what improved, what got worse since launch

[Ricardo41 5,935]

Most folks are playing MSFS in front of a monitor, pushing around a cheap joystick, while hitting pause every once in a while to go and take a bathroom break. I use Navigraph charts for all my flights, but I'm not confused about that being "real life". When I play "Doom Eternal" I'm not really training for an imminent invasion from Mars.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Ricardo41

[Cristi_Neagu 134]

7 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

Most folks are playing MSFS in front of a monitor, pushing around a cheap joystick, while hitting pause every once in a while to go and take a bathroom break. I use Navigraph charts for all my flights, but I'm not confused about that being "real life". When I play "Doom Eternal" I'm not really training for an imminent invasion from Mars.

And your argument is that what you described, sitting in front of a monitor, pushing around a cheap joystick, is a much worse simulation of flight than, say, playing Flappy Bird on a phone? A very bold statement indeed.

[Ricardo41 5,935]

50 minutes ago, Cristi_Neagu said:

Which is why i said "the point of a simulator is to simulate real life as closely as possible" r

Why is this the point of MSFS 2020?

[Cristi_Neagu 134]

5 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

Why is this the point of MSFS 2020?

I said "the point of a simulator", not "the point of FS2020". And the definition of "simulation" is:

Quote

A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time

Secondly, taken from their Steam page:

Quote

Aerodynamic Modeling - a state-of-the-art physics engine with over 1000 control surfaces per plane allows for a truly realistic experience.

 

[JRBarrett 3,035]

46 minutes ago, Cristi_Neagu said:

@Ricardo41 "For entertainment purposes only" and "as far from real life as possible" are two VASTLY different things. For example, PMDG give out with their products real Boeing manuals, but they still write "For entertainment purposes only". Navigraph does the same with real world charts. And to say a Navigraph chart is "as far from real life as possible" because it says "Navigraph charts intended for flight simulation only - not for navigational use" is frankly ridiculous.

Indeed. Navigraph charts are exactly the same Jeppesen charts used in r/w aviation, and are just as complete and current as the ones a Jeppesen subscriber would receive in the official Jeppesen FliteDeckMobile  app. The “flight simulation use only” warning is to prevent a real world aircraft operator from trying to use Navigraph charts in an actual airplane in lieu of paying thousands of dollars for a Jepp subscription. That’s not to say that someone might not try getting away with it, but if the FAA ever caught someone doing that, they could probably kiss their pilot’s certificate goodbye.

[RXP 2,336]

For what it's worth, I'd like to share my 2 cents about the recent comments in this discussion.

I find it a little useless to arguing about the what has improved or got worse since launch because the question remains open whether it is about factual changes or emotional changes. What I mean is that there are, without any shadow of a doubt, a certain number of things that got better in the implementation, at least if you're considering these enhancement could be solely inferred from the actual visible and measurable results.

For example I don't believe anyone will be opposing any argument if I'm saying a number of performance enhancements have been brought in (intermittent performance spikes, a number of stuttering situations, a certain number of bug corrections to the scenery SDK, and other similar stuff). Some are also finding, by precisely measuring before and after, that some of the flight modelling aspects got improved if not entirely at least partly and in a good direction. As equally though, there are other factual proof a certain number of things are degrading, for example the "mesh morphing" which is getting closer to the point of view to the point it is now visibly morphing a few hundreds meter away only, or some aspects of night lighting, and there are certainly many other such visible deterioration in other aspects of the game.

By the same token, the emotional response and sentiments one is experiencing are vastly changing over time. This is after all natural and this is what gaming is about too. Even if FS2020 is a simulator and not just a game, nevertheless it produces an emotional response which importance will vary from one individual to the other depending on many factors, including among other things expectations, experience, mood, and sensibility. I'm not surprised some are expressing so divergent opinions and are having so divergent feelings about what changes and this shows in this discussion like in any other.

In my opinion what is more important is recognizing we're all alike and we're all sharing the virtual sky for different personal reasons, and this naturally let us feel the changes differently. This doesn't mean one is right and the other is wrong, just that there are different point of view and this is expected. There is a reason someone is saying this is just a game and this is not a simulator, and conversely there is also a reason someone else is answering the reverse for opposite reasons, I don't believe anyone is right here but everyone is right.

