One week with MSFS2020

[IRLATC 31]

Hello to everyone.

I am a radar/APP atco in real life. I have "played" flight sims since the very early 90s. Lately, my flight sim of choice has been X-Plane 11. I like to sim GA IFR; my planes of choice are the DA62 (previously the DA42) and Cirrus Vision. They are the aircrafts I´d fly IRL if I had the money/spousal permission (none of them available at the moment or in the future :-)). I mainly fly in the FIR in which I work; this means I know the procedures, minimums, sectors, frequencies etc. at heart.

Last week I started a 10 days holiday period and decided to purchase and try MSFS2020. These are my impressions (and some requests for help).

I am a MAC user and I was hesitant to try a Widows10 sim, but I went ahead 8 days ago and purchased and installed it (Steam version) in my bootcamp partition. My computer is a very advanced one (not for gaming: Imac pro, Intel Xeon W 10 cores, Radeon pro Vega 8gb Vram,  32Gb RAM and 1Tb SSD, 5k retina 27" display). The simulation runs well once you step down from the "recommended" settings. The software suggested everything in ultra with a 5k resolution. The program just kept CTDing every time.

The town where I live is rendered in photogrammetry as well as the town I work in. My first flight was between these towns and I was overwhelmed. Graphic quality is impressive.

I feel a great step forward has been achieved, and I would like to thank Microsoft/Asobo for it.

There are some things not so great whatsoever:

Ground handling for piston aircraft is very unrealistic, I have flown DA42s IRL and almost no rudder needs to be applied for takeoff while in the runway (unless wind conditions are extreme) ; in the simulation a lot of it has to be applied. Taxiing is a nightmare. Simple to achieve imo.

AP is very unrealistic; LOCS and VOR radials should be engaged sooner and more efficiently. Simple to achieve imo.

Anti icing systems don´t work, at least in the DA62. Flying in this time of the year with real weather is almost impossible in western Europe unless you take that realism option off. This should be easy to fix imo.

ATC is horrendous. I have been assigned flight levels well below minimums in areas I know and have been CFITed twice. I have been cleared to land when a traffic was landing in the oposite runway, I have been cleared to FLs well above the operational ceiling of my aircraft... This needs to be redone. An "unable to comply" option would be nice.

I would like to be able to fly with altitude expressed in hpa instead of in inches, I would like to have my aircraft display UTC instead of local time. I would like to know the transition altitude/levels. This should be very simple to implement, I think.

Overall, very impressed. If/when the glitches are resolved and a good DA62 and Cirrus Vision are available I will be a very, very happy camper. If/when the program is optimized to use all the CPU cores available then I would be in flightsim heaven :-)

Thank you for your attention and for providing this wonderful forum.

 

Ricardo.

 

 

 

 

[DylanM 1,069]

Welcome, and great comments Ricardo. You should post up on the official forums as well...

[Noel 4,492]

Hi Ricardo,

As you are undoubtely discovering there is a lot to fix w/ MSFS but there is reason to believe it will continue to be developed and improved going forward and that MS/A is in it for the 10 year haul, and that they will not ignore the needs of the more hard-core user as they also are preparing for release on Xbox.  I use Bootcamp but not for anything as demanding as MSFS is so not sure how that will go for you ultimately.  MSFS is rather GPU limited (in my box) and likes VRAM, and 8Gb of it really is the bare minimum IMO--I have an 8Gb NV card.  Given your comments I would suggest just being patient as the release is now a grand total of 3.5 months old and MS/A seem to be feverishing focused on staying with it, but again I feel their focus now is readying for Xbox release so they may well be ignoring certain issues that would be easily problematic for experienced simmers, and less so for those consolers who will come into the hobby perhaps w/ somewhat different agendas.  Enjoy it for what it is currently and it's still highly useable even in its default state.  No CTD's here except after the initial release, and I do IFR flights only in the wonderful TBM930, the worlds fasting single engine commercial plane, and all works very well.  ATC is very funky, but does have some positives as well.

[CFIJose 5,485]

Ricardo,

Welcome to the MSFS 2020 beta testing program. We believe in "pay to play." Enjoy your time here, even if it's just for a little while.

[Bosco19 198]

‘‘Tis the season to be jolly..........

actually, I have reason to believe that Microsoft is in cahoots with hardware and peripheral makers and sellers. The reason they pretended to be offering a fully-functioning new sim was to create a run on hardware and peripherals. It seems to have worked. 

[Maxis 1,859]

1 hour ago, Bosco19 said:

‘‘Tis the season to be jolly..........

actually, I have reason to believe that Microsoft is in cahoots with hardware and peripheral makers and sellers. The reason they pretended to be offering a fully-functioning new sim was to create a run on hardware and peripherals. It seems to have worked. 

May have a point there.

Spent a whole lot on brand new hardware for this release and still have an eye to upgrade even more hardware when they become more readily available(5800x/6800xt or rtx 3080 and honeycomb peripherals). I hope the software eventually steps up to the hardware i'm investing for it.

[Chock 17,769]

It's worth bearing in mind that for anything such as a game, a sim, a movie or a novel, people who do the things this stuff portrays for real as their job, will always find that the treatment in such offerings is not as real as it is in actuality.

