23 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

he reality is that within the features that MSFS supports, it has objectively, from a mathematical and implementation perspective, the highest resolution and most capable flight model of any home flight simulator, by an order of magnitude.

The issue is it doesn't look or feel like another sim, which is already the holy grail of perfection 🙄

19 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

That makes sense. I built a new high-end system for MSFS so performance was never the biggest issue... and the deteriorating visuals in exchange for performance is not a welcome change.  

Yeah, I get it.  I do see some popping, but no enough to sour my outlook....yet.  I spend too much time in the cockpit monitoring gages and adjusting things, to spend a lot of time looking at things out the window, although I do look out the from windshield most of the time.  When I notice popping, it's when I am looking out the side window.  I more attribute those things to my 20Mbs internet speed more than anything because I do get the Internet speed is not sufficient message often when my flight loads, but I click ignore and press on.

3 minutes ago, SmokeDiddy said:

I more attribute those things to my 20Mbs internet speed more than anything

I actually think it is just the SU5 FOV trade-off... your internet speed should be fine.

8 minutes ago, DylanM said:

The issue is it doesn't look or feel like another sim, which is already the holy grail of perfection 🙄

lol ... the main person pushing that view has admitted elsewhere they are not a real world pilot, not a developer and have no academic qualifications in aeronautics or engineering, they just talk a lot.

1 hour ago, Bert Pieke said:

Or, decided that performance was more important for most users... 😉

I am OK with it... but also understand that an FOV slider is planned, so you can have your views back..

That's all i ask for .. Options. 

I have been pretty hard on the devs for this sim. because at release i was happy with the sim. Of course their were bugs in the release candidate but one would think that they would get taken care of. Things went downhill pretty fast after that with the updates breaking even more stuff. Ive changed my mindset for this program and my expectations have changed and i use the sim if im happy with it or park the program accordingly if i cant deal with an update bug that has .. for me turned into a showstopper. In regard to the developer providing sliders. I welcome this knowing that probably most people appreciate the uplift in performance and did not feel as if they lost and graphical fidelity. I had the hardware to run proper ultra before the Service update and welcome the opportunity to have that graphical fidelity back for the most part.

I have also started to apply the same mindset to the forums. If i find that almost 100% of a person's posts annoy the word not allowed outta me ill ignore them. If i can reason with a person even if i don't agree with them i will take part in the discussion if i have something to say.

Life is too short and i have more pressing life matters at the end of the day.

Overall i think this was a turbulent year for this sim (My opinion)viewing through the perspective of software development not sales. and the base code appears to not yet be baked in. I'm willing to sit around for another year  to see what happens. In the mean time ill be minding my own business trundling along with whatever FBW throws out of the hangar. For a person like me who primarily wants to fly the tubes and only has a passing interest on everything else they have been a the team i would give an award to in terms of output and performance this past year.

Also looking forward to PMDG and Fenix to see how they fare with this platform as well.

Would somebody please give us an A350 ? LOL 

Cheers

Edited August 27, 20214 yr by Maxis

1 hour ago, Maxis said:

Overall i think this was a turbulent year for this sim (My opinion)

And mine is that it has been a great year.  Haven't had this much fun in years.

That's why some of us are so defensive about our new toy I guess.

Cheers

bs

Edited August 27, 20214 yr by bean_sprout

In one fell swoop I'm reminded why its useless to give a previously ignored user the benefit of the doubt. I just posted my opinion No need to quote me to express your obviously opposed view. You have done so multiple times and I've tried my best to avoid interacting with you and your "ever positive" post and threads.

Sigh..

Ill correct my belief in human redemption accordingly.

Edited August 27, 20214 yr by Maxis

14 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

The light rendering is better than ever on a HDR screen but still out on a SDR screen though the hotfix helped SDR  a bit .

Some of the issues introduced by SU5 can be offset by LOD 300 or above and higher render scaling.

The terrain pop in every time you turn your head (introduced to save memory in low end PCs) is not currently fixable.   One must assume whoever thought of that clever innovation sits in the cockpit and just looks straight ahead for days and never pans around or goes to external view.

 

Ongoing FM issues causing grief are the awful transition from the ground physics modelling to the flight model and the fact that propellers, turbo props and floats are not modelled at all and devs have to create workarounds.

 

It’s pretty sad we just passed the one year mark, and are dealing with these issues. 😞

15 hours ago, MattNischan said:

Plenty of pilots will have plenty of opinions, .......... but it's just the nature of being a human being. Perceptions are just perceptions.

