3 hours ago, tweekz said:

Very well explained. I hope you've sent them a ticket with that content. 🙂

When they send me something free; I'll send them a ticket explaining what they've got wrong. They've already had 109 quid off me, they can sort the bloody thing out themselves, it's not my job to be their unpaid consultant. 🤣

Edited August 23, 20205 yr by Chock

8 hours ago, Chock said:

When they send me something free; I'll send them a ticket explaining what they've got wrong. They've already had 109 quid off me, they can sort the bloody thing out themselves, it's not my job to be their unpaid consultant. 🤣

It's only in your own interest. The more they get annoyed, the higher it goes on their priority list. 😉

There definitely seems to be a concentrated effort to remove the “on rails” feel so many have previously complained about. The problem is the manner in which it has been implemented, as a generic, singular overall effect to the aircraft, rather than as a true, live aerodynamic simulation. I don’t care what you fly, if it’s a perfectly still morning, with no wind, everything feels like it’s on rails, from a 152 to a 777. This is because there’s simply nothing in the air to provide any disturbance to the airflow. 

In the past, the default turbulence model was so poor, that even with wind modelled, it was so steady that it felt on rails all the time unless you encountered a wind change or specifically set up turbulence. This was even more true if people only few with clear skies. Clear skies and no wind absolutely should feel on rails. 

It seems the fix now has been to make the aircraft more sensitive and twitchy, combined with a generic turbulence effect. Whilst there seems to be genuine improvements in turbulence modelling from things such as terrain, thermals, etc, these are really let down by the generic effect applies to all aircraft, regardless of the actual atmospheric conditions being simulated.

42 minutes ago, norman_99 said:

generic effect

It's not really a generic effect though. It's supposed to be an air mass simulation. And it feels that way to me but as mentioned it needs to be refined and include more roll to the effect and reduce the see-sawing effect in favor of dips and climbs for the entire aircraft.

In the small Cessna props I get non-stop light bumping around, in any weather preset, at any altitude, over any kind of terrain, at any time of day. Never one second of steady non-turbulent flight. That just doesn't seem right. No settings that I've found anywhere to fix this either. Very annoying on a 4-hr flight to be constantly bumping around.

That's not true for every plane or every geography though.  I flew across a good section of Colorado yesterday in the XCub and had little to no movement at 12,000 feet other than mountain turbulence effects (very cool!). I could let go of my controller for minutes at a time with no change in altitude. This was with live weather (clear day with light winds).

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by MarkSC

On 8/23/2020 at 2:17 PM, Chock said:

As I've said, I don't object to the sim depicting turbulence, and even really bad turbulence, I want it too, but what I do not like at the moment, is the way it does it, by pivoting the aeroplane from its CoG so the nose is bouncing around all over the shop. That's not how turbulence affects an aeroplane; the entire aeroplane is moved by turbulence, so it moves in its entirety up, down sideways etc, with the occasional little roll movement or yaw movement.

I've reflected on that a little.

Turbulence are pockets of air with different speeds. When this air hits the plane, the high area of attack of the stabilizers causes quite a lot of momentum as well (just as on takeoff roll with side wind component). This applies to yaw as well as pitch. And it should also cause a roll momentum when it hits under your wing.

Sure it also moves the plane in a translatory manner, but this is not that sensible in the sim (no sense of motion other than headshake) as it would be in RL. However you can easily sense a rotational movement by the change in angle looking outside your cockpit window.

All in all we have a certain amount of rotation, depending on how severe the turbulence is. And that's the point IMO. The wind effect is generally a bit overdone in MSFS.

Edited August 26, 20205 yr by tweekz

On 8/23/2020 at 2:05 PM, Chock said:

Yes the nose will bounce around a bit, but most of what you are seeing when it appears to do that in real life, is the entire aeroplane bouncing around as it traverses through turbulent air. If you think about it logically, the aeroplane (at least in the case of a single engine Cessna) is being pulled through the air by a propeller.

This is a very good point Chock is making. You do get roll in aircraft because small pockets of air affect wings assymetrically, and you get yaw, but pitch is another matter. As almost all wings have their centre of lift very close to the CofG, then any updraft or sink tends to affect the whole aircraft, not the nose. The nose pitching in every aircraft is the most stable part, movement-wise.

In the video example, the pilot has very well adapted his movements to the sim. Although you cannot see much of the real aircraft's yoke you can see his hand movements. His movements on the sim aircraft are tiny and at times imperceptable. The telling moment is the flare, when the sim aircraft has trouble flaring in a stable manner. At this point most aircraft, if they are near the stall, require an assertive amount of back pressure - not enormous - but significant. They generally flare quite elegantly unless the pilot over-reacts or over-pulls/pushes.

