What do you want to see added to flight sims?

[VeryBumpy 272]

FSX is great is so many ways but anything can always be better.

 

What would you add to current flight sims to turn them into 'your' perfect sim?

 

I don't mean necessarily just an addon, I'm talking 'anything goes' type situation; functionality from the ground up.

 

Is a new graphic engine really going to make a big difference? IMO, not much really.

 

What I'd like to see is interaction and airport management. Get to the airport, find the briefing room, check the flight and weather info, chat with fellow workers, check the plane history logs, walk outside doing a true walkaround, be forced to do some actual repairs on a plane, control the baggage routine, get and position all the ground equipment, operate the meal truck lifts....things like this, besides just flying.

 

Almost like an RPG Pilot/Airport Career game but with excellent flying sim physics and handling.

 

 

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

Boy, I keep a list in my head about P3D.  In no particular order...:

 

• Better air movement.  Turbulence and lightly moving air.  An airplane is essentially floating and it should behave as such.  Even small fluid movements of air have an influence.
• Bug fixes for turboprop, turbocharged and mixture. (hugely important!)
• Real lights and better night lighting.  When your airplane is sitting under a flood light it should be lit up.
• Tools to help developers.
• Buildings and vegetation on photoreal.
• Realistically moving vehicles.
• Visible rain under rainclouds
• Solid, solid cloud decks (I haven't tested this in 3.x but 2.x couldn't do it.)  Realisic turbulence in clouds.
• Sky colors that change based on your atomospheric conditions  (pollution, high humidity, rain coming)...especially at dawn and dusk.
• Ability to have fly into a city without the performance going to crap.
• More "Carenado" functionality.  (They stink at making systems work.)  Make some higher level functionality that they can glue to all the stubbed out switches.  For example, make a ground radio that functions outside of the Avionics switch or an FLC mode for autopilot.  This is not a little thing...Carenado makes nearly *all* GA airplanes.
• Improved algorithm for ILS hold.  From what I see on youtube videos, most RW airplanes lock onto it well.  Many in the sim don't.  It may be because there's almost zero documentation on the variables.  Or it's something else.
• Ability to have sloped, crowned and undulating runways/taxiways.  (That work with AI).
• Better ground handling for aircraft.
• Direct support for fuses/outages.
• An Ezdoc style built in view system.
• Atmospheric heat shimmer for those hot days. 
• Glass edge distortion...you know...near the edge of glass where the light gets bent?
• Windshield rain effects.
• Visible icing effects.

Not much...right?

 

EDIT:  It might sound like I'm complaining.  I'm NOT!  I absolutely love the changes in 3.2!  But, if they're looking for another big thing...have at it!  So many wonderful things to do!

[Gordon Hutchison 76]

^^^What he said  :smile:

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

Those first two already exist in 3 aircraft addon own. The iFly 737, 747 and Aeoroworx King Air. All three are affected by the air movement more then any other aircraft I own including FSX add-ons, Pmdg included.

 

That's good to hear.  I've held off getting that King Air due to bugs in the Citation Mustang G1000...I figure they carry over.  (Just realized that that's not the G1000 King Air that Flight1 sells).  The iFly thing is interesting too...I have had my eye on one.   The rising ITT is one bug (quite significant) but there are others as well.  It boggles my mind that prop aircraft mixture still has bugs.

 

BTW, what's your framerates in the 747 compare to?  I've heard they improved things with 1.1 but still hearing struggles.

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

One other thing that'd be nice (and I'm dreaming)...more realistic snow cover.  Often snow only comes and stays for a couple of days or weeks...it doesn't hang around all winter except in the frozen north.  Also, it comes and goes in late fall and early spring.

[ViperPilot 81]

I want ATC to tell me, "You got a pen or pencil ready? Write down this phone number...".

 

It's my understanding that, when the Controller says those words, the Pilot (ME) is in, um, Trouble!

 

Alan  :smile:

[Christopher Low 5,354]

Decent photoscenery of Northern Ireland, and a colour corrected 0.6m version of England & Wales.

[scottb613 1,188]

Hi Folks,

• Fix the default GPS so it can do a correct "Direct To"...
• Real ATC traffic separation...

