As real as it gets? - yeah right

[chumley 0]

I cannot believe that such a simple fix as the incorrect timezone bug has not yet been addressed by Microsoft.This must be at least the 4th incarnation of FS to have this problem and we still must trely on first MS giving up some secrets via the SDK then the likes of John Thompson (bless him) tinkering around to give us some accuracy.I have just spent a few days pottering around SE Asia and am really ###### about the timezone inaccuracy down here. For example (all centres are UTC plus) Singapore +7, Kuala Lumpur +6, Bangkok +6, Hong Kong +7, Perth +7 - are you listening MS - they are all in the same timezone - UTC +8.For goodness sake get this problem ironed over the next 2 or so years so that we may have an element of accuracy down here.I'll bet the good ole USA is accurate - imagine the furore if they got that wrong.Andy B

[G7USL 117]

As much as sympathize with the problem that seems to effect you, I think you might be missing the point of MS providing a imperfect version of Flight Simulation.Ask yourself what would we do without them? would we have a flight-sim program to be proud of, or would we have to tolerate offerings from other FAR FROM ACCURATE programs.I will always be in 'awe' of the MS FS and the way it is moving forward for us, the enthusiasts. To knock it, doesn't actually impress the designers it can, and sometimes does, as in another persons decision mentioned elsewhere in 'Avsim's forum pages', cause them to just wash their hands of the whole thing. Thankfully he has been influenced by the appreciative majority to reverse his decision. I'm sure you know who I'm referring to?I know we all strive for perfection but, we do not live in a perfect world do we?So, be patient, supportive and who knows, you might just get what you want. In the meantime, appreciate what we have got, while it lasts.

[Guest Dean]

>Ask yourself what would we do without them? would we have a>flight-sim program to be proud of, or would we have to>tolerate offerings from other FAR FROM ACCURATE programs.>>I will always be in 'awe' of the MS FS and the way it is>moving forward for us, the enthusiasts. The reason you can be so appreciative of the progress the MSFS has achieved is because of the offerings from other CLOSE TO ACCURATE flight simulators. Fly! and others challenged MS to raise the bar, and they have responded. You really should be asking "where would we be without THEM?" >I know we all strive for perfection but, we do not live in a>perfect world do we?I'm not sure we in the US would accept it as a slight inperfection if San Diego was in a different time zone than San Francisco in MSFS. The original poster's point is a valid one. The FS developers pride themselves on having more airports worldwide than any other sim. I don't think putting them in their proper time zones is too much to ask.

[Guest LLgaz]

>>>>To knock it, doesn't actually impress the designers it can, and sometimes does, as in another persons decision mentioned elsewhere in 'Avsim's forum pages', cause them to just wash their hands of the whole thing.<<<<<<

[chumley 0]

>As much as sympathize with the problem that seems to effect>you, I think you might be missing the point of MS providing a>imperfect version of Flight Simulation.I think I am missing the point in this ####-eyed ludicrous statement. Are you trying to say MS provides an imperfect simulator for a good reason? If this is correct perhaps you would like to enlighten me, and others, as to what could possibly be motivating this.>>Ask yourself what would we do without them? would we have a>flight-sim program to be proud of, or would we have to>tolerate offerings from other FAR FROM ACCURATE programs.I have asked myself what I would do if they stopped producing FS and the answer that came back was that I would stick to the last version and at least I can have correct timezones.>>I will always be in 'awe' of the MS FS and the way it is>moving forward for us, the enthusiasts. To knock it, doesn't>actually impress the designers it can, and sometimes does, as>in another persons decision mentioned elsewhere in 'Avsim's>forum pages', cause them to just wash their hands of the whole>thing. Thankfully he has been influenced by the appreciative>majority to reverse his decision. I'm sure you know who I'm>referring to?If a simple comment were to dissuade MS from producing FS I think we would not have got past FS1 Beta 1. What a nonsense statement. If MS were to continually produce a spreadsheet that couldn't add up - how long would they last? Not long I suspect - their QA boys and the bean counters would be kicking programmer #### all around their programming kennels.As to the other guy - I applaud his work but more so his gall - he has taken his bat and ball and gone home on more than one occasion.>I know we all strive for perfection but, we do not live in a>perfect world do we?>So, be patient, supportive and who knows, you might just get>what you want. In the meantime, appreciate what we have got,>while it lasts.No we don't live in a perfect world - but the John on the street does try not make the same mistake twice. The old cliche - Learn from your mistakes - clearly does not aply to large business conglomerates.I have been patient - as I said in my opening post this is the 4th iteration where the bug hasn't been corrected.I think MS has applied the basic 15 degrees = one hour and that is not good enough. It would not be a difficult exercise to program zones in a similar manner to which flatten switches are built to exclude scenery and have a correct global timezone patchwork. This could further be enhanced to provide for DST areas.Also as the timezone changes FS decides it should pause, reload textures etc and then continue. It didn't do this in FS2k2 but does now. Backward step - you bet.Anyway - enough said - toll on the release of the Scenery SDK so John Thompson can weave his magic once more.Andy B

