Honestly for years now i flew many hours in a few sims and there was probably cables missing under some jetways at a few CUSTOM MADE / PAID airports 

and just like that there are a few things missing here and there that if someone does not  point out to me I CAN  CARE LESS because I want to fly the plane ✈️. 
KEEP in mind that i had taken off and walk the ramps at must of this airports i know what things looks like in real life . 
SOMEHOW there’s always someone that find everything or anything to put down any new sim that comes out . 
 

on the other hand thanks for the update. That vatsim episode looks like its gona be interesting..... 

 

Edited July 24, 20205 yr by rtodepart

1 hour ago, rtodepart said:

Honestly for years now i flew many hours in a few sims and there was probably cables missing under some jetways at a few CUSTOM MADE / PAID airports 

and just like that there are a few things missing here and there that if someone does not  point out to me I CAN  CARE LESS because I want to fly the plane ✈️. 
KEEP in mind that i had taken off and walk the ramps at must of this airports i know what things looks like in real life . 
SOMEHOW there’s always someone that find everything or anything to put down any new sim that comes out . 
 

on the other hand thanks for the update. That vatsim episode looks like its gona be interesting..... 

 

One of the downsides of MSFS making the world so realistic is that more people are going to complain about things that were not even modeled (or were modeled horribly in other sims). In P3D, my hometown is unrecognizable and awful. The buildings go right into the river, the roads aren't all there, and the none of the buildings match anything (i.e. houses in downtown, casinos not represented at all). In MSFS, it's 90% correct except now I notice that a certain building isn't the right color or something and around and around we go...lol.

Just how it goes. It's why I'm preaching for people to keep things in context and to not have false nostalgia about the old sims. MSFS will not be perfect visually. If you know an area IRL, you will find flaws. Non-photogrammetry areas are not going to have every landmark across the world.

Edited July 24, 20205 yr by bonchie

3 hours ago, bonchie said:

You want to know what any place will look like? Load up the Windows Map app and see. Now, simply imagine autogen and trees placed over the footprints of the buildings and forests on the ortho. That's what it will look like (but color corrected, better lighting, etc.).

There's no mysteries here. If a place in the world has awful ortho quality, it's not gonna look great.

You know, I keep forgetting about Bing maps.  Thanks for reminding me.

I just pulled up Bing maps and looked at a number of remote locations around the world and must say that the resolution is quite good.

I also remember now that I did this very same thing months ago and was impressed then as well.  I was able to zoom in on a remote village in Africa and see individual huts.

Guess I'm getting old so the memory's not as good as it used to be.

Dave

2 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

You know, I keep forgetting about Bing maps.  Thanks for reminding me.

I just pulled up Bing maps and looked at a number of remote locations around the world and must say that the resolution is quite good.

I also remember now that I did this very same thing months ago and was impressed then as well.  I was able to zoom in on a remote village in Africa and see individual huts.

Guess I'm getting old so the memory's not as good as it used to be.

Dave

Now, having said all that, it remains to be seen just how good the AI scenery engine will be at placing the right kinds of buildings, structures, vegetation, etc. in the right places, as well as what those objects will look like. 

For example, will the buildings and vegetation be customized for different parts of the world?  It's likely that they will, but will it be good enough?  FSX had this regional autogen as well but it wasn't very good.

Anyhow, I'm quite sure that it will be much better than what we have now.  Plus there are third-party developers who can improve things like that.

Dave

 

Alpha got updated and it includes a feature everyone has been clamoring for. Rest easy.

2 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Alpha got updated and it includes a feature everyone has been clamoring for. Rest easy.

Topless girls at the FBO? 🎆😋😎😵

6 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

Real pilots don't think, in their heart, that a sim can reflect the true experience of flight. They are right and then more forgiving . The good simmers know that but look for everything that could make the pilots wrong 😉.  Both the pilot and the simmer are right in their own way.

