Dear pilots, take some rest and make your choice!!! 😄

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by OSM

9 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

At the moment, it's all about different sims for different purposes. If you want to just pay $60, as you say, MSFS obviously looks the best and is simple. If you want to pay that much and get the best GA flight experience, X=plane is likely a better choice. If you want to fly VR in a tubeliner, then it's P3D all the way.

I don't quite understand why some simmers have to be evangelists for a single platform and deride all of the alternatives. I, personally, am platform agnostic.     

I get a pretty good GA flight experience though with the Cessna 152 and Cessna 172 in MSFS.  I don't know what you are talking about.

And I think you miss the point.  What MSFS has done is bring flight simulation into the 2020s, not only with the graphics, but being able to stream data off the cloud so that 3D terrain is generated that is somewhat close to real life, at a low cost of $60 USD (no recurring subscription fees).  That's a huge benefit to us flight simmers.  The competing flight simulators do not do that at the moment for the home market, and certainly not at a one time cost of $60 USD.  

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by abrams_tank

24 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

 

...

Just to make you a bit quite:

my first comment in the thread:

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Since MSFS was released:

1) 2 other platforms already have newer and faster rendering engines.

2) more "study level" aircrafts have been released to other platforms than what is available for MSFS.

just some facts to the record...

Nothing in specific about Xplane, even aerofly has a newer rendering engine. and PMDG just released a new update to P3D.

Then you:

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But those two platforms have major shortcomings.  The first is the graphics, that is obvious.  But the second biggest shortcoming is that MSFS can stream satellite data to give you terrain that parallels real life.

Then, literally my first sentence in the #2 comment:

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I reallyyyyy have no intention talking more about other simulators in this forum but frankly you are totally wrong.

Then you asked for a break, so I ignored:

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Stopped reading here, go take your break.

Then you proceed with:

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Show us XPlane using satellite data to generate 3D terrain across the entire world.  You can't?

Me, for the 3d time:

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I'm not debating Xplane VS MSFS, that's you.

Then you again:

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Stop showing examples from other games or gaming engines, lol. Show us examples from X-Plane!

It's clear who is pushing this thread towards an Xplane VS MSFS thing. don't play it a fool, this tactic is rubbish. 

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by akita

3 hours ago, OSM said:

In a three years everybody will be flying in the FS2020 sky.

In a three years everybody will spend at least $100 to fly in the FS2020 sky.

In a three years all developers will be making good money in the FS2020 sky.

In a three years some will spend at least $100 to fly in the X-plane and P3D sky, but who cares? 😄😄😄

Maybe. Or maybe no one will be flying MSFS. Asobo are doing an awful job of the post-launch development, Who would have really thought they would introduce this may bugs and performance issues with patches when this thread was started 6 months ago? I didn't - I expected a much more steady progression towards excellence.

Remember that the many gigabytes of streaming data that you are downloading is expensive for someone. Microsoft needs to make a fair chunk of cash to make this worthwhile.

I just rechecked the steam stats just now, and the concerning slow downwards trend continues: https://steamcharts.com/app/1250410#All - user numbers are down massively from their peak, and their is zero, nil, none at all evidence that some sort of momentum or recovery is building.

By comparison, X-plane numbers on Steam have actually risen this year, so the available data actually shows the opposite of what you are claiming.

Btw, before you call my an X-plane shill  (since that seems to be popular in this thread) - since MSFS released, I've almost entirely replaced my X-plane flying time with MSFS, so I'm one of the guys going against the trend shown in the Steam stats,

 

 

 

  

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by OzWhitey

6 hours ago, OzWhitey said:

After 6 months, i still find MSFS fun to play with but i can’t imagine using it for serious GA aviation, or for flying some heavy iron accross the pond.

It's always useful checking how things were in the past. Here's a thread from August 2007, almost a year after FSX came out:

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/62812-why-so-few-airport-sceneries-for-fsx/

 

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Even Fly Tampa seem to be steering clear of FSX

 

 

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90% of the community seem to have reverted to FS9.

 

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Aerosoft seems to be on the bandwagon for sceneries in FSX, but even with their awesome sceneries in FSX, the performance issue still sucks

 

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With fsx I am pretty satisfied with the default fsx renditions of these two airports and don't feel a need to buy 3'rd party

 

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And for people who fly from hub to hub with the bigger aircraft, there's just not much on the market. For those people, there's also not a whole lot in FSX to warrant a switch away from FS9,

 

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many FSX default airports are pretty darned good - take KSEA, for example; I have FT SEA for FS9 - fabulous!, but - to spend another $40 - $50 on an FSX replacement? - no, the existing one is good enough for me, and it's much the same for many others.

 

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Same with me-don't need an add on Detroit or San Diego now-the fsx ones are fine

 

Or this one, May 2007, 9 months after FSX came out:

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/227631-fsx-sp1-is-out-but-i-have-no-driving-desire/

 

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It is really nothing against FSX, I am just so content with FS9, LVL-D, PMDG,PSS and all of my add-ons that I really have no immediate desire to leave it behind.

