I thought I was in it for the pretty graphics...

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

I've been at this hobby one year shy of thirty years now and it's been the one hobby that has stayed with me throughout adulthood.

 

Funny you should say that. I was thinking the same thing. I started on the subLogic version on a Commodore 64 and have been at it ever since, although I did lay off it for a bit in the '90's due to college and later work, but have been pretty steady since I joined Avsim in 2003. I can say that there aren't a lot of hobbies besides golf that I have participated in as regularly as simming and golfing. More so simming since I dont golf every day, but even days I dont fly the sim, I still read the Avsim forums. Come to think about it, since 2003 I can't even remember a day, including ones where I have been sick with a flu or something, that I didn't at least read the forums if I didn't fly. There's not much more I can say about a hobby that has that kind of staying power and never seems to grow old. I think you could almost consider it a life style when your that active in it.

[Wendall 50]

I gotta agree with Jereon, I have several different scenery add-ons, but If I had a choice of taking a default 747 into ORBX territory ending, with a marvelous landing at Ketchikan, or taking the Coolsky DC-9 through default Alaska and fully going from Cold and Dark and mastering radio navigation all flight, I'd easily take the DC-9 any day. It alone has taught me almost as many things as the rest of my hangar combined, and I love the challenge.

[Guest]

This is a really good thread. Nothing wrong with flying around aimlessly, to each his or her own. The fact FSX is still going strong this long even after the official "end-of-line" goes to show just how much depth the product has and how everyone changes with it.

 

I'm looking forward to the future and enjoying the moment (be it FSX, P3D, XP10).

[ttiedman 0]

That's all cool everybody, but for me, I find myself stressed out by the myriad of details involved in the millions of different procedures and systems for thousands of different aircraft. I guess I'm the biggest fan of ctrl+e! Daily life is stressful enough, so I sim fly to relax, and nothing relaxes me more than watching a beautiful aircraft flying through the bright blue sky with fluffy white cottonball clouds scattered here and there... whether in real life or on a computer. I would say that 99% of my sim flights are flown in spot view outside the aircraft looking at the aircraft as it climbs and decends, banks around, flaps deploying, ailerons twisting, rudders, elevators I can watch it all day and never get bored! I especially love a well-modeled thrust reverser on the heavies! GA singles, light twins, turboprops are my favorites. Mostly from the 60's and 70's era. Aerobatics from tower view with a white smoke trail turns me on also. Oh sure, now and then I'll cold and dark the old Cessna 152 and try to keep current by shooting touch and goes at Fleming Field (KSGS) as precisely as I remember doing them them in real life (by the way, the Carenado Cessna 152 and CR-1 Aeronca Champ are the only 2 payware aircraft I own after more than a decade of flying the computer) but the spot view of an aircraft in flight is my main attraction to flight sim. I can get lost in it until all the day's worries have faded away... I go into a kind of a trance watching them fly around. Scenery isn't that important to me either, as I'm watching the actual aircraft flying throughout most of the flight. I fly IFR (I Follow Roads) a lot, mostly in Minnesota/Western Wisconsin. I enjoy a nice little well modeled mom and pop country airport with lots of eye candy whenever I feel like looking at scenery, or when I'm flying a helicopter, but the big airports don't turn me on... too much hustle and bustle. They cause stress. And I'm a guy who likes to keep his hangar full. I would guess there's well over 10,000 aircraft liveries in my menu, maybe 20,000, and I like to keep them all in FSX, not in an outside file to be moved in and out of the sim. This doesn't hurt my framerates. I have a machine that is powerful enough to handle the sim with all settings maxed out and all liveries in 32 bit, but it does take several minutes for the sim to startup with all those aircraft in the menu... time spent dreaming about watching aircraft flying! Whatever works!

[lthendrix 25]

come to think of it you can get a pretty realistic radio navigation scenario in the default 172 with all the stuff to the right and my traffic 2013 at 30 percent with rex at real word weather 100 mile vis in overcast conditions with most photo or land class scenery

I love fooling with knobs and buttons but I also appreciate a good view Otherways I would just fly by night......

[Noel 4,483]

Anyone else who has had a similar experience? Maybe in the opposite direction?

 

I think this is why FSX has indeed 'had the magic' it takes to do what it's done: 7 y/o platform, yet still, lots of followers! Now, if only a new set of developers would FOLLOW THE BASIC MODEL of FSX, yet modernize the code so that it is congruent w/ the direction that hardware development has gone: i.e., multicore, parallelism, modern graphical APIs, etc. That, IMO, would spawn a whole new future for the hobby, and perhaps attract even more users were the product developed really well w/ a modern interface. XPlane 64-bit has some of this in terms of scalability from what we hear, but maybe is missing some of the magic, though I'm not sure as I haven't used it.

