I just updated to the new patch and did my usual First Flight from my home airport in Bonham down highway 75 to downtown Dallas and back to Bonham.  I've done this flight a few times in every sim I've owned and am intimately familiar with it.

The first thing I noticed was that my ported Stearman didn't crash.  Second was that the TrackIR view didn't reset after 6 seconds, thank you Asobo.  F00 still has no buildings, just roofs on the ground, as expected. 

The third thing I noticed was that roads looked different.  It looks like they've done an overlay to correct the color and possibly blur the graphics a bit.  I haven't flown over any "green roads" so I don't know if that's been fixed;  has anyone checked it out yet?  Highway 75 still had center stripes but they weren't as prominent as before.

I flew over my house, found it quite easily this time.  Both houses and my barn were there, but the barn had a peaked roof.  Looks close enough to me! 😄 

Fourth thing I noticed was that while I could still see buildings out to a great distance, trees weren't being drawn quite as far.  I was flying about 1000 AGL.  I'm trying to decide if I liked that effect better.  It did make it easier to find airports off my direct route.

I did see a few power line towers, but the radio towers are still AWOL.  Weather was accurate:  severe clear. 😄 Not as much wind as I would have expected but I'm not complaining.  Downtown Dallas is still generic buildings... again, as expected.  I didn't even try to open the VFR Map, I just alt-tabbed out to skyvector and Little Navmap as necessary.  I didn't notice any overly tall buildings where they shouldn't have been.

I gotta say that highway 121 back to Bonham was a lot easier to follow with the new roads.  Scenery graphics are still phenomenal.  From what I'm seeing, we've gotten improvements except for the lower LOD on trees.  Water in the river looked OK. Frame rate seems about the same.

I did not get the Japan expansion.  I have never used scenery cache.  I set my graphics on Ultra when I got the sim and haven't changed them, and a comparison of old and new options files showed them to be identical.

Hook

1 minute ago, LHookins said:

I just updated to the new patch and did my usual First Flight from my home airport in Bonham down highway 75 to downtown Dallas and back to Bonham.  I've done this flight a few times in every sim I've owned and am intimately familiar with it.

The first thing I noticed was that my ported Stearman didn't crash.  Second was that the TrackIR view didn't reset after 6 seconds, thank you Asobo.  F00 still has no buildings, just roofs on the ground, as expected. 

The third thing I noticed was that roads looked different.  It looks like they've done an overlay to correct the color and possibly blur the graphics a bit.  I haven't flown over any "green roads" so I don't know if that's been fixed;  has anyone checked it out yet?  Highway 75 still had center stripes but they weren't as prominent as before.

I flew over my house, found it quite easily this time.  Both houses and my barn were there, but the barn had a peaked roof.  Looks close enough to me! 😄 

Fourth thing I noticed was that while I could still see buildings out to a great distance, trees weren't being drawn quite as far.  I was flying about 1000 AGL.  I'm trying to decide if I liked that effect better.  It did make it easier to find airports off my direct route.

I did see a few power line towers, but the radio towers are still AWOL.  Weather was accurate:  severe clear. 😄 Not as much wind as I would have expected but I'm not complaining.  Downtown Dallas is still generic buildings... again, as expected.  I didn't even try to open the VFR Map, I just alt-tabbed out to skyvector and Little Navmap as necessary.  I didn't notice any overly tall buildings where they shouldn't have been.

I gotta say that highway 121 back to Bonham was a lot easier to follow with the new roads.  Scenery graphics are still phenomenal.  From what I'm seeing, we've gotten improvements except for the lower LOD on trees.  Water in the river looked OK. Frame rate seems about the same.

I did not get the Japan expansion.  I have never used scenery cache.  I set my graphics on Ultra when I got the sim and haven't changed them, and a comparison of old and new options files showed them to be identical.

Hook

A couple of things...

1)  They stated today in the Q&A that there did seem to be an issue with LOD and trees and building draw distances..  it was not a deliberate "dumbing down" of the sim and they are trying to determine what happened and in fact they are contemplating extending the draw distance as the distant objects take little extra power to represent.

2)  They also stated today that they are working hard on an "obstructions" database which will include things like power lines, radio towers, etc etc and investigating what source, by country, can provide the best records that they can use to incorporate these as they have found that a lot of the sources for obstructions are not accurate enough to use reliably.