 

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After 6 months, i still find MSFS fun to play with but i can’t imagine using it for serious GA aviation, or for flying some heavy iron accross the pond.

 

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I don't see myself giving up my PMDG 747, Level D 767, and other countless add-ons with FS9; I just like it to much to give it up and when I get frustrated with FSX, I shoot over to FS9 and go for a hassle free flight.

 

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3 words: Squawkbox, ActiveSky, PMDG. When FSX can run those simultaneously without rolling back FPS to the low teens (with SP1), then I might spend time with it--till then, I'm sticking with FS9.

 

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I just wonder what PMDG thinks how many copies they will going to sell...And I'm already eager to read all the bad comments about low FPS in forums like PMDG's once people realize they simply ain't got the hardware to run that stuff.Guess at latest that's the point when FSX shows its real face, and it won't be fun anymore for all those FSX advocates then

 

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PMDG is going to wish they hadn't made the decision to abandon fs9, its gonna really screw them over.

 

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FSX on the other hand, has only been out for a few months"Well, it's been out for over seven months ... not my idea of a few 🙂

 

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For us GA flyers, FSX has got to be the only way to go. Maybe FS2004 is best for the big tubes...

 

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Most of the posts I see from FSX supporters show tiny GA aircraft tooling about alone in the middle of nowhere in the idyllic spot plane view. That works for some people, great. But I enjoy airliners flying from and to larger airports with real weather and AI traffic, so for all the work in getting it to spit out 10-15 FPS, FSX is not for me

 

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I'm sticking with FS9 too. If FSX had addressed the ATC and AI inadequacies of FS9 then I might be interested. As it is I'm not about to abandon my FS9 world, painstakingly built up, for the dubious advantages of a frame rate hungry interloper!

 

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As regards add-ons it really ####### me off that the majority of providers don't want support/provide updates for people still preferring to use FS9 versions of their prodcuts. It's getting more and more obvious that making new money is their only concern, but my feeling is that such approach can easily backfire and some of them will go out of business pretty soon, because who on earth is going to buy a complex FSX add-on if it cannot be run properly in FSX

 

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contrary to what some developers think, FSX will never be what FS9 currently is. We can ALL hope ACES learned its lesson with this FSX debacle and makes FS11 the next FS9 so to speak

 

 

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by virtuali

9 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I get a pretty good GA flight experience though with the Cessna 152 and Cessna 172 in MSFS.  I don't know what you are talking about.

And I think you miss the point.  What MSFS has done is bring flight simulation into the 2020s

If you're happy with a "pretty good" flight experience, then MSFS is fine or even good for GA. The default X-plane 172 shows greater verisimilitude, and if you add the cheap-ish rep pack it's definitely better. But MSFS suffers from a lack of great aircraft - it has some decent/good aircraft for sure, but there's no A2A equivalent right now.

As for "into the 2020s" - you mean like with DX11, as opposed that competing sim that has Vulkan, and the other one that uses DX12? :)

Like I said, I didn't really want to rehash the 'Sim X' vs 'Sim Y" thing, but you do make some outrageous claims. 

As for the scenery - YES. MSFS gives you orthoscenery without having to work. It's really not that hard to brew a continent with Ortho4XP, but for those who don't want to do that, MSFS fits the bill. And MSFS has a better lighting engine and substantially better overlay over the ortho than you'll see with the other available sims. In short, it looks very pretty and if that's a priority (and there's nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of times I want a good-looking sim) then MSFS fits the bill. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm going through a phase myself right now of using MSFS as my preferred platform for low-and-slow GA. 

9 minutes ago, akita said:

 

It's clear who is pushing this thread towards an Xplane VS MSFS thing. don't play it a fool, this tactic is rubbish. 

Sigh.  I really hate to go into the details but earlier, you used a strawman argument of comparing MSFS to the Unreal Engine in this comment:

Quote

Much of the steps are part of the graphics pipeline, MSFS are using streaming to stream those low quality base materials and then walk through the pipe-line i.e tessellation, color shaders etc...

But those base materials (orthos) are not really built for that, the pipeline is there to shadow the artifacts, not to accelerate an even more impressive art assets. orthos will never look as real as:

https://quixel.com

(or any other high quality artists work)

The quixel.com website points to Unreal Engine. You then compare MSFS to the Unreal Engine, which is not a fair comparison.  That is a textbook example of setting up a strawman and then knocking it down.

I have said all along, to compare flight simulator to flight simulator.  That is the only fair comparison. And what Asobo has done with the graphics for MSFS is amazing for a flight simulator. 

