What's missing in MSFS?

[w9nwrwi 26]

4 hours ago, andyjohnston.net said:

Actually, the autopilots work, but they're much more like real ones, instead of what we had in FSX and previous.

Could you verify that the Baron B58 autopilot works, and if it does, tell me the sequence(s) to get it turned on. I have been totally unsuccessful.

The SR-22 works just fine for me.

 

Thanks

[ark 1,291]

16 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Here's an example of the baffling ATC. Maybe this make sense to somebody, but I certainly haven't ever been directed to do this. I did get even, though. Since I couldn't figure out what to do, I switched to full AI control of the aircraft. Otto indeed did an ILS 01 approach perfectly until right after he intersected the glideslope. At that point he put the gear down and the aircraft went 90 degree nose down and crashed. I suppose I'll read about on the evening news.

 

If you were in IMC with a strong wind out of the west and no instrument approach to RW28 available, then the instructions are not unreasonable it seems to me. However, from your screen shot it looks to be VFR.....

Al

[ryanbatc 12,859]

5 minutes ago, w9nwrwi said:

Could you verify that the Baron B58 autopilot works, and if it does, tell me the sequence(s) to get it turned on. I have been totally unsuccessful.

The SR-22 works just fine for me.

 

Thanks

The Baron is screwed up because lack of altitude selector (that'll be fixed).  But a way to get around this is to manually climb to an altitude, and be in some sort of lateral mode (HDG/NAV) (with AP master on) and then press ALT.  If will hold current altitude.  You can then press ALT again and use UP/DN to go into a pitch mode to climb and descend.  Press ALT again to hold altitude

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I agree that the AI must have responded to a change in the active runway, but I'm not sure why it would just cancel ILS 01 altogether and go RNAV 28. I guess that I am expecting too much at this point in time. According to the RL METARs at KALB the wind did shift from N @ 8 to NW @ 12 gusting to 18 just before final.

[Farlis 2,287]

Someone compiled a first list of missing airports:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/missing-airports-sent-to-zendesk/165814

Just for those that think this is a "minor" issue.

And when you hear the number 37.000 that sounds like quite an improvement.

And then you find this website: https://ourairports.com/

and can't help but wonder why the MSFS databank is so severly lacking...

Edited August 23, 2020 by Farlis

[Noel 4,504]

6 hours ago, overspeed3 said:

When I first heard it could be installed for Xbox players, I cringed.  I thought this new MS FS product would be somewhat "dumbed-down" for a much younger age group who probably were never really  that interested in flight sim except for combat scenarios.  

Then I saw the first videos from Asobo and those that followed, and all the promising updates.  I was really excited and optimistic.  But now:  Meh.  I think It's going to take many months of work by the Asobo team to include missing features,  and to fix all the bugs for most of us to say "This is finally the sim I've been waiting for"!      

The core engine is phenomenal though.  Perhaps they intentionally left out many airports etc to create development opportunity for content providers or something along those lines.   It really just depends on what the long term mission is for this product, and I haven't heard much to give much of a sense of what exactly that might be.   What would be great would be an announcement, loud and clear, to convey the idea this is a new platform w/ a 10y service life, or something along those lines.  This opens the door for devs to start cranking content, and really ASOBO does not need to do much (after one patch that addresses a few critically important major issues) of anything beyond support a robust SDK, and very slowly evolve the product over the first 5y of that service life.  Then let it fly, pardon the pun, and start working on the next major release, 5y later.  This 10y cycle model gives time for hardware to mature enough to help support improvements in the next major release.   I never cared for LM's frequent updates, requiring all of those content providers to adapt for every release.  And new and cool content helps feedback to drive more purchases of the core platform and so can easily push out that service life to 10y plus.  Just look at FSX.  Plus designing around compatibility with Xbox brings in a potentially large cohort of flight gamers, and that will help pay the rent for and fund the next major release.

Or....it morphs more towards Xbox and the hardcore nuts in the asylum will have to get their jollies from P3D or Xplane.  

Edited August 23, 2020 by Noel

[diajohn 169]

I see a lot of things that have little to do with flying the aircraft.  I have spent about 20 or so hours just setting up my controls and learning many of the various options.  
 

