A (personal) First Take on the New Sim

[EagleSkinner 36]

I already had the basic download pack installed the day before, so, I started the download of the necessaries just after midnight and went to bed. My reasoning: if it doesn't work, then there is a problem. Being and "olderguy with olde guy's problems" I woke up four hours later for the usual... on checking the 'puter - "all done". I could go back to bed... er... nope. Just one try... Well, after some fumbling I did get a flight going in the Crafters Cub, which I promptly crashed.

There was a lot of cursing about why couldn't I use my joystick? Why is the cesspip only black and white? How the hell do I do this and that? Why didn't they keep the old key bindings? Oh my deity of choice, why is that marshaller walking right into my spinning props? Why are the blue taxiway marker lights so high? How do I take a screenie? Why can't I get my DA62 into the air at Grand Canyon airfield (6700 feet and HOT!)? Blast! This darn control setup is twitchier than a (expletive deleted)...? Why the heck did they put the turn and slip indicator in the CAP 10 upside down? Why are there so many "inop" buttons and switches?

You are getting my drift - I went through many of the issues nearly everyone with a RANT button goes through with a new piece of simflight software. I even railed at the French inability to create a logical tree structure for the texture filing system (there isn't one single SimObjects or Aircraft folder, but one for EACH aircraft...) Mind you, what Brit understands a Frenchman? We've not done that since William the Conqueror.

But after a couple of cups of tea, this "Rosbif" (that's what they call us) took a step back and thought a bit.

"Hey - this is FSX after a hand wash and proper waxing." We still have typical FSX problems - I think Microsoft/Asobo simple did some shuffling - The scenery is better now that they got rid of the computer generated landscapes and moved to Google/Bing/Whatever... But we had that already in FSX - except that we had to make our own terrain maps, download petabytes of Googl maps data and spend months just mapping a few square miles of our own favourite areas. We now have (only a few) beautifully hand crafted airports and cityscapes. We had them in FSX too - St. Maarten was my favourite. We now have some beautifully modelled aircraft. Well, what they've really done is made and mapped more textures per aircraft and used different naming conventions to frighten third party developers and painters... A lot of us FSX painters were already creating glossy metalflake paints, realistic bump maps, ultra high definition skins.

What they have made with FS2020 is a flight simulator that uses the realworld imageries via the Internet. It uses realworld weather (errrmmm, didn't we already have an addon that did that?) OK, the FS2020 weather system has been updated to allow many more layers, different cloud types, wind effects. The flight dynamics have been improved a lot, or so they tell us. I am already/still seeing real life pilots complaining about the over or under responsiveness of various control dynamics. Especially a couple of aerobatics pilots

Anyway, the upshot of it al is we now have a new FSX styled simulation that has been restyled enough to call it new. We will still be seing a lot of complaints and bugs and more grumbling because "It isn't using the same keypress for that function" or "How do I open the doors" or "I get ctd's when i do..." ...

...well I have news for microsoft/asobo: the users will eventually figure out your problems and make fiixes, no matter how hard you have tried to make the system unmodifiable 😁.

...and I have news, too, for us users: don't panic, we'll help each other. Just let's be patient. There'll be plenty of 3PDs along soon (that's third party developers, as opposed to P3D 😉) the baby is not even three days old. Of course we must expect poopie nappies and little accidents.

My verdict: I like FS2020 despite the teething problems (many of which are mine). The use of live streaming allows a lot more freedom for creating eye-candy on the fly. It looks good. Following the guided AI flying instructor helps a lot too.