MSFS has the most advanced flight model?

[BobFS88 633]

1 minute ago, Janov said:

the problem with that argumentative chain is that no one ever said that the flightmodel was perfect 😄.

Not sure if there is any software that is perfect? Probably not.

That is exactly right!

No software is perfect but I know Austin tries to improve it as much as he can. It's too bad some folk can't appreciate it.

[jarmstro 2,402]

59 minutes ago, Janov said:

I have (tried) to explain this to you several times at length in the other forums. I have little hope that another time would be more succesful. I, for example, have a hard time understanding the string theory, we all have to accept that there are personal limits to comprehension of complex circumstances... unless someone does not WANT to understand something 😉

For everyone else:

The "legacy" model of X-Plane 11 was the standard flightmodel - until Austin improved the flight model in the version 11 run. This new and improved model (better downwash, better calculation of oblique airflow on cylinders and some other small things) was dubbed "the experimental flight model". To keep compatibility with existing third party aircraft, this new "experimental" flight model was initially opt-in to collect feedback...kinda like a live beta.

After the "experimental" flightmodel was deemed tested and good, it became the new (experimental) flight model. As I said, it is of higher fidelity than the previous model, but for reasons of backward compatibility (aircraft tuned for the old flightmodel) there is now a choice for aircraft authors to pick in the aircraft file which flightmodel they want the plane to run on.

There is also a switch in the GUI for the user to set - so you can force planes tuned for the "legacy" flightmodel to run with the "new (experimental)" flightmodel if you would like to see the difference.

I thought you said all it did was increased drag and I shouldn't worry about it? In fact I am sure that's what you said. I do understand that the experimental flight model has been tested and has been found to be superior and yet few of my planes use it and in fact the Zibo throws up a warning if I turn on the experimental model. I'm not sure about the recently released BA146 which I am tempted by once it's got a custom FMC?

You also maintained that X-Planes flight model was peerless and that MSFS could never achieve achieve anything approaching realistic flight as It was based on lookup tables. 

 Can we look forward to an experimental experimental flight model?

Edited June 8, 2021 by jarmstro

[FlyBaby 659]

38 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

Yes of course I did! LOL I am so silly indeed and you not a troll at all LOL

Whatever you do, don't insult him.

I think that most people familiar with his antics ignore him, or spend very little time going back and forth. Over in the XP thread, he brags about blocking certain people so that he doesn't have to respond...and then he comes here to debate about a sim that he doesn't even own.

So lets keep the threads open by not getting into insults. I think the 2M+ pilots, the swarm of Devs flocking to MSFS, the freeware community, WT, FBW, all attest to where MSFS is going.

[ThrottleUp 617]

23 hours ago, snglecoil said:

I know this is going to ruffle some feathers...but It simply does not matter.

I have 2 current students that started as simmers first. They started by touting the merits of another sim with a “superior” flight model. After the first few lessons by the time we started working on landings, both realized that the sim was nothing life real life. I’m not saying that sims are not valuable or fun, but I wouldn’t get all worked up about A vs B flight model. Truth is any of the current sims can work well enough. 

This! You said it best. These pretend computer pixel planes all feel the same to me. Good for learning stuff like navigation, procedures and such. But no way would you want to think the way they "feel" and "act" can be like the real thing. As your students discovered in a hurry. 

The closest to that would be the latest generation Level D flight sims such as those made by CAE. Even then airline pilot friends say the real thing is much easier to fly! 

The XP11 vs MSFS vs FSX vs P3D vs DCS vs Aerofly debating while interesting here and there just results in players frothing at the mouth lol.

Edited June 8, 2021 by ThrottleUp

[Janov 2,383]

25 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

and in fact the Zibo throws up a warning if I turn on the experimental model.

Because it has not been tuned for he new experimental flight model. The biggest effect is - yes - changed drag at higher body angles (due to the changed airflow calculation on oblique bodies like an aircraft fuselage that is not pointed straight into the airstream).

Any aircraft author that considers his aircraft to be current and kept up to date in X-Plane should by now have tuned it for the experimental flight model...it has been "final" for how many years now?

25 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Can we look forward to an experimental experimental flight model?

