Any Reaction to the Alpha Yet?

[Sasyska 12]

The most important questions are:

Does it run on 60fps and more?

Is there a career mode and flight school?

Steam release?

[Paraffin 2,197]

5 hours ago, Sasyska said:

The most important questions are:

Does it run on 60fps and more?

I can run my current flight sim and most AAA games at 60 fps if I turn the graphics sliders down far enough. Although, I'll accept a lower frame rate to get more eye candy. So that's not a simple question to answer.

What you really want to know, is whether you can get the kind of eye candy you want from the sim at 60 fps. 😉

We won't know anything about that until the final optimizations have been done, and that won't happen until just before release. The answer will be different for everyone anyway, because we all have different ideas about what's "acceptable" for eye candy in a flight sim. And of course we're all running different hardware. 

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Is there a career mode and flight school?

No information has been released about that yet.

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Steam release?

No word on that yet, but I think it's possible that even if they sell the base sim on Steam, you might still need some kind of Microsoft account login to fetch the streaming scenery, because that's coming from MS servers, not Steam. 

That's just a guess, based on how some Steam games include publisher portals and logins to access a game purchased on Steam. For example, you have to go through the Uplay portal for Ubisoft games, the Rockstar portal for their games, and so on. The portals are used not just for authorization but to market add-ons and for multiplayer access.

Again, we don't know yet and I'm just guessing here, but it's a Microsoft title, so you might not be able to avoid dealing with that company completely.

[highflyer2020 607]

11 hours ago, Sasyska said:

The most important questions are:

Does it run on 60fps and more?

Is there a career mode and flight school?

Steam release?

 

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Can't give much away but on my setup (9700K@5.0, 2080Ti, 32Gb) running at 4K, sim gfx options maxed, and I do mean maxed.

Take off from Heathrow runway 9L in the C172 G1000 and fly straight over greater London with scattered/broken clouds I'm sitting at approx 50fps.

According to MSI afterburner my 2080Ti was sitting around 80% and 9.5Gb on the VRAM, cpu utilisation in task manager was around 65%, with the core 0 pretty much maxed.

What's a strong positive from my experience so far is that weather doesn't effect performance, at all.

Clear skies or heavily overcast with multiple cloud layers, fps doesn't change. And the clouds are true volumetric.

It's not perfect, there are weak areas that we are feeding back to MS/Asobo via the insider forums; but it's still an alpha, albeit a very good one.

Expect a truly next-gen sim in 2020

 

 

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/568811-a-video-posted-yesterday-on-a-nvidia-twitter-account/?tab=comments#comment-4164211

Edited January 8, 2020 by highflyer2020

[mpo910 2,112]

21 hours ago, Sasyska said:

The most important questions are:

Does it run on 60fps and more?

Is there a career mode and flight school?

Steam release?

To challenge: P3D runs at 60FPS! What I would try to say is: What does it help you to know that it runs with 60FPS. Isn´t that dependend on your Specs, Sim Settings, Hardware, Config, etc.?

For me it is important to see it runs smooth and stable with average settings on my system (which is probalbly not equal to yours). I don´t care about FPS at all! Not even at other SIMS like P3D or XPlane 11. 

On your other important topics I can´t comment.

Marcus 

[tweekz 2,165]

On 12/24/2019 at 6:15 PM, dtrjones said:

Clearly asking for a reaction for the tech alpha isn't going to get you a Christmas card from Microsoft! Why don't we focus on what we would like Microsoft to show us next. For me the deep dive videos including IFR and Airports will be fascinating.

I'd also like to see some more on ATC and missions. There probably isn't too much left if I'm honest, I mean we can go all day about features but Microsoft still need to work on the core mechanics first which these deep dives videos are still flushing out. 

Airports. How are they implemented with Azure? Do they have any logic implemented? Jetways etc. DeIcing! ❤️ Pushback.

What about the Air Traffic?

Does ATC still guide you in mountains?

If you can load real world traffic, how do you fit in? I mean, lots of popular airports are really busy...

[highflyer2020 607]

22 hours ago, tweekz said:

Airports. How are they implemented with Azure? Do they have any logic implemented? Jetways etc. DeIcing! ❤️ Pushback.

What about the Air Traffic?

Does ATC still guide you in mountains?

If you can load real world traffic, how do you fit in? I mean, lots of popular airports are really busy...

From what I've seen on other threads/forums the ATC in the TA is very basic and similar to what we had in FSX but it's only there for Class B airspace at the moment and the real world traffic is not there yet.

[Scottoest 1,561]

On 1/8/2020 at 5:51 AM, Sasyska said:

The most important questions are:

Does it run on 60fps and more?

Is there a career mode and flight school?

Steam release?

Xbox have re-committed to releasing their games on Steam, so I'd say it's a 90%+ guarantee.  Though it will almost certainly also require a Microsoft/Xbox account log-in within the sim, for the live streaming elements.

[Christopher Low 5,393]

As it stands, I am not sure that I would purchase the new Microsoft Flight Simulator on release day.. That's because I do not think that the UK terrain scenery/detailed airports/ATC/AI traffic combo in the new simulator would match the ORBx TrueEarth GB/UK2000 airports/P3D ATC/detailed custom AI traffic combo that I will have installed on my new PC in the near future. Amazing graphics are great, but they are only part of the puzzle.