[HiFlyer 9,336]

For me, the thing that I want doesn't seem to exist. Games that have great graphics don't often have the depth to keep you occupied when the mood strikes you for detail, and sims that have details coming out of their noses seem to have graphics from the stone age. Nothing seems to combine to two, and the one project that hinted at the potential for both was never given a chance.

 

I note that the War Thunder community is edging steadily towards detail (Much talk on the forums about full realism mode being where the pros go to kick real hiney) and people who were pretty much raised with joypads are all abuzz about where to get good Joysticks, TrackIR and the sim paraphernalia that is common here; yet the two communities are worlds apart otherwise.

 

The type of sims popular here are irrelevant to the majority there (boring generally, and look dated) and the people here tend to dismiss those types of programs as games irrelevant to simming.

 

Looking back, I seem to remember the gaming/simming communities being much more tightly bound, and the hobby moving forwards together. Now, we seem increasingly far apart, which is a shame for some like me at least, since I feel the two sides have a lot they could share.

[Anxu00 176]

try it and you will really like the feeling of flying a 64bit 777 in a 64bit flight sim :drinks: a little warning before you buy: after seeing xplane10 with HDR settings at night and day, you will not be able to fly fsx again :lol: I even got depressed for spending $thousands$ on fs9/fsx/p3d without trying xp10 first. :good:

I have hundreds of $ invested in FSX too, but I now stop buying any more FSX add-ons, as I hate throwing more good money after bad. P3D has no future for entertainment market, if there will be a platform that will get my money, it would be XP-10. That or I will enjoy the current run of the limping FSX until it no longer works with future OS, HW platforms, and then quit Flight Sim altogether!

 

So yes, more on the a/c and less on scenery! To preserve your sanity

[LAdamson 240]

I have hundreds of $ invested in FSX too, but I now stop buying any more FSX add-ons, as I hate throwing more good money after bad. P3D has no future for entertainment market, if there will be a platform that will get my money, it would be XP-10. That or I will enjoy the current run of the limping FSX until it no longer works with future OS, HW platforms, and then quit Flight Sim altogether!

 

So yes, more on the a/c and less on scenery! To preserve your sanity

 

I'm going to start buying MORE FSX addons......

 

Even bought a brand new copy of FSX.

[1mikel151 71]

Interesting thread. Myself, i really have no interest in tubeliners, tried them many times, but the whole concept of that kind of flight did nothing for me. I like having a purpose for the flight and as such imagine a scenario around the flight, much like a VA charter. I LOVE scenery, especially photoreal with autogen and the details surrounding that including a dynamic world, moving everything..Whenever I take a real flight i take note off all i see to try and duplicate it in the sim, the weather, the birds, the traffic (ground and sky), the life at the airport and the FBO. takeoff and landing are my fav parts or a flight, just as in real life..

 

being a scenery developer and a modeler and being able to change/enhance/alter any visual aspect of the sim opens so many doors for me with FS. I have done WWII scenery when in the mood to fly vintage fighters, done Vietnam FOB jungle scenery when i felt like flying military Huey flights, done photoreal Island scenery when I wanted to tool around paradise in a sailboat, done large photoreal game parks in Africa with custom lodges and animated wildlife to fly hunting parties and tourists in, even done large photoreal areas of Afghanistan to do missions in a blackhawk or Kiowa.. To me, FSX is a world simulator, not just a flight simulator. I LOVED the first person walk around view Flight had and wish it could be implemented in FSX (tried BOB, not the same).

[simmerhead 885]

I'd say I'm in it 60% for the scenery and 40% for the aircraft. But I've been flight simming since the 1980s, and all we had then was systems and aircraft. The scenery wasn't immersive until FS2002, and since then I have used flight sims for virtual travel mostly. Flying the PMDG NGX doesn't interest me one bit. Any aircraft that forces me to turn down the visuals are of no interest to me.

[tttocs 301]

While flying around in a GA (and not using all the systems but simply using Ctrl-E to get up in the air quickly) and (sometimes) enjoying the scenery, I noticed I was missing something... Even though things looked good (every now and then...) I was bored to death pretty quickly... I was wondering what it was. What did I miss? Why didn't the scenery satisfy me?