Let me illustrate what I said with a direct example: it took at least 3 closed threads on the FS2020 forum in a year (unfortunately yes, they are closing topic talking about Reality XP, or they are menacing to do so openly (1)), endless forum posts from many simmers, countless personal contributions to helping other simmers (search my post history over there) and finally Bert's topic (2) to get some attention toward Reality XP, in order to reach a minimum of traction. This situation can legitimately be interpreted in many different ways, but there are many customers sending me messages every week, which go along the line of it shouldn't have taken this much efforts to start opening some communications with Reality XP should the title is really aiming to be a simulator for simmers, because RXP is a renown brand for 20 years in this business offering nothing less than some of the most authentic gauges and simulation products on all simulator platforms. Does it make all the people telling us this right? Maybe, or maybe not, only Microsoft knows it better.

Nevertheless, when stepping back and looking at a bigger picture with emotions asides, and in trying to assess the most pragmatic way what it is doing good and what it is doing bad, I can't help thinking there is potential but we're not there yet, and there are certainly conflicting messages and implementation traits which are too blurry for now to conclude anything about the goal and the level this title is aiming at. In addition, because we're all sharing the virtual sky for different personal reasons, I don't think the franchise could ever benefit from standardizing the way add-ons should be done and how they should run, but this is another topic in itself.

But these are just my 2 cents and I don't expect everyone to agreeing with me either, this is what also makes this hobby a fantastic place to be, because we are all having opinions but in the end we all want sharing the same sky one way or the other, not just in the way the simulator is enforcing us to.

---

(1) "Also, just a kind reminder to avoid a flag later on: No topic bumping, and no vote solicitation, either here or in the other sub-forums. Thanks."
    https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/open-up-communications-with-reality-xp/392140/10?u=cptlucky8

(2) I thank all of you supporting us!
    https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/600080-please-vote-to-open-up-communications-with-rxp/

 

 

[Ricardo41 5,935]

2 hours ago, Cristi_Neagu said:

I said "the point of a simulator", not "the point of FS2020". And the definition of "simulation" is:

 

I thought MSFS 2020 is a simulator? What am I missing?

At any rate, this is a pointless discussion since nobody is going to change their minds. Enjoy MSFS 2020 any way you want to. 

In fact, I'm just about ready for take-off!

Edited May 12, 2021 by Ricardo41

[Cristi_Neagu 134]

4 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

What am I missing?

The rest of my post 🙂

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

22 minutes ago, RXP said:

By the same token, the emotional response and sentiments one is experiencing are vastly changing over time. This is after all natural and this is what gaming is about too. Even if FS2020 is a simulator and not just a game, nevertheless it produces an emotional response which importance will vary from one individual to the other depending on many factors, including among other things expectations, experience, mood, and sensibility. I'm not surprised some are expressing so divergent opinions and are having so divergent feelings about what changes and this shows in this discussion like in any other.

For me, it's mostly positive at this point. I was really disappointed when the major terrain issues first popped up after the US World Update, even though I realize there were minor issues before. However, the SIM is moving in the right direction, I just hope they keep the momentum. Once I heard they hired WT, there is no question about the sim moving in the right direction.

That said, (and this is just IMHO - maybe I am wrong) but, the error margin for landing some planes seems abysmally small, especially the mid-sized jets. If you don't place it at exactly the right angle within 5kts of the exact right speed, it just bounces all over the place like a major crash. Having spent hours and hours watching these planes land in real life, I've seen some pretty hard landings where some of these planes barely bounced or even after the bounce it was a minor bounce, and I've seen some come in way too fast and still come out ok. I know it can happen, but it's rare in RL, not as easy to bounce a jet like that unless your angle or speed are really screwed up. Sure, it's easy to bounce a Q400 or a Turboprop, but this game wants to bounce almost anything other than the largest airliners.

In the end, it's a bunch of people working from home probably due to Covid, so this is all being done by humans.

The graphical elements in the SIM are nothing short of amazing at times, but the aerial imagery is still lacking in some places (would like to see it improved in Western-Central US - Montana - Wyoming - Idaho - Utah). The Eastern US looks pretty good for the most part.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[Cristi_Neagu 134]

@Alpine Scenery A quote from a JustFlight developer, for your reference:

Quote

I'm not sure how deeply you have looked into the actual engines within the flight model, or within the sim in general, but we are seriously limited by what the sim provides us with. The engines are now (finally, after battling against the sim's internal editor messing up and even re-writing on occasion) laid out with the correct figures as far as possible, and then adjustments have been made to the areas which are 'flexible'. However, it is always going to be a 'best fit' to some extent.

