ons.

But the overall flying experience in MSFS is a bit sterile. There's not much else out there; airfields aren't populated by anything resembling real traffic and the ATC experience is not a significant advance on what we got with FS9. Control responses (on default aircraft) are just plain weird in many respects. But it's probably the best compromise available just now, and it is improving. No other sim is ever going to have the money and effort spent on it that MSFS is, so the chances are that it will get much better in a reasonable time scale.
 

=rk=

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For a commercial developer, this is terrible. You have to constantly retest and rework your project. And to make matters worse, some PCs tolerate projects while others do not.

But it is a pretty sim, and the market will force developers to enter it or be left without customers.
For the reason stated above, I have suspended scenery development, because the disappointment factor is as real as it gets. So I started working on an aircraft, a missile actually. It had been a lark, an offshoot if a model I developed for someone, that I got my own model for and continued to develop the flight characteristics. I made a VC for it, which is a table, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, because the thing is entirely fictional anyway, but it is easier to fly from cockpit view and I wanted a place to locate a PFD.

I started testing it at Edwards Air Base, because where else would someone test a manned missile anyway and the optics seemed good for screen shots. Lifting off and turning west, one can see there is an absolute cloud of player ID's and my first reaction is to go over there and really test it.


scramjet interior.JPG
cruisin.JPG


Arriving on scene, is a bit of a let down, I must observe. Easily, over 90% of the ID tags indicate the user is flying default aircraft. Occasionally I see an "Airforce" designation, "F22", or "Tomcat." Extremely rarely, I see tags that I cannot guess what they represent. This morning I saw a user "HazeBlue" with some numbers, 22 I think and his vehicle was "haze." I usually practice intercepts on the Tomcats and Airforce tags, but HazeBlue and I definitely stirred it up - until he vanished.

I suspect it is a connectivity issue, because large swaths of user icons vanish simultaneously. I have no idea what my tag tells them, probably "Airforce," because I remember typing it into the aircraft.cfg, maybe "scramjet," because that is what my .cfg says where theirs would say "Tomcat."
Besides HazeBlue, I have also had interaction with Tomcat pilots. I have a video of repeatedly breaking from a furball and dropping back onto one's tail, the scramjet is fictionally fast, light and will turn tightly in any speed range from 600 kts to 150 or less, it burns off E quickly and will boost to 40k, or more, in seconds, so there really is no competition with anything modeled under the burden of real world physics. I'll Immelmann up to where I can see the Earth's curvature, nose over the top and look below for the Tomcat, clawing his way up to me, smoothly drop onto his tail and if I overshoot, I'll just do it again. All by the seat of my pants.

The thing that amazes me, is that all of the players that would frequent LAX area, all lining up like lemmings getting their virtual certifications acing final into KLAX, all the sky kings hovering overhead in their F-14's and Raptors, HazeBlue and I are the only one's "making our own."

Lately I have been thinking my ID tag serves as an "advertisement" and I should put a link on there somehow. I haven't uploaded video of my furballs, but here is one of me intercepting some poor pilot on final.
But the overall flying experience in MSFS is a bit sterile..
I'd call it vacuous. For a sensationalist like me, to find any entertainment at all, it must be dumbed down.

 
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