42 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Maybe it's more important for serious gamerz to study for their PPL's. That way, they can use the sim, any sim actually, to learn and better their procedural skills with complex addons. I'm purposely not using that ridiculous term of 'study level', complex is more appropriate. 

Anyhow, that's the way we worked at our Virtual Club, with PPL's. It made us all better virtual pilots, and their enthusiasm helped a lot of us become real pilots. The immersion of the sim, NOT the eye candy did the trick. 

As a commander of a real plane then, what are the immersion factors that are "must haves" for you?

Did they change throughout your training?

Well, a typical example of immersion is 'bumping' in your seat, anticipating touchdown, sing joystick, yoke & pedals with appropriate aircraft. Once you are immersed in the virtual flying, eye candy becomes secondary to your flight.

We have seen this many times, when we had a young pilot visit us, as she was offered a job, flying for DHL at Luton, using freeware scenery & addon free Boeing aircraft & she wanted to practice (she got the job) also  with kids we were mentoring, becoming so immersed with basic scenery & planes, and watching them getting their PPL's. All this with FS2004, by the way. Eye candy would not have made any difference at all, nor would it have increased the flight experience.

So, immersion is really a state of mind with what you are doing. You can be as immersed in flying a Cessna, as you are with flying a complex aircraft, irrespective of what the scenery is looking like. It far outweighs the realism factor, which is basically non existent when sitting & simming at home, sitting on a chair, joystick in hand, landing a yoke'd aircraft (Boeing et al)

 

M. Wlock will certainly learn a lot about flying a GA aircraft, but will not change anything regarding liners. You don't need to be an A320 pilot to model an A320 correctly (I know what I am talking about), you just need to talk to the right people, which Asobo is supposed to be in contact with (they say they are helped by Airbus). If this is true, they may even fly a pro full flight sim. I am not sure this ever happened, and if they were really in contact with Airbus experts that can test their aircraft, the A320 wouldn't be that bad. 

1 hour ago, Wobbie said:

Well, a typical example of immersion is 'bumping' in your seat, anticipating touchdown, sing joystick, yoke & pedals with appropriate aircraft. Once you are immersed in the virtual flying, eye candy becomes secondary to your flight.

We have seen this many times, when we had a young pilot visit us, as she was offered a job, flying for DHL at Luton, using freeware scenery & addon free Boeing aircraft & she wanted to practice (she got the job) also  with kids we were mentoring, becoming so immersed with basic scenery & planes, and watching them getting their PPL's. All this with FS2004, by the way. Eye candy would not have made any difference at all, nor would it have increased the flight experience.

So, immersion is really a state of mind with what you are doing. You can be as immersed in flying a Cessna, as you are with flying a complex aircraft, irrespective of what the scenery is looking like. It far outweighs the realism factor, which is basically non existent when sitting & simming at home, sitting on a chair, joystick in hand, landing a yoke'd aircraft (Boeing et al)

 

If you would prepare for a cross country to an area you have never flown to IRL. Would you use MSFS or FS2004?

I ask because flying in a pattern is what it is. But alot more is at stake when you sit alone in the cockpit and fly to various destinations, using primarily  visual cues outside of the aircraft.
Was FS9 a good VFR tool when you did your PPL training?

I think I'm going to take a break from reading Avsim for a while. Some of the responses on here to news of the man in charge of Flight Simulator gaining real world aviation qualifications are truly incomprehensible.

1 hour ago, SAS443 said:

If you would prepare for a cross country to an area you have never flown to IRL. Would you use MSFS or FS2004?

I ask because flying in a pattern is what it is. But alot more is at stake when you sit alone in the cockpit and fly to various destinations, using primarily  visual cues outside of the aircraft.
Was FS9 a good VFR tool when you did your PPL training?

 

We, I have often done cross-country rallies & flights, using FS2004. The freeware scenery that we have, available here, has all the elevations, roads, rivers & powerlines needed to navigate. The primary visual cues are perfect, & have been for the last 12 years. I do not need the expense of a high end computer to be able to use perfectly useful visual cues, for any VFR flights,.With MSFS, the visual clues are not guaranteed, as seen by others that have picked up errors.

So, yes, FS9 was, & is perfect for VFR, immersive when used correctly. Also used by many to practice procedures, as I mentioned earlier, with the DHL pilot practicing let downs to Luton.

 

Edited October 3, 20205 yr by Wobbie

46 minutes ago, lambourne said:

I think I'm going to take a break from reading Avsim for a while. Some of the responses on here to news of the man in charge of Flight Simulator gaining real world aviation qualifications are truly incomprehensible.

Having a theoretical written qualification does not a qualified PPL pilot make!

14 hours ago, Chock said:

Despite the fact that this is 'old news' since magazine stories tend to be written a while beforehand, I still can't believe some of the nasty and bitter responses from people on this thread. Yes it is true that you don't need to have been a pilot to make a flying game, but it can only serve to improve matters if you are. Besides, anyone who has been through the training and done that first solo etc is 'part of the club' and will presumably be more passionate about seeing that the sim is as good as it can be.

Some people are just mad or agitated because of bugs and problems; others like to push up their glasses and make sure to gatekeep who is a "real" pilot.

I also immediately recognized at least two usernames in here from the MSFS thread on x-plane.org, who confirmed over there that they haven't even used MSFS themselves (though I haven't read it in a couple of weeks now).  So I can only assume those people are here to subtly concern troll and/or throw fruit from the cheap seats.