Regards,
Scott

[hillsboy 33]

...especially flying into a big city (i.e LAX, SFO, Miami, London Heathrow) without having to adjust for low FPS or VAS

 

JOHN

[SKEWR 364]

I like the ideas from the OP. Talk about as real as it gets. I'm not sure I'd like the ultra realism however. Like this week we had a MD11 where the #3 pneumatic system failed and got MEL'ed. Then it was fixed, Total time? About 40 minutes. Don't know if I'd like to sit and wait for events like that. 

 

Anyway what would I like?

* Yes I would like 64 bits please. Thanks.

* I would like a new graphics engine. If for no other reason the options it would bring the sim

* Seeing people in the terminal would be nice (hard to imagine now, but maybe someday)

* Seeing random service vehicles and having a schedule to adhere to within the sim (not an add on)

* Hot air ballons when VFR

* Air pollution for some major cities (haze layer that can be seen from the air)

* Lights reflecting from clouds from major cities 

* Realistic night lighting on ground

* VR and flight sim controllers (ranging from entry level prices to very high end price points) that replicate being there

* New generation of force feedback controls for the sim (again from entry level to super high cost)

* Integrated ATC that is more than OK

* And everything else the OP listed!

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

Realistic ATC

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

I absolutely love the changes in 3.2!

 

Do you love the changes in 3.3.3 too?  :smile:

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

 

 

Do you love the changes in 3.3.3 too? :smile:

 

Uhhh....welllll, I haven't gone there yet.    UK 2000 fan front and center.

[Jimmy RFR 406]

What would you add to current flight sims to turn them into 'your' perfect sim?

 

Many of the things on everyone's lists are present to some degree in one platform or another, one aircraft or another, or one environmental addon or another. Not all platforms have everything of course, and there are still important things missing.

 

But what I would like from a civilian flight sim is the ability to easily install, operate, and maintain the platform. I want one click installs, one click modifications, one click upgrades. There can (and should) always be the ability to augment the platform with more precise scenery or aircraft, but the platform itself should be capable of handling said augmentations easily and precisely, preferably from within the platform itself.

 

The ecosystem relating to the platform should be invisible to the user except through extra content purchase or download.

 

None of our current platforms do this very well at all, without limiting the world within which we fly. There are a handful of tighter, military focused platforms that do it fairly well - they are often meant to be a fully featured game, with some of them adding the ability to purchase or add separate aircraft or gameplay in the form of DLC.

 

Perhaps I'm spoiled by the large library of Steam titles that I own, where I'm able to purchase, click to install, and be playing a feature complete title with zero attention required as to the process involved. Indeed, the biggest concern I have in most other modern titles is how to best assign buttons to my controllers.

 

When platform developers talk about trying to entice a 'new' generation of flight simulation hobbyists, I think they forget this important detail - most people are used to seamlessly purchasing, downloading, and playing gaming titles that simply work (and generally work very well on a visual level) on current generation hardware.

 

I think sometimes, as hobbyists, we have this viewpoint that the extra work required to make a flight simulator look (and perform) at a top notch level makes it somehow an exclusive club, something to be proud of. "If you don't want to do the extra work, then you aren't deserving of it in the first place."

 

I disagree.

 

I want a modern platform that embraces easy installation, easy use, easy upgrading and easy modification. It needs to have the components available to make for successful and realistic flight simulation, but it also needs to let me spend the vast majority of my time simply flying. Anything less, and I want less and less to do with it.

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

Solid, solid cloud decks (I haven't tested this in 3.x but 2.x couldn't do it.) Realisic turbulence in clouds.

 

Nope...still can't do it.  Set up a flight at 6000 ft...set the bases at 1000 and the thickness up to 20,000.  Even with that, still holes both with Active Sky and with native weather.  (I think Active Sky was better.)  Native was, at best, broken.

 

EDIT:  To be clear, my test is on 3.2.  Haven't upgraded to 3.3 yet.  FSX could do this much better. 

EDITEDIT:  I turned on Active Sky Enhanced Overcast and was able to get a pretty decent overcast if I cranked settings to a 300 ft base, 10,000 thickness with Stratus clouds.  Cumulonimbus was second with holes. Cumulus had giant holes everywere.