What the heck was going on in Alpha/Beta?

[LHookins 3,103]

4 hours ago, robert young said:

16,000 is a staggeringly high number. That many testers is bound to create an unmanageable ocean of white noise. Even for a complex sim/game/application you need a modest pool of observant people who are experienced at testing. You don't need more than 50-100 testers even for a vast project. What you do need is people who have reasonable expertise in various fields within a given sim. 16,000 people all chiming in with conflicting perceptions and priorities makes for unworkable chaos.

Among those 16,000 will be just a few who are very experienced on sims and have piloting experience on type. Among the thousands of others their views are hardly going to get a look in. 

I'm not sure how to respond to this other than, "So what?"  Everything you posted was implied or stated in my post that you quoted.

We were stress testing the servers so they could fine tune them.  This is an important function.  We also reported bugs.  Some were fixed.  Our function was not primarily as bug finders.

We also provided our feedback on things like look and feel, the UI, ease of use and understanding.  But there is no way we were driving any part of the design.  This is exactly how it should be.

----

Your primary use to me is not to complain about what's wrong, it is to research and tell me what can be fixed.  You have the experience to be able to do this, few others have.  I can only touch the surface of this myself, and somewhat inaccurately.  One question I have is, do you want it fixed?

Perhaps you have inside information that you cannot divulge, or even hint at.  Such people exist.  I've seen some who are publicly very critical.  We've also seen a few like PMDG and Aerosoft who are publicly very much behind MSFS.  What to make of this?  Obviously there are a lot of people who aren't very happy at the high technical levels.  I have no idea what it all means, or why.

Can it be fixed?  I don't know.  Is it worth fixing if it can?  Absolutely!  Will MSFS ever be rated for flight training?  I don't know but I doubt it.  Maybe with third party aircraft?  Is Asobo dropping the ball?  It looks like it, and I'm guessing they're in over their heads.  What does the future hold?  We can only hope it holds considerable improvement, but I'm not as optimistic as I once was.

A LOT of stuff is still wrong and a lot of stuff I expected is still missing.  I won't post a list as it will all come out in the forums.  People will be discovering things like Valdez for a long time.  I can't be certain any of this will ever be fixed.  It's... still just a flight sim, with all that implies.

But for many people, the experience is magical.  Some aircraft, although not all of them, are "close enough."  Not good enough for training but still good.  Some are likely to be less than close enough, I don't know.  I'll call it a "flying simulator."  More than a game, less than a full flight sim.  Appropriate for a target market of first time simmers taken from the larger gaming community.

I guess we'll see how it all goes from here.

(And sorry for the long post 🙂 )

Hook

[Paraffin 2,197]

10 hours ago, strider1 said:

Xplane still has fantastic 3 party GA addons with amazing default avionics and flight dynamics, on top of descent scenery with addons. 

Helicopters, which will keep me flying XP for a while yet.

Among the several things that astonished me about the development of this sim, is that they had this amazing new way to generate a plausible world on the ground, and not a single default helicopter to enjoy it to the max.

Of course, having seen how basic the flight modeling is now -- just a single wing in the flight model to represent two separate wings for a biplane? -- I hope they take their time with rotary wing aircraft and do it right. Not necessarily a default helicopter from Asobo, but at least a specific rotary wing flight model extension that can be used by 3rd party helicopter devs. Needs more airfoils, guys.

[Flying Fisherman 41]

Why didn't MSFS get initially released as an "Early Access" program, with a slightly reduced price? People know what that means; it's a not completely finished product and one can expect  bugs etc... Other developers do it and it's being honest to the consumer about what they are purchasing.

Imagine that you are a newbie to flight sims and have been totally hyped for the past 6 months about MSFS and maybe even got so excited that you splurged and pre-ordered the Premium Deluxe Version. You probably don't know anything about AVSIM yet and wouldn't be aware that there were going to be many issues because of the rushed release. Yesterday, you were one of the unlikely ones and had a nightmarish install. After finally getting that sorted, you start up the sim and your common joystick isn't configured by default. You crash the plane a few times, finally figure out that there is a complicated (and apparently not very intuitive) controller configuration section but since you know little about aviation terminology, you don't really know what you should be configuring to just make the plane flyable.

What do you think such a person is likely to do at that point? Request a refund perhaps. Maybe instead just be furious about the money you spent and uninstall the program, move on to other things and think "I'm never touching one of these flight sims again!"

Many of us on this forum will persevere with the teething pains of this revolutionary new sim, but Microsoft really had an opportunity here to attract a new user base and get them hooked on flight sims and aviation and that would have benefited all of us in the long term. I just hope that what has transpired the past 2 days doesn't adversely affect the possibility of that occurring.

[LHookins 3,103]

3 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

But there is so much to contemplate! 😲

I think I'll go down to the beach and contemplate the bikinis.  With the current mask rule in place, I don't even have to feel bad about not looking at any faces! 😄 

Hook

[robert young 2,897]

4 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I'm not sure how to respond to this other than, "So what?"  Everything you posted was implied or stated in my post that you quoted.

Apologies if we were on slightly different subjects. I'm not bashing you for saying how many were on the alpha test and I get that many of them were being used for a bandwidth stress test.