Learn what is available in this sim like setting up your hat switch.  Learn how you may want to operate this as we did many years ago with FSX and then Xplane. This is an Infant product that will grow every day.  In a couple of months, all of us who were FORCED to purchase MSFS will be wonder why we just didn’t understand.

yes it needs work just as FSL took, how long?, to be a decent Airbus. 

[cwburnett 1,809]

14 hours ago, DJJose said:

For those of you who have FS2020 working smoothly and feel that there's something missing, what is it?

I was one of the unfortunate ones who could not get decent performance with my i7 2600K, Titan Pascal, 32GIGS of RAM, SSD, and 1080P monitor.

Does FS2020 has what was missing on all previous sims, or just another platform that needs a lot of work and 3rd party support?

Jose

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread, which is understandable...people are still learning it and haven't found everything...and of course, one of the missing items is documentation. But, if you were posting this to try and make a decision about whether to try it out (or upgrade hardware or whatever), I'd suggest asking about specific features you care about.

For example:

-There are cloud shadows.

-There are three types of pause. Menu pause, which is the easiest, but no good for screenshots, active pause which exists for who knows what and is oddly the default and then full freeze pause.

-I haven't found an autopilot that doesn't work (good job fixing from the last beta), except the noted missing ALT knob on the G1000 in the Baron, which is easily worked around until they patch that one.

-ATC is basically a slightly improved version of the one in P3D. In other words, not very good. I don't use it except for ATIS to check weather at nearby airports. But it does support departures and arrivals now. It will assign an instrument approach if one is available and gives you the option to choose another if you prefer a different approach, including circling approaches, which I don't think FSX had.

-You can setup view panning for internal and external views with the hat switch to work just like it did in P3D. I even wrote a tutorial for how to do it with screenshots. I did it on my Thrustmaster HOTAS and my Honeycomb yoke.

-The G1000, G3000 and others show airspace depending on zoom/declutter settings.

That said, there are a lot of things that need work. There are performance discrepancies with a lot of the planes; I wouldn't call it arcade-like at all, if anything these planes are harder to fly than the real thing, not easier. But some of them feel pretty good. There are entire threads dedicated to this and even the real world pilots of these planes (myself included) disagree about what's right and what's not...however, other than the Neo (which is passable), the jets are a disaster. If you want to fly only jets, MSFS is not yet right for you.

There are missing airports and other scenery problems that result from reliance on AI and ortho imagery. These will get fixed over time, probably by third parties like Orbx. But it is also of note that I've enjoyed landing at several strips in Tanzania that I know exist, but aren't in the sim nav database...but they're still there, thanks to ortho, procedurally drawn grass and buildings. There are a few larger airports missing due to bad imagery and this needs to get rectified - if for some reason the imagery doesn't exist in Bing, it won't be in sim - simple as that. Considering the size of the earth, the number of places missing is minuscule.

The live weather in the US is glitchy. Not for Europe, but in the US I've found ATIS telling me there are 26 knot winds, when the wind is actually calm, and winds aloft are basically non-existent in the US for me. This is a data issue that Asobo knows about and is working with the weather partner (forgot their name) to address as we speak. Manually setting weather seems to be missing some capabilities, like limiting visibility. You can adjust aerosol density...maybe that does it? Haven't played with it yet...

What I miss the most is my fleet from P3D, lol. All the big names in aircraft development have announced projects. I'm personally excited for the Milviz B55, which is their first or second. I think we'll be pretty happy with the A2A Comanche as well. Bigger jets will come too. In the meantime, I have been in this new sim pretty much nonstop - it is very addicting and sometimes challenging. The flight models may not be exact, but there are a bunch of them that are perfectly lovely to fly. For me, it has mostly been the TBM and the C208, with some time in the King Air and the CJ4. The Neo is really the only airliner that's totally usable in my view, but I've only done a few full flights because I've been so enamored with taking flights in the C208 or TBM to airports and even countries that never stood a chance at being modeled well in any previous sim...and I know a better Airbus is on the way, so no rush for me to fly around in the default one.

