Just not the same

[Janov 2,383]

1 hour ago, Nyxx said:

Fly a simulation were you can see the world as it is or fly a sim were not looking out the window is best?

It depends on what you are interested in. The world outside or the airplane you are flying.

I would rephrase. Would you fly a simulation where the plane is modeled like the real one or one where you would rather look out of the window so you don´t have to see whats not working inside? 😁

[Ricardo41 5,949]

16 minutes ago, Janov said:

It depends on what you are interested in. The world outside or the airplane you are flying.

I would rephrase. Would you fly a simulation where the plane is modeled like the real one or one where you would rather look out of the window so you don´t have to see whats not working inside? 😁

I'm sure the WT team would love your input and expertise.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

I Couldn’t go back to FSX (and I never really used P3D). As someone else stated, it’s a relic. 
I did use XP11 for a few years, it was good. I fired it up the other day, and although the plane was better, and the system was smoother (vulkan), I just couldn’t do it. I went straight back to MSFS. Why? XP11 looks ancient. Even with addons. 
MSFS may have its shortcomings (all the sims do), however, it looks light years ahead of anything else out there competing in the same market. It actually gives the belief of flying. And that’s the whole point isn’t it? What’s the point in being able to press all a planes buttons and program all its computers, and as soon as you look out of the window you see cardboard trees and decades old scenery technology. To me, I might as well stare at a calculator. I use flight sim to enjoy it. How many actually use it just to simulate FMC’s or practice for the real world? Can’t be many. It’s an entertainment product, designed to entertain. MSFS excels at this. 
MSFS has brought flight sim in to the modern era. It’s not perfect, but nothing ever is. It can only get better. 

[honanhal 1,420]

I can’t help but think part of the issue is what part of the world people are doing their flying in. If you only fly in Europe or North America, and if you have already spent the money on addons in P3D to make those look better, then they look pretty solid in that sim (performance is another story, but never mind). They still look better in MSFS, but I will absolutely concede that it’s often a question of degree rather than kind. In fact, I don’t doubt you can find specific spots that look better in addon P3D than in MSFS, eg Northern California with Orbx vice stock MSFS with its rather ugly, too-green satellite imagery.

What if you want to fly in Asia, or Africa? Probably a lot of the people saying P3D is fine have never tried. Well, let me tell you. You don’t have to do too much looking out the window to conclude it’s pretty awful. Inaccurate, jaggy coastlines (at least without addons that sap performance) and the landclass is just hopeless (even with Scenerytech and Cloud 9, both of which I purchased). Don’t get me started on how thundercloud-heavy conditions look in P3D...

AirAsia flights in the FSL Airbus? You can do it, but it’s not much fun. MSFS holds incredible promise in this regard — everywhere in the world looks pretty good out of the box! — and it’s getting there.

James

[RaptyrOne 1,412]

26 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

Would you fly a simulation where the plane is modeled like the real one or one where you would rather look out of the window so you don´t have to see whats not working inside?

Have you even tried the WT CJ4 or the FBW A32NX? Or maybe the B36? Or the C152? With these mods that span almost all the default aircraft and the plethora of fantastic add-ons that don’t cost you one cent, FSX, even with a ton of add-on’s is not even a shadow of MSFS 2020. You may as well be comparing FS98 because that’s how relevant the comparison is.

I was a customer of PMDG’s NGX and many other fine add-on’s in FSX and P3D. The A32NX is just about on that level right now (and in fact already surpasses it in some respects) and I strongly suspect will surpass it very soon in all other aspects too. For FREE!

FSX and P3D were uninstalled from my PC the day before I bought MSFS. Below is a list of all the things I miss about those two sims:

 

 

 

Have a lovely day further everyone! 😉

Edited January 17, 2021 by RaptyrOne

[CFIJose 5,485]

7 hours ago, PIC007 said:

Anyone else a bit disappointed in the current state of affairs or am I alone on this?

Aside from a need to fix the coastlines that the dev broke and adding the watermasks plastered all over their promo videos, I'm happy with my VFR sim.

Thanks for asking.

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

just spent the last hour flying with these AUSSIM  guys (it is still live as I post) in Iceland

 

 

[dtrjones 356]

8 hours ago, PIC007 said:

Anyone else a bit disappointed in the current state of affairs or am I alone on this?

