24 minutes ago, tgsweat said:

Ok i have a question.  After seeing all this talk about what a perfect flight model/behaving aircraft should be, has any sim thats available right now pulled it off? Please let me know the sim and the aircraft that is perfectly modeled because I would like try it out, or does that not exist? I genuinely would like to know, not trying to be smart or take shots at anyone.   

Perfect?  Nope.  There are some really good ones, some "meh, OK" ones, some really bad ones, and everything in-between.  But none are perfect, not even the multi-million dollar Level-D commercial sims.

With the MSFS debut, I'd happily settle for "Meh, OK" if I could get it.  The visual environment is a really innovative step forward...I'd just like to see that paired with a flight model that doesn't wage a full frontal assault on my senses.

 

6 minutes ago, w6kd said:

I'd just like to see that paired with a flight model that doesn't wage a full frontal assault on my senses.

Beautifully put.

2 hours ago, RudyB24 said:

Robert, if I understood right you have MSF running ... have you looked at rudder deflection with a rearview camera? Does it move linear from left to right, linear with pedal or joystick deflection?

I can't run the sim long enough before it crashes to find out.

Oh no ... that is frustrating ...

7 hours ago, fogboundturtle said:

I disagree. Every controllers have different control sensitivity characteristic. It would only make sense if everyone was using the same controller.  I am sorry Robert and OP but you are wrong.

I've always did controller sensitivity adjustments and null zone adjustments in Windows.  Seems to work better overall.

Regards

bs

1 hour ago, tgsweat said:

Ok i have a question.  After seeing all this talk about what a perfect flight model/behaving aircraft should be, has any sim thats available right now pulled it off? Please let me know the sim and the aircraft that is perfectly modeled because I would like try it out, or does that not exist? I genuinely would like to know, not trying to be smart or take shots at anyone.    

 

As mentioned above, no sim is perfect. But out of the box without modifications, the C208 in FS2002, a sim released 18 years ago, is a more flyable, closer to true life representation than what we have been presented with in FS2020. That’s the really disappointing aspect.

2 hours ago, w6kd said:

I'm kind of surprised at how much hostility Rob is getting over this--he's a well-known FDE designer that has produced some of the best models we've seen in FSX/P3D.  He's a bona-fide expert on this stuff, and no, he's not wrong here.

Doesn't matter. To some people, his criticisms of MSFS is akin to insulting their mothers...

Sensitivity curves be damned. There's a long-standing and significant problem with the response of control surfaces for certain peripherals.
Not everyone wants, nor can afford a Honeycomb yoke. The range of motion on the more common / older stuff isn't large and yet small control movements give outsized deflections of flight control surfaces.

I hope some adjustments by Asobo (and my purchase of new, higher-end peripherals later this year) will solve the problems Rob (and others) have discussed.

 

2 hours ago, robert young said:

Even in challenging conditions they do not buck up and down in pitch, nor do they yaw 50 degrees from left to right in less than a third of a second. They are designed to be stable, and they are.

I think there was a desire to get away from the 'flying on rails' sensation criticism of FSX and P3D and it was taken too far.

I had a few people tell me that even on still days you would get noticeable turbulence. In my (albeit limited) experience, that's nonsense. However, it's an obvious differentiation in the flight model to MS legacy sims and it feels right to the crowd Asobo had to appeal to.

1 hour ago, robert young said:

I can't run the sim long enough before it crashes to find out.

Robert, have you tried the 152 yet? It is the one plane (has analog gauges) I've used in the sim for a while that flies like you feel it should for the most part, and can easily be trimmed with little effort for straight and level flight. It also has no autopilot, and I've been wondering if the A/P system which Asobo seems to have been struggling with is somehow interfering with the control systems of the planes that have A/P, even when the A/P is left off.

 

Just throwing something out there, I'm no expert in flight dynamics or modeling. Like most, struggling with flying the planes and getting control sensitivity workable.

3 minutes ago, BaronKen said:

Robert, have you tried the 152 yet? It is the one plane (has analog gauges) I've used in the sim for a while that flies like you feel it should for the most part, and can easily be trimmed with little effort for straight and level flight. It also has no autopilot, and I've been wondering if the A/P system which Asobo seems to have been struggling with is somehow interfering with the control systems of the planes that have A/P, even when the A/P is left off.

Sorry to disappoint but the 152 is as bad as the rest, but even worse in a way because its inertia is so low that it is like trying to control a 2 kilogram RC aeroplane. You might be aware of a video where someone tries to convince you they "must have got it right" because he could set up a 50 knots wind and the C152 miraculously flew but did not make progress over ground. There is nothing magical in this. You can set up any sim with a 50 knots or so wind and all small aircraft will lift off.

What this guy failed to notice is that the C152 was twitching around like a bucking bronco out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It was utterly ludicrous. All of the light aircraft in this sim fly like toys. They display completely unrealistic reactions to turbulence, controls, air mass and lift. I can't express this strongly enough. I started out being reasonably restrained about it, but there is no point in doing so any longer.

Ok, thanks for your input. I am confident they will eventually sort this out; I just completed a flight in Florida that just made me smile... this will be a marvelous sim when they do. 😊

9 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

I didn't tweak my controls except rudder. I have learnt my hard lesson during alpha to assign control to "axis" instead of others. 172 and few smaller GA doesn't feel like too much far off, yer they are far from perfect. I think rudder authority somewhat deficient in most GA. My attempts to put 152 aerobat into spin resulted a shallow slow roll which is completely unrealistic. Reverse area of command seems poorly modeled. Is there a hope to fix that all? I sincerely hope so !

rudders is the Z Axis.

What do you mean by "others" some people use other keys? keys???

my advise to those, If a jostick doesnt have Z axis, dont even install the sim, get one first

Come on mate, you’re the one that brought up real world time as a metric to measure a posts validity. 
 

