Searching the positives from Sim Update 3

[Biology 1,347]

1 minute ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

If you mean the blurry terrain at higher altitudes, that's always been a problem indeed, and in fact, in an older Developer Q&A (was either September or October), Sebastian claimed that this would be an easy fix without a great performance hit relative to the visual improvement. However, several months later and not only does this issue remain, but we also got several other mesh issues related to level of detail.

The blurry terrain is something that setting Terrain LOD to 200 does not help alleviate a lot, but it pushes the newer mesh issues quite far out, making them less noticeable. As someone that sets Terrain LOD to 25-75 depending on the situation, I believe the recent mesh issues are much, much worse than just the blurry terrain, completely annihilating the scenery in areas with lots of mountains or coastlines.

Indeed - MSFS looks beautiful at lower altitudes but these visual issues are really distracting for an airliner guy like me, even though many others don't even seem to notice. I also remember Sebastian mentioning it would be easily fixable, and I'm still trying to keep bringing that on Q&A sessions (along with lack of a visibility slider) hoping they see.

I noticed mesh issues too - mountainous regions are either too smooth or have a weird low resolution look on them. Combined with scenery popping in and "molten buildings", it's hard to not be annoyed.

15 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Yep, that's what is going on. Someone makes a thread about the terrain morphing, the coastline issues, the degraded TAA or CTD/performance issues, and then it's always the same people coming in and calling us "drama queens complaining about blades of grass". And then others complain about us making more than one post explaining the problems, when it's those who are insulting around that keep the discussion going. Meanwhile, I do not go into threads that praise Asobo or the simulator to voice my complaints. It's not like the complaining threads cannot be easily ignored for someone who does not like them.

And then we get comments like "fly more, complain less". Not possible to do that when you cannot fly because of constant crashes, looping downloads, or other massive issues that ruin the immersion. Instead it should be "fly more, complain less about those who complain". And also "go back to the old simulators if they were so perfect". Nope, if I were feeling satisfied with the older simulators, I wouldn't be here complaining.

I'm not denying that there are some extreme cases of people calling the simulator utter garbage or an arcade game, and I do not agree with these views either, but constantly insulting those complaining about some of the post-launch and other lingering issues that are taking too long to fix, at least compared to other AAA games with a massive budget, is unacceptable in my opinion.

There's nothing wrong about complaining as long as it doesn't turn into developer bashing. What I was annoyed by is not people complaining, but the reaction I thought (it turns out it wasn't about me) I got from them. All I've done was saying that many people don't have an FPS issue and I can't reproduce it either, so it might be something specific about the drivers, OS installation, external libraries or a specific game setting that triggers it, which resulted in people calling names including "clown", even though I've never said things like "fly more, complain less".

[Biology 1,347]

4 minutes ago, devgrp said:

if you are getting blurries in msfs,  cant imagine how your p3d looks, because thats a blur fest in some areas

Both P3D and X-Plane looks really sharp for me. P3D and especially X-Plane lacks MSFS' much better atmospherics & lighting, but blurries is mostly a MSFS issue.

[devgrp 1,233]

Just now, BiologicalNanobot said:

Both P3D and X-Plane looks really sharp for me. P3D and especially X-Plane lacks MSFS' much better atmospherics & lighting, but blurries is mostly a MSFS issue.

I've never had blurries in xp, but p3d was nightmare in certain areas

[Biology 1,347]

1 minute ago, devgrp said:

I've never had blurries in xp, but p3d was nightmare in certain areas

Do you use anisotropic filtering? Unlike X-Plane, P3D defaults to a really low value of anisotropic filtering, which causes blurries. Lack of anisotropic filtering is what causes blurries.

Other than that I started having blurries on X-Plane Vulkan mode (not related to anisotropic filtering but VRAM budget), which is why I still use OpenGL mode.

Edited March 13, 2021 by BiologicalNanobot

[jarmstro 2,404]

6 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

I noticed mesh issues too - mountainous regions are either too smooth or have a weird low resolution look on them. Combined with scenery popping in and "molten buildings", it's hard to not be annoyed.

Is there a sim that does it better? If so I would like to know. XP doesn't for sure.

Edited March 13, 2021 by jarmstro

[Biology 1,347]

7 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Is there a sim that does it better? If so I would like to know.

Uh... X-Plane, P3D, DCS and more?

Edited March 13, 2021 by BiologicalNanobot

[devgrp 1,233]

1 minute ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Do you use anisotropic filtering? Unlike X-Plane, P3D defaults to a really low value of anisotropic filtering, which causes blurries. Lack of anisotropic filtering is what causes blurries.

yes in msfs

[jarmstro 2,404]

1 minute ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Uh... X-Plane, P3D, DCS and more?