Complete opposite but I fully understand your point of view. This is the same for any new release of Flight Simulator and even more so here with a completely new team and architecture I feel what you want as you rightly say will take time. Aerosoft who are an official partner of Microsoft and Asobo look like they are releasing the CRJ soon so that might be worth weighing in to once it's released otherwise take your time.

From my own personal experience I couldn't be happier. Carando's level is great for me haha! I love the sight seeing and now that I have VR smooth (the trick was to overclock my 9900K to 4.7Ghz) then this now is the dream sim, so many places to explore and a growing array of nice aircraft to use, sure the sim still has issues but what I get in return is overwhelmingly positive and puts a silly smile on my face everytime I slip on the G2 headset.

[AUA425 130]

I am replying here again - with the same statement (MSFS Forum) !
 

Actually, I don’t even take part in such discussions any more because it’s actually pointless - and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
But it is the case here that apples are being compared with pears.
I can only repeat myself: people expect a SIM to cover everything that other SIMs have taken almost 10 years to cover, right from the start. When FSX came out in October 2006, it was far less usable than MSFS after it came out. Started with bugs and not to speak of before the slideshow with ENDHIGHEND rig.
Why do people keep forgetting that. Same with XPlane11 or XP10 back then - but they still don’t have a real decent weather representation, until now, as an example.
I don’t want to defend MSFS2020, but these are facts. And to be honest, I’ve been with FS since 5.1 (and I was still a child then and I knew the FS 4.0 but did not really use it.) and there has never been a SIM with adapted ADDONS and airports, sceneries (except for aeroplanes, but they also took a long time with the others) as quickly as with MSFS and a lot of them for free, even though the graphical / technical leap is immense.
I would have done a few things differently, no question and there are enough improvements necessary and a bit of fine tuning but the platform is great and of course it will still take time to make EVERYONE happy.
And you can’t compare FSX with MSFS2020, please. You have almost the whole world scenery and that “for free” - live traffic “for free” - live “weather” for free etc. (of course there is still room for improvement) and then people still complain!
There won’t be a perfect simulator for a long time, but you can enjoy what you have, very simply.
BR !

BR Arnie !

[Dazzaboy 81]

8 hours ago, Chock said:

We're traditionally always disappointed with the shiny new sim in its first few months of release. FSX took a very long time to get good, and didn't really mature as a base sim until Dovetail tarted it up in 2014, which was eight years after it first came out. It was ten years before the FSL A320 came out for FSX and it was five years after the release of FSX that the iFly 737 NG came out for it and a month or two after that when PMDG managed to get their NG out for it.

P3D was hardly worth bothering with at all until three versions in if you already had FSX unless you added a bunch of DX10 payware add-ons for cloud shadows etc, and XPlane was basically awful for high quality realistic and complex add-ons until MS announced they'd stop making flight sim in 2009, whereupon developers started looking at it as the possible lifeline for add-on sim stuff before P3D really took off, and that was with version ten of XPlane. Not forgetting Aerofly FS2, which even now still lacks a lot of basic functions.

Conversely, we're a few weeks away from getting a CRJ for MSFS. This will be about six months after its release, but this is practically a ballistic rate of progress compared to all of the aforementioned stuff.

I'm not disappointed with MSFS at all, because I can remember all that preceding stuff, and all the stuff before it with the first version of flight sim etc. Asobo is going great guns with progress by comparison. We're just not bothering to remember how tectonically slow it has been for all preceding sims. And if anyone thinks Aces didn't @rse up the patches for FSX, then they've got a pretty short memory and a pair of Ray Bans with pink lenses firmly balanced on their nose. I won't deny that there have been some dodgy moments with patches for MSFS, but the truth is, Asobo is sussing it out pretty quickly and in most cases they sort problematic stuff out after a couple of weeks with another patch, which is particularly impressive given that they are working on all this during the middle of the zombie apocalypse and obviously were under pressure to release it early.