I can only speak for myself, but being a pilot has given me an appreciation for what a sim can do well, and for areas where the sim can and should be given a little more grace. There's so much talk about flight models in sims and I sincerely would love every plane to have the best flight model available. I'd say a good flight model will give predictable performance against know conditions. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was never taught to fly a traffic pattern by a specific series of RPM, flap and trim settings. At best I was given a target speed and flap setting for each leg. I did whatever it took with pitch and power to hit those targets, but to say my patterns, even at a commercial level, were still too inconsistent for the level of professionalism I was striving for would be accurate. When I started my CFI training, my instructor (who is also a designated pilot examiner) stopped me and gave me the specific numbers he wanted to see for a C172.  2250 rpm on the downwind. Abeam the touchdown point, reduce to 1600 RPM, add the first 10 degrees of flaps and give it 2 rolls nose up on trim wheel. Maintain 1600 rpm until the landing zone is made selecting 20 degrees of flaps on base, 30 degrees on final. That with just small power adjustments consistently put us 65 kts over the fence on glide path and set up for an easy touchdown. If a sim flight model can reproduce those type of results, I'd call that excellent (even though the 2 rolls of trim is still hard to gauge in the sim).

The problem is that you can have have the most perfectly developed flight model ever made, THE Holy Grail of flight models, and it still falls apart when, for instance, when paired with controls that may be really high-quality hardware, but have response curves that are configured incorrectly...or they may just be garbage hardware. Look up "speech jammers" on YouTube. The speech jammer works by creating just enough latency between what you are speaking and what you hear that it completely wrecks some people. It's similar with control inputs that don't really match, though generally not as extreme nor funny. That's just one small example, nevermind kinesthetics factors. 

Speaking of kinesthetics, I personally think one of the place desktop sims struggle most is in representing coordinated flight. Sure you have the ball in the turn coordinator for visual feedback, but most experienced pilots can tell you without looking at the panel if they are in coordinated flight by the feeling in the seat of their pants.  It only takes a quick glance at the instrument to verify. I've never found a desktop sim that does particularly well in rudder inputs...but again, that may be a limitation of the 20 year old CH pedals. So if a flight model is a little forgiving with rudder pedal inputs, I'm willing to give a little grace. In reality, though, good rudder control is imperative, not only for passenger comfort, but for safety at many points in the flight envelope. ...And now I'll quit rambling.

 

TL;DR - What Dominique said 🙂

Edited July 24, 20205 yr by snglecoil

6 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Alpha got updated and it includes a feature everyone has been clamoring for. Rest easy.

Yeah, I heard TrackIR is working. Very nice.

13 minutes ago, snglecoil said:

I can only speak for myself, but being a pilot has given me an appreciation for what a sim can do well, and for areas where the sim can and should be given a little more grace.  

🙂

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. As a RW pilot as well...and blessed with exceptional instruction...I know how to configure pitch/power/trim for virtually every phase of flight and I found that certain FSX models were quite good at replicating RW performance given those inputs. Some were terrible at it...especially in modelling ground effect and the ability (falsely) to slam on a landing at excessive decent rates and grease the landing anyway.

ITRW, after slamming it on, you get to pick which of the next 3 bounced landings you like the best.  (-:

My greatest hope for 2020 is accurate landing modelling...including ground effect float and bounced landings if excessive sink rates are used. Of course, the sim cannot model the seat of the pants feeling when ground effect is dissipating and you know to increase back pressure because the rubber is about to meet the road.

2nd place will be VATSIM compatibility because synthetic ATC interaction...except in the most rudimentary phases...is a bridge too far for current technology at least at flight sim costs. I would guess that a high end AI engine to accomplish intricate ATC interaction...especially in the IFR environment...would cost at least $10k if it could be done at all.

11 hours ago, bonchie said:

No, the alpha was an alpha. Early access would be a general, paid release and would allow them to make money without being crucified for bugs and unfinished features. 

Every comment I’m making is with an eye toward their success because I believe the sim can be that good. I wish I could go into detail, but I can’t. Soon enough though.

Early access is in general nothing else but a paid alpha release.

24 minutes ago, Farlis said:

Early access is in general nothing else but a paid alpha release.

What are you trying to argue? If MS' goal is to get money coming in, they should have just done an early access release.

The current alpha is not making them any money.

Edited July 25, 20205 yr by bonchie

10 hours ago, snglecoil said:

I can only speak for myself, but being a pilot has given me an appreciation for what a sim can do well, and for areas where the sim can and should be given a little more grace. 🙂

Chris appreciated that you took the time to write this long post ! Avsim at its best. 