I would say yes - the flight model is not perfect, and Austin will certainly tune and refine the flightmodel in the future if and when he (or users) finds deficiencies. Not sure what he will call that new flightmodel. The iterations are getting smaller, I believe that there are no fundamental flaws remaining.

I know he did a bunch of things in relation to electric engines and small diameter rotors (as he used X-Plane to predict flightmodel of the Alia 250 eVTOL).

Edited June 8, 2021 by Janov

[jarmstro 2,402]

3 minutes ago, Janov said:

Any aircraft author that considers his aircraft to be current and kept up to date in X-Plane should by now have tuned it for the experimental flight model...it has been "final" for how many years now?

And yet none of my favourite planes authors, even though they are constantly updating their planes, (Toliss, Zibo, FF, TorqueSim etc) have bothered to tune the aircraft for the experimental flight model. Odd to say the least?

[Janov 2,383]

40 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Odd to say the least?

I would say that they don´t feel the need to do so. If you tune for the "old" flightmodel, you get very accurate performance for the performance and fuel flow enroute - so this will not even be noticed when someone compares the model against the POH. You will - however - get discrepancies in N1 necessary to achieve those values. You can either tune the engines (and N1) to be realistic at high AOA (i.e. during landing) or you during low AOA operation (during cruise). Since even few actual pilots know the "normal" N1 during cruise, this is something that designers can get away with easily.

To get highly accurate N1 for both regimes you need to use the newer flightmodel. But as I said before - the difference is "just a few percent" so a lot of designers may simply not care (it is a big task to tune a flightmodel!).

[jarmstro 2,402]

2 minutes ago, Janov said:

I would say that they don´t feel the need to do so. If you tune for the "old" flightmodel, you get very accurate performance for the performance and fuel flow enroute - so this will not even be noticed when someone compares the model against the POH. You will - however - get discrepancies in N1 necessary to achieve those values. You can either tune the engines (and N1) to be realistic at high AOA (i.e. during landing) or you during low AOA operation (during cruise). Since even few actual pilots know the "normal" N1 during cruise, this is something that designers can get away with easily.

To get highly accurate N1 for both regimes you need to use the newer flightmodel. But as I said before - the difference is "just a few percent" so a lot of designers may simply not care (it is a big task to tune a flightmodel!).

Well it's fine with me whether any author does or does not tune their plane for experimental flight model. They all fly great with or without it. 
 

It would be nice, however, not to have to see Meyers in any more videos standing behind a plane with his wind-o-meter because it's pretty cringeworthy.

[marsman2020 1,310]

I've been in the process of moving across the country and haven't had time to try Sim Update 4 yet.

Can you takeoff and land in a crosswind without a giant unrealistic yaw discontinuity at the moment the wheels liftoff or touch the ground?  Because that one is totally obvious the instant you turn Live Weather on an go to any airport with even a 5 kt crosswind.

[Bobsk8 12,582]

1 hour ago, ThrottleUp said:

This! You said it best. These pretend computer pixel planes all feel the same to me. Good for learning stuff like navigation, procedures and such. But no way would you want to think the way they "feel" and "act" can be like the real thing. As your students discovered in a hurry. 

The closest to that would be the latest generation Level D flight sims such as those made by CAE. Even then airline pilot friends say the real thing is much easier to fly! 

The XP11 vs MSFS vs FSX vs P3D vs DCS vs Aerofly debating while interesting here and there just results in players frothing at the mouth lol.

 I flew the CAE 767-400ER Level D sim years ago at an airline  training center with a check pilot. My only experience in Tubeliners was a couple of years flying the Level D 767 in FSX.  I hand flew a traffic pattern and made 9 take offs and landings. I only bounced one landing in because I flared too high. Other than that, all my other landings were OK. I held the altitude handflying the 767 within a hundred feet most of the time.  The check pilot was surprised that I had no actual turbine time other than FSX. I was suprised at how heavy the controls, especially the elevator was in the CAE sim. You really had to adjust the trim to control it. 

I also had a tour with one of the engineers at CAE in Montreal, and we had a few discussions about how the sim was designed. The data that was used to program the sim, was obtained directly from Boeing, and it was the data created when the 767 was test flown generated by computers in the aircraft. No blade element BS for them. 