[Arnaud 0]

Yope,Flight Simulator is a huge big business, it surely brings a lotof money to MS. This is one thing.I am, I am an enthousiast, but I may get bored, because MSjust laughs at us now.The scnadal is: the FS engine is old, the graphic engine is archaic,it had never (except fs2k2) been updated correctly.We could definitely run this program with smaller PC.I'm tired o having to buy some Ultra powerful PC to run FSwith some modest 25fps, while all others games and sims, for someof them more complex, run soooo better.Last, the MSFS world is flat, this also, had never been updated:IMPOSSIBLE to make polar flights, you will end at North 89

[michal 44]

>The scnadal is: the FS engine is old, the graphic engine is>archaic,You are probably right here. This got to be the most glaring shortcoming of the product now.> Earth in FS is flat.This is not true. Someone else just days ago stated here that the Earth in FS is cylindrical !!. I have no idea why people perpetrate those false beliefs.Earth is perfectly round in MSFS. Otherwise all nav-gps tools (say GNS530) would be showing huge errors for distance and headings. What is probably wrong is the way scenery is 'tiled' causing significant errors around the Poles.Michael J.

[LAdamson 240]

I read this whole reply & can only grin.As a beta-tester last year, I couldn't believe all the crap & problems the programmer/designers go through........... to at least give us a somewhat workable and satisfying simulation.And then someone say's they don't care much!!!!; as if they really knew :(L.Adamson

[Arnaud 0]

Okay, Michael.I'm not perprarting false ideas, you know.It is some personnal obsession, make a polar flight: I confirmMSFS do not allow you to do so: flying above the Pole, North and Southis just impossible: SO, Earth is not spheric in MSFS. Easy.I posted a long and detailed thread on another forum to explain this,with screeshots.Try yourself, this will be sufficient to convince you.The GPS has nothing to do with this: the GPS is a simulated GPS.The INS also computes distances with coordinates, OK, we all use them.(GPS has nothing to do with INS actually).Same for GPS: it only computes distances from one coordinate to another one, nothing to do with the not-spheric MSFS world.BUT, despite the distance are correctly done, the world below athigh latitudes is false.that's why at 89

[LAdamson 240]

Just consider the MS world to be a bowling ball cover with tie strings at the top & bottom. And the cover doesn't quite pull tight over the poles.

[chumley 0]

Glad you got a grin out of it.I got one too only it was a wry one.Andy B

[Geofa 108]

One can easily make a list of hundreds of items that are still not realistic in fs-some flaws that have been there since the beginning fs1 and some that can always be added/improved until there is no need in the future to ever fly a real plane . For now however-until another company comes up with another sim that is closer-fs is "as real as it gets". If you show me a sim that is more real I will certainly be the 1st to jump ship -I am always on the lookout and own/have owned just about every one ever made-and my loyalty is only to the best ! :-)I'd certainly like to see your time zone issue fixed in the future-but at the same time it is not the top one on my personal list to fix-I have my own set of priorities as I am sure many others do also.Assume that perhaps the MS team also faces the same decisions with each version of what is important to fix, what can be fixed within a given time cycle, and what new features/improvements can be added within that given time. The decisions they come to can't possibly match everyone in the worlds' personal priorities- and never will.So keep pushing for your wishes, but also enjoy all the issues that were solved in this version along with all the considerable improvements, and I can certainly second what Larry stated about the MS team. Like seeing a beautiful women with a wart on her shoulder-perhaps notice the wart-but don't let it cloud the whole picture-which in fs2004's case is quite remarkable and equally beautiful! http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

