Ok, now there are three.  I decided to add the Aerofly FS2 Sim to P3DV4.x and Xplane 11.x. 

Glad I did.  It is a fun little sim.  No tweaking, just works fast and fluid, much faster than P3D and Xplane 11, out of the box.  I am using their Vulkan beta.

It is sim candy, I feel, when I am not so serious about cockpit drill but still want fun, VFR flying in a fairly large, photoreal region, with gobs of fps and stutter free photo scenery...  A better answer than Google Earth, and it fills a simming niche for me that has been missing since Flight Unlimited 2 came out.   Quick and fun flying.

It took me a bit for it to see my Logitech Extreme 3D pro the way I wanted it to, but that was it.

The aircraft selection is cool enough, it's a sim I will not want add-ons for other than the nice freeware updates I have already found.

It's new fodder for me to post to the screenshots forum I suppose!

John

13 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

Ok, now there are three.  I decided to add the Aerofly FS2 Sim to P3DV4.x and Xplane 11.x. 

Glad I did.  It is a fun little sim.  No tweaking, just works fast and fluid, much faster than P3D and Xplane 11, out of the box.  I am using their Vulkan beta.

It is sim candy, I feel, when I am not so serious about cockpit drill but still want fun, VFR flying in a fairly large, photoreal region, with gobs of fps and stutter free photo scenery...  A better answer than Google Earth, and it fills a simming niche for me that has been missing since Flight Unlimited 2 came out.   Quick and fun flying.

It took me a bit for it to see my Logitech Extreme 3D pro the way I wanted it to, but that was it.

The aircraft selection is cool enough, it's a sim I will not want add-ons for other than the nice freeware updates I have already found.

It's new fodder for me to post to the screenshots forum I suppose!

John

One day you may try it in vr, and..........

By the way Congrats to both Ipacs and Avsim for moving the Aerofly forum up from the subforums to its own full forum this week.

Rare for me, I've put a lot of hours on the Aerofly hobs since this post last night, even cutting my normally eight hour "beauty sleep" short, lol.  It is just such a fun, different sim, the aircraft have a familiar P3D/Xplane feel, obviously the same add on devs in those sims helped Aerofly out.  I found six or seven free add-on aircraft, all quite nice and fun to fly, especially the historic English Channel crosser, the Bleriot.  It is missing AI but that does put a damper on performance in some sims, and its scenery is not broad enough for long jet flights, just 300 mile or so hops.  As I noted in my opening post, I would consider it a "Flight Unlimited 5" had that series been continued.

John

Edit: Just added Swiss scenery--absolutely stunning, so peaceful to fly with the glider.....

Edited August 3, 20196 yr by John_Cillis

The only thing that has stopped me from trying it is that there is no FSUIPC/XPUIPC connection for it to a VA ACARS. If someone ever developed that, I’m in!

2 hours ago, Speedbird21 said:

The only thing that has stopped me from trying it is that there is no FSUIPC/XPUIPC connection for it to a VA ACARS. If someone ever developed that, I’m in!

No, it is a fairly simple sim.  No AI, no ATC but incredible graphics, better than any sim I have flown, incredible fps and fluidity, and aircraft that fly on par with the two biggies.  I wish one could record flights in it, I can record video using video capture, but there is no way to save a flight situation or a recording of a flight, and no instant replay feature.

Still it is as addictive as the two biggie sims I have, with its incredible graphics and static ground scenery in places.  And with the adding of the Swiss scenery and the free Orbx autogen, it offers hours and hours of entertainment.

John

As a Genesis fan I was drawn to this post by the title. 

Derek

5 hours ago, John_Cillis said:

no instant replay feature.

Still it is as addictive as the two biggie sims I have, with its incredible graphics and static ground scenery in places.  And with the adding of the Swiss scenery and the free Orbx autogen, it offers hours and hours of entertainment.

John

The replay is available when the simulation is paused, press 'P' to pause the simulation. There is a slider to scroll through the recording and a button to start / stop the replay at the bottom of the screen.

7 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

The replay is available when the simulation is paused, press 'P' to pause the simulation. There is a slider to scroll through the recording and a button to start / stop the replay at the bottom of the screen.

