I tell you one things after release of FSX I had to wait about 5 years to get powerful enough PC so I can run sim on high settings. This is not a case with MSFS2020

As far IFR flying we need update navdatabase and enhance basic GPS functionality in MSFS !

7 hours ago, qnh said:

I must admit I tend to agree with most of what he said. This product has been rushed to market, it is effectively still a beta; thankfully I used a Microsoft Gamepass to test it out before buying. I'm going to put it back on the shelf and wait 12 months before having another look to see if it has matured.

 

I find responses like this quite confusing.  Every single flight I make is stunning with superb lighting, scenery and aircraft (C152 and DA40 are good).  The weather never fails to make me mutter a few expletives under my breath it is that good.  It won't be long until third party developers gives us study level aircraft and instrumentation.

No other simulator out the box has ever been this good.  I guess some people get a strange sense of achievement by moaning.

3 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

... brings back these memories of dispair in 2006 when I realized that my (then) potent computer was seen as a potato by FSX. It took me 5 more years (2011) until I bought an i5 2500k which handled FSX good enough.

oh how quickly People forget. in MSFS I am buzzing downtown Manhattan in 4K at almost 60fps straight put of the box.

Hardware couldn't coupe back then in 2006 with FSX, and a lot of people stayed at FS9... We had to wait for the first sp for FSX to make a bit enjoyably...

But FSX was in so many ways off, talking about an to early release... 

Edited August 26, 20205 yr by awf

7 hours ago, ErichB said:

Maybe Bruce needs to be reminded just how crass FSX was when it was first released - not to mention the awful performance.  Desert landscapes as far as the eye could see - absolutely everywhere.  There was absolutely nothing to like about default FSX.  Nothing at all.  Don't even get me started on flight models of FSX default aircraft.    I think time has conveniently erased that from his memory.  Only two years after initial release did people start saying, 'oh okay, this isn't bad'.  Aces only released 2 small patches for FSX and that was the extent of the FSX support and development.  It was ridiculous.  Orbx single-handedly saved FSX by transforming it into something people actually wanted to use.  I'm not a huge John Venema fan, but the success of FSX and its longevity, can largely be attributed to him.   Third parties (out of extreme necessity) made FSX what it was.  And not because it was that amazing to work with either.  Much of the FSX development was  based on complex workarounds because of the shortcomings of the SDK - many of which have only recently been addressed by Lockheed Martin's P3D team.

People are being very short sighted with their commentary.    Especially people who should know better.  Many commentators are giving their 'nit-picky' view of individual aspects from 500ft . That's easy to do.  Any kid with an Xbox controller can nitpick.  People who know better should provide more insightful commentary about MFS as a platform and its potential (or lack of potential) -  from 30,000ft - and substantiate their commentary.  Otherwise, their Youtube ramblings are worthless.

Of course, what most users (especially new users) are looking for is validation from IRL pilots and developers.  We all want the comfort of our new sim being validated.  But real pilots and  developers will also only provide a subjective view.  Those views can differ considerably between a pilot using a crappy, poorly calibrated controller, sub-par hardware and a stuttery internet connection and another using a $600 yoke, a $300 throttle unit and a 55' 4K screen with a good internet connection.   I know which scenario will deliver a better overall perspective.

We are one week into release,  and already I am amazed at what people are doing with it and the extent of third party releases. It is unprecedented in our flightsim history.   Of course there are issues.  But it's only a week old and they will be resolved.

'A step back for real pilots and serious simmers'?  Give me a break.

Agree 100% with your comments!

Every other day Orbx has released new content.  The good in Flight Simulator far outweighs the initial bugs and oversights.  Imagine being able to navigate the WHOLE world in VFR and saying the product is bad!

Flight simmers hate change. Even when they get something better. Just the way it's always been. 

4 minutes ago, Slides said:

Flight simmers hate change. Even when they get something better. Just the way it's always been. 

Yeah I just don't want that to kill a new sim and we get stuck with another decade of old tech.

To me, some people who struggle with success in their personal ventures have a hard time accepting / acknowledging / praising success in others.

The common saying from critics is that MSFS “looks great” but lacks depth.

If we consider that many people had depth in other sims prior to MSFS, how did Orbx, Rex, Active Sky, Carenado thrive? Because people wanted something that “looks great.”

He writes...

“The beautiful scenery and modeling will engage “simmers” only so long before they return to FSX or X-Plane and the many add-ons that make those simulations much more realistic and complete experiences of “flying.”

Those "other" many addons had much to do with "great looks" that people won't have to get in MSFS. And how much better will MSFS get when it gets those aircraft addons with more depth that every other sim requires for those so called serious simmers?

MSFS has "positioned" themselves to be the flight sim of the future…therefore it is not about the people going "back" to other sims, they have already been accounted for. It is about the new people coming into the genre...for basically $100 they get the next gen sim and visual that match current gen games without the need for all those addons (costing $hundreds more). 

 

9 hours ago, ErichB said:

Maybe Bruce needs to be reminded just how crass FSX was when it was first released - not to mention the awful performance. 

This is the post of the year and the year is not even over yet! 

Edited August 26, 20205 yr by n4gix
Removed unnecessary long quote!

48 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

... brings back these memories of dispair in 2006 when I realized that my (then) potent computer was seen as a potato by FSX. It took me 5 more years (2011) until I bought an i5 2500k which handled FSX good enough.

oh how quickly People forget. in MSFS I am buzzing downtown Manhattan in 4K at almost 60fps straight put of the box.

Exactly.

