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Microsoft Flight Simulator

Hace El Oso

Arcane
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OFP/ArmA has accurate night skies as well, including moon phases. Used to have accurate tides, but not in ArmA 3.
 

Burning Bridges

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The airplanes seem to be in wildly different stages of completion.

Everything with small engines seems allright. I've flown the Robin DR 400 and it is nice though it has no power. The sound of the flat 6 engine is so good. The 2 Cubs are also nice, especially the Zlin.

Some people say the Cessna 152 + 172 are very good. I have yet to fly it, probably wait till I have bought the Deluxe edition so I have real instruments (I play on gamepass right now).

I cannot fly those weak buckets all day though. And among the turboprops Socata 930 seems to be rather complete. I've flow it today and ca 90% of switches are modelled. The Autopilot works and the interior graphics look very good. In the next days I will compare performance with reality, it's probably way overpowered but tbh that is fun, it's a real powerhouse.

All in all it looks like the Socata is going to be my first goto plane, and there are already the first mods for it.

Unusable: The King Air 350. While it has a gorgeous externals it seems to be a clusterfuck. Maybe they can salvage it, but right now it's more like an alpha version, with countless bugs, a autopilot that makes no sense and most switches inoperable. At one point I had a bug where I could move the control surfaces, the aircraft would creak under the stress but would move dead on. Somehow the autopilot did never disengage and had also taken over physics. Another time it suddenly disintegrated mid air at 250 knots (way below critical speed).

Reports indicate The Citation Longitude is complete rubbish. Since the Citation II in the basic package feels half-assed too, we can forget the business jets for now.

The Extra 300 and Pitts are crazy. I did not expect that I would be interesting in this type of plane but tbh it's exciting. The control sensitivity in MSFS is ridiculous and you roll in what feels like 1/10 of a second. This is an area where you can show off your computer if you have fps over 60, and your joystick if it has MR sensors.
 

Burning Bridges

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Today I have installed the first mod, a fix for the brightness of the TBM 930 screens. It has begun!

It also seems pretty mod friendly although the MS version completely blocks certain things like command line options (I was unable to use the -Fastlaunch option because the shell link and the exe are completely inaccessible). Therefore I would get the Steam version.
 

Burning Bridges

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OFP/ArmA has accurate night skies as well, including moon phases. Used to have accurate tides, but not in ArmA 3.

It did not look anywhere near that good, but maybe I don't play enough Arma. The stars in MSFS are even twinkling though that may be a positive collateral effect of the sometimes horrid aliasing.
 

Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,377
So which version is worth it? Should I spend 120e or 70e?

If you don't have/want gamepass, buy the lowest tier version (70 Euros, I think). The additional planes in higher tiers aren't study level planes and much better versions are expected to come out, then you can buy the ones that you like.
 

Burning Bridges

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If you are not sure, the basic version will do.

Shock Ultra is nice but uses the same sounds as the Savage Cub. The Citation Longitude is a trainwreck.

The non-G1000 C172 is nice to have but there are better planes in the standard package.

As to the airports, they may be worth 50$ extra but are also butchering your fps.

I will personally go with the Premium package, but only because I dont want to be in a situation to have to upgrade later.

That's the only snag. The basic package + upgrade costs 170€, so this would be the absolute worst possible situation.
 

dbx

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Base version it is then. I checked the list of additional airports and I don't care much about the additional ones.
Same with planes apart from the longitude.
W.r.t. XPlane I'm probably going to miss the Vision SF50 more than anything else.
 

Burning Bridges

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Most decent aircraft are already in the base package: eg the TBM 930, the DR400, Cessna 172, Savage Cub. So the smart solution is to go skip Premium and invest them money into something else.

Wether you have 20 popamole planes or 30 makes no real difference.

I think when study level airplanes arrive the vanilla plane will go the same way like in X-Plane. Either someone takes them on and turns them into the premium freeware planes or they become obsolete toys.
 

Burning Bridges

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Two weeks into into the release and the mood currently slips towards disappointment and acceptance.

There is major work to do, most functions don't work or require restart/tricks. As it is it's a fine ultralight plane simulator, landing on forest clearings can look almost like Arma 3. But as a simulation of commercial planes it falls short, way short.

ATC is always the same voices saying the same lines all over and online traffic seems to have given up the ghost. There were other planes when I started playing but now I no longer see planes. The world is just as dead as X-planes, and the ground activity and modelling at the airports is even less than X-Plane.

People report that there are maybe 2 landing per hour in major international airports, which is a joke even during Corona.