3)  They also talked about things such as roads masking and night-time masking and stated that they have pulled in a dev team from Microsoft China to help with all of this using some new-fangled tech that Microsoft China are developing and are trying various solutions (maybe you flew in an "experimental" area on your flight.

Finally, they also mentioned that they are now working with a number of orgaanisations such as Ordnance Survey in the UK and similar organisations in other countries to see how they can incorporate their data into the sim to make it even more accurate..

I was also pleased to note that they also have internal teams from other organisations, such as a team from ORBX working on the in-game airports and other things...   so Hopefully  that will help everyone with an even better sim 🙂

Regards

Graham

2 minutes ago, Moria15 said:

A couple of things...

1)  They stated today in the Q&A that there did seem to be an issue with LOD and trees and building draw distances..  it was not a deliberate "dumbing down" of the sim and they are trying to determine what happened and in fact they are contemplating extending the draw distance as the distant objects take little extra power to represent.

2)  They also stated today that they are working hard on an "obstructions" database which will include things like power lines, radio towers, etc etc and investigating what source, by country, can provide the best records that they can use to incorporate these as they have found that a lot of the sources for obstructions are not accurate enough to use reliably.

3)  They also talked about things such as roads masking and night-time masking and stated that they have pulled in a dev team from Microsoft China to help with all of this using some new-fangled tech that Microsoft China are developing and are trying various solutions (maybe you flew in an "experimental" area on your flight.

Finally, they also mentioned that they are now working with a number of orgaanisations such as Ordnance Survey in the UK and similar organisations in other countries to see how they can incorporate their data into the sim to make it even more accurate..

I was also pleased to note that they also have internal teams from other organisations, such as a team from ORBX working on the in-game airports and other things...   so Hopefully  that will help everyone with an even better sim 🙂

Regards

Graham

yes, I found their candor, responsiveness, insights etc quite helpful to relax me about where the sim is going and glad they are aware of the issues etc...  and they even acknowledged they need to slow down.. trying to do too much almost...   worthwhile to watch on TWITCH Microsoft channel for those interested

1 minute ago, KORH Jeff said:

yes, I found their candor, responsiveness, insights etc quite helpful to relax me about where the sim is going and glad they are aware of the issues etc...  and they even acknowledged they need to slow down.. trying to do too much almost...   worthwhile to watch on TWITCH Microsoft channel for those interested

Me too.. however, let's not forget  that a Q&A such as that is usually somewhat scripted and is a marketing exercise  (after all I am sure most of the responses were developed prior to the last patch dropping), but even so, having said that, I agree the candour was good and I think speaks well for the future.

Graham

37 minutes ago, LHookins said:

The first thing I noticed was that my ported Stearman didn't crash.

Is it the model from Microsoft Flight?

The #1 thing I noticed with this update is that over the Los Angeles area, and also where I live near San Jose, CA, is that I can fly theses areas on full Ultra settings with reasonably clear weather (few clouds) and get a solid 30 fps, using the nvidia driver fps limiter.  With any more than a few clouds, notching back clouds to high brings back a solid 30 fps.  Running on a 2K monitor driven by a gtx 1070...before this update full ultra choked my card to 20 or fewer fps.  The big thing about draw distance now being limited I've also noticed, along with the more prevalent autogen pop.  Is this performance increase worth this loss?  Hmm.... I'm uncommitted as of yet...seems my gtx 1070 just got more life left in it than I thought a few days ago.  Check my rig specs in my sig for more details.

 

Edit: I would image that if one has a 40" or bigger display, the newly limited draw distance would be considerably more jarring of a change.

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by TheFamilyMan

2 hours ago, Moria15 said:

They stated today in the Q&A that there did seem to be an issue with LOD and trees and building draw distances.

I know.  I read the summary.  I was quite impressed with their answers.  Actually, I was expecting things to be much worse given the comments in the forum.  What I saw looked pretty good.
 

2 hours ago, Moria15 said:

They also stated today that they are working hard on an "obstructions" database which will include things like power lines, radio towers, etc etc and investigating what source, by country, can provide the best records that they can use

We're seeing power lines.  Still need radio towers, water towers, factory stacks and such.  I've been flying without them without major problems, but I do miss them.  On my last flight a single radio tower would have been a good check point as there was nothing else along that half hour route that I could use.  I guess hazards.bgl from FSX etc isn't quite accurate enough? 😄  Funny, I've found two or three radio towers out of place out of thousands, and I suspect it was the chart that was wrong in those cases.  Yes, the official charts have errors, and you'll see them with MSFS.
 

