Let me confirm that the Longitude also suffers this nausea-producing motion after SU9. Even if you set the weather to Clear Skies and hand-remove any wind layers. Still, it sometimes looks like you're flying through a hurricane for no apparent reason.

3 hours ago, David Mills said:

Let me confirm that the Longitude also suffers this nausea-producing motion after SU9. Even if you set the weather to Clear Skies and hand-remove any wind layers. Still, it sometimes looks like you're flying through a hurricane for no apparent reason.

This is my experience as well. Sometimes, really bad. I'm disappointed. SU8 was not nearly as bad.

20 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

Not claiming the default aircraft are OK, ...

That exactly should not be the case. Are you saying kind of "MS is vending an essentially rubbish/flawed base product, the rest has to be done by addons."? Like if I buy a PC, but it's not reasonably usable - to get it working properly, I have to buy an addon, e.g. a keyboard. Then a Windows update comes along and breaks the usability of the keayboard. I have to download and install a new driver. Still not to talk of the base product, which is still not fulfilling reasonably its original purpose.

 

18 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

The over-reaction in light/GA aircraft you speak of is once again I think the fault of MSFS's default GA aircraft implementation, and not necessarily the world airflow simulation.

Do we talk here about, let's say, a weather simulator with "world airflow simulation" or about an aircraft simulator?

 

It was said, that MSFS 2020 is a 10 year project. Fine for me. But shouldn't they do the most important aspect correct from the beginning? I don't know when they started with development, but I assume it might be around 4 years ago? Shouldn't be flight modeling meanwhile be at least "acceptable", considering the big team they have? And it's not that they started from zero. Even if it was this way, I bought a FLIGHT simulator at first and at second a "world sightseeing" simulator (I can get the latter with GE for free as well).

1 hour ago, flying_carpet said:

That exactly should not be the case. Are you saying kind of "MS is vending an essentially rubbish/flawed base product, the rest has to be done by addons."?
.....

No, you might need to re-read a bit more carefully so as to discern exactly what I (and others) are saying... MSFS's *default* aircraft, like with many other civilian flight sims are at a quality and fidelity that are not so great in some of the provided birds, acceptable in others, and pretty good in yet others i.e. C172 (and they are all also slated to keep improving, both in their flight modelling aspects as we've seen since SU8+, and definitely the avionics with Working Title's contributions such as NXi)... in fact on the avionics side MSFS provides a much better *default* experience than other civilian sims.

The quality and tuning of MSFS's default aircraft is separate from the quality and capabilities of its core flight model and aerodynamics engine, which is where a sim developer should always focus on. If for whatever reasons you only want to fly default aircraft in MSFS and they're not satisfactory for your needs, then you'll have to move on/back to other civilian sims I guess. But I'm not sure other civilian sims' default aircraft provide a much better experience.

AFAIAC, the only add-ons needed for MSFS to complete the proper flight simulator experience are high fidelity aircraft which have well tuned flight models and deep systems (no different from many other/past sims), some of these add-ons are free like the FBW A320, WT CJ4, mods for default aircraft, etc... overall that is still a much easier ask than using other flight sims which also not only need similar aircraft add-ons, but also add-ons for airports, scenery, weather, etc etc. And even with those other add-on the other sims lag far behind when it comes to  world + weather simulation/rendering... so ya, MSFS is an unbeatable experience for FLIGHT simulation when all aspects are considered, for many of us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edited May 2, 20224 yr by lwt1971

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

The quality and tuning of MSFS's default aircraft is separate from the quality and capabilities of its core flight model and aerodynamics engine, which is where a sim developer should always focus on. If for whatever reasons you only want to fly default aircraft in MSFS and they're not satisfactory for your needs, then you'll have to move on/back to other civilian sims I guess. But I'm not sure other civilian sims' default aircraft provide a much better experience.

As you highligted "separate": does that mean, MSFS's default aircraft aren't interacting with the core flight model and aerodynamics engine? With what else do they interact? Are the core flight model and aerodynamics engine intended only for addon planes? If it was this way, it's a somewhat strange concept.

Further above I've written something about a PC and a keayboard as an addon. That was probably not the best example, but if I take e.g. a racing simulation with nice surrounding (i.e. the spectators waving with flags, nice grid girls and knick-knack 😉), but the driving physics aren't this well, then I need to buy addon car's? That's not what I know from racing simulations. Either the physics are (reasonably) good or they are arcade style. I don't know any racing simulation (but I might be wrong), where you have to buy addon cars. You can add certain race tracks as addons, but not cars.

