Aerofly FS 2: opinions changed already?

[Sethos 4,335]

It's an interesting platform but ultimately very shallow at this point and most likely will be for years to come. Though I could forgive so much had they decided to put more effort into the weather out of the gate, pick a better off-the-shelf solution than that awful SilverLining SDK that SkyMaxxPro uses. There's a reason why 99% of screenshots and videos are in clear weather I assume. I can't even find a single mention of their plans for the weather, nothing on their roadmap, then I worry it's a low priority despite it being such a massively important aspect in flying. 

[WingZ 547]

AFS2  is a 64 bit sim, from the ground up.

You cannot insert an FS2002 aircraft model into it, nor can you fill endless forum pages with baggage bewailing the issues you are having with 3-letter acronyms caused by the poor underlying coding.

The IPACS team do strike me as quite sensible. They walk their own path, and generally everything they do, is Good.  When there are identified issues, they are attentive and rectify them.

If you have 70 hours a week to spare, it makes a great second sim. And it has amazing VR capabilities which surely must rank as the best Instant Gratification you can get. So it is my only simming "fix" at present. (I don't have the 70 hours)

I love the fact that there is development work going on all the time, and that we've been given toys to go make our own stuff if that's your thing. 

The future of the sim looks rosy; I too would like more eye candy. It will no doubt come.

[carlito777 712]

From my point of view, I think AFS2 does have some serious potential, but it still has a looooooooong way to go. In it's current state it doesn't give me anything that I can't do in another sim (system depth, weather, ...). So for now it will stay a nice "game" to play around a little and enjoy VR, but it is far from being a serious contender to P3D or XP11. But maybe that's changing in the future. 

[Paraffin 2,197]

On 7/31/2017 at 4:03 AM, J van E said:

If these developments do nothing for you: what would you need before you would get really interested?

I would need the following improvements to get interested:

1) Because I do most of my flying in FSEconomy, there would have to be enough airports and small airstrips in the world to roughly match the FS9 database used in that game. 

2) For the same reason (FSEconomy) I would need a decent stable of GA planes and helicopters to fly. Right now I just "own" a Pilatus PC-12 and Bell 412 in the game, but I often rent things like a Twin Otter, Grumman Goose, or Douglas DC-3 just for variety. The current lineup of planes in AFS2 covers a lot of bases, but they aren't the specific planes I like to fly. Which is the whole point of a general-purpose flight sim -- having enough variety to please everyone.

And of course I would need FSEconomy to support the sim with a plugin, which might happen if the sim becomes popular enough and those two conditions above are met. 

3) Because I despise blurry textures at ground level, and artifacts like squashed buildings and cars on the ground, it would need much higher resolution ground textures. At least around airports; I don't like seeing blurry ground next to a sharp runway. And it would need enough hand-editing to erase those flattened building artifacts in places where there isn't 3D autogen to cover it up.

4) It would have to look as good at night as X-Plane does. 

They might reach #1 and #2 eventually. Maybe #4. But for #3, I can't see the ortho-based paradigm being improved enough for me to enjoy the overall look of the sim away from developed airports and big cities. There just isn't enough high-res imagery out there for the rest of the world, and the amount of hand-editing to remove artifacts would be prohibitive. As someone who just isn't a fan of ortho-based scenery, I'm probably never going to be a candidate for this sim.

I'm still glad it's out there, as an incentive for improvement in other sims. The X-Plane devs are now focused on boosting frame rates and integrating VR in the sim engine. Maybe AFS2 had something to do with that.

[WingZ 547]

You sound like a perfect match for FS2004.

But get AFS2 for those "quick fix" moments... :)

[jcomm 5,930]

Flight / physics wise I feel AEFS2 and X-Plane are very close in the "feel of vlight(*)" they transmit to their users.

Strangely they both are extremely sensitive to wind on ground, with the aircraft equally weathercoking at even the slightest x-wind components.

I have to compare AEFS2 to X-Plane because these are actually the two most powerful civil flight simulation platforms available for simmers right now. In this regard, while AEFS2 still lacks a lot of features that have been available for quite  long time in X-Plane, the main advantage of the Aerofly approach is, IMO, the way their aircraft are coded, call it the "CFG" files of AEFS2 :-)  

This coding shows a very well thought and structured approach to defining the physical properties of an airplane, of any sort, and for instance the detail put into the turbines ( 3 stage ) of the recently freeware Q-400 shows how great detail, with a lot of quality, can be coded and is actually clear as cristal to anyone willing to open those files, looks across them and try to understand how it's  done.

Hidden bugs / misconceptions / limitations and the present features can be more effectively identified by anyone willing to dedicate to this platform, and while the development cycle might look slow, I am sure there is a lot of work in the background, and that with time 3pd will start seriously looking at the platform as a commercial chance and alternative to the older offers.

I still think that if I had to choose among X-Plane and AEFS2, I would pick X-Plane 11, but the only factor weighting on my decision is selfishness, and lack of patience to wait and profit from what I already have in AEFS2. SInce I can have both ( uninstalled :-) ) I prefer to keep them both, and wait and see where it goes to.... while I keep enjoying DCS World, and it's unique flight dynamics and Aerowinx PSX for my short 744 circuits ( I am not a tubeliner simmer... ).

If I could see a nice orthophoto scenery for Portugal and Spain in AEFS2, with  detailed airfields, things might change, because AEFS's gliders are more realistic in their flight dynamics than those I ever tried in X-Plane...

(*) It's on purpose - vlight = virtual flight :-), as used by a long time fellow PSX user at the Aerowinx forums ...

 

[Guest]

Just think if LM's P3D team, LR's Xplane team, AFS2's dev team, FSW's dev team all came together and created ONE company for "flight simulation+" ... we'd be back in the ACE's Studio days in terms of developer count and who knows we might all be able to realize a GTA V level of detail GLOBE before I hit 80 (27 years from now) ... but MOST important it would get rid of the X vs. Y vs. W platform debates, AND I wouldn't have to keep buying the same airport/scenery 4 times for each flight sim platform, and developers wouldn't have to keep "re-inventing" the same wheel (literally) with a slight twist each and every time.

Wouldn't that be something ... ?  

Cheers, Rob.

[Guest]

12 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Wouldn't that be something ... ?

I have a dream that one day...