2 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Is it the model from Microsoft Flight?

It's the Golden Age Simulations Super Stearman with my Cannibal Queen paint job and a bunch of my custom "accu-engine" code to make the Queen do everything it did in the book.  Ports don't work very well (no click spots for example, no bump maps, etc) but I've got this one flyable.

I just landed from another flight.  Had some slightly greenish roads but not like before.  If there was any autogen popping, I didn't notice it at 3500 feet; visibility wasn't quite as good as the first flight.

One thing I noticed is that my flights aren't showing up in the log book or being added to my Profile time.  They were in the previous patch.

Hook

3 hours ago, LHookins said:

I did not get the Japan expansion. 

How did you not get the Japan expansion?  I mean, I thought if you downloaded the update you got the Japan expansion whether you wanted it or not. (?)  Anyway I didn't seem to have an option, the sim just updated itself along with Japan data it seems?

Just now, Mace said:

How did you not get the Japan expansion?  I mean, I thought if you downloaded the update you got the Japan expansion whether you wanted it or not. (?)  Anyway I didn't seem to have an option, the sim just updated itself along with Japan data it seems?

For me, the patch download and install was automatic but to get the new Japan scenery to install I had to go into the marketplace and manually "buy" it for free and then it downloaded and installed.  Until I hit "buy" in the marketplace I just had the new patch and no japan addon.

Just now, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

For me, the patch download and install was automatic but to get the new Japan scenery to install I had to go into the marketplace and manually "buy" it for free and then it downloaded and installed.  Until I hit "buy" in the marketplace I just had the new patch and no japan addon.

Hmm you guys are smarter than I am.  I did go to the store and kept right on clicking.  I'd be a sucker for malware when it comes to flight sim no doubt.

4 hours ago, Moria15 said:

Me too.. however, let's not forget  that a Q&A such as that is usually somewhat scripted and is a marketing exercise  (after all I am sure most of the responses were developed prior to the last patch dropping), but even so, having said that, I agree the candour was good and I think speaks well for the future.

Graham

It honestly didn't sound scripted to me. Too many off the head answers.

Thanks for the insight LHookins. McKinney National, Aero Country, Air Park-Dallas and Addison are my local airports and I've been disappointed that the Dallas / North of Dallas area doesn't look as good, but I'm biased. I drive up to Bonham about once a year in the fall and enjoy the drive. I'll check the area out again. 

3 hours ago, JJ_ said:

I drive up to Bonham about once a year in the fall and enjoy the drive. I'll check the area out again. 

If you fly up highway 121 to get to Bonham, check out Tejas Stone Ranch (88XA) just past Melissa;  it's in the sim.  I see that every time I pass on the road and it looks great from the air.  It doesn't obviously look like a runway, but you know where it is. 🙂  From the road, the sign on the fence says "Top Fun".  It's actually worth the trip, at least in MSFS.

Hook

20 hours ago, LHookins said:

If you fly up highway 121 to get to Bonham, check out Tejas Stone Ranch (88XA) just past Melissa;  it's in the sim.  I see that every time I pass on the road and it looks great from the air.  It doesn't obviously look like a runway, but you know where it is. 🙂  From the road, the sign on the fence says "Top Fun".  It's actually worth the trip, at least in MSFS.

Hook

Every time I drive by that place, it looks very interesting, but until now, didn't realize there is an airport there! I'm going to have do a low and slow fly over (if not, try to land there), perhaps with the Zlin Shock or Savage. 🙂 Thanks for the tip! P.S. they have a 2000' seaport, so perhaps the Icon is in order.

Edited October 2, 20205 yr by JJ_

It's been a while but I've seen a Cessna parked there, and they used to have a wind sock.  It never occurred to me that you could land a float plane on the water;  I'll have to try that.  My son tells me they have several recreational activities.

If anyone wonders why MSFS is so special, this is why.  Flying isn't just all about jets and international airports, it's about these little recreational air parks or bush strips out in Papua New Guinea or sand banks in Alaska.  Or little lakes in remote locations where no one has ever been and you can go there and fish.  And it's all there, even if the runway isn't actually an airport in MSFS, it's still visible and you can land on it.  There more to do than just sightseeing. 🙂 

Hook