The reality is that within the features that MSFS supports, it has objectively, from a mathematical and implementation perspective, the highest resolution and most capable flight model of any home flight simulator, by an order of magnitude. And all the comparisons to Level D sims or FAA training approval, are downright silly. Level D sims use old school table lookups with single CoG point force application and absolutely zero air mass simulation, FS9 era mathematics. The dynamic 4D air mass simulation alone is totally a complete first in the simulation space. The _default_ 172 in MSFS flies so incredibly close to measured data that it's down to that last extra degree of adverse yaw here, that one or two knots of extra deceleration in a slip there. You can now do the most complex IFR approaches possible in real life with your own G1000 NXi equipped 172, approaches that even many historically super expensive third party aircraft implementations haven't gotten totally right. And for not a single penny extra out of your pocket. Any of the previous MS flight simulator iterations could have gotten FAA approved for training, if they had decided to throw down the cash for the process and thought it was at all relevant to their vision. It has very little to do with super accurate flight modeling, I'll tell you that much.

Is it the most advanced overall? That depends on if you need arbitrary flight surfaces and other non-standard plane design stuff. For 90% of fixed-wing aircraft designs, it is stunningly capable. For the other stuff, not so much yet.

I get people's frustrations, I really do, and do know that the team isn't flippant about regressions, they do take it very seriously. But it's a huge product with millions and millions of lines of code, and as we take it further and further out of the FS6-FSX era there will be teething issues but things will improve. But this flight model nonsense really needs to go.

That's all I'm going to say about it, so don't come in guns blazing expecting a protracted argument. Just posting for the sake of the reader. 🙂

-Matt

Matt, I find your post very interesting. As a professional mathematician, I have read the sdk published by Asobo and indeed I got to the same conclusions about this new flight model. I believe that it is hard to do better today if your goal is to build a multi-purpose , modular flightsim, where you can plug in new aircraft at will.

One question about this: do you agree that some improvements are needed in ground interactions? I mean taxiing, takeoff, ground effect and landing? After all, in modern civil aviation, those are the only moments when you hand fly the aircraft 🙂 (that's why I mainly fly the 172 with steam gauges)

And do you agree about the need to improve envelope boundaries? I had a similar discussion on the same topic in another sim forum, and finally came to the conclusion that higher order effects with ad-hoc modeling and more sophisticated mathematical models are needed, and this is not easy to do in a modular flightsim.

Also interesting is what you say about pilots, opinions and perception: it reminds me of what I call music simulators (hifi setups). They reproduce music, but real music is something different. And different people will look for different things in music reproduction, so they will hardly agree.  Our toys try to reproduce flight, but flight is something different, and every person will look for different things, so some will love sim A, others will love sim B.

Finally, if by level D you mean airline training simulators, are you sure that they are single CoG point with no airmass simulation? If I may, can you point me (even in pvt) to a source for this?

All in all, the only desktop simulator I have tested in which the flightmodel is really good is PSX (the 747-400 sim). I tested it many times with a retired 747 captain and he found it absolutely excellent. But that's a single aircraft sim, so it's in another league. And it has virtually no visuals, so it's in another league for that reason also. 

A.

14 hours ago, Maxis said:

That's all i ask for .. Options. 

I have been pretty hard on the devs for this sim. because at release i was happy with the sim. Of course their were bugs in the release candidate but one would think that they would get taken care of. Things went downhill pretty fast after that with the updates breaking even more stuff. Ive changed my mindset for this program and my expectations have changed and i use the sim if im happy with it or park the program accordingly if i cant deal with an update bug that has .. for me turned into a showstopper. In regard to the developer providing sliders. I welcome this knowing that probably most people appreciate the uplift in performance and did not feel as if they lost and graphical fidelity. I had the hardware to run proper ultra before the Service update and welcome the opportunity to have that graphical fidelity back for the most part.

I have also started to apply the same mindset to the forums. If i find that almost 100% of a person's posts annoy the word not allowed outta me ill ignore them. If i can reason with a person even if i don't agree with them i will take part in the discussion if i have something to say.

Life is too short and i have more pressing life matters at the end of the day.

Overall i think this was a turbulent year for this sim (My opinion)viewing through the perspective of software development not sales. and the base code appears to not yet be baked in. I'm willing to sit around for another year  to see what happens. In the mean time ill be minding my own business trundling along with whatever FBW throws out of the hangar. For a person like me who primarily wants to fly the tubes and only has a passing interest on everything else they have been a the team i would give an award to in terms of output and performance this past year.