Why are people do defensive when discussions like this are raised? To put it bluntly, this sim is a huge advancement, and there is some ground breaking technology involved. But there are also some really poor areas that should have been taken care of before release. Aircraft flight dynamics being one of these. The simple fact is, out of the box, these aircraft fly significantly worse than default aircraft from the last 3 or 4 version of MSFS, for all the reason mentioned.

Edited August 20, 20205 yr by norman_99

8 hours ago, Sterlin44 said:

280 degrees

Most of us don't have flight sticks with the same range of motion as the real aircraft. It's can't be 1:1.

Thought I'd add my couple of cents here...the only plane in sim that I have a lot of experience with IRL is the Baron, since I own and fly one. I've flown a number of the others, but only a few hours here and there.

With respect to performance, I'll just say I only wish my plane had the climb performance of the Asobo Baron. However, other than having too much muscle, the basic flight characteristics are not wildly off. I haven't tried OEI ops, stalls or anything like that - I will once I get my Honeycomb bravo, since I need all six power levers to do it right and one of my saitek throttle quadrants no longer works...but I also would note that the default Baron from P3D never flew right either, and only when I got my hands on the Milviz B55/E55 package was I happier with it (though that Baron also wildly outperforms mine and other real world Barons I've flown).

With that said, and on the subject at hand - specifically handling and control sensitivity - this subject is a little of column A and a little of column B. The roll rate at full aileron deflection is about right, and when flying that plane with my honeycomb alpha, I only slightly reduce roll sensitivity, and I'll explain why shortly.

As others have mentioned, control sensitivity plays a part because most controllers we use lack the features and feeling of the real thing - first, they don't have as much throw, or range of motion. This is especially true in the pitch axis. Second, at 150 kts IAS, I would be hard pressed to apply full aileron deflection in my plane - but on the sim, it is easy because there's no force feedback on my Honeycomb Alpha. In my Baron, the pitch axis of my yoke probably has about 15" of throw (if not a little more).  So, to get a 10% elevator deflection, I need to move my real yoke 1.5"; in the sim, with only 5" of play, to get the same 10% elevator deflection, I need to move it only .5".  When you're flying a real plane in normal conditions, it is very rare that you'd ever want even 10% deflection - maybe 2% or 3% to initiate a pitch change, for example to start or end a climb. 2% of 15" is a third of an inch - on my honeycomb, that would be one tenth of an inch - that's awfully hard to do. When you consider the real yoke wants to stay right where it is, it is actually easier to make small movements because all I have to do to start or stop a climb is apply a small amount of pressure to the yoke - but that doesn't work with a simulator yoke. Also also, in cruise, we mostly fly pitch with trim - why? because the moment you change airspeed, the airplane is out of trim - so I do most of my climb/cruise/descent pitch changes with trim anyhow. Of course on the ground, in takeoff/departure and arrival/landing, at slower speeds, more control input is required and the yoke is used with trim following yoke movements to keep an in-trim situation.

With roll, the Honeycomb has just about the same throw, or range of motion, as the yoke in the Baron (and Bonanza) - 180 degrees. So no sensitivity adjustment is really needed - however, for the same reason - force feedback - I do use a -10% in the sim. Even more pronounced than pitch, at cruise only the slightest yoke movement is required to initiate a roll - at speed, there is plenty of force holding the yoke centered, so again, only slight pressure up or down with the left hand is required to start or stop a turn. Because it is hard to just apply a little pressure, I reduce slightly the sensitivity to attempt to counteract the ease with which one can start a rapid rolling motion with a simulator yoke.

There's also the issue of the accuracy of the actual sensors in the controller - in the Baron, there's a direct link from the yoke to the control surfaces - the slightest change is directly translated to the control surface. In computer-based controllers, sensitivity is limited to the accuracy of the sensors, which are inherently less accurate than a direct link control.

So, all that tells me that these models could be better and that it is true that sensitivity alone isn't the answer, but sensitivity is an important component to replicating a somewhat realistic experience. Let's be honest. I have never flown a simulator, even the American Airlines 727 training sim that I spent 2 hours in, that felt even remotely like the real thing. Simulators in the real world are used more for procedure, flow, crm, performance and other types of training, but learning to fly an airplane happens in a real airplane because no simulator can accurately reflect the dynamics of flight. Only recently did the aviation industry accept that their simulators needed to accurately reflect flight dynamics at high altitude and in stalls - prior to just five years ago, the simulators did not have accurate flight dynamics in those flight regimes. At least in the United States, you cannot earn a pilot certificate of any type in a simulator alone - all you can do in a sim alone is earn a type rating and conduct recurrent training. And no airline allows a pilot to earn a type rating and then immediately go fly it without hours and hours of supervised operation in the real thing.

As with previous simulators, we will have to rely on our third party developers to tweak the flight models and hopefully Asobo has indeed improved the parameters and modeling to allow even more accurate and detailed models. I don't believe any of the current models are likely to be highly accurate in all flight regimes, but I also haven't been wildly offended in the way that others claim to have been by the experience. All we can hope for is the ability to get somewhat realistic performance and handling, but we can't ever hope to truly replicate the feeling of flying with a home computer and USB controllers.

3 minutes ago, Slides said:

Most of us don't have flight sticks with the same range of motion as the real aircraft. It's can't be 1:1.

I agree. If the real control has 12”of travel and your control only has 3” they will never feel the same. But the ratios should still be consistent. A full left input on your stick should produce the same result within the sim as full left input in the aircraft would. The fact that the simulator aircraft responds with roll rates multiple times greater than what the real world aircraft is physically capable of, is not due to control setup, but grossly incorrect control surface authority/effectiveness within the aircraft FDE.