38 minutes ago, flying_carpet said:

As you highligted "separate": does that mean, MSFS's default aircraft aren't interacting with the core flight model and aerodynamics engine? With what else do they interact? Are the core flight model and aerodynamics engine intended only for addon planes? If it was this way, it's a somewhat strange concept.

Further above I've written something about a PC and a keayboard as an addon. That was probably not the best example, but if I take e.g. a racing simulation with nice surrounding (i.e. the spectators waving with flags, nice grid girls and knick-knack 😉), but the driving physics aren't this well, then I need to buy addon car's? That's not what I know from racing simulations. Either the physics are (reasonably) good or they are arcade style. I don't know any racing simulation (but I might be wrong), where you have to buy addon cars. You can add certain race tracks as addons, but not cars.

maybe you should focus on Racing Sims then..

50 minutes ago, flying_carpet said:

As you highligted "separate": does that mean, MSFS's default aircraft aren't interacting with the core flight model and aerodynamics engine? With what else do they interact? Are the core flight model and aerodynamics engine intended only for addon planes? If it was this way, it's a somewhat strange concept.

The flight sim engine handles the physics/aerodynamics providing a general framework for aircraft developers, to implement on top of and provide aircraft specific parameters, geometry definitions, etc.. Asobo, also as an "aircraft developer" provides default aircraft that make use of their physics/aerodynamics core flight model engine. It is in this role (as aircraft developer) they can never be as good as specific 3rd party aircraft developers who have the expertise in whatever type/model of aircraft they specialize in (no matter how good the core aerodynamics engine is, if the specific parameters and other custom logic per aircraft aren't properly and realistically implemented, the aircraft is not going to fly realistically).... but Asobo can surely improve here, and are definitely taking steps in the right direction (i.e. the C172, avionics via the expertise of Working Title, etc). This is how it's been in the flight sim world forever, there are no strange concepts at play here.

21 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

I'll have to go back look at the initial videos Asobo put out, but if they were promising default aircraft with sound aerodynamics then yes, that is a promise not as yet delivered (with the exception of their C172 maybe).. but I took it as them showcasing the core flight sim engine capabilities more so than how their default aircraft would implement and take advantage of said capabilities.  And I certainly don't think MS/Asobo were trying to convey that MSFS will negate all need for add-on aircrafts and such, those were all proclamations from initial over-eager fans of MSFS.

And I agree re: the physics/aerodynamics being quite doable from many years ago, as I was a big fan of Flight Unlimited back in the day... This is also why I like to keep repeating that the real revolutionary tech MSFS puts forward is its use and combination of technology stacks like cloud, AI, satellite terrain, weather etc.  I think MSFS's core engine having the capability to model more discrete portions of the aircraft, and other improvements they spoke of in their aerodynamics video series might've been conveyed (and rightly so) as something new vs existing sims... but again, it is going to come down to aircraft developers properly implementing and taking advantage of these core capabilities... I don't expect MS/Asobo to deliver such refinement and fine tuning in their default aircraft.

Also in terms of the latest world airflow and turbulance simulation in SU9, there are many (including IRL pilots) who think that's realistic, along with perhaps equally many who feel it is too constant and "always on" and want options/sliders to manually override turbulance that the sim serves up depending on time of day, seasons, and kind of terrain (water vs land) being flown over. At least Asobo is now considering such overriding sim settings/sliders.

The over-reaction in light/GA aircraft you speak of is once again I think the fault of MSFS's default GA aircraft implementation, and not necessarily the world airflow simulation.

In terms of properly simulated GA/light aircraft, if you're able to assess the Milviz C310 or FSW 414, then perhaps you can get a better feel for what the core sim is capable of facilitating, or not. Maybe @Dutch727 if you care to chime in on this discussion from the perspective of your C310 that'd be much appreciated 🙂

Sorry for the late reply I've been pretty busy over the last week or so 🙂

We have four IRL 310 pilots who've been advising us on the 310 IRL flight dynamics.  They are in general agreement about the essentials (despite the old saying that if you ask X pilots about something aviation related you'll get X+Y different answers.)   