What? X-Plane is just 1990s graphics with little reality to the real world. Generic stuff they've got from God knows where. 

[Biology 1,347]

2 minutes ago, devgrp said:

yes in msfs

In MSFS anisotropic filtering doesn't help as the low-resolution look is caused by the orthophoto imagery itself. But for P3D it eliminates all blurries. In X-Plane anisotropic filtering is set to a high value, so you never have them.

[Biology 1,347]

2 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

What? X-Plane is just 1990s graphics with little reality to the real world. Generic stuff they've got from God knows where. 

What? I'm not talking about how these games look - they (especially X-Plane) clearly have worse lighting & atmospherics than MSFS (with the exception of DCS), but mesh resolution and ground texture resolution is significantly lower in MSFS, especially at higher altitudes, that's really obvious.

And I wouldn't bash X-Plane, while it looks the worst among these 4 games I've mentioned, it still looks really nice with some modding. It also has its own other set of advantages, why not accept and love all?

Edited March 13, 2021 by BiologicalNanobot

[Nedo68 533]

1 minute ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

In MSFS anisotropic filtering doesn't help as the low-resolution look is caused by the orthophoto imagery itself. But for P3D it eliminates all blurries. In X-Plane anisotropic filtering is set to a high value, so you never have them.

sorry this is complete wrong, in msfs af at x16 makes a hughe difference, you better check you gpu settings under win.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

4 minutes ago, devgrp said:

I'm glad I could help man lol, seriously, some of ya'll take this way too serious lmao

I agree, you and a few others.

3 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

There's nothing wrong about complaining as long as it doesn't turn into developer bashing. What I was annoyed by is not people complaining, but the reaction I thought (it turns out it wasn't about me) I got from them. All I've done was saying that many people don't have an FPS issue and I can't reproduce it either, so it might be something specific about the drivers, OS installation, external libraries or a specific game setting that triggers it, which resulted in people calling names including "clown", even though I've never said things like "fly more, complain less".

Exactly, those cases are getting extremely tiring. Both the developers and those who provide constructive feedback trying to help the simulator improve are getting constantly bashed. And yes, I wasn't talking about you specifically either, but about that bunch that always come to the complaint threads and say the same stuff all the time.

Asobo keep saying this over and over, they appreciate our constructive feedback and it's alright if we are feeling grumpy sometimes, but they don't want us fighting with each other. I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong when I'm discussing some of the issues with others who are experiencing them too, and when I'm trying to let Asobo know when I think they haven't handled something in a very good way. The reason these discussions keep going on is because of people that keep denying the problems exist, claim that the simulator is in a perfect state and any issues are user error, and yet spend more time insulting rather than flying.

I'm not sure why anyone would think I'm just coming in here to complain. I made it clear in my first post in this thread that I felt Sim Update 3 was an overall improvement, and lately I've been flying a lot more compared to the dark days of flickering clouds and broken coastlines galore. I always give praise where it's due, and I seriously can't wait to give Asobo a huge "thank you" when they finally resolve the LOD issues.

[Biology 1,347]

5 minutes ago, Nedo68 said:

sorry this is complete wrong, in msfs af at x16 makes a hughe difference, you better check you gpu settings under win.

It's like a bottleneck - anisotropic filtering clearly helps in MSFS, I never said otherwise. Without 16x anisotropic filtering everything looks extremely blurry, which is why anisotropic filtering is used in modern games at first place. However it doesn't completely eliminate blurry ground textures as they're bottlenecked by low-resolution ortho imagery. In other words, blurry ground texture issue is not caused by a lack of anisotropic filtering.

Edited March 13, 2021 by BiologicalNanobot

[jarmstro 2,404]

2 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

What? I'm not talking about how these games look - they (especially X-Plane) clearly have worse lighting & atmospherics than MSFS (with the exception of DCS), but mesh resolution and ground texture resolution is significantly lower in MSFS, especially at higher altitudes, that's really obvious.

And I wouldn't bash X-Plane, while it looks the worst among these 4 games I've mentioned, it still has its own advantages. Why not accept and love all?

I know you have brilliantly developed some volumetric clouds for X-Plane. For which I salute you. But let's face facts. You can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear.

[Ixoye 1,821]

42 minutes ago, devgrp said:

Most of the people here complaining are probably boombers who's a 100 years  old or more. These guys get grumpy at anything. These are probably some of the same guys that would throw a fit if they saw some kid flying a drone thinking they are being spied on. They go to bed at 6pm and wake up at 4am with nothing else to do but complain. 

If you're lucky, you'll also be a grumpy old man someday 😄