Actually the comparison to Arma3 or Windows 10 may be fitting. This is not yet a failure but could require 2-3 additonal years before people become satisifed (but will play 100s of hours anyway)
 

Burning Bridges

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Well, looks like I was right about an issue that I mentioned directly after the texture streaming was announced

If you do the math, it is not possible to stream ZL19 textures in realtime. It's also not possible to stream ZL 18. For 17 you would need a super fast connection that less than 1% have.

Maybe you can do16 if you have the recommended 15- 50 mbits but most people will be limited to highly compressed ZL15 to 16.

What's strange is that MSFS actually does not even use the available bandwidth, only 1-2 MBit. It seems they want to set the bar as low as possible, because most people dont realize or dont care they have been tricked.

Someone made a comparison in which you can see that Microsofts high altitude textures are currently in the range of ZL15-16

qeakLQ2.jpeg


The Bing imagery are not even high resolution Orthophotos, otherwise the difference would be even greater.

In their defense it has to be said that the short range imagery is higher resolution, and could be ZL18. But this is only when you stand on the ground and can see only a few hundred meters around you. That is the maximum that can be done with the available bandwidth.

Asobo also makes good by an excellent rendition of scenery, buildings, trees etc. But the textures are atrocious, and will remain so until people have 10-20 higher internet bandwidth, and Bing has seen massive upgrades in worldwide HD image sources.

Right now people have fallen for the oldest trick in the world. X-Plane with OrthoXP can look better than MSFS, although it has shitty scenery and Ortho4XP requires an awful lot of work. So it's a tie with Ortho4XP and payware scenere. Of course it also beats default X-plane which looks just ridiculous.
 

Burning Bridges

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MSFS is a month old and more and more people report that it looks shittier every week.

I'm beginning to lose interest in this game. There must be some serious underlying problems that people find out little by little, which is very frustrating. We were deceived by the pretty pictures.

Asobo have hardcoded a very annoying fisheye effect which could be just a trick to make the Earth look more like 4000 km in diameter (i.e. 90% less terrain to render on the XBox)

the download speed is a joke, 0.5 MBit/s in non-photogrammetric areas

for two weeks I have not seen a single ocean waves, although I saw them when the game was released

in many parts of the world MSFS uses generic textures that look shittier than X-Plane without Orthos

0O3x8Gc.jpg


Many instruments and simulated systems not working. Not even the torque gauge in the Cessna, fuel consumption is over the moon. So why bother with prop/mixture at all?

Basically you only have a little to do during takeoff and landing and the rest of the flight you can watch out of the window. Which gets old if the textures look shit, the weather does not work, there is no traffic, and the controller always says the same things with the same voice.

etc. famous last words

For the first time I'm beginning to think I should uninstall and wait for another year. Maybe they need a more time, maybe they are already dumbing this down for consoles even though they promised they absolutely wouldn't. If so, how original
upyours.png


I never saw one of those giraffes either, not even 1. Must be exclusive to the premium version or something

desktop-hero_8711a4cf.jpg
 

Burning Bridges

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And btw, the new patch is imo quite good.

Fixed a lot of things for me, fps are much improved. ATC is a little more varied with the addition of 3 different voices.
 

Geisler

Educated
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And btw, the new patch is imo quite good.

Fixed a lot of things for me, fps are much improved. ATC is a little more varied with the addition of 3 different voices.
Flown any turboprops lately? The patch pretty much breaks the entire engine simulation even further. My main interest (at least for civilian GA) are turboprops (pretty much TBM and the Caravan exclusively) and they have broken immersion completely for me on these planes. Just look at your torque during climb on any turboprop to see the most glaring example, the engines actually react inversely to reality.
 

Burning Bridges

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I have not played much recently, and I don't like the direction they are going.

This might well become one of the biggest dissapointments in gaming of all time.
 

Burning Bridges

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I played it until recently but it's more of a scenery simulation than a flight sim. The included planes are shyte.

I could enjoy the Mooney Bravo for a very short time but now after every mandatory patch it stops working. I think Asobo is really incompetent and frantically trying to reimplement the internals while people are already using them. Part of the disaster is that they apparently used automated tools to convert most of the flight sim systems from 20 year old Flight simulator code, and lately users are beginning to grasp what they did. It is a planet engine for Bing maps with 20 year old flight sim internals running in crappy web technologies, a stupid icing effect and some minigames like ATC. It is nice sometimes when you want to relax and simulate what you see when you look from an airplane, but as a flight simulator it is total crap.
 

Burning Bridges

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DCS is by far the most realistic.

But X-plane has airliners and you can fly the whole world. DCS only has popamole maps that you fly out of after 10 minutes. They also take 4 years to make and cost 50 Euro apiece.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
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Mar 23, 2006
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DCS can be removed from inventory now.
 

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