Define Realism

[Dominique_K 10,133]

If you crash your aircraft , it gets deleted from your SSD and you have to buy it again.

[bonchie 2,305]

It'll never feel like real life, but these are the things that help and the things I feel like sims are missing the most vs. my real life flying. 

1) Proper ground physics and a proper simulation of ground effect. Both XP and ESP based sims miss the marks on these in the opposite direction (one is too on rails feeling, the other way too unstable and all over the place). 

2) Better camera movement that can simulate things like turbulence, the feeling of lifting off, the feeling of a hard landing, etc. Both sims have decent plugins that do this, but having it native and more refined would be great. 

3) Graphics are always helpful in suspending disbelief. 

4) Better scaling of terrain/autogen + a realistic viewpoint. This is especially bad in ESP based sims. Just default the view to what you'd see in real life. Then give people the option to fish-eye things if they want. Even at 1.0 zoom in P3D, it's never really right and by the time you zoom in that much, texture sharpness becomes an issue. Trying to land with the scale of the runway all out of wack has always been a chief complaint of mine. 

5) Better visibility and weather representation. I'm talking more visually. One of the ways you spot cells in real life is simply looking out the window and seeing rain under a cloud bank. No sim, as far as I know, simulates that and rain only appears when you are physically in it. 

6) I really do think VR is going to make a big difference here as the technology improves. Support for VR is a must going forward. 

 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

The best thing MS could do to increase realism other than supporting VR, which is probably a foregone conclusion, is make a big industry push towards force-feedback controls so we can feel onset of buffet stall, onset of vortex ring state in helicopters, and all the rest. 

And not just chintzy plastic joysticks either. Although that might be a start with a MS-branded stick and yoke option to revitalize the market. I want a force-feedback version of my Thrustmaster Warthog joystick, with full sim support for things like trim release in helicopters. 

[Murmur 3,941]

1 hour ago, bonchie said:

One of the ways you spot cells in real life is simply looking out the window and seeing rain under a cloud bank. No sim, as far as I know, simulates that and rain only appears when you are physically in it.

Only FlightGear shows rain shafts. Would be great if MFS will do that.

[Wobbie 938]

We have found that immersion works better than realism. 

In our 3 sims that we've built, real pilots, on landing, brace themselves in their seats, anticipating the touchdown bump.. And this is in FS2004, with freeware scenery.

[HighBypass 2,339]

The first step towards realism is turning off the FPS indicator and go fly  

I don't have much immersion when it comes to my setup, but like most simmers I suspect, I try and get into a "mindset" that I'm about to fly a plane .. and heck, I do enjoy flightsimming all the same!

I have a single small monitor in front of me with the PC tower next to it and my peripheral vision takes in the room around me, before I turn to look away from the screen!

HOWEVER, when I landed the Carenado Cessna SkyMaster at Courchevel, forgetting to put the undercarriage down beforehand, the impact and the scraping sound genuinely shocked me for that split second until I realised that I'd done something in the sim which I never thought I would do, apart from possibly in a real plane with all the real workload going on for approach and landing (I'm not a real pilot...) . Occasionally real pilots forget to lower the gear, but I'm just flying the sim - I've never forgotten the gear, word not allowed! 

[Andiroto 37]

I personally would like to have the feeling of sitting in a dynamically working machine!  An airplane is subjected to many forces and wears out! Engines have different operational times, therefore different values, which are displayed in the cockpit! All this can also cause errors and MEL events and a little simulated maintenance on the ground would not be too bad, as some racing car simulations already have!

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

15 minutes ago, Andiroto said:

I personally would like to have the feeling of sitting in a dynamically working machine!  An airplane is subjected to many forces and wears out! Engines have different operational times, therefore different values, which are displayed in the cockpit! All this can also cause errors and MEL events and a little simulated maintenance on the ground would not be too bad, as some racing car simulations already have!

Buy an a2a plane..

[Andiroto 37]

@Bert PiekeGood tip but is something like that also available for Heavys?