We knew going in that getting 100% perfection on the numbers in every area was not possible but we aimed to be close. Even that took lots of experimentation with the SDK parameters - they are all individually documented but their interactions and undocumented behaviors had to be discovered by many many hours of testing.

Most of our FDE work is spent in the non-normal flight envelop and this is where we hit the most problems.  Everything had to be re-done when the SU8 "new prop physics" was released.  That update made feathering and unfeathering possible and that was a big win.  But the single-engine performance is not currently accurate and we couldn't make it accurate with the existing parameters so we had to resort to coding to do things like limit single-engine level flight speed, or make single-engine takeoffs impossible.

The most time was spent on engine-out consequences.  You'll notice a big difference in the way the 310 reacts to an engine-out versus what's come before.  We have feathering working accurately - you can maintain altitude and climb slightly with an engine out and the prop feathered.  Without feather all you can do is fly to the scene of your accident.  There's a bug in the sim regarding unfeathering that required us to slightly change the unfeathering procedure from that of the real 310, and we wish that weren't so, and hope Asobo will get that fixed.

In the end (after lots of back and forth) our 310 pilots have praised our efforts, saying we are more accurate than some IRL sim tools used for recurrent training.  I was happy to read that, just a few days ago, from the guy who was for many years a 310 CFI.

I think MSFS has made great progress in flight dynamics, but we're looking for more improvement.  It's not a disaster internally. It's given us the tools to get almost 100% there.  In the future, I think that will be possible as long as Asobo keeps working on it.

1 minute ago, Dutch727 said:

Sorry for the late reply I've been pretty busy over the last week or so 🙂

We have four IRL 310 pilots who've been advising us on the 310 IRL flight dynamics.  They are in general agreement about the essentials (despite the old saying that if you ask X pilots about something aviation related you'll get X+Y different answers.)   

We knew going in that getting 100% perfection on the numbers in every area was not possible but we aimed to be close. Even that took lots of experimentation with the SDK parameters - they are all individually documented but their interactions and undocumented behaviors had to be discovered by many many hours of testing.

Most of our FDE work is spent in the non-normal flight envelop and this is where we hit the most problems.  Everything had to be re-done when the SU8 "new prop physics" was released.  That update made feathering and unfeathering possible and that was a big win.  But the single-engine performance is not currently accurate and we couldn't make it accurate with the existing parameters so we had to resort to coding to do things like limit single-engine level flight speed, or make single-engine takeoffs impossible.

The most time was spent on engine-out consequences.  You'll notice a big difference in the way the 310 reacts to an engine-out versus what's come before.  We have feathering working accurately - you can maintain altitude and climb slightly with an engine out and the prop feathered.  Without feather all you can do is fly to the scene of your accident.  There's a bug in the sim regarding unfeathering that required us to slightly change the unfeathering procedure from that of the real 310, and we wish that weren't so, and hope Asobo will get that fixed.

In the end (after lots of back and forth) our 310 pilots have praised our efforts, saying we are more accurate than some IRL sim tools used for recurrent training.  I was happy to read that, just a few days ago, from the guy who was for many years a 310 CFI.

I think MSFS has made great progress in flight dynamics, but we're looking for more improvement.  It's not a disaster internally. It's given us the tools to get almost 100% there.  In the future, I think that will be possible as long as Asobo keeps working on it.

 

Thanks Dutch, always great to hear insights from developers like you! That's great how the IRL 310 pilots are full or praise re: the accuracy being better than even IRL sim tools used for training. Yup as you say hopefully Asobo keeps working away at improvements and considers all feedback from devs.

Sounds to me like the C310 is going to move forward the GA flying experience in MSFS a great deal... along with the recent leaps forward of the airliner/jet experience courtesy of other high fidelity aircraft, I'm liking 2022 so far in MSFS 🙂

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

 

Thanks Dutch, always great to hear insights from developers like you! That's great how the IRL 310 pilots are full or praise re: the accuracy being better than even IRL sim tools used for training. Yup as you say hopefully Asobo keeps working away at improvements and considers all feedback from devs.

Sounds to me like the C310 is going to move forward the GA flying experience in MSFS a great deal... along with the recent leaps forward of the airliner/jet experience courtesy of other high fidelity aircraft, I'm liking 2022 so far in MSFS 🙂

The 310 isn't perfect of course - we've had to accept some compromises between the possible and the practical.  But we hope we've raised the bar; we sure have tried to do that.