For example, if you watch the movie The Bourne Ultimatum, there is a section where Jason Bourne is being written about by a Guardian journalist (played by Paddy Considine). When the evil CIA bad guys who are after Bourne attempt to track this journalist who is meeting up with Bourne to tell him some critical plot stuff, it shows the CIA guys in a situation room with the typical movie fast paced dialogue and jump cut editing, where everyone is snapping out comments about needing to locate the journo so they can take him out. 'Come on people. We need to locate the journalist ASAP' or words to that effect, yells the station chief. At this point, having been a writer for the Guardian myself, I was yelling at the screen jokingly, 'yeah, he'll be in that pub on the corner of Quay Street and Deansgate if he's like every Guardian journo I've ever worked with. He sure as hell won't be at his desk doing some typing...' It also amused me when the journo flagged a black cab outside the Guardian's offices instantly - yeah right - and said he wanted to go to Waterloo Station. I suspect the cabbie should really have said: 'Sarf of the River at this time mate? You're 'avin a larf'.

Similarly, there is a scene where Bourne buys a pre-paid phone from a Car Phone Warehouse kiosk at Waterloo Station, which remarkably, already works when he gets it out of the box without the need to charge the battery. It's not realistic of course, but it does manage to drive the plot along, so it adds to the fun and the fast pacing. However, I'm sure anyone who has ever tried to buy a phone from the Car Phone Warehouse has never got served that quickly either, and certainly not without the sales person trying to upsell them a better more expensive phone, payment plan, insurance, etc, etc. The point being that realism is okay, but for the average person, it gets in the way of the fun.

Likewise when I worked on the ramp at airports pushing planes out, I could get picky about this or that in a flight sim and say 'that's wrong' or 'there's no way we'd do that', but generally speaking most sims do these operations well enough to please the average user and make things sort of fun so it would be churlish to slag it off. I think the same is true of all the other aspects of most flight sims. After all, if there was no fun to be had for new users, we'd end up with a sim that'd please far fewer people and be bought by far fewer people too, meaning it would either be vastly more expensive, or would not be made in the first place, since it would have limited appeal. Thus it's the price you pay - or rather don't pay - for having the thing exist at the price point it is. So when someone who flies a 747 for real says 'yeah, the real thing rolls 1.3 degrees per second slower than it does in the sim' or some such, it's not likely to bother most users much, even if they knew this to be the case and so I don't let it bother me too much as it is unlikely to really matter to me in real life.

For those who do fret about that stuff, this is where add-ons come in, where they can make things more realistic for those who concern themselves with such things. Although having said that, I do agree with you that the ground handling of the aeroplanes on take off and touch down could really do with some fixing, and this would certainly not put new users off, because if aeroplanes were really that hard to land and take off, we'd be seeing plane crashes on the news on a daily basis and I feel sure that I'd have died on my first ever real life solo attempt in an actual aeroplane. 🤣

Edited December 5, 2020 by Chock

[sd_flyer 6,037]

4 hours ago, IRLATC said:

Hello to everyone.

I am a radar/APP atco in real life. I have "played" flight sims since the very early 90s.

 

 

 

 

Welcome to world of bugs, torture and pleasure LOL 

Since you IRLATC I gotta tell you ATC joke then

ATC: Citation 6MA say altitude

Citation: Altitude..

ATC: Citation 6MA say airspeed

Citation: Airspeed..

ATC: Citation 6MA say cancel IFR

Citation: 15000 ft, 250 kts..

[IRLATC 31]

Thank you very much for your comments. Maybe I have sounded too harsh; I really like the sim. I am a bit sad about the, in my mind, failures, since I believe they are very easy to fix.

I don´t think beginners or casual users are well served with an ATC that clears you to altitudes where you crash or to situations where steering an aircraft in the ground seems like a very hard acomplishment, when it is not. Again, I think autopilot, ATC and steering in the ground would be easy to fix and would be more welcoming to causal users. 

Of course, QNH and UTC times may be a little more professional, but I dont think they are concepts so dificcult to understand/explain and you can always be given the possibility to use/activate them.

My suggestions are given in a very well spirited manner. I love the sim, just think it can be improved with really very little work.

Anyone using realsimgear G1000? I have some questions to ask 🙂

 

[IRLATC 31]

18 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

Welcome to world of bugs, torture and pleasure LOL 

Since you IRLATC I gotta tell you ATC joke then

ATC: Citation 6MA say altitude

Citation: Altitude..

ATC: Citation 6MA say airspeed

Citation: Airspeed..

ATC: Citation 6MA say cancel IFR

Citation: 15000 ft, 250 kts..

Very funny, I have many jokes about ATC/pilots interaction. Many of them first person 🙂

Some of them are not very PC 🙂

 

[Bosco19 198]

Hah!  You guys missed the less complicated, more romantic days, when we sat out between the runways in tiny trailers with rotating antennae on top, hunched over a tiny round display with a glide slope pictured on it, saying things like, "Fifty feet above glide slope, adjust rate of decent."

[IRLATC 31]

The military ATC mobile group in my country has a setup like that, they can provide GCA in 24 hours anywhere in the world supported by surveillance aircrafts. I visited the "box" where the system and ATCOS are and it is pretty claustrophobic. It is the same size as a regular container with very thick walls to make it NBQ "resistant". What a job, to be inside that box while being a primary objective for the enemy...

[robcap 80]

@Chock, what a great post. Thanks for that.

[Erv Moore 21]

Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts ,Ricardo. Appreciated. Hope you have passed info to MSFS.

[IRLATC 31]

I have not 😞

How should I do it?