After several hours trying out FSX with their 15 minute demo addon, I gave up on it but REALLY liked what they've done and were trying to do. I can see why they abandoned it.

 

Which lead me to buying, trying and deciding to keep their other product, FFS (bad acronym). MANY features are missing compared to FSX, but besides the excellent VR, 2 things hooked me; the streaming full world scenery and great performance (it uses all cpu cores!!). Night time flying has great visuals too.

 

Being able to fly anywhere and have lots of solid autogen with the true to life satellite scenery is definitely the future, *ahem* FS2020. You spawn in the world first, then in about <45 seconds on my internet, you see the autogen and scenery fully load in; so pretty quick loading of streamed data.

 

Due to the dozens of things missing and lacking, I would only recommend FFS to those that plan to fly VFR; huge, busy airports are all ridiculously flat and empty.

 

It's Early Access but for $37, I'll easily get 37 hours of enjoyment out of it until FS2020 hits (which I don't plan on buying until it has VR).

 

Give it a go, VR heads. Being designed from the ground up for VR shows with smart, easy to use menus and UI.

 

Per Steam, you can try the game for 2 hours and refund it if you don't think you'll get your moneys worth. BE WARNED, you'll use up 30-45 minutes of this time configuring and setting up the controls and options.

 

 

 

I have picked this up again now after a long time. I no longer suffer from CTD's so that seems to have been fixed (or it's related to new gfx drivers, who can tell...)

Anyway,

Good performance and the scenery is improving slowly with each update. The distribution of the autogenerated 3D building blocks is now more realistic (as opposed to ludicrous at times). I guess this is due to improved Open LC data and the Bing satellite photorealistic landscape.

A big Plus point of this sim is that you can go ANYWHERE in the world and get a realistic impression of what it looks like out there. But you need to be at a reasonalbe height for this to take effect. But i am happy to see that flying lower is also improving with improved autogen.

However, the quality of the library is dissapointing. it's like lego blocks in FS9 style and many airporst have issues with incorrect height, resulting in runways with hills on it.

So, there is no real incentive to fly anywhere to unless you can forget the fact that there are no realistic terminal buildings to taxi to. The final approach however can be very interesting.

At this moment i have issues with all the aircraft but one, the baron 58 is the only stable plane that has no real issues/bugs. I wish they would have added some more interesting aircraft by now instead of the added helicopters.

As for the wheather, i do not like the 'preset' wheather types (cloudy, rainy, fair etc..). When you use the interface to add your own layers of desired cloud types the world can look way more 'plausible')

If there's one thing they need to do is to fix the moon or get rid of it alltogether. The logic of its behavior seems to derive from a flat earther.

Night lighting is not bad, not bad at all !

In short, still much to be done, but this sim can, at times, be both awesome and dissapointing. If you can forget about the flaws, which are being fixed i assume, then this is a sim really worth considering.

If i compare it to Aerofly FS2 then the immediate advantage over that is that you do not have to pay for selected scenery's which represent perhaps 0.01 % of the planet (the rest is just one big blur) but you do get the WHOLE world ! 

 

Edited June 10, 20205 yr by avhpilot