I think all devs - Asobo included - are still learning about what's possible in MSFS flight dynamics and how to accomplish it.  I'm sure, a month or two from now, we'll be seeing dozens of things we could have done better.   But those can go into future updates.

On 5/2/2022 at 3:43 PM, Bobsk8 said:

maybe you should focus on Racing Sims then..

Don't worry, I'll do 😁. But not only. I want MSFS to be as good as possible. However, if the base product is flawed (or more friendly "improvable") and almost every update breaks something (it's not only me saying that), that means that even if you want to use only addon planes - their developers have to do much more work then necessary. It takes longer for them to develop, i.e. you get the addons later and they get more expensive.

As Dutch727 wrote:

On 5/2/2022 at 4:07 PM, Dutch727 said:

... but their interactions and undocumented behaviors had to be discovered by many many hours of testing.

...

... But the single-engine performance is not currently accurate and we couldn't make it accurate with the existing parameters so we had to resort to coding to do things like limit single-engine level flight speed, or make single-engine takeoffs impossible.

 

 

On 5/2/2022 at 4:04 PM, lwt1971 said:

The flight sim engine handles the physics/aerodynamics providing a general framework for aircraft developers, to implement on top of and provide aircraft specific parameters, geometry definitions, etc.. Asobo, also as an "aircraft developer" provides default aircraft that make use of their physics/aerodynamics core flight model engine. It is in this role (as aircraft developer) they can never be as good as specific 3rd party aircraft developers who have the expertise in whatever type/model of aircraft they specialize in (no matter how good the core aerodynamics engine is, if the specific parameters and other custom logic per aircraft aren't properly and realistically implemented, the aircraft is not going to fly realistically).... but Asobo can surely improve here, and are definitely taking steps in the right direction (i.e. the C172, avionics via the expertise of Working Title, etc). This is how it's been in the flight sim world forever, there are no strange concepts at play here.

(For good reasons) I don't expect the default planes to be - in every aspect - as good as the addon planes. But what do the avionics by Working Title have to do with flight characteristcs and aerodynamics?

Apart from the above: one thing I don't understand yet - I read that the flight modelling (or whatever term is correct) is encrypted for every single aircraft? Is my understanding correct and what does this mean for developers and finally for us end-users?

On 5/2/2022 at 2:04 PM, flying_carpet said:

As you highligted "separate": does that mean, MSFS's default aircraft aren't interacting with the core flight model and aerodynamics engine? With what else do they interact? Are the core flight model and aerodynamics engine intended only for addon planes? If it was this way, it's a somewhat strange concept.

Further above I've written something about a PC and a keayboard as an addon. That was probably not the best example, but if I take e.g. a racing simulation with nice surrounding (i.e. the spectators waving with flags, nice grid girls and knick-knack 😉), but the driving physics aren't this well, then I need to buy addon car's? That's not what I know from racing simulations. Either the physics are (reasonably) good or they are arcade style. I don't know any racing simulation (but I might be wrong), where you have to buy addon cars. You can add certain race tracks as addons, but not cars.

I spent many years racing online in iRacing.  Some of the default cars are good, some poor.  I purchased many addon tracks and cars, not only for iRacing, but every race sim I had.  Default aircraft in flight sims have, for the most part, been not as good as addon aircraft.

45 minutes ago, flying_carpet said:

Apart from the above: one thing I don't understand yet - I read that the flight modelling (or whatever term is correct) is encrypted for every single aircraft? Is my understanding correct and what does this mean for developers and finally for us end-users?

Aircraft purchased through the MSFS Marketplace are encrypted, not addon aircraft purchased from other online stores.

On 5/1/2022 at 8:41 PM, David Mills said:

Let me confirm that the Longitude also suffers this nausea-producing motion after SU9. Even if you set the weather to Clear Skies and hand-remove any wind layers. Still, it sometimes looks like you're flying through a hurricane for no apparent reason.

Is your experience just default aircraft exhibit this behaviour?  I never fly the default and don't notice any issues with excessive turbulence.

1 hour ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Is your experience just default aircraft exhibit this behaviour?  I never fly the default and don't notice any issues with excessive turbulence.

The Longitude is the only aircraft I ever fly. And I don't use any mods for it. So I honestly don't know whether this turbulent behavior affects other aircraft.