You mention in another post about power being a result of the combination of RPM, manifold pressure, fuel flow and density altitude - the last of these is ENTIRELY worked out by the sim. There is nothing I can adjust which will affect this. Fuel flow is almost as bad - we have 'fuel_flow_scalar =1' and 'BestPowerSpecificFuelConsumption=0.49', nothing which will allow us to set fuel consumption at various points to specific levels. For all intents and purposes, you can forget these when trying to create an engine in the sim until you are almost done! The fuel flow is set as a result of the rest of the engine build, once that's all done you can play with those two scalars to try and hit as many points as possible but that literally is it. It gives you readings on a gauge but doesn't do any more.

We've just lost two of the four items which control power. That's down to the base sim's modelling of aircraft. If you take away two sides of a square, is it still a square? Can you make a square with what is left? This is a piece of core simulator code wich we are trying to manipulate so that it gives you a reasonable facsimile of what the real aircraft does. Even external engine builds are not perfect and look at the amount of time they take - you certainly would not have this aircraft in-sim yet if we were waiting for one of those.

I guess it's going to have to be a case of managing expectations - this is a new sim, there is reliance on it to a large extent and also a big lack of knowledge about it (the whole engine files are different to what went before, yet there is no supporting documentation. We're just left to guess). If you're flying the real thing every day, you're going to be able to pick holes in ANY sim aircraft. I don't think it's fair, though, to point the finger at the JF Arrow specifically when we're fighting against the simulator's own limitations and doing our best with limited resources to overcome them.

Here's another quote:

Quote

I would STRONGLY advise against anyone changing the wing dihedral. The sim has a nasty tendency to overdo the secondary effect of rudder input and this is worsened by the dihedral angle - in testing it was found that with the correct dihedral angle you could roll the aircraft almost as well as an aileron roll purely on rudder alone. At the setting suggested above, roll almost becomes the primary effect of rudder use.

Unfortunately, this is a base sim issue, and we have to create an aircraft which flies as well as we can within the limitations and problems presented by the sim. This is just one example of why reading the POH and repeating it perfectly into the sim does not work.

 

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

Yes, there are ground physics issues and landing issues, but the actual in-air physics (at least higher up) are very "heady" deep fluid dynamics stuff that I'm not sure anyone will get right, equations are too long. They can simulate it I suppose, which makes it a simulation of a simulation (hence pseudo math simulating real equations). Would slow the game down too much to plug in ALL of the actual wind physics for every surface, that is too many calculations, they can do some. I don't know how many or which ones, I just know the real ones are really long from someone I know from the University of Maryland (one of the top 5-10 predominant schools of physics in the US), that actually had a degree in that stuff that I talked to.  

The in-air physics doesn't seem worth it to get right, maybe it could be improved, but it's not very noticeable flying on a monitor unless you were in a moving simulator. The landing and ground physics are quite noticeable as it throws my plane all over the place. They need to fix the physics and ground effect as you get close and then as you land, doesn't seem right, but who knows, I'm certainly not an expert I'm just going by how it feels.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[kaosfere 3,115]

17 hours ago, Cristi_Neagu said:

Which brings us back to: Why then not offer standardized alternatives for those "clever hacky interactions"?

Dude, you seem like you are so intent on being outraged at everything said by, seemingly, everyone that you missed the very portion in my post where I noted that the Asobo folks at the Q&A said developers should let them know how things weren't working for them so adjustments could be made.  Do you think that, perhaps, that might be so that "standardized alternatives" could be provided?

Folks could (and, clearly, will) quibble all day long about the sincerity of this offer, or the speed at which work is being done, or the openness of the developers to responding to feedback -- @RXP here has plenty of feelings on that one. 🙂  But the fact remains that it's happening, although perhaps not at a pace that may make some people happy.

Not everyone is going to be satisfied with where development goes, and there are fundamental decisions you may disagree with. That's fine.  That's life.  If that's where you end up and you want to react to that by assuming the worst and casting the approach being taken as one chosen with the intent to expose proprietary code and punish developers who do unique things...  well.   That's your right, I guess.   But you're kinda coming off as though you're attempting to process everything in the most negative possible light. 

Perhaps that's just more of that dangerous and absurd hyperbole on my part, though.

