Hello Everybody,

First of all I apologize for my English (I am Italian). If something is not clear please let me know.

I have read some reviews and watched some videos of this new FS under development, and I am getting curious.

It seems to me that it can grant a photorealistic experience with very good performance (so far, we will see when a full weather implementation and AI traffic will be included) but two aspects raise my concern for the future of the project:

1. The size of the DLCs*: as far as I understood, at the moment we are talking about 100+ GBs for only part of the USA territory with few airports. When (and if - how long will it take?) the entire world will be covered, the size of the full package will be insane, unless they are working on some more efficient compression system for the scenery (are they?)

*This is the reason why I did not buy XPlane 11 after having tested it: the default scenery is underwhelming and even covering small parts with good orthophotos requires terabytes of space!

2. The final cost of the sim package. I would prefer to invest 100-200 $ today and be assured that I will get the full package when it's ready, rather than spending 50 $ at a very early stage of the project and being totally unaware of the cost of the future DLCs. In my opinion a flight simulator conceived to be competitive with XPlane and Prepar3D must cover the entire world with homogeneous scenery quality since the beta (or at least v1.0).

I would like to know the opinions of people who are testing Aerofly FS 2.

Thank you for any comments  :)

Happy landings.

 

 

1. That's how it is with photoreal. It is impossible to compress the images even more because then you would end up with bad looking low res textures. You need a specific amount of pixels to keep things looking good and, just as with X-Plane, P3D and FSX, this simply costs a lot of disk space. 

Covering the entire globe is not a goal of IPACS. Because of the required disk space it is impossible (at least for some years) to offer the entire globe in the same quality as the southwest US. Orbx has announced they will offer regions for Aerofly in the future but those will certainly NOT cover the entire world, just like their current FTX regions don't cover the entire world (and that's while those are landclass,not even photoreal!!!)

2. The above already answered this question, really. The default sim will never ever cover the entire world and even it if would, after a few years, most of it would come as DLC. (In your opinion this is a must but I disagree with that completely.) 

BTW The sim as it is does actually cover the entire world but the scenery outside of the high res area's is very low res, barely suited for airliner flights, and has no airports or objects anything.

7 hours ago, enek0id said:

2. The final cost of the sim package. I would prefer to invest 100-200 $ today and be assured that I will get the full package when it's ready, rather than spending 50 $ at a very early stage of the project and being totally unaware of the cost of the future DLCs. In my opinion a flight simulator conceived to be competitive with XPlane and Prepar3D must cover the entire world with homogeneous scenery quality since the beta (or at least v1.0).

Welcome to the world of flight simming...

I use Aerofly 2 essentially as a fun vfr sim when I'm not in the mood for a lot of button pressing and procedures. It's a nice diversion and, with the new geocreation tool, it's possible to custom create your own photo scenery for free using publicly available tiles. That's pretty much a hobby all of its own and folks are aleady getting impressive results. Then factor in the apparently much more systems based Q400 that's in development as free dlc and you have a beautiful looking sim that's going places. It won't be replacing the P3Ds and XPlanes any time soon however.

Buying and flying Aerofly FS 2 has been to me the best decision I've ever made to run a simulator in my laptop. In my opinion Aerofly FS 2 has a strong potential to become the sim of choice in the future, once all other known features are developed (ATC, AI Traffic, Full instrument functionnality in stock airplanes, real weather, and some others). IPACS recently released a tool called GeoConvert that allows you to create your own scenery, based on photoreal representation of earth (by sing FSET or the USGS services), and this is totally free, so you won't necessarily will have to spend hundreds of dollars in scenery, but for sure will require to have a good amount of disk space.

It's also important to point out the collaboration in place between IPACS and ORBX, and the first results of such venture are the releases of LOWI (Innsbruck, Austria) and KCGX (Meigs, Chicago, USA). These are excellent and extremely well detailed sceneries, the most detailed you can imagine, but they're payware.

Cheers, Ed

For me Aerofly FS 2 is the most promising platform right now. It will take some time and some aspects will probably always be less developed, but when the second generation VR headsets arrive with a better resolution and feeling, I will definitely also get on the aerofly FS train (probably not as my only sim though.). I think VR + photoscenery + Orbx is a perfect match and I look forward to experiencing that in a few years.

Best,

David