Thanks, did not notice it whenever I hit pause because it is opaque, gave me a nice replay of a 737-500 takeoff out of Reno.

John

On 8/5/2019 at 7:05 AM, Flamingpie said:

I do wonder if it will survive the MSFS release though...

Eh.

I do think sometimes we we simmers have a tendency to look under couches expecting cats that simply are not there.

Ipacs main income is almost certainly not Aerofly FS2, but rather Aerofly Mobile 2019, which is doing extremely well, and would not be affected one bit by anything Microsoft does. Ipacs also has a long standing and commanding position in the RC sim market and has had that for many years.

The Aerofly sim exists now primarily because it's something the company has always wanted to do, and like X-Plane, is kind of the founders passion project

The company also has extremely low overhead as its essentially just a few people with almost non-existent outlay for licensing, advertising, and other stuff that drained money quickly from other efforts.

Which is actually one of the reasons for the slower advancement, as rather than licensing tech, Ipacs tends to do every last thing themselves in-house, and also tends not to release until they have code that runs as fast as possible, as one of their overriding goals is famerate, framerate, framerate!

Back to MS2020.

Over time, Ipacs has said repeatedly they consider their sim to exist in its own space irrespective of what's happening with other sims.

The issue is getting the community to accept that.

1 minute ago, HiFlyer said:

I guess the issues is getting the community to accept that.

It certainly has grown on me as a sim, quite a few "hidden Mickeys" in it as we Disney fans like to say, and solid, gripe free, crash free performance, I have had hours long flights with it without nary a stutter.  I get solid performance in Xplane11 and P3DV4 but once in a blue moon they have their hiccups.  I wish there was city night lighting in the sim, would make it look nicer at night in the metro areas, but I seldom fly at night and the dawn to dusk rendering is beautifully and artistically done. 

I enjoy hand flying aircraft in the sim quite a bit, and the way the Navigation system works, my wing view video of my approach into Sky Harbor in the Videos forum was easy to film because the Navigation system was handling downwind, base and the last moments to final until I took over and hand flew the rest.   It is easier than programming an FMS, you just give the sim your start and destination airports and preferred landing runways and it does the rest, I like to choose runways opposite the direction I am coming in from so Nav mode can fly downwind and base.

I have to wonder if it was Aerofly that convinced Microsoft to start working on a new sim, because I feel certain that Xplane convinced Lockheed Martin that P3D was worth a go.  Competition means there is consumer interest in our hobby, and serious non gamer interest too as the C64/FS2 generation that I am part of is getting into their 60's and 70's now with less time to fly in real life due to health or retirement planning.  Were it not for Light Sport and Trikes, many of us would not be able to get up in the air at all, and with diabetes flare ups I ground myself eleven months out of the year, getting up in the air maybe once or twice just to get practice real flight time in under Light Sport.

John

1 hour ago, John_Cillis said:

I wish there was city night lighting in the sim, would make it look nicer at night in the metro areas, but I seldom fly at night and the dawn to dusk rendering is beautifully and artistically done. 

Tell me what area, and I can probably locate a community mod for enhanced cultivation and night lighting. Buildings for California.... New York... (and florida is already covered)

What's interesting is I post links to these mods fairly regularly, but people have often seemed barely aware of the Aerofly forum that exists here, and when they first Start, I usually have to guide people to the links.

Even now many people post videos with little to no autogen showing, and I just cover my eyes, because usually coverage for the whole area was done ages ago, if people only knew!

Even for you, did you know that the sim very recently unveiled a functioning FMS system?

(Good for you, if the answer is yes!)

http://www.aerofly.com/dokuwiki/doku.php/aircraft:universal_uns1_fms?fbclid=IwAR3FRoIAS0F3AzJRbpgXjm9jvn7ey5mY3Xux6FkXHas1mHaPXJ_FaEZ4F-U

 

2 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Even for you, did you know that the sim very recently unveiled a functioning FMS system?