- Comparing just flying a speed target with pitch and power and flying with precision the whole set of parameters in a circuit flight. From a simmer point of view, both should expected from a good flight model.  The ESP environment does a good job now in fair weather conditions (A2A, RealAir etc. of course). It is less satisfying in turbulent  weather in a light aircraft. I hope that the new architecture will bring a decisive improvement. As @av84funnoted below, ground effect could also be better but I had my share of floating the aircraft down the runway.

- On the same topic, I look forward to get your opinions when the time comes, as the default aircraft are said to be quite well off  with  a special mention to the 152 though which would be only 10 knots off at 2400 rpm.

- controls.  Fully agree on both accounts. The physical quality is paramount and even my old warthog HOTAS is no more as precise as I’d like it to be (dirtied mechanism ?). But the curve configuration is also extremely important and this topic rarely discussed on forums. People don’t change the default curve.  I have initiated, over the years, a couple of posts to share curves which got no response.  The FSX/P3D cumbersome interface does not help here. I do it in DCS because it is simpler than in P3D but this is a trial and error process  not guided by a competent pilot.

- Coordinated flight. I’ve read some good FDE designers saying that the ball gauge doesn’t work so well in rendering skids and slips.  I wouldn’t know. After decades of simming, I do know that 1/ I cannot fly without pedals so something works somewhere 2/ I feel (or I imagine I feel 😏  ?) when I slip ( external visual cues).

Edited July 25, 20205 yr by Dominique_K

On 7/24/2020 at 3:10 AM, Theboot100 said:

This means were are officially at the "its not a game its a simulator" moment.

How so? Does online ATC make this game a sim more than anything else?

 

On 7/24/2020 at 9:08 AM, ludekbrno said:

Too bad you don't know the same.

Don't even bother. He has constantly shown he doesn't know a lot of things, especially when it comes to aviation. Instead his fixation on "undulated" runways and trees remains to this day. So again, why bother.

 

On 7/24/2020 at 9:48 AM, sanh said:

Please stop the boring trees chat. OK it is what it is. Must every new update result in 500 posts about trees from a small number of people? 95% of readers who come here don't care.

Thank you...

 

18 hours ago, bonchie said:

But there are issues that need to be ironed out before release, and no, I'm not talking about superficial stuff like big trees.

Amen to that...

 

21 hours ago, Rimshot said:

And I wonder how many of them have actual flight experience in the aircraft featured in the alpha? The only judgement of a flight model I value is of a real world pilot with real world time on the real world aircraft.

11 hours ago, snglecoil said:

[...] The problem is that you can have have the most perfectly developed flight model ever made, THE Holy Grail of flight models, and it still falls apart when, for instance, when paired with controls that may be really high-quality hardware, but have response curves that are configured incorrectly...or they may just be garbage hardware. [...]

Completely agree. That's the exact reason I won't even think one second about replacing my good old Sidewinder FF2 stick and fly all types of aircraft with it, from a sailplane or SEP to a four-engine airliner, as I know I'll never have a "realistic" feeling of any flight model if the hardware isn't capable to reproduce it. For many types I'd have to get powered flight controls to emulate just one aircraft model, which is ridiculous not only financially. So I generally agree to what Rimshot says, but even then it's unrealistic to judge a flight model without the right hardware, even if you do have r/w experience on type. I'm fine knowing about these limitations and I can totally live with them. The stick is a compromise in every possible way, but for me it's the most practical solution. I know I can't have a 100% authentic feel on my desktop, I can have that every day at work.

 

On 7/24/2020 at 9:48 AM, sanh said:

Please stop the boring trees chat. OK it is what it is. Must every new update result in 500 posts about trees from a small number of people? 95% of readers who come here don't care.

I am amazed at some of the criticisms and "I am glad I did not pre order there are going to be bugs". Please tell me the bug free flightsim you are using right now? If its p3d v5 its raining in your cockpit! Otherwise you are using something with graphics from 15 years ago. Msfs is hardly up against a high bar

I suppose you are not in the alpha. And if you are, I suppose you don’t read the official forums. 

19 hours ago, bonchie said:

There's no mysteries here. If a place in the world has awful ortho quality, it's not gonna look great.

What is it gonna do if one part of the tile is summer and the other one winter with snow? Does it recognize it's a field or will it be printed white?

Edited July 25, 20205 yr by tweekz