MSFS - My Take

[canuk_22 24]

My take, I've been flying XP10 & P3Dv5 ever since, XP11 next paycheque.  I have zero plans to buy FS2020 addons for at least 1 year.  I use it for some GA here and there, keeping my eyes open to see what the updates will bring.  A friend is RW pilot on a Dash 8 and he asked me my thoughts, when I told him his reaction was, I'll wait.

[Johan_Dees 84]

Hi gentlemen, and perhaps a woman or two ?

Its been a long time, absent for may years. After FDE work in FS2004 and a bit of FSX I stopped simming all together,
But now seeing this new sim, the itching starts again. Lurking for a while, reading and looking at YT movies I have a rough idea of waht the sim yet cannot do.
We sure miss a lot.

But, after many years of simming and pretending, airliners are not for me any more. Been there done that,

This new sim is the VFR sim avant la lettre, or in english, perfectly fit.

On to the questions.

What recommendations you do for buying a machine to run this on ?

I see 32 GB ram is enough. A fast CPU is very under utilised. (bug or patch needed), and a GPU card ?.

Any affordable suggestions ? is i7 still in the game or ?

Oh, I dream of a fluid VFR flight in all kinds of weather, with a nice radial, DC3 or a uhm.. L749

Greetings,

 

Johan

Edited September 15, 2020 by Johan_Dees

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

34 minutes ago, Johan_Dees said:

On to the questions.

What recommendations you do for buying a machine to run this on ?

I see 32 GB ram is enough. A fast CPU is very under utilised. (bug or patch needed), and a GPU card ?.

Any affordable suggestions ? is i7 still in the game or ?

Oh, I dream of a fluid VFR flight in all kinds of weather, with a nice radial, DC3 or a uhm.. L749

Greetings,

 

Johan

No radials at present... but as for Hardware... just read the forums.

My view (using a 1080 monitor):

i7 YES,  even my 4770K@4.1 can run it

32 GB is plenty, I run it on 16 GB

GTX 1070 or better

Also need a decent internet connection and a dedicated 500 GB SSD.

4K monitor.. different situation..

Edited September 15, 2020 by Bert Pieke

[Johan_Dees 84]

"Just read the forums"

Too much conflicting opinions.

So you say, i7 4470, 32 GB and a GTX1070.
Internet is fast, and a fat SSD.

I use only 1080p, more then adequate.

Hmm, will checkup on others who have this more or less..

[Paraffin 2,197]

21 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Your experience is similar to mine and many others, but I'll keep MSFS around and hope for the future as it has much that can be improved.

Same here. I'll keep it and dip in and out occasionally for low-level sightseeing, but it will be a while before it could be a full-tim sim for me. I wish we could fast-forward to next summer and see what it's like by then.

According to Asobo that's when they might release a paid helicopter expansion. That really should have been a part of the sim from day one, given the focus on "next gen" scenery, but it's a big job to do helicopters right. Taking a year to finish it is at least an encouraging sign that it will be a full-featured flight and systems modeling for helicopters like DCS and X-Plane.

By next Summer we should also have more of the bush and vintage planes I'm interested in. The default planes aren't really floating my boat other than maybe the Caravan, and I'm just not a fan of glass panels. 
 

18 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Actually, you can turn off Photogrammetry, and I have good news for you... no flattened cars, houses, or trees.  The 3d buildings are quite well done, and cars drive along the roads..

It depends on where you're flying. In areas I fly in the Pacific Northwest, there are many smaller towns with no photogrammetry, and I see plenty of squashed cars and other 2D artifacts. One or two squashed cars are hard to see, but it's more apparent when I fly over a parking lot with a hundred or so squashed cars. It's also very visible with marinas, where boats and piers are just pixellated squashed objects.

I don't expect this to change, because I still see that with products like Orbx TE ortho-based scenery that's hand edited. You can't catch everything, and with worldwide coverage it will be impossible for Asobo to edit out these artifacts. Maybe one day the Azure AI will be good enough to catch it, but it obviously isn't there yet.
 

17 hours ago, hangar said:

Yes it would be nice...but at least it's not a game breaker.

In XP11 we're able to assign a profile to whichever planes you select in a menu...then that profile gets auto loaded with the plane or planes you previously assigned it to. Works great and would be nice to see that feature here as well.

I wish Asobo would adopt that idea. They're almost there with the ability to save different user profiles for controller settings, but we have to choose that manually before flying an aircraft. Now they just need to follow the XP11 example to automatically switch profiles assigned to a specific aircraft or group of aircraft types. 

 

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

47 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

It depends on where you're flying. In areas I fly in the Pacific Northwest, there are many smaller towns with no photogrammetry, and I see plenty of squashed cars and other 2D artifacts. One or two squashed cars are hard to see, but it's more apparent when I fly over a parking lot with a hundred or so squashed cars. It's also very visible with marinas, where boats and piers are just pixellated squashed objects.