So yeah, it is not the same, it's actually much better than all previous efforts. Would I like a DC-3 and a 737 etc for MSFS right now? Of course I would, but I can guarantee you they'll be in my MSFS hangar a lot quicker than they were for any other flight sim, and when they are, they'll sound better, look better, fly better and run better than they ever would or could in any other sim

Some developers might be crying about having to wait a while to turn on their cash cow for MSFS whilst they await an SDK, but I'm unlikely to shed too many tears for them when they've been driving around in nice cars that I helped to pay for over the past two decades. They've done alright out of us lot thus far, and it won't be long before they'll be doing it all again. And for once it will be in a sim where you don't need to sell a kidney to be able to afford a super-computer which can just about manage 20 FPS the moment it sniffs an add-on aeroplane on your hard drive.

Beautifully put sir . Take a bow . 

[ryanbatc 12,857]

I feel like I need a canned response since these threads are a dime a dozen haha.

Let me think of the state that FSX was in 7 months in....  Oh yeah - people with brand new high end hardware were having horrible performance.  As far as addons...not much except a few freeware conversions.

I had switched from fs9 to fsx and I remember a frustrating start - but I stuck with the new sim.  

Oh and remember all the monthly development updates MS gave us for FSX?.... Oh wait...

 

Edited January 17, 2021 by ryanbatcund

[Nyxx 6,993]

2 hours ago, Janov said:

It depends on what you are interested in. The world outside or the airplane you are flying.

I would rephrase. Would you fly a simulation where the plane is modeled like the real one or one where you would rather look out of the window so you don´t have to see whats not working inside? 😁

I said planes will come did i not? go fly your sim, if you want to fly FSL etc go to the P3D forum, am fully aware airliner are not right in MSFS but it does not mean MSFS does not work, its a dream for VFR. Do people post "how can you fly VFR" in P3D forums? Do they? NO. So think.

Do people enjoying MSFS go post in the FSX or P3D asking silly questions or question why people fly that sim? No. So........

Sick to dead with you comments Ignore list added.

Edited January 17, 2021 by Nyxx

[Chock 17,769]

I think it is worth adding that in relation to the comments about MSFS not being great for IFR and all those add-ons etc, that it really isn't any worse than any of its competitors in this regard, as they come straight out of the box.

To elaborate upon this, if anyone can name me another flight sim out of all the big ones, which can add SIDs, STARs and Transitions to a default flight planner route - and I'm not even talking about its default flight planner when these first came out, I mean right now with their latest versions - then I'm all ears. You can do that with the MSFS flight planner, and you could do so from day one with it, and it works pretty well. It could stand a few GUI tweaks to make it a bit more friendly in terms of making adjustments to a plan, but it's certainly not alone in that respect and it is the only one which actually has a stab at all that stuff from the box.

So, on to ATC. Does anyone who is 'serious' about their IFR flight simming use the default ATC in FSX or P3D or XPlane? I would say this is not likely, so again, MSFS is no worse than these other sims in this respect, and in some cases it is actually better, since as mentioned above, it is at least capable of utilising proper IFR route planning and arrival and departure procedures by default. Personally, I am using the default ATC in MSFS and whilst it does suffer from a lot of the issues which manifest themselves in other sims and isn't super-duper realistic, it's no worse than any other sim in this respect, and especially out of the box. If I had a quid for every time FSX ATC vectored me into the Sierra Nevada mountains when descending into Almeria airport, I could probably afford to buy a real Boeing 737.

Then you've got AI traffic. Again from day one of the MSFS release, I was pleasantly surprised to notice that you can have it plonking real-world traffic in your skies which tallies with what you see on Flight Radar 24 and what literally flies over your house. Now granted it might not have all the liveries on these things correctly and it might use a generic plane model rather than the actual type, but since you're supposed to be staying a couple of miles away from these things when flying IFR and should really only be able to see their nav lights at that distance, this is not the end of the world. Sure, it might not look great at the airports, but I'm sure an add-on can sort that, as it can with other sims.