Finally, I'm surprised you can't run the sim with a little settings optimization...it's quite flexible and there are some undocumented ways to improve performance, like turning off a bunch of the custom toolbar features, such as the VFR map, to free up both GPU and CPU headroom. The glass cockpits are pretty demanding on CPU and GPU right now, which needs further attention, but I'd think you could hop into something without a moving map and have some flights. If you haven't tried, it could be worth giving it a go for $1 with gamepass... If you've tried this already, then okay...let me know if you give it a try and I'll be happy to share what I've learned in hopes of getting you a taste at least. For $1, there's really nothing to lose and no problem if you don't like it! 🙂

The sim is a work in progress, and they fell down and had misses in a number of areas, but I have all the confidence in the world that they and 3PDs will fill in the gaps in short order. In the meantime, my P3Dv5 is waiting for me to come fly the Dash 8 or MD80, but so far...that hasn't happened.

By the way, after some prodding in another thread, I made my FS2020 videos public instead of unlisted. So you can see some vids here...https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuhNl1CjoODTxhxQugbUaNg/

Edited August 23, 2020 by cwburnett

[neilhewitt 494]

6 pages in and no-one has pointed out the lack of multi-view / multi-monitor capability (and no, Nvidia Surround isn't true multi-monitor) and the ability to create views with precise camera control and put them on to different screens to get a wraparound view. This is vital for anyone with multiple screens in any kind of angled config, let alone those with multi-projector setups. And being able to pop-out instruments (G1000 etc) and undock them onto separate screens. This is stuff 'classic' MSFS was able to do for years. Hugely disappointing that these were not must-have requirements when Asobo was building the rendering engine. They even said in the discovery videos that they wanted to support home cockpit builders, but we have essentially nothing in the released version.

I get it, this is a minimal viable product they've released here (and probably rather earlier than the dev team wanted - I'm very familiar with pressure to release early coming from the product owner in software projects). There will be more frequent updates than in the classic era. But they won't share any kind of meaningful roadmap as to what features are coming when and so we're left wondering when, if ever, we'll get what we need. At least the VR and helicopter crowd have confirmation that their requirements are coming.

Oh well... guess we'll just have to wait. And meantime, this sim sets a new bar in terms of what's possible with scenery and weather and hopefully Laminar Research and LM will step up to it in years to come.

Edited August 23, 2020 by neilhewitt

[cwburnett 1,809]

4 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

And being able to pop-out instruments (G1000 etc) and undock them onto separate screens

I don't know about multi screens, but you can pop out the G1000 and move it anywhere you like, including another screen...

(hold the right ALT key and click on the G1000)

Edited August 23, 2020 by cwburnett

[BijanStudio 896]

1- Slew mode

2- More variety of tree/colors.  Almost all forest look the same. Maybe more color variation or types of trees or vagation.

[cwburnett 1,809]

6 minutes ago, BijanStudio said:

1- Slew mode

Slew mode exists and works quite well. It is enabled with the Y key just like in P3D. You need to map controls or keyboard commands like in P3D, but by default it uses the number pad. I have it connected to my xbox controller which I use for slew and for the drone camera.

[BijanStudio 896]

1 hour ago, cwburnett said:

Slew mode exists and works quite well. It is enabled with the Y key just like in P3D. You need to map controls or keyboard commands like in P3D, but by default it uses the number pad. I have it connected to my xbox controller which I use for slew and for the drone camera.

Oh thank you.  I will check it out.

[FPStewy 538]

18 hours ago, Farlis said:

and can't help but wonder why the MSFS databank is so severly lacking...

this was somewhat answered behind the scenes, I don't remember the article or posts, but it seems that some POI and Airports have copywright issues and it's mostly why some are not included.

[CFIJose 5,485]

21 hours ago, cwburnett said:

I'd suggest asking about specific features you care about.

Thanks for asking.

The features I care about are:

1) Photo scenic textures with seasonal variations including 3D trees.

2) Beautiful water that changes colors depending on the region that I want to fly. Waves that move with the wind and change size. 

3) Lots of payware quality airports.

4) AI traffic with liveries with default ATC control.

5) Realistic ATC for VFR & IFR operations.

6) Real weather that is dynamic, historic, and user defined.

7) Controller support for yoke, pedals, throttle, and GoFlight modules.

8 Ground Services by FSDT.

9) 3rd party airplanes such as A2A, Milviz, or PMDG.

10) Reasonable loading times, good fps, and stability.

Jose