Even before FSX was released, we knew the methodology FS used was long in the tooth and was only going to get worse and there were many discussions about it, with people all saying the sim needed redoing from the ground up. Unfortunately at that time its main supporter - Bill Gates - was looking to hand over the MS reins and so the enthusiasm and investment he had for flight sims, which was a necessary component in its success in preceding years, was not forthcoming.

So when FSX came out, it struggled to run on contemporary hardware and really, nobody who knew about computers and software was especially surprised. This was ironic because for years FS had effectively been Microsoft's technology demonstrator. Now MS is back to having something which is indeed a technology demonstrator once more, and it is impressive enough to be gaining mainstream media coverage from people who have no horse in the 'my sim's better than yours race', they are just telling it like it is.

And interestingly...

If you look at my video review of the new sim on YT, you'll see me compare the cost and capabilities of a copy of subLOGIC Flight Simulator from 1986, with the present version.

If you put the amount seen on the price tag sticker of my copy of it which I show (£34.99), into an historical inflation calculator and figure what it equals for 2018; you get an equivalent figure of £101.12, which is approaching double the cost of the standard version of the new sim and is only nine pounds less than price of the Premium Deluxe version. It is over 100 quid more than the Gamepass version.

So not only is the new sim better looking and vastly more capable, with coverage for the entire globe and a load of detailed airports and aeroplanes, it's actually vastly cheaper too.

And you can clearly see in my YT review, where I show all of the specs of my pretty modest PC in great detail, that the sim runs fine on it, right out of the box. That's whilst I'm recording the footage at 60fps (something notorious for tanking frame rates massively). And as if that wasn't enough to challenge that modest PC's resources, I was also recording a V/O and playing guitar and recording that too, all on that same PC whilst the new sim was running in the background.

Edited August 26, 20205 yr by Chock

8 hours ago, DavidP said:

As people frequently point out, FSX is 15 year old technology. It should be possible to do better these days, no?

My thoughts exactly. 15 years and zero progress in that department. But at least it’s pretty.

1 hour ago, awf said:

Here we disagree -;) they are different , or you have to use the legacy FDE 😉

If you analyse the new flight_model.cfg you will see it’s a concatenation of the old aircraft.cfg and air table in a txt format. That is to say based on derivatives.
I was surprised to see they changed the ground effect by plotting it vs mach which is quite weird... anyway The BIG new stuff Asobo introduced is the discretisation of aircraft surfaces according coarse geometry parameters as described in geometry section. From this geometry they deduce the basic surfaces (wing, tail, fuse...) that they cut in 1000 element surfaces on which they spread the forces computed from old air cfg system. Example : the lift computed from CL and it’s derivatives (CL vs mach, CL vs aoa) is spread on the computed coarse wing surface. The idea I think is to compute the moments of asymmetrical forces on the airplane. Could be interesting but in real life pressure and so forces are not not spread equally on all the surfaces. Take example if the lift. It spreads on the wing differently with AOA, drift angle, mach. The result of this spread evolution is the pitch moment described macroscopically by Cm coefficients. What is funny is despite Asobo computes forces application on 1000 surfaces to get these moments right, they kept Cm coefficients in the new cfg. The risk is the moments get overestimated by addition of Cm and force repartition.

I would have loved to see implementation of multi wing, a more evolved drag model including effect of Reynolds, mach and aoa conjugated, effect of slats on CL vs aoa etc...

Regarding the UI and the initial menus, there were many comments in the Alpha test about the console-ish design, with overly large click boxes and inefficient use of screen real estate. I get that this is actually necessary because it will be released on XBox, but it would have been nice to have an alternative, more functional UI available for PC pilots. It's a minor complaint, we'll get used to it, but nothing wrong with pointing it out.

He's also making a good point about the bare bones avionics, especially the GPS functions. It's something that surprised me coming from X-Plane where we have several full featured (if not 100%) GPS units in the default sim without needing add-ons.

I fear that we're looking at having to spend a lot of money soon for 3rd party GPS units. Again, something I'll get used to, but worth pointing out when at least one other current sim includes more functional default avionics. 

Maybe he didn't give enough props to how stunning the world depiction is for VFR navigation and general immersion, but overall I think it was a fair assessment.

Developers on MS flight sim up to FSX failed miserably. I distinctly remember upgrading the PC at the time including buying a very expensive Nvidia 7800 GTX, only to load up FSX and fly over Seattle city and get 7 fps. That thing was a complete dog of a sim.  And basically the reason why I retired from flight sim for quite a while before coming back to XP11 in 2016.  Developers like this fella are a total disgrace to the history of flight sim.  Microsoft was completely right to fire the lot of them.

Greazer.

Edited August 26, 20205 yr by Greazer

The UI for me personally, is absolutely beautiful, modern, clean and simple. Especially the flight planner with the Globe displaying all the bits and pieces of information where you can toggle on or off. This makes the whole experience much more visual and easier to understand. This is how I've envisioned what flight planning of the future would be like and it's certainly a huge step forward in the right direction. I hope they will further add more stuff to the flight planner to make it more powerful. Like the ability to go in and paste routes and edit waypoints by dragging and zooming in the globe on the areas we want to fly in. And also the ability for it to assign correct runways for takeoff and landing based on live weather data.

Edited August 26, 20205 yr by captain420

I agree with nothing the original poster said or very little. Others have already pointed out that much or all of the bitter ire and frustration with early MSFS products has been repressed, which is what humans do under stress and disappointment. It's going to take Asobo and the gathered forces of many developer add-ons to take this sim where it will eventual end up. Until then I love this thing, a lot! I have had problems but have learned to adjust and be patient. Months and months of development remain and no, this title should not have been held up in months more of betas until it was "finished." Sims like this are never finished and no, this is not a game. It's a sim.
United001