Your take is the same as mine. Good for him.  It's great that working on a sim ignited his interest in real flying, and should make him even more passionate to make MSFS the pre-eminent flight sim.  That's great.

Hello all,

A little while ago a wise man named Chock said,

"Despite the fact that this is 'old news' since magazine stories tend to be written a while beforehand, I still can't believe some of the nasty and bitter responses from people on this thread. Yes it is true that you don't need to have been a pilot to make a flying game, but it can only serve to improve matters if you are. Besides, anyone who has been through the training and done that first solo etc is 'part of the club' and will presumably be more passionate about seeing that the sim is as good as it can be"

As usual, this clever man has separated the trees from the chaff and hit the nail on the head. From the general tone of this thread, I think most people would prefer that a PPL should be mandatory instead of an advantage.  That advantage would really only extend to enthusiasm if the owner of the software vendor doe not have the ability to transfer his flying skills to the actual programme. Not an easy task any way you look at it.  For my mind, we might as well mandate that these same developers have cornflakes with milk and sugar for breakfast.  In essence it may well produce the same result. 

8 hours ago, Scottoest said:

So I can only assume those people are here to subtly concern troll and/or throw fruit from the cheap seats.

 In another thread "lets figure out why some people have trouble with MSFS" there are a group of people who are encouraging the display of Systems, Event viewer error results and ,cfg so that the community can look and maybe find a common denominator.  In six pages of comments, the only people displaying anything are the ones who are trouble free.  As usual there are people who are simply repeating the fact that they have problems, but there is no actual demonstrations that they really want help because they are the ones who are not giving any further information.  Judging from the results of that topic so far, I have to agree with Scottoest and the statement I quoted. I would add though, that it is only some people as opposed to "those" people. I know that if I was having the problems that they are complaining about, I would be doing everything I possibly could do to sort it out.  These guys are not doing that unless in their world, a complaint is all that is required and subsequently solves everything. 

I am not saying in any way that there is NOT a problem or problems with MSFS, but in a similar vein to the PPL in relation to sim performance, complaining or commenting is simply not the be all and end all of problem resolution.

To keep the subject on topic, I have to say that having a PPL is not necessarily an advantage, and will only be an advantage if the holder has the ability to interpret his flying abilities and transform them into software. That however, has been said many times in various ways in this thread. 

Regards

Tony

Real world flying experience definitely benefit for simulation development . However, perceptions will change and transform as experience grow. Nevertheless, it's positive trend! In fact, a lot of software engineers who work in aviation software business either certified  pilots or eventually become certified pilots.  So what a big deal here?  

9 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

Real world flying experience definitely benefit for simulation development . However, perceptions will change and transform as experience grow. Nevertheless, it's positive trend! In fact, a lot of software engineers who work in aviation software business either certified  pilots or eventually become certified pilots.  So what a big deal here?  

This thread was started as an obviously salty,  sarcastic thread.  It should have been closed at the beginning

Edited October 4, 20205 yr by ErichB

1 hour ago, ErichB said:

This thread was started as an obviously salty,  sarcastic thread.  It should have been closed at the beginning

Eh, I wouldn't assume that.  Yeah he takes a little jab at the bugs (which is fair enough), but not angrily so, or with a pretty obvious motivation.

2 hours ago, ErichB said:

This thread was started as an obviously salty,  sarcastic thread.  It should have been closed at the beginning

Putting aside the couple of posts of the unavoidable jerks, I read the OP's comment as a tongue-in-cheek remark. Tongue in cheek and not unwarranted. This is what Bossard the executive producer at Asobo says : 

The previous flight simulators were based on an engineer approach with a concern to have all the correct parameters and instruments but too disconnected from a physical experience. Now, with the technologies at our disposal, we can reproduce the entire Earth and therefore favor another type of flight: visual flight. It is also the first type of flight that we learn in pilot training: finding one's way in relation to the coast line, the river, etc. We really put the emphasis on the feeling of flight, on the fun, on the pleasure of feeling the masses of air, on the dynamic camera.

 

Having the correct parameters was not a goal. Okay...  it gets more problematic when he adds : For me, the main technical difficulty of this project was precisely to approach this overall sensation of flight so that it was not only mechanical. And to get there, we had to link all the simulation parameters to have experience precision at all levels. 

 

The precision at all levels is still a bit lacking, right ? 

 

Also, if the (laudable) goal was to set up the environment of visual flight why having added three airliners ? The pressure of the MS marketing people ?

 

More than the Neuman's marketing blah blah ('we focus on core simmers', my foot !), the recent interview of Wloch and Bossard that I partially translated in another thread is interesting. What they intended to do was a flight simulation environment platform. Why not ? But it is time that they understand that such a platform requires a better engine and flight modelling. 

 

 

 

9 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

But it is time that they understand that such a platform requires a better engine and flight modelling. 

As an experiment, go back to Prepared (the version you're using) and completely remove all the add-ons you have installed. The aircraft, airports, scenery enhancements, environment, weather and only use the vanilla version. Then come back and tell us how it went.

That quote isn't saying that the correct parameters weren't a goal - he's saying that previous sims focused ENTIRELY on those mechanical parameters, at the expense of the actual tactile, physical experience of flight.  And indeed the follow-up quote you post confirms that mechanical precision is still a goal, even if they aren't quite there yet.

And favoring VFR doesn't mean your flight sim platform is just going to completely ignore IFR, airliners, etc.