In another video a female pilot (of a Dash-8 I think?) is flying an FS2020 approach in a similar category aircraft and is fine until the flare point, where she is surprised by the extreme instability of the nose and is overwhelmed by it to the point where the sim aircraft crashes. 

On 8/24/2020 at 9:38 AM, norman_99 said:

There definitely seems to be a concentrated effort to remove the “on rails” feel so many have previously complained about. The problem is the manner in which it has been implemented, as a generic, singular overall effect to the aircraft, rather than as a true, live aerodynamic simulation. I don’t care what you fly, if it’s a perfectly still morning, with no wind, everything feels like it’s on rails, from a 152 to a 777. This is because there’s simply nothing in the air to provide any disturbance to the airflow. 

In the past, the default turbulence model was so poor, that even with wind modelled, it was so steady that it felt on rails all the time unless you encountered a wind change or specifically set up turbulence. This was even more true if people only few with clear skies. Clear skies and no wind absolutely should feel on rails. 

It seems the fix now has been to make the aircraft more sensitive and twitchy, combined with a generic turbulence effect. Whilst there seems to be genuine improvements in turbulence modelling from things such as terrain, thermals, etc, these are really let down by the generic effect applies to all aircraft, regardless of the actual atmospheric conditions being simulated.

As a real world pilot with 7K hours, I couldn't have said it any better myself. This is such a flub by Microsoft that I can hardly believe it. I prefer the old flight model. At least that could simulate a smooth flight. This new one is so irritating and not any more realistic and yes, I deleted the wind layers. It's like Microsoft is trying to trick sim pilots with "look! no more rails!" Sorry, can't fool me. I only fly MSFS for sightseeing. If I wanna enjoy flying, I go back to P3D

1 hour ago, tyda0501 said:

As a real world pilot with 7K hours, I couldn't have said it any better myself. This is such a flub by Microsoft that I can hardly believe it. I prefer the old flight model. At least that could simulate a smooth flight. This new one is so irritating and not any more realistic and yes, I deleted the wind layers. It's like Microsoft is trying to trick sim pilots with "look! no more rails!" Sorry, can't fool me. I only fly MSFS for sightseeing. If I wanna enjoy flying, I go back to P3D

Agree fully and I made the same point a few days ago. There's nothing wrong with simulating turbulence that is related to weather. It's a good addition to visceral feedback. But baking in an artificial oscillation is not a good idea. It means that even on the most benign evenings or mornings, you are still going to get that constant baked in movement. It drives me nuts too!

On 8/24/2020 at 12:53 PM, desbean said:

In the small Cessna props I get non-stop light bumping around,

I had a perfectly stable early morning flight in a Virus over Quebec the other day in live stormy weather. If anything, the weather was bugged as I had no turbulence when I should have had. The aircraft was perfectly stable with no control inputs and AP off.

Edited August 27, 20205 yr by Slides

Here is good overview of turbulense that would be nice to see in the sim

 

https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/turbulence_stuff/turbulence/turbulence.htm

1 hour ago, sd_flyer said:

Here is good overview of turbulense that would be nice to see in the sim

 

https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/turbulence_stuff/turbulence/turbulence.htm

It's a challenging problem because if you look at that page and that page alone, you would think nothing EVER flies stable in real life. But that's clearly not true. I suspect modeling accurate turbulence is more difficult than the actual flight model. I appreciate Asobo's attempt at doing this as no one else really has so far. It's not perfect by any means. I look forward to the fine tuning to make it better. It will never be perfect in a sim.

Edited August 27, 20205 yr by Slides

Well the turbulence issue isn't nearly as bad as the twitchy landing issue when trying to flare due to weird ground effect.

Flaring in most planes causes 2 things, unrealistic amount of ground effect (heck even with no flaps I get huge ground effect even when under the optimal speed at the correct pitch), and unrealistic need to flare too hard to lose extra speed to try to get the plane on the ground.

I mean it should be possible to actually land just a little fast, not all planes are suspended in air from ground effect when flaring even when coming in a bit fast.

I'm not a real pilot, so hard to say, but definitely something feels off in the landing more than any other part of the procedure.

Edited August 27, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

@Slides if you want to avoid turbulence then you would want to fly in a high pressure area, stable airmass (that means vertical movement is impeded because the air is warmer than the surface = no convection). 

Early sunny mornings with no clouds or stratus clouds is a good time to fly and should be turbulence free (even radiation fog is also a good incidator, the fog will dissipate into stratiform clouds as the sun rises)

Edited August 27, 20205 yr by SAS443