Then you got the weather, which is a big part of IFR flights since they depart, traverse and land frequently in IMC. FSX needs a decent add-on to make this a usable proposition and P3D definitely does as there is no default function for that, so Active Sky is pretty much a must have for both those sims. By default, MSFS doesn't need an add-on for this. Now sure it is a bit iffy in places, but not everywhere, and the visual depiction of it is of an order of magnitude better than any other sim either with or without an expensive add-on. I'll not pretend it doesn't need a bit of work in how it interprets METARs, but that is being sorted out and in the interim, it is still better out of the box than any other flight sim and in visual terms, any comparison you make with any other sim's depiction of a thunderstorm is a joke, which is just as well I suppose since MSFS does love its Charlie Bs - let's be honest here, they really do need to sort that one out. 🤣

Then you've got the included aeroplanes. Now of course these are not FSL-level airliners in MSFS, but neither is this the case with either FSX or P3D. FSX default airliners didn't even have a functioning FMC and P3D has relied on a few old ex-payware FSX aeroplanes for any of this kind of functionality, so it's similar in that regard. But what we have seen, is that many talented and dedicated freeware developers have jumped right in and started souping up the default A320 and some of the business jets, and these are now rivalling some payware offerings you had to unzip your wallet to have for FSX and P3D. You certainly have more choice in this regard with FSX and P3D, and even AeroFly FS2 if we're honest at this point, but it's not like we can't crank up P3D for the odd fix of that, after all, we certainly paid enough for all that stuff didn't we? Still, those souped up freebie ones in MSFs ain't half bad now, and we're gonna have a CRJ in about a month or so, which will also mean we'll have the SDK for other airliner roadmaps, so that should start the ball rolling. Personally, I can't wait to hear all those excuses from PMDG as to why the model for their FSX and P3D 737 can't be stuck in blender and exported for MSFS and so that's why they have to charge you another 150 quid for their 'new' 737 which they did all the research for to produce it, over a decade ago lol.

Now all this doesn't mean MSFS is some problem-free rose garden where every day is the first day of spring, but the notion that it cannot be used for a fairly satisfying IFR flight, literally with the default stuff and a few speedy freeware add-on downloads, is simply incorrect, because it can. Of course you can do a lot more of that stuff in P3D or FSX, but let's see how...

FSL A320 - $99.95 for FSX, or $139.95 for P3D.

HiFi Technologies Active Sky for FSX/P3D - $41.99, plus Cloud Art, $27.59 for a total of just shy of $70.00.

We're up to two hundred Dollars here already...

A decent flight planner app, for example Aivlasoft EFB 2 - $73.51.

A couple of typical add-on airports to fly between - Approximately $40.00.

That's passing $300 Dollars...

Some nice terrain to fly over for approximately 1,000 miles - Let's be conservative and say $100.00, although I think that'd be cheap in reality.

There goes $400 dollars.

Some AI traffic - let's go for Traffic Global at approximately $40.00.

Let's throw in some ATC - We'll pick ProATC at $50.00

Coming up on 500 bucks...

How about we add a decent co-pilot and checklist app as well? Let's go for MCE at $60.00

Oh well, just a bit over $500 Dollars for a realistic sim experience isn't desperately bad. After all, nobody said flight simming was cheap. But hang on a minute, what's that you say? With all those add-ons your $500.00 computer is running FSX and P3D  like a slide show? Okay, off we go to Crazy Bob's Computer-You-Like to see what we can do about that...

Computer capable of running FSX or P3D at a decent frame rate with all this stuff and not running out of graphics memory - Let's be conservative and say $2000.00, although again, I'm sure we've all spent more than that over the years trying to get FSX to make it into double figures on the frame rates when coming in to a payware Heathrow in our super-duper add-on 747.

Computer capable of running MSFS? Well that could actually be an XBox for about 450 quid, or if you prefer, a PC for about that same price.

 

Edited January 17, 2021 by Chock

[ryanbatc 12,857]

4 minutes ago, Chock said:

I think it is worth adding that in relation to the comments about MSFS not being great for IFR and all those add-ons etc, that it really isn't any worse than any of its competitors in this regard, as they come straight out of the box.

 

Nice post!

[sanh 823]

I only fly IFR and only use MSFS. Flying only the A320 mod. I think a lot of IFR simmers are using MSFS.

Many airliner/IFR flyers don't need everything modelled in a cockpit - just the core systems to fly - think Aerosoft aircraft standards. I dont want to spend 45 minutes planning a flight and fuel and plotting every navigation point on my route or spending most of my time pushing buttons and then watching a computer fly the route.

I hand fly to about FL80 after takeoff and then set the autopilot and walk away. Come back for the landing and hand fly from 3000ft to the runway regardless of weather - if its zero visibility then all the more enjoyable.

What you see out of the window matters since that's all that changes on an IFR flight each time apart from navigation points.