 

(Finally, since my affiliation was brought up a couple times in this discussion, I want to note that, though I may be a "WT developer", I am not a spokesman for Microsoft or Asobo, and I am not here to provide official clarification of the statements or the intents of other FS partners.   I've provided personal insights from my own perspective as an experienced professional developer who is passionate about flight simulation and has been deeply involved with the sim since its release, and nothing more.)

[Noel 4,486]

11 hours ago, RXP said:

I can't help thinking there is potential but we're not there yet, and there are certainly conflicting messages and implementation traits which are too blurry for now to conclude anything about the goal and the level this title is aiming at.

Try this Jean-Luc:  MS/Asobo is first addressing what matters most to both the coming Xbox users, as well as PC desktop simmers, and that is clearly scenery and atmospherics.  If you don't buy that argument then just contemplate how much money, time, learning, hassle is spent getting the other sims to be decent.  I was a fool and gave LM $200 a couple of times, then proceeded to spend other $1200+ on things to make the experience even half ways immersive.  That required ActiveSkyNext, REX SkyFarce, FSCaptain, GSX I and II, untold purchases of Orbx regional sceneries, airports, Navigraph, and settled on 4 planes from PMDG, Majestic, and one Coronado w/ the GTN750 to make it shine.  Thank God I didn't spend a nickel and GB's of HD space to install TruEarth.  And to this day, compared to canned MSFS, it's still only half ways decent.  The amount of installing, uninstalling, updating, countless installers, updated installers, blah blah blah, and still my reasonably strong PC still demands I disable Orbx NCA/SCA, AND dial back autogen to laughable levels, to fly into any decent size terminal in a PMDG plane just to maintain the requisite minimum 30fps required to keep vsync to 30Hz liquid smooth.  And no, nothing's wrong w/ my PC.  I just don't like hitches, pauses, etc that happens in P3D regularly, and they do.   When MSFS developed its infamous FPS drops I left for a week or two and returned to P3D, and it was nice to have.  Since the FPS drops has improved significantly, haven't been back.  Why?  Because, despite its shortcomings, MSFS is vastly superior in so many ways, so many of which are flat out discounted and ignored by some here.  Default airport quality is nothing short of spectacular, canned, right out of the sim.  Runway slopes, default aircraft, even unmodded ones now, are so far superior to the garbage in the other sims, they are certainly sufficient to keep me up in the air until excellent 3rd party planes arrive.

But back to the point--what is the direction one can conclude about the end game for MSFS?  After getting scenery and atmospherics fully up to par and everything that that entails including managing servers in a soon to grow user base, DX-12 port, then we will see fine tuning of stuff that matters to the folks used to the other, ancient, unwieldy 'sims'.  To me, this is far and away the easy part, truly.  Improving the SDK to meet what amounts to exceedingly well-known attributes to help MSFS mature towards a more robust sim in terms of the old basics present in the other sims.  This is the easy part, and is being left to when the priority is fully ready to let go of.  So it's no mystery to me.  They've said it themselves--it's a 10y project, they won't leave out the more seasoned simmers, etc.  Unfortunately, too many are immersed in a narrow vision of where this is going because they cannot see the forest for a few old trees.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

I agree with most of what you said above, though I think Xplane isn't as far behind as people think, the hardest part in Xplane would be for them to fix the clouds. It really shouldn't be too bad for them to improve the trees and water, that is not too complicated. The problem will always be a lack of aerial imagery with Xplane (or having to download it manually constantly), as the quality of NAIP can only go so far. There is some decent scenery in Xplane though, but the environmental washed out lighting of Xplane is a constant issue, whereas in MSFS you can just adjust the day/night slider and it can fix the contrast of wherever you are flying. There are also other issues with Xplane, like a lack of really great performing turboprops, unless you want to pay $40 to $80 per plane (the best planes in Xplane are quite expensive). Xplane is still not bad, but it's very expensive to get the best experience out of it.

Edited May 13, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[mrueedi 702]

For me the greatest improvement since launch is VR. I don't care what could have gotten worse just for the existence of VR. Even with the poor hardware specs that I have, it is so good, that no gap in any other area could change my (admittedly totally subjective) verdict.

From an application life cycle and development perspective, VR and DX12 seem to be the two big topics, which are adressed in the first year after launch. Anything else is important too, but just ground noise compared to these two topics. The first (VR) massively increased the value the sim has for me, so I assume, the second will too.