(Good for you, if the answer is yes!)

http://www.aerofly.com/dokuwiki/doku.php/aircraft:universal_uns1_fms?fbclid=IwAR3FRoIAS0F3AzJRbpgXjm9jvn7ey5mY3Xux6FkXHas1mHaPXJ_FaEZ4F-U

 

Yes, I'm aware of it but have not used it, preferring the simple navigation planner.  For night lighting I would love Cali, NV and AZ since I fly there the most.  I tried downloading the Northern WA scenery but no matter where I try to put it, it does not work, the scenery is default and quite useless. 

Only thing I do not like about Aerofly FS2 is it saves add-on stuff to my One Drive's Documents folder, which is limited in space and I use it for other things, such as image and video sharing.  I wish there were a way to point the sim to another storage area, on the drive where I installed the base sim, which has much more space.

John

Do you mean the wan scenery? Where did you place the files? I was trying to keep the instructions simple (you did unzip them, right?) 

46 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

Only thing I do not like about Aerofly FS2 is it saves add-on stuff to my One Drive's Documents folder, which is limited in space and I use it for other things, such as image and video sharing.  I wish there were a way to point the sim to another storage area, on the drive where I installed the base sim, which has much more space.

You can define a custom user folder by adding your location to the field: <[string8][extra_user_folder][]> located within the main.mcf file. Your secondary location should be placed between the brackets.

The location must contain the sub-folder “scenery”. This will give you the ability to place your custom scenery in a location other than the documents folder located on the root drive.

46 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

For night lighting I would love Cali

Some files I could find off the top of my head:

Autogen San Francisco Bay: https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/121-autogen-san-francisco-bay/

Streetlights autogen Las Vegas: https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/126-streetlights-autogen-las-vegas/

KRNO Reno Area Autogen: https://flight-sim.org/index.php?search-result/1618/&highlight=Reno

Autogen Los Angeles 3: https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/271-autogen-los-angeles-3/

Autogen_Santa Barbara: https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/273-autogen-santa-barbara/

San Diego Area Cultivation: https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/127-san-diego-area-cultivation/

San Diego Harbor Aircraft Carrier-USS Eisenhower (AF2): https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/5-san-diego-harbor-aircraft-carrier-uss-eisenhower-af2/

San Diego Harbor - USS Patuxent (AF2): https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/3-san-diego-harbor-uss-patuxent-af2/

San Diego Air Race Course (AF2): https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index.php?entry/2-san-diego-air-race-course-af2/

Thanks Hiflyer, I feel high and I am getting more and more jiggy with Aerofly FS2.  The Seattle scenery that did not work on my one drive works and is awesome, I created an Aerofly folder on the drive I installed the base package, and a scenery folder and put the Seattle scenery within it.  I love the Olympic Mountains and North Cascades National Parks, two unsung national parks in our National Park system, and beautiful to fly over. 

I visited Olympic park on a solo driving tour in 2013, since my wife as we were in the process of having an amicable divorce said I needed a vacation because of a long illness I had had which got me way out of shape.  Though divorced, I still love her for her insight, she has been my life's Nostradamus and everyone needs someone like that in their life, so the old Nostradamus's predictions do not come true, otherwise we would have a future like Mad Max/Thunderdome, which does exist in certain places of our world, but is getting to be less and less.

That is why I loved learning to fly in real life, because if times got really bad, and some type of civil war broke out in my country, I could head to the nearest airport, steal an aircraft like I saw in the great escape, and head for neutral territory with my loved ones, lol.  Flying is just a good skill to have and greasing a landing in the worst of conditions is so important.

I bought Aerofly FS2 because I had seen some videos and I said "Hmmmm, this just seems to be more fluid than the two biggies, and does not require much tweaking (other than the drive location tweak you gifted me). 

However if they over burden it with more bells and whistles, like ATC and the like, it might slow the sim big time.  But I think their Vulkan technology rocks, at least on my system.  I said "what the hay" and went with that option when I saw it.  Maybe if Xplane gets it into their system, and P3D, it will help alot.  Graphics cards have a lot of hi tech built into them, and good code can get them spinning, and take the load off of the cpu.  Xplane is less CPU dependent than P3D, that us what I have seen, one really needs to listen to Nvidia and the reality they can create with their cards, they got ahead of the game, and I do not think anyone can catch up.

John