Also looking forward to PMDG and Fenix to see how they fare with this platform as well.

Would somebody please give us an A350 ? LOL 

Cheers

Great Post in my opinion, but from the point of view of discussion... 

I am worried about some of these options they will introduce ATTHIS STAGE OF THE SIM.   For example, it's likely that if you put in a slider to allow more loading of scenery around the plane,  in theory to stop popping,  most people will just ram that upto max without another thought and then complain about things like scenery not loading, or even worse stutters, etc etc.

Trust me,  I love options, but the more options you have, the more likely it is that people will get ahead of themselves and make matters worse.

Theres a big part of me that says.. lets get some of the other stuff sorted out to an acceptable level first, and then add sliders etc to allow people to experiment with additional stuff if they want.   

With my spec, it's kinda irrelevant what they do frankly, because I lock everything down on full ultra and 40FPS at 2k  and have no popping or stuttering as I look around, assuming my rolling cache has run for a bit, as everything is already loaded in there anyway and my machine is fast enough to page stuff in and out.  I do notice, when flying tubes, that as I go up or descend, theres a point where the landscape shifts from low level lods to high level lods or vice-versa that causes a very very slight blip...  am talking my rock solid 40FPS goes to 35 for a second then back to 40, however, the rest is solid.

I personally don't need lighting changes  (I run in SDR even though I have an HDR monitor), or extra LOD distance (I fly mostly in the UK, so the odds of having weather that allows me to see further than 20 miles is rare 🙂  )

As to performance.. that rock ssolid 40fps for me continues whether in the country, coming into Heathrow or flying over London.

But as I say, I love options, but am slightly concerned that it will be used to overdrive what people "should" expect from their equipment and cause more problems for some than it solves.

As to the forums, I agree with you and see 90% of this as first world problems.  I have a few people blocked (actually 5) and it's been a much nicer place since I finally bit the bullet and did that 🙂

I also accept that many things will have to come (as they did for all other sims) from third parties..  things like ATC, Ground Handling, Accurate Garmins and non-default aircraft whether tubes or llow and slow..  that I accepted from before day 1 and am really surprised we are getting some of those so quickly.

I also agree re turbulent year, but when I think back to the years of Angst on the other sims which went on a LOT longer than a year for all of them, I am actually quite happy with the state of the union currently.

Regards

Graham

16 hours ago, MattNischan said:

The reality is that within the features that MSFS supports, it has objectively, from a mathematical and implementation perspective, the highest resolution and most capable flight model of any home flight simulator, by an order of magnitude. And all the comparisons to Level D sims or FAA training approval, are downright silly. Level D sims use old school table lookups with single CoG point force application and absolutely zero air mass simulation, FS9 era mathematics. The dynamic 4D air mass simulation alone is totally a complete first in the simulation space. The _default_ 172 in MSFS flies so incredibly close to measured data that it's down to that last extra degree of adverse yaw here, that one or two knots of extra deceleration in a slip there. You can now do the most complex IFR approaches possible in real life with your own G1000 NXi equipped 172, approaches that even many historically super expensive third party aircraft implementations haven't gotten totally right. And for not a single penny extra out of your pocket. Any of the previous MS flight simulator iterations could have gotten FAA approved for training, if they had decided to throw down the cash for the process and thought it was at all relevant to their vision. It has very little to do with super accurate flight modeling, I'll tell you that much.

Thanks Matt.  I think many real life Cessna 172 pilots at the official MSFS forums.flightsimulator.com forums, and here at AVSIM as well, have said the Cessna 172 in MSFS flies pretty good compared to the real life Cessna 172.

The other thing is the mathematics of the flight model.  As discussed already in a different thread, the MSFS flight model is quite advanced and has a higher resolution than its other home market competitors.  From what I gather, it's not perfect and needs to be tweaked further, but the base foundation is very good.

I think people need to come up with more concrete evidence if they claim there are issues with the flight model.  For example, a split screen of how the Cessna 172 behaves in real life, versus the 172 in MSFS (the conditions should be the same or almost the same of course), for specific situations, so that Asobo can tweak the flight model further.  Or perhaps people can show actual numbers & measurements that are different in how the 172 behaves in real life versus MSFS.  

And even for subjective posts, hopefully it's from a real pilot that flies that specific plane in real life.  If that pilot really wants to help correct the behavior in MSFS further, again, a split screen comparison of real life versus MSFS would help a lot, or showing the measurements between real life and MSFS can help.  