 

Why so binary? So, "a or b"? In the words of Adam Savage of "Mythbusters", "I reject your reality and substitute my own".

 

For me, it's about simulation and I enjoy it most when that simulation is most complete. That means systems, flight characteristics, weather, scenery, airports, operations - the whole bit.

 

As a GA flyer, I fly IFR completely in the system, VFR partially in the system and VFR "old school" pilotage and dead-reckoning and bush flying. Each has varying levels of complexity, and each can hold interest if given purpose. And each (and even more so in combination) benefits in some way from having as close to the whole package as possible.

 

As a real world pilot I can tell you that even real world flight gets routine if done without purpose - the exp<b></b>ression used when I was active was going up and just "boring holes in the sky" - pun very much intended. Almost every flight I've ever made had some purpose - from "going somewhere" to practicing basic flight maneuvers to test standards, to practice approaches, to intoducing someone new to GA flight to... After hundreds of hours, it never got - y'know. The dreaded "b" word. Same goes for the sim.

 

From my biased perspective it isn't about scenery vs systems, it's about assembling the most complete simulation I can get, aiming for maximum immersion, and scenery is absolutely and unequivocably part of that equation.

 

Scott

[Rocky_53 1,566]

Hi Jeroen, your post could just as easily been written by me! I know exactly where you're coming from. I've had the same experience for a while. Sure, flying GA is nice, but yes, it can get very boring once you're up in the air, I mean what else is there left to do except watch the scenery? OK, a little simplified but nevertheless, compared with flying the NGX and all the associated aspects involved with flying a tube, it is pretty boring. However, I do enjoy jumping back into the Duke and hearing those piston engines roar into life and drag me off the runway towards some of Orbx's beautiful scenery. It is like you say Jeroen, learning all the relevent aspects of flying a tube such as flightplanning, ATC, programming the FMC, all the preflight rigmarole and working with SIDS and STARS etc etc, that's what I find really interesting, immersive and above all challenging. Like most things in life, if you work at something and invest time and effort, then you get far more than you would if something is laid out on a plate for you :wink:

[Guest]

Why so binary? So, "a or b"?

 

I didn't mean it as you put it. ^_^ I still like pretty graphics but pretty graphics ALONE isn't enough! I didn't say I only want good systems and that I don't care about the scenery: far from it. I also want a complete experience. It's just that my interest in systems and so on has grown over the years without me knowing it. I started out with flightsimming ONLY to enjoy the pretty pictures outside and that has been a focus for quite some time, but I found out, while focusing on scenery for a week or two, that I learned to appreciate the other aspects of flightsimming more and more without really noticing it! I still like to fly a GA to enjoy the scenery or a sunset but that GA would be the Legacy with the RXP GNS530 and I would start it from cold and dark and use VOR to reach my planned destination. So yes, I definitely want the complete package! ^_^

 

Hi Jeroen, your post could just as easily been written by me! I know exactly where you're coming from. I've had the same experience for a while. Sure, flying GA is nice, but yes, it can get very boring once you're up in the air, I mean what else is there left to do except watch the scenery? OK, a little simplified but nevertheless, compared with flying the NGX and all the associated aspects involved with flying a tube, it is pretty boring. However, I do enjoy jumping back into the Duke and hearing those piston engines roar into life and drag me off the runway towards some of Orbx's beautiful scenery. It is like you say Jeroen, learning all the relevent aspects of flying a tube such as flightplanning, ATC, programming the FMC, all the preflight rigmarole and working with SIDS and STARS etc etc, that's what I find really interesting, immersive and above all challenging. Like most things in life, if you work at something and invest time and effort, then you get far more than you would if something is laid out on a plate for you :wink:

 

:drinks:

[LHookins 3,102]

Sure, flying GA is nice, but yes, it can get very boring once you're up in the air, I mean what else is there left to do except watch the scenery?

 

Turn off the autopilot and fly the plane.

 

I've been doing a lot of flights in the A2A Cub using dead reckoning with real world weather. Most of the time I don't even have time to watch the scenery. I've got AS2012 set up to inject a minimum wind turbulence and Accu-Feel set up to adjust the turbulence effect so that I'm never flying on rails. The effect is subtle, but it's something you have to keep on top of. Holding a course in gusting winds from variable directions definitely keeps you busy.

 

I like eye candy, but it's not the reason I fly. After all, how much eye candy can there possibly be flying across the Texas panhandle? At least the mesquite bushes compare favorably to real world pictures.

 

Hook