[Guest longbeer]

Gotta agree with you Arnoud. My understanding is that FS's world model is, indeed, flat. I don't think it is mapped to a cylinder (called a simple cylindrical projection), its just square regions tiled east to west in a logical loop. If it was a cylindrical projection you should be able see a greater east-west curvature than north-south at high altitude which would look, um, odd. I can't recall ever seeing a curvature in FS great enough that it couldn't be explained by a circular field of view...The convergence of longitude parallels (I know that is a contradiction but we are talking about a 2D construct of a 3D surface here) at the poles is fudged by mapping the tiles as gradualy narrowing rectangles as latitude increases. I'd have thought you could fudge it and just logially connect all the edges similar to what happens going east-west, but I may be wrong. I'll have to raise the question with a mate who knows far more about the mathematics of topography (topology? I'll even have to ask him what it's called!) than I.I'm guessing that this fudging of the longitudinal convergence is the cause of ALL the problems people report at extreme high latitudes. It should also be visible in great circle courses as a series of straight lines rather than a curve in your flight planner. This rings a vague bell with me.Anyway, this is a shortcoming in the FS world engine. No amount of patching will fix it; it needs a rewrite. Lot's of other sims now have round-earth models - X-Plane and Orbiter spring to my mind so it's not impossible or impractical.Regarding the timezone issues - anyone know how they are mapped to the world? I haven't looked at a map, but the East Asia / Oz issues may result from mapping them as a of series north-south bands. This would work in North America, but not where they step east and west to get around political borders. Maybe this also is the a result of a simplified world model.To my mind, everything else I've encountered is just unfinished detail work. It's the sort of stuff I expect to see in any project involving a huge, poorly validated database. I've not experienced the crash-to-desktop bugs, but that sounds like a data validation problem to - this time allowing illegal data through to the engine. This is a QA issue for the project management people, not the programmers. I agree that it should be fixed, but I'd rather see the resources put into the engine itself. Call me selfish, but I live in South Oz, fly GA above 40 deg south, so the geometric fudge factor is very small for me, and all the scenery is third party anyway :-)FS has without a doubt provided me with more outright fun than any other software I've ever bought / downloaded / written / stolen / whatever. FS2004 is definitely the best so far. I found my original copy of FS3 in box of floppies a month ago so this is some time I'm talking about having wasted.Oh, and never forget that "as real as it gets" is a marketing phrase and should therefore be ignored.Laurie

[Guest LLgaz]

"Somewhat workable"I wonder if you'd grin if you had a "somewhat workable" TV set? You could only get channels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Nothing else. But hey.....at least the guys at Sony went through ##### to give you a "somewhat workable" TV so you'd be happy right? Apples and Oranges? Not really......Its ethics that count here. As someone said in another thread, if the East Germans had just decided that "Hey, we have a "somewhat workable" life here....the Wall is just to big to tear down" then....I'll let you guess where they would have been today.Again ...apples and Oranges? Not really.....You see, if these things aren't discussed politely, then nothing will change.And if after THREE OR FOUR SUCCESSIVE VERSIONS, THE PROBLEM ISN"T FIXED then maybe polite discussion needs to become polite Microsoft Bashing....at some point they will listen, the problem will be fixed, and all the apologists would be the first to install any patch that's released.

[Guest DanielBu]

I'd say (again) that the problem is backward compatibility, something MS won't ignore anytime soon I guess. But I agree, they should focus on removing the known glitches first before adding all the bells and whistle stuff.-Daniel