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

Just now, Andiroto said:

@Bert PiekeGood tip but is something like that also available for Heavys?

Do not know... airlines have a maintenance department, I would think..

[Andiroto 37]

3 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

Do not know... airlines have a maintenance department, I would think..

In real yes but apparently not in the flight simulation world but maybe that would be too much of a good thing!

[188AHC 2,138]

https://www.gforcefactory.com/

Check out the link. This company makes small full motion simulators. Not cheap but when you are a flight simmer, what is money?

I saw this in action at FSexpo and it was pretty neat.

 

[irrics 1,517]

1 hour ago, 188AHC said:

Not cheap but when you are a flight simmer, what is money?

Great point!

Hopefully all the "serious simmers" around here agree and we can dismiss any concerns about having to re-purchase add-ons for the new sim.

After all - as you said - as a flight simmer, what is money?

[eslader 1,779]

2 hours ago, Andiroto said:

@Bert PiekeGood tip but is something like that also available for Heavys?

PMDG planes require you to "order" maintenance through a menu in the FMS. The maintenance intervals are realistic, however, which means it's gonna be a LONG time before you accumulate enough sim hours to need it. 

 

[Noodle 626]

For me, "realism" is about suspension of disbelief. I value the flying qualities of the airplane, the view out the window, the soundscape, and the ability to interact with high-fidelity aircraft systems--regardless of the complexity of those systems...I'll fly a well-modeled Stearman before I'd fly a nerfed A320.

Things that jar me back into reality are poor/innacurate scenery (and especially poor clouds), pauses or stuttering during loading, and dumb AI behavior like stacking up on approach or the weird wiggling they do while taxiing that makes them look like paper airplanes instead of 150,000 pound airframes. 

I'm ecstatic to see the preliminary screenshots of the new clouds and lighting. No third party addon has ever come even remotely close to capturing the scale, diversity, or mood of large-scale weather phenomena. The screenshots shown so far come much closer to reality than anything I've ever seen on a computer screen, and seem far beyond the basic TrueSky implementation in FSW. 

The same for scenery. The old landclass system wasn't terrible out in the American Heartland where the scenery really is repetitive. But in cities and towns, it was horrific to see blurry streets cutting across images of buildings and such. I'm not really a huge helicopter fan, but my metric for scenery realism is whether I could fly at 500 feet and 80 knots over a town and pick out a parking lot or intersection from which to Medevac a virtual patient. And if I were on the ground, waiting for said patient to be loaded, would it feel like I was in a believable city scene. In FSX, unless using a very localized addon like an airport scenery, the answer is a resounding no. You'd be sitting on a blurry road texture next to a few oversized square buildings with low resolution textures, with no recognizable landmarks, telephone poles, traffic lights, wires, etc. But looking at the new screenshots, it looks very convincing...even with it's current flaws. I'm eager to see what non-photogrammetric scenery looks like, and also how much Azure AI can reduce or remove the artifacts visible in the photogrammetric stuff.

Separately, I started flying DCS in VR and WOW...the suspension of disbelief is effortless. The sense of scale and three-dimensional space is right on the money; the natural ability to determine your velocity vector and plane-of-motion regardless of head position is completely natural and effortless. It's a revolutionary change from the dreadful TrackIR days. Resolution is definitely an issue, especially if you're trying to fly instruments, but for basic seat-of-the-pants flying in Day VMC, there is just no substitute for VR.

ETA: I love PMDG products, and I prefer their level of detail over most others. But for me, that Mx stuff is irrelevant to "realism". I challenge anyone to provide a convincing estimate of the number of times a 737 pilot has ever made a maintenance logbook entry requesting a hydraulic fluid top-off, APU SCU motor servicing, or half of the options available. If it were me, I'd spend that development time modeling things pilots actually see on a daily basis like an inop thrust reverser, inop autospoilers, an inop pack, an APU intake door pinned open, missing aerodynamic sealant, or a hundred other things. And don't forget the MEL/CDL stickers!

Edited August 14, 2019 by Noodle