There is a solution/fix (which is what you wish me to offer). The solution is to divide testers up into specific tasks. A person might be interested in scenery and might even design some, but doesn't care too much for other aspects. Another tester will be a formidable pilot and interested solely in flight model assessment. It would be easy enough to direct these people into a "sub-forum" for testers so that important observations are not lost in the noise.

For what it's worth, and of course on a tiny scale compared to this one, we kept tester numbers down to a bare minimum because in the end we got higher quality feedback. I'm not intending to compare directly as the Asobo project is enormous. 

[jcomm 5,939]

Give it time guys....

I remember another well known sim where it took around 5 years to get a bug everyone was complaining about to finally get addressed by the developer.

RW pilot's reports and thousands of forum posts and many emails / tickets weren't enough to convince the guy it was completely / screamingly WRONG!  Until someone presented a totally irrefutable proof... and the guy decided to check and found the error...

Well, since I participated in the Alpha / Beta, many bugs were addressed and characteristics fine tuned, so I strongly believe the problems you now see will most certainly get addressed a lot sooner than later...

[LHookins 3,103]

2 hours ago, MattNischan said:

Well, I say that having looked pretty extensively over the past 24 hours at the SDK and flight dynamics editing process. It's as advertised.

Good.  In your opinion, can the current crop of default aircraft (at least the GA stuff) be "fixed" to be better than just "good enough"?  Have you done any experimenting?  

I haven't looked at the SDK but what I've seen in the aircraft files looks good.

Hook

[FlyingInACessna 656]

2 hours ago, MattNischan said:

Well, I say that having looked pretty extensively over the past 24 hours at the SDK and flight dynamics editing process. It's as advertised.

Agreed that we need more feedback with pilots who have type experience. Plenty in the testing process with experience on the smaller GA types (I expect that's why they're closer to the books), not as many with experience on the expensive stuff. It's hard to find pilots who have those planes and the time on a good day and we're in the middle of a pandemic with GA way way down, to boot, so I imagine it's been a challenge.

How do you gain access to the SDK? I’d like to edit the taxiway names at my home airport.

[LHookins 3,103]

2 hours ago, FlyingInACessna said:

On the Cessna 172S with analog gauges, during my run up, I turned off the alternator to see if there was discharge, and doing so showed an INCREASE in charge... disconnecting the generator from the battery actually charges the battery. Then, when I turned the alternator back on, it showed discharge again 😕

I know only enough about the flight modeling to be dangerous, but engine gauges are in my area of expertise.  For most people those gauges are merely decoration, just enough processing to drive an animation.  For me, I want them to give a useful reading.

Although I haven't seen the analog gauge 172 and haven't looked at the electrical gauges in other aircraft, I have an idea of how this might be fixed.  The gauge code looks to be eminently modifiable with the processing separated from the .mdl file.  I won't know if it *can* be done until I've done it though... who knows what works and what doesn't? 😄

Hook

[LHookins 3,103]

19 minutes ago, robert young said:

There is a solution/fix (which is what you wish me to offer). The solution is to divide testers up into specific tasks.

Good GRIEF!!  I don't care about TESTERS, I care about DEVELOPERS!  In this case, that would be YOU, Sir.  The initial testing has already been done.

Asobo had plenty of developers.  Probably every problem you can think of to come up with was covered at some point.  It's not that Asobo didn't know about them, it's that they couldn't fix them for whatever reason.

One thing I'm fairly certain of is that Asobo did not have any real experts in FSX/P3D flight model tuning, not experts to the extent they exist in the P3D world.  Those experts should be able to do a better job than Asobo if given the right tools.  So... are you in or are you out?

Hook

[LHookins 3,103]

16 minutes ago, FlyingInACessna said:

I’d like to edit the taxiway names at my home airport.

Along with 36,999 others around the world.  I'm sure there must be *some* that are correct... I've at least found a few parking spaces that were numbered correctly. 🙂 I don't think that was high on the priority list.

Hook

[LHookins 3,103]

39 minutes ago, Flying Fisherman said:

Why didn't MSFS get initially released as an "Early Access" program, with a slightly reduced price?

It was.  As many as 16,000 people got early access for free!  😄 

Hook

[FlyingInACessna 656]

15 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Along with 36,999 others around the world.  I'm sure there must be *some* that are correct... I've at least found a few parking spaces that were numbered correctly. 🙂 I don't think that was high on the priority list.

Hook

I think it’s funny that my home airport, which only has one main taxiway named A, is named B in the sim haha 🙂 Everywhere else A is the main taxiway...

[Flying Fisherman 41]

19 minutes ago, LHookins said:

It was.  As many as 16,000 people got early access for free!  😄 

Hook

16,000 people now flying in the officially released version and they didn't have to pay for it! I'm so envious. 😉

[LHookins 3,103]

1 minute ago, Flying Fisherman said:

16,000 people now flying in the officially released version and they didn't have to pay for it! I'm so envious. 😉

Unfortunately for them, it was only the early access part that was free. 🙂 They got to pay full price for the release version like everyone else.  At least they could try it out first to see if it was worth it.  Pretty much the same as the $1 Game Pass people who eventually buy, just a tiny bit cheaper.

Hook