[Scottoest 1,561]

5 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

As it stands, I am not sure that I would purchase the new Microsoft Flight Simulator on release day.. That's because I do not think that the UK terrain scenery/detailed airports/ATC/AI traffic combo in the new simulator would match the ORBx TrueEarth GB/UK2000 airports/P3D ATC/detailed custom AI traffic combo that I will have installed on my new PC in the near future. Amazing graphics are great, but they are only part of the puzzle.

I really wish people would stop with the gently condescending "amazing graphics are great, but..." thing, as though that's all this sim is primed to offer, despite months of them talking about and presenting demonstrations of how in-depth they aim to go with the actual simulation (both of the planes, and the environment).

I see this a lot on the X-Plane.org forums too. People acting like MSFS is just going to be mindless eye-candy for simpletons who like shiny things, or acting as though your options are to either look nice or be a quality simulation, but not both.  This part isn't addressed to you specifically, but now I'm on my soapbox, haha.

Will MSFS, out of the box, be able to stand up to hundreds of dollars of accumulated payware in a specific geographic area where they may not have photogrammetry data, custom airports, etc.? Sure. maybe not - not that we actually know one way or another right now.  If your flying interest is solely hooning around the UK, then perhaps MSFS won't be the product for you at launch.

[Dominique_K 10,152]

17 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

I really wish people would stop with the gently condescending "amazing graphics are great, but..." thing, as though that's all this sim is primed to offer, despite months of them talking about and presenting demonstrations of how in-depth they aim to go with the actual simulation (both of the planes, and the environment).

 

I am with you 100% here. What we have seen are not only "amazing graphics" but a new weather, a new air dynamics over relief, and a new flight modeling all core things we have been craving.

Speaking of graphics, the previewers speak of a fluidity far above what anybody with a moderate machine can reach now with the Orbx TE line. Also what I have seen of the coloring of TE US products (including Florida) is far from convincing me that it is superior to FS20.

[tweekz 2,165]

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

As it stands, I am not sure that I would purchase the new Microsoft Flight Simulator on release day.. That's because I do not think that the UK terrain scenery/detailed airports/ATC/AI traffic combo in the new simulator would match the ORBx TrueEarth GB/UK2000 airports/P3D ATC/detailed custom AI traffic combo that I will have installed on my new PC in the near future. Amazing graphics are great, but they are only part of the puzzle.

In the beginning it will have its flaws for sure! And of course it won't be OrbX quality. That's probably a bit too much asked. But to have ortho coverage including real world buildings or at least an approximation of it by an AI that applies info from satellite images on autogen is just amazing.

[Tuskin38 6,635]

On 1/8/2020 at 12:46 PM, Paraffin said:

That's just a guess, based on how some Steam games include publisher portals and logins to access a game purchased on Steam. For example, you have to go through the Uplay portal for Ubisoft games, the Rockstar portal for their games, and so on. The portals are used not just for authorization but to market add-ons and for multiplayer access.

For Halo on Steam, it’s just a login screen when you boot into the game. It doesn’t have an external client/launcher like with Rockstar or Ubisoft. You can also link your Microsoft account to your steam account so it automatically logs you in.

Edited January 10, 2020 by Tuskin38

[Scottoest 1,561]

On 1/10/2020 at 5:48 AM, tweekz said:

In the beginning it will have its flaws for sure! And of course it won't be OrbX quality. That's probably a bit too much asked. But to have ortho coverage including real world buildings or at least an approximation of it by an AI that applies info from satellite images on autogen is just amazing.

Based on what we've seen, I'll bet the areas with photogrammetry data stand up to OrbX quality just fine.  But yeah, the autogen?  Of course it won't stand up in comparison to manually authored payware in terms of detail and accuracy, lol.

However, I think MSFS is going to have one important thing up it's sleeve in terms of making the world look and feel more real in the air, and that's the lighting model.  The atmospheric hazing and scattering looks much better than any other flight sim I've seen, and gives the world a very tangibly real look that's arguably more important than whether individual autogen houses look correct, or the trees look like blobs when you get close enough.

[Dominique_K 10,152]

20 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

 

However, I think MSFS is going to have one important thing up it's sleeve in terms of making the world look and feel more real in the air, and that's the lighting model.  The atmospheric hazing and scattering looks much better than any other flight sim I've seen, and gives the world a very tangibly real look that's arguably more important than whether individual autogen houses look correct, or the trees look like blobs when you get close enough.

This is exactly what I thought looking at the new Florida XP11 TE product. YMMV but it looks dull to me, the colors are kinda dark, not at all the brightness of a tropical landscape as I know them. Maybe the XP palette or color calibration of the author computer, but more certainly the light rendering engine.

[tweekz 2,165]

1 hour ago, Scottoest said:

However, I think MSFS is going to have one important thing up it's sleeve in terms of making the world look and feel more real in the air, and that's the lighting model.  The atmospheric hazing and scattering looks much better than any other flight sim I've seen, and gives the world a very tangibly real look that's arguably more important than whether individual autogen houses look correct, or the trees look like blobs when you get close enough.

This. The whole weather simulation seems to be really well done. This not only adds to immersion, but also to the flight model. Lot of people tend to forget that a great flight model consists not only of accurate aerodynamics but also on the environmental influences. What purpose does it serve to have an accurately designed flight model that flies in idealized / simplified air conditions. OK, there are addons, but it's nice if the base game natively already provides that feature where you could possibly even build on top.

Edited January 12, 2020 by tweekz