Aerofly FS 2: the good, the bad and the ugly

[simmerhead 885]

Minor stutters now and then is to he expected. Often this is caused by your hardware or other software running in the background, so unless you have a supreme system tuned to perfection its hard to really know why stutters are there.

[neucoas 82]

I really want to jump into this sim.

 

Sadly, the 65+35Gb is a no no for my poor 6mbps line. Is there a way to only download the high resolution scenery and not the rest of the world?

[HiFlyer 9,360]

Based on the youtube videos though, it seems AFS2 is smooth but with some minor stuttering every a few seconds or so. Is this your experiences too or it is completely smooth stutter-free to you?

 

I don't get that, but I have a Nvidia 1080 with a large amount of memory both on the card and on my system, which might be giving me an edge. (I suspect in Xplane as well)

 

Jet pack, one of the developers, made a post recently that may or may not be relevant:

 

If you pick a location on the map the Aerofly algorithm will load the surrounding area when you press fly, if its not already been loaded before. When you are flying it will continuously load new chunks and will free the memory that is no longer needed.

 

As far as I know it finds the scenery needed in a different thread, so the simulator is not slowed down even if one had a thousands of Gigabytes of scenery on one hard drive. The only bottleneck is uploading textures to the graphics card because the graphics card will stop for the loading process of the textures and that can result in a couple of frames dropped, that's an issue with today's hardware.

[Guest]

Based on the youtube videos though, it seems AFS2 is smooth but with some minor stuttering every a few seconds or so. Is this your experiences too or it is completely smooth stutter-free to you?

Well, I doubt if any game or sim is completely stutter free. In other flightsims fps is simply a lot lower and while it may look smooth AFS2 looks smoother. You simply don't have the idea you are looking at frames which are glued together in such a short time that it seems smooth: you are just looking a something as it it is there. Hard to explain. However, I sometimes do see, if I pay attention, trees passing by on the side with a slight hiccup and once in a while you can get a sudden spike but overall it is so smooth. That is what you get with computers. But because it usually is smooth as can be I can certainly live with that.

 

Let me put it in other words: in my other sims I am often thinking 'fps must be pretty good because it looks smooth' or 'I wonder what fps is right now'. With AFS2 I don't think about fps: things just move and look good.

 

What does sometimes spoils the idea of simply seeing things move is screen tearing though... Vsync gives me stutters, at least (!) when looking around with TrackIR. So that is a pity. Hopefully they can sort that out. If you simply look at one direction though there is no tearing of course. AFS2 simply feels smooth as if there is no fps at all. I notice this even more if I first play one of my other sims...! They never ever are this smooth.

 

This evening I flew at 9000 ft in the King Air and I spend a long time simply looking, with my head still, out of the window to the left, with the low sunlight on the engine and wing and the landscape passing by so smooth as it if was real... Awesome.

 

Take note that you can try AFS2 yourself: Steam has a great refund policy. You can play the sim for up to 2 hours over a period of two weeks: want a refund after playing it 1.55h and 12 days? No problem, no questions asked. If you try it, don't give up too soon though: you might need some time adjusting to the new sim and appreciating what it offers instead of hating what it does not offer. That is my personal experience...

 

BTW I have a i7 4790@4.5, 16 GB RAM and a GTX780 with 6 GB VRAM. And I fly at 1920x1080.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

What does sometimes spoils the idea of simply seeing things move is screen tearing though... Vsync gives me stutters, at least (!)

 

Three things are liable to cause stutters in Aerofly. It apparently doesn't like Vsync very much, Heavy cumulus clouds can cause microstutters (currently) and shadows swallow FPS like pac man, which means that with full shadows over New York I can drop from 250fps to 150fps at 4k DSR, which I'll still take over 25!  :wink:

 

Use advisedly.

 

The developers are looking at this.

[FlyIce 354]

Thanks, guys. I'll definitely find time to give AFS2 a try. Right now time is the premium...