Edited June 8, 2021 by Bobsk8

[tweekz 2,165]

MSFS is theoretically a little more detailed. But it suffers from immaturity. The mathematics behind it is no magic. Or to say it with Elon Musks word "rocket science is no rocket science"! 😄

What MSFS lacks is fine tuning. Some things just don't feel right yet. However, those things that do, feel definitely better and more sophisticated than in XP. Take the small bumps in air or the air mass simulation as example. But also don't forget the weather simulation. I strongly think this will be improved in XP12, but as of now you get instant weather load-ins - how realistic is that?

Edited June 8, 2021 by tweekz

[Andiroto 37]

I compare Flightsims a bit with Coverbands. As good as many of them are, they will never reach the original! The Devs still learning this new Sim and I am sure we will have in two or three years realistic virtual planes which we had like this never before!

[ThrottleUp 617]

50 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

 I flew the CAE 767-400ER Level D sim years ago at an airline  training center with a check pilot. My only experience in Tubeliners was a couple of years flying the Level D 767 in FSX.  I hand flew a traffic pattern and made 9 take offs and landings. I only bounced one landing in because I flared too high. Other than that, all my other landings were OK. I held the altitude handflying the 767 within a hundred feet most of the time.  The check pilot was surprised that I had no actual turbine time other than FSX. I was suprised at how heavy the controls, especially the elevator was in the CAE sim. You really had to adjust the trim to control it. 

I also had a tour with one of the engineers at CAE in Montreal, and we had a few discussions about how the sim was designed. The data that was used to program the sim, was obtained directly from Boeing, and it was the data created when the 767 was test flown generated by computers in the aircraft. No blade element BS for them. 

What an experience that must have been, very lucky. And to top it all off you got to see the CAEs and how they were designed. Talk about straight from the horses mouth, data directly from Boeing, how cool. The Airbus sims must have been a bigger challenge initially because of the complex FBW system Im guessing. Would love to get a ride in a Level D one day. 

[Bobsk8 12,582]

7 minutes ago, ThrottleUp said:

What an experience that must have been, very lucky. And to top it all off you got to see the CAEs and how they were designed. Talk about straight from the horses mouth, data directly from Boeing, how cool. The Airbus sims must have been a bigger challenge initially because of the complex FBW system Im guessing. Would love to get a ride in a Level D one day. 

This was before 9/11. I am guessing it is much more difficult today to arrange. Back then, just the hydraulics platform for the motion was around $2,000,000+. When you took off, it would throw you back in the seat, feeling just like an actual takeoff. If you did a rejected takeoff, you had to make sure your seatbelt was securely fastened, or you could wind up plastered against the panel. 

 

https://www.cae.com/civil-aviation/aviation-simulation-equipment/training-equipment/full-flight-simulators/

Edited June 8, 2021 by Bobsk8

[EvidencePlz 276]

Here's a comment about flight model in home desktop flight sims from Matt Nischan of Working Title he posted in March 2021:

Quote

 

There’s no conclusive observation that can be made by looking at one specific aircraft flight model configuration and then applying that conclusion to the entire flight simulation. How well a particular aircraft meets book values is entirely dependent on how well the flight model author adjusted the values to make the book values possible.

This is exactly the same in both MSFS and X-Plane. X-Plane only uses geometry to the same extent MSFS does, for the most part. All the complex study level flight models developed in XP heavily use datarefs to adjust various tables and scalars to modulate the output of the simulation, because all simulations are imperfect.

If the flight model designer has not input the correct parameters into the model, then you get a crappy simulation, both in MSFS and XP. It’s why the default 172 in XP flies like it has no idea what longitudinal stability is, while payware offerings are much better: that doesn’t mean XPs flight model overall is garbage, just that the configuration of it may be for a given airplane. Similarly, taking the default 787 which doesn’t match book and claiming it means something about the core of the MSFS flight engine is just misguided.

In the right hands, the MSFS modern engine is going to produce some seriously accurate aircraft. How do I know that? Because our Working Title CJ4 does actually hit those book values at all regimes, with correct N1s, fuel flow, climb rates, over various altitudes and ambient pressures. Not only that but we have stall speeds within a knot of two of book, proper approach angles, correct bank rates, etc.

Is the MSFS simulation completely perfect and without limitations or quirks? No, but neither is XPs, by a long shot. These strange questions and tests are apples and parsnips.

 

Source: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/real-physics-for-each-aircraft/372656/256