Edited August 28, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

My personal summary after a year of MSFS 2020:

13 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I think people need to come up with more concrete evidence if they claim there are issues with the flight model.  For example, a split screen of how the Cessna 172 behaves in real life, versus the 172 in MSFS (the conditions should be the same or almost the same of course), for specific situations, so that Asobo can tweak the flight model further.  Or perhaps people can show actual numbers & measurements that are different in how the 172 behaves in real life versus MSFS.  

And even for subjective posts, hopefully it's from a real pilot that flies that specific plane in real life.  If that pilot really wants to help correct the behavior in MSFS further, again, a split screen comparison of real life versus MSFS would help a lot, or showing the measurements between real life and MSFS can help.  

Interestingly, I had someone round the other week who is a CFI at my local airfield.  He hadn't seen MSFS yet and wondered what all the noise was about, so I sat him in front of my screen and said.. have fun and let me know what yoiu think of the planes.

Well he went straight in to the 172 which he instructs on and after a bit I said.. well..  he said.. yeah  not bad, but it's obviously a much newer plane than any at the airfield,  none of them can perform quite as good as this, but as a brand new one, it's great.  Are there any options for degrading it to the level that most people fly at with a 10 year  old one thats had lots of maintenance and lots of flying hours?

Kinda made me chuckle some.

Graham

 

13 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

, the MSFS flight model is quite advanced and has a higher resolution than its other home market competitors.  

Again with Microsoft promoting misinformation and people quoting BS, they are known with that though.

I'm not saying who is better, but the talks about x-plane's FM vs MSFS, and also based on Asobo's own explanation, is simply wrong, it has been discussed multiple times. If you don't understand it, stop talking about it and enjoy what you already are enjoying but most importantly stop with spreading misinformation.

23 minutes ago, mtaxp said:

Again with Microsoft promoting misinformation and people quoting BS, they are known with that though.

I'm not saying who is better, but the talks about x-plane's FM vs MSFS, and also based on Asobo's own explanation, is simply wrong, it has been discussed multiple times. If you don't understand it, stop talking about it and enjoy what you already are enjoying but most importantly stop with spreading misinformation.

And what do you know?  You are just some random person with no credentials in aeronautical engineering and you don't even bother to go into detail about what's wrong with the discussion there, including a discussion of the related mathematics.  Maybe if you feel confident enough, you can tell us how the details of some of the comments are incorrect and how the mathematical model is also incorrect.  But you probably can't. Looking at some of the comments I cited in that thread, it appears there are people familiar with the mathematics of aerodynamics.  Included in that discussion is Matt's explanation of the MSFS flight model:

Quote

Additionally, MSFS categorically _does not_ use Blade Element Theory. Blade element theory is the idea that you can slice an airfoil up into cross sections, evaluate those cross sections, and then come up with a single lift and drag component for each cross section. XP does this slicing across the defined lifting surfaces to generate a limited number of lift points. It is relatively coarse and doesn't generate different values across each individual surface cross-section, but nonetheless it is used to great effect and the work done with it is quite good, as I've said before.

MSFS also starts with a base geometrically defined lifting surface, but then goes a completely different direction and discretizes the lifting surface into a large number (comparatively) of grid samples. Each individual grid sample receives its own airflow simulation that gets input from the airflow model in true 3d space: i.e. the atmospheric model is also 3d and thus the air itself is not a just a single scalar contribution but instead a varying 3d contribution across each grid sample where the atmospheric model and grid intersect. This means that each grid sample on any lifting surface contributes its forces individually and is also affected by a 3d atmospheric model individually.

Whether or not one believes the current aircraft flight model configurations use this well or whether enough parameters are exposed, the base grid sampling of the MSFS flight model is of a much higher resolution and the atmospheric contribution in 3d is a consumer sim first (to my knowledge, anyway). It also has the benefit of generating different lift values across the surface from front to back, which can be critical value differences at the flight envelope edges.

No offense mtaxp, but your opinion is just as useless as mine (I am not a certified aeronautical engineer either).  Mtaxp, you need to start citing some details rather than claiming vaguely why MSFS's flight model isn't as good as the other home market simulator flight models.  Do what Matt did in the above quote - go into the details and explain to us the details of why MSFS's flight model isn't as good as you claim it is. Otherwise, until then, your comments have absolutely no substance.

 

Edited August 28, 20214 yr by abrams_tank