I've been watching many of the newly released videos and of course I can only say 99% of the time MSFS looks stunning. We also can see it's not perfect yet. For one, the totally chaotic car traffic can be an immersion killer when flying low. But I guess things like this will be ironed out with updates.

The thing that keeps nagging at me though is the (in my eyes) sometimes strange or unnatural plane behavior. I have this feeling the stronguest with the Airbus ... my brain keeps telling me something is off. It feels too light, as if it has no inertia. All planes give me that feel by the way ... even the 747, a heavy weight, does it really wiggle like that?

There also were planes that maneuvered without any visible control surface movement, something that has been mentioned before. Then I think ... so far for the 1000 airflow calculations that make up for the flight dynamics. Apparerently the plane did not move based on those calculations, unless a control surface 'moved' deep down in the software but that info never reached the graphics module?

More often than not the flight model looks like straightforward joystick / yoke movements to me. One would hope at least via a sensitivity curve correction, followed by an inertia calculation, but I often feel the inertia is lacking which make the planes look like how the cars seemed to float over the roads in the first iterations of 'the Need for Speed'.

Today I watched some 10 planes perform a landing, real life ones I mean ... watching that is how my brain is 'programmed' on how planes move. Never did I see a plane move the way they do in MSFS.

I hope I'm all wrong and all will be fine ...

default aircraft. repeat after me. default aircraft.

4 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

default aircraft. repeat after me. default aircraft.

Exactly, this should probably be repeated more often; do not expect "PMDG"-quality from default aircraft. High fidelity aircraft will surely come.

Now take a deep breath. 

5 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

default aircraft. repeat after me. default aircraft.

Which are using the built in flight modeling system which payware aircraft will probably have to use too. A payware aircraft is not going to magically have a completely different set of parameters to use which Asobo developed, but then somehow did not know how to use when making their aeroplanes. I'm pretty sure the company which actually made the way the thing simulates flight know how to use their own development tools.

Edited July 30, 20205 yr by Chock

Just now, Chock said:

Which are using the built in flight modeling system which payware aircraft will probably have to use too.

you don't get it. They are made to be accessible for everyone. Not everything will be modeled on purpose. It doesn't mean you can't build complex airplanes in the sim. I would not judge the sim fly dynamics on default aircraft ever. 

1 minute ago, fogboundturtle said:

you don't get it. They are made to be accessible for everyone. Not everything will be modeled on purpose. It doesn't mean you can't build complex airplanes in the sim. I would not judge the sim fly dynamics on default aircraft ever. 

I think it is you who doesn't get it.

Do you seriously think that every single model out of all of the ones available in the simulator (and it is a lot of aeroplanes) were all made not using the full range of parameters available, and that out of all of them, not one of these ever used some apparently hidden magical more realistic parameters which make the thing move differently in the air mass? Because Asobo staff thought: 'yeah I know we've made all these other cool things our flight sim can do, but let's not bother testing them out on any of the aeroplanes we've made.'

"They are made to be accessible for everyone. Not everything will be modeled on purpose."

That's where the 'reality' settings come in, like the use of auto-rudder. That doesn't mean it should move unnatural. I'd expect just the opposite, on the easiest settings it should be very forgiving which makes it move perfect.

Edited July 30, 20205 yr by RudyB24

2 minutes ago, Chock said:

I think it is you who doesn't get it.

Do you seriously think that every single model out of all of the ones available in the simulator (and it is a lot of aeroplanes) were all made not using the full range of parameters available, and that out of all of them, not one of these ever used some apparently hidden magical more realistic parameters which make the thing move differently in the air mass? Because Asobo staff thought: 'yeah I know we've made all these other cool things our flight sim can do, but let's not bother testing them out on any of the aeroplanes we've made.'

I could answer you but I got this thing called NDA. Read back my stuff and read between the lines.

There is nothing to worry about with the flight model. 

To borrow from the PMDG 737 thread;

It has been nearly a year since I told you that PMDG stands squarely behind Microsoft’s re-entry to the simming market and we intend to release all of our core product lines (PMDG 737, PMDG 747, PMDG 777, PMDG DC-6) into this platform upon it’s arrival. Since that announcement I have been largely silent on the topic primarily because it didn’t seem to make much sense to share with you the few bits of information that I am allowed to share when so much of what we might share is subject to embargo.

With Microsoft’s announcement of the pending release date for their initial version of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) I have been cleared to give you a bit of a view behind the scenes in order to help set your expectations with regard to PMDG’s products in the coming weeks and months. (For the wannabe lawyers: Yes... We have permission to say/show you what is here. 😁)

Our first product release for MSFS will be the PMDG 737NG3. This product is being built using the core capability that emerges from our historic line of 737NG simulation technology. This product is not merely a conversion of the Prepar3D product line, but is a complete rebuild adapted specifically to utilize the new simulation engine of MSFS. It would be hard for me to overstate the enormity of this task and I will cover some of the reasons for this description in another post perhaps. Suffice to say that for the first time in 23 years, the entire PMDG development team is learning to work with an entirely new development process that bears little resemblance to the methods and technology we have been using for nearly a quarter century. For a number of years, we have all hoped that one day we would see a new simulation platform that capitalizes on the existing core simmer ecosystem while leveraging everything modern hardware has to offer. MSFS is rapidly growing to give us what we have wanted with all of the benefits that come from the speed and capability of a big-budget development effort.