8 minutes ago, virtuali said:

It's always useful checking how things were in the past. Here's a thread from August 2007, almost a year after FSX came out:

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/62812-why-so-few-airport-sceneries-for-fsx/

I was an FSX early-adopter. It was a buggy mess that was virtually unplayable on existing hardware, and led to years of simmers trying to find a tweak to get almost-acceptable performance. In my opinion, it's terrible performance made MS look bad (flight sim had always been a tech demonstrator in its previous iterations), which was a strong contributor to the demise of the product line and the studio that made it,

So - not a great example! Based on FSX, Asobo gets to release another service pack or two and then gets sacked. We struggle on with a half-broken sim for years until someone in ten years time decides to fix it. After which, we slowly forget the horror of the sim's origin! :) 

6 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

As for "into the 2020s" - you mean like with DX11, as opposed that competing sim that has Vulkan, and the other one that uses DX12? 🙂

 

This is part of  the point though.  Why does MSFS yield better graphics with DX11 while the other simulators can't even do that with DX12 with Vulkan?

Seriously, you need to appreciate what Asobo has done.  That is an amazing feat in itself that they can use DX11 and still give better graphics, at a reasonable FPS, than a competing simulator which is using a more updated graphics library.

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by abrams_tank

1 minute ago, abrams_tank said:

This is the point though.  Why does MSFS give better graphics with DX11 while the other simulators can't even do that with DX12 with Vulkan?

Seriously, you need to appreciate what Asobo has done.  That is an amazing feat in itself that they can use DX11 and still give better graphics, at a reasonable FPS, than a competing simulator which is using a more updated graphics library.

They've got a good-looking engine, but performance is poor. Trying flying in VR with the clouds on normal settings some time, it's not pretty. Maybe DX12 will fix this, who knows.

Just now, OzWhitey said:

They've got a good-looking engine, but performance is poor. Trying flying in VR with the clouds on normal settings some time, it's not pretty. Maybe DX12 will fix this, who knows.

Performance is absolutely acceptable for me.  I run a very mediocre computer (specs are in my sigs) and I still get 30s FPS to 40 FPS in many areas, not using VR though.

32 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

... before you call my an X-plane shill  

Just want to remind you that at least 50% of FS2020 users are former ADVANCED X-plane users with 1Tb+ orthoimages post-processed in Photoshop, with 500Gb+ W2XP OSM data and handmade forests. Believe me we could teach you HOW to make X-plane a good looking sim. But because we are ADVANCED X-plane users we are with FS2020 now!!! Don`t waste your time to tell us about X-plane! 😄😄😄

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by OSM

17 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

As for the scenery - YES. MSFS gives you orthoscenery without having to work. It's really not that hard to brew a continent with Ortho4XP, but for those who don't want to do that, MSFS fits the bill.

I really, really, appreciate that.  I can jump into any location in the world with MSFS and start flying immediately, rather than have to download ortho data ahead of time.

Also, people are saying they store Terrabytes of data with ortho, and often need a separate hard drive for that.  I appreciate that I don't have to fork out the money to buy a separate hard drive to store all that ortho data in MSFS.  That also saves me money.

One of the brilliance of MSFS is that flight simmers used to spend hours and hours downloading ortho data, and then spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on add ons to make their flight sim look half decent.  MSFS did away with all that at a one time cost of $60 USD.  And no recurring subscription fees are required!

And FYI, I have the Premium Deluxe version anyways so I paid more than $60 USD.  But for those people that paid $60 USD, they got a great deal. As someone who is very interested in business case studies, that is amazing what MSFS did for the flight sim consumer.

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by abrams_tank

44 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Weren't people downloading like 2 TB of ortho data for scenery?  That's like a 2 TB separate hard drive you have to have.  For MSFS, I only store about 120 GB so far, a fraction of that.  And I don't have to purchase a separate hard drive.

Yes, and I was one of them. I actually quite liked creating those scenery, but I take the option to effortlessly stream the data over that any day. And, even though Bing imagery isn‘t that great in some places, the scenery generally looks better than in XP (well, apart from mountains, but that‘s another story).

27 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

I was an FSX early-adopter. It was a buggy mess that was virtually unplayable on existing hardware, and led to years of simmers trying to find a tweak to get almost-acceptable performance.

Yes, it was one of the most successful releases ever, leading to an explosion of the 3rd party add-on market as never before, EVEN IN THAT STATE, with FS9-ers convinced developers that "jumped on FSX bandwagon", would shortly gone bankrupt because of their "wrong" decision drop FS9. Right.

MSFS is way better now than FSX ever was during its first year. That was the point of my post.

 

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In my opinion, it's terrible performance made MS look bad (flight sim had always been a tech demonstrator in its previous iterations), which was a strong contributor to the demise of the product line and the studio that made it,

The "terrible" performances of FSX didn't had anything to do with the ACES demise. FSX in 2008 was doing well, post-Acceleration pack. The one and only reason for the ACES closure was the 2008 financial crisis, when MS shareholders demanding jobs being cut, so the whole PC gaming division was dismissed. Microsoft was in an entirely different place than it is now, it was Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, the same guy who laughed at the 2007 iPhone keynote, saying "it will fail, nobody will buy a 500$ phone"...

Edited April 13, 20215 yr by virtuali