I did not say it was perfect... but as you said "One or two squashed cars are hard to see.."

When you go bush flying, there are not a lot of big parking lots around 🙂

[UAL4life 237]

The sim is a nice Bing Explorer, I would go back to P3d if I had the time to install all the addons and tweak but it’s simply too much of hassle to even begin doing so. 

[bean_sprout 1,201]

3 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

So what about those of us who prefer future "simulation technology" over future "looking"? 

My point is that the current harvest of sims are backward looking while FS2020 is not.  As a coder I want to go forward and help design a new path.  The old (current) sims are just that - old sims.

Regards

bs

[wills42 0]

I've been flying flight simulators and using add ons both payware and freeware since the early 90s.  Today I uninstalled MSFS premium  from my computer.  I may give it another go when they release the next "patch" but for now other than it's pretty to look at I don't have anything else positive to say about it.  I tried and failed to get a modded A320 to even show up as an optional plane  after trying half dozen methods found on youtube on how to do it. even after being successful at installing some liveries... go figure.  So for now, I'm sticking with P3D 4 & 5 and XP11. 

[bean_sprout 1,201]

What about realism?  The old sims always felt like I was flying a game where as FS2020 feels like an RL experience.

Cheers

bs

[hangar 660]

51 minutes ago, bean_sprout said:

What about realism?  The old sims always felt like I was flying a game where as FS2020 feels like an RL experience.

Cheers

bs

I think what he's trying to say is that... other than the visuals, what makes it more life like than it's predecessors for you?

..and for him the answer is little or perhaps even nothing.

Edited September 16, 2020 by hangar

[bean_sprout 1,201]

Correct - airplane gadgets and even flight models don't get me excited as a realistic world environment.  That's a major point of FS2020 IMO.

Cheers

bs

Edited September 16, 2020 by bean_sprout

[Scottoest 1,561]

6 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

That's the part I don't understand, it's already supposed to be there so what happened?

Nah, this is word not allowed.  No one ever claimed Azure (or the Blackshark.AI algos) were in a place where it could create a perfect rendition of the entire planet with no errors.  Even one of the official trailers for the sim briefly showed a photogrammetry area with the blob trees.  The point was to create a believable rendition of the planet out of the box, from the point of view of a plane high in the air, by knitting together a bunch of different data sources and technologies to parse that data.  The sim overwhelmingly succeeds at that 95% of the time, even as people find terrain errors all over. 

The planet is a large place, and I predicted months before the sim even came out that we'd all have a front row seat to months of "so this is the future? lol"-style posts as people found and drew attention to the places where the algorithms got it wrong, or bugs surfaced.  There was never any chance that a bunch of automated processes would get it 100% right, nor that Asobo could ever hope to give the entire planet a "oncer over" check for errors.  All they can do is refine their data sources over time, and refine the tools that process them - and indeed that appears to be part of the purpose of their "world updates".  The community itself has also overwhelmingly responded with lots of easy-to-apply terrain fixes to some of the problem spots.

At some point people need to evaluate MSFS as what it is - a nascent v1.0 release for a next-generation platform that is going to see years of refinement, exactly like P3D and X-Plane have over the years - instead of smugly and/or snarkily evaluating it based on the fever dreams of some of it's most over-hyped supporters from months ago (as though there weren't people pushing back against the overheated hype even back then).

It's an exciting new platform that integrates lots of exciting newer technologies and features, being worked on by a huge group of developers for the forseeable future, who give every indication of being completely committed to making that platform as good as it can possibly be.

[nbhall68 106]

I honestly don't understand a lot of the naysayers.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion of course, but my experience has been amazing.  And I'm not new to this.  Some claim the flight model is "spot on", others claim it's complete garbage.  Lol!  Well, that was predictable.

I think much of the problem is that it's just different.  If you want a deterministic, well behaved flight model then you have plenty of options, but maybe MSFS 2020 is not for you.  There's nothing flight simmers like more than to get up on their high horse about "realism" while they're flying their desk.  I applaud Asobo for having the courage to step outside of the well accepted box and take a shot at the future.

Personally, I've found the flight model in MSFS 2020 to be very interesting.  It's certainly more alive and I don't find it to be as "random" as some have claimed.  I've had very smooth flights (usually at higher altitudes and/or in calm smooth air...not a cloud in the sky).  I've also had flights that were quite bumpy, often at lower altitudes and in and around clouds.  Is it perfect?  Well of course not, but I find it to be quite believable.  

But the part that amazes me the most is that it's only been out for 1 month.  Are any of you old enough to remember P3D 1 month after release?  Or X-Plane 1 month after release?  Or how about FSX 1 month after release?  Apparently not.

[craigeaglefire 195]

i like MFS,

i like P3D (purchased FSDT O'Hare V2 this morming)

i like XP11.5

i like DCS

i like Aerofly FS2

no problem!