The Faustian Bargain here is that we cannot simply drag our existing code sources over, click a few buttons and output a new product for you. What is required here is a top-down engineering effort to bring our existing technology into the simulator while simultaneously learning everything we can about the new platform so that the product will leverage the new platform in order to give you the greatest simulation experience possible.

I try very hard to stay away from superlatives, but in the case of seeing our prized 737 appear within MSFS it is hard not to dump them judiciously into paragraph after paragraph. Microsoft and their partner, game developer Asobo, have really given us something spectacular to work with in the MSFS engine. As Jason and Vin have been working through the process of building new models for MSFS, they have come spectacularly close to near-photographic quality of images and you can see this in a few of the images here.

The lighting engine in this simulator is spectacular at all times of day. In it's current, still-in-development iteration, the lighting is so convincing that I dare say one of you reading this right now is going to succeed in fooling one of the major airliner photo sites with an image of a PMDG aircraft taken within MSFS over the next couple of years. Maybe not right away, but we are getting very close to seeing the core simulation engine capable of incredible visual fidelity and I will stake a year’s subscription to PMDG Global Flight Operations on that certainty one of you is going to pull it off.

Other aspects of NG3 that you can expect are an entirely new flight model designed using the new capabilities of MSFS, along with a similarly new sound model built to capitalize on capabilities brought to us by the new simulation engine. We have done wonderful things with the 20+ year old methods given to us with FSX and Prepar3D, but this new platform opens up doors we only gazed upon wistfully in other gaming engines. At the core of your airplane, the simulation will remain pure PMDG, with all of the features, failure modes, complexity and simulation value that you have come to expect from our products. We have yet to find any functionality that will be lost, but we are looking at a number of new features we can add to our products moving forward.


These images of the flight deck are intentionally shown without the airplane powered up. This is not done for any purpose of showmanship, but is a decision made intentionally because the powered up flight deck simply isn’t ready for you to see yet. There are aspects of the MSFS SDK/API that aren't finished, and functions still missing that we need in order to bring everything fully to life. We are fortunate to have a wide open channel with Microsoft and Asobo so once these features are implemented, debugged and ready for prime time, we will share those results with you. I am eager, however- as this new simulation engine allows us to do so much without "hacking" the platform to get the results we want- and the finished product really shows improvement.

Many of you saw the huge leap forward in the complexity and detail of our 737 cockpit model with the release of our NGXu product in November. The PMDG 737NGu is leaps and bounds ahead of the nine year old NGX model you had been using prior to release of NGXu. You will see yet another generational leap forward with the model being used for the new PMDG 737NG3 for MSFS in large part due to the dramatic increase in what the simulation is capable of supporting in terms of model detail, resolution, textures and lighting. The NG3 flight deck is factors larger in terms of polygons and texture size, yet provides no discernible negative effect on the performance of the simulation.

Our modern platform has finally arrived.

Does it sound like there’s a problem with the flight model?

14 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

I could answer you but I got this thing called NDA. Read back my stuff and read between the lines.

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense from even a cursory glance.

You were talking about default aircraft being different from payware ones and allegedly the arrival of additional ones would improve matters. But since all the aircraft you have experienced in the sim in the beta are the default ones, this logic falls apart, as you have no experience of additional payware ones. Moreover, a few posts up you said that the appearance of less than great flight modeling was because it was default stuff, which you are now changing your tune about and saying they aren't that way. Both these things cannot be the case.

And that's nothing to do with the NDA, that's just simple logic, or a complete lack of it in this case. 

Edited July 30, 20205 yr by Chock

30 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

default aircraft. repeat after me. default aircraft.

Yeah we almost need a sticky for this remark.  Just because they look incredible doesn't mean they are incredible lol

because you know more about the game than people who actually played it...right.

Asobo  can ( i want to emphasize that) up to 1000 surface points on the aircraft. It doesn't meant the default aircraft in the game does have 1000 points model  I think you need to go back and watch the Asobo video on flight model.

9 minutes ago, 2reds2whites said:

There is nothing to worry about with the flight model. 

To borrow from the PMDG 737 thread;

They never mention anything about the flight model -- all the explicit praise is for graphics. 

It sure sounds there is potential.

People are so dramatic in this community, it hasn't been released and there are threads who are already worried or disappointed 😥. Wait until its release and then we can talk again.