Let's talk about fun Fenix, Leonardo or PMDG

[Bobsk8 12,584]

8 hours ago, Doering said:

Great to read through this post and hear the voices of authority on the subject .. . ie those who have flown the jet liners for years in this hobby. I believe I made the right choice on getting the Fenix as my first big jet in consideration of the automation. I will stick with the FENIX for some time in order to really know this airliner and fly it well in all scenarios.

As a post script, I took some time off from flight simulation several years back. When starting up again, I went for XP as it was the superior choice in terms of aircraft flight dynamics at the time. I don’t think the improvements in XP12 will cut it without significant scenery upgrades. I watched a couple of XP videos today and the contrast to MSFS in realism is like night and day. Now with the recent addition of 3rd party general and commercial aviation aircraft in “full immersion” (avoiding the term study level) XP does not stand a chance in the long term as a true competitive platform.

I agree, XP is like watching a Black and White SD TV after owning a HD TV. 

[ha5mvo 241]

1 hour ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

So I guess it is a case of pick your poison - do you want better flight modeling or better systems modeling?

I wouldn't know about x-plane as I don't use it  but why is it either\or ? what's stopping one from having both? isn't that what a "complete" simulation is about?

[Fiorentoni 4,156]

3 hours ago, ha5mvo said:

Like this guy you mean?

 

Start watching at about 2:08....

 

Maybe the both of us need more practice.... I bet we can use some advice from a senior fleet captain with 2100 hours behind him.....

It's a bug, but one that can be easily avoided by setting disc pedal to OFF in the EFB. You make it sound like the aircraft is fundamentally wrongly designed from ground up. It's a bug that will be fixed and can be one-click workedaround in the meantime.

[ha5mvo 241]

2 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

It's a bug, but one that can be easily avoided by setting disc pedal to OFF in the EFB. You make it sound like the aircraft is fundamentally wrongly designed from ground up. It's a bug that will be fixed and can be one-click workedaround in the meantime.

incorrect! watch the video again!

[Sethos 4,304]

1 minute ago, ha5mvo said:

incorrect! watch the video again!

You don't just drop an almost 3 hour video and just tell people to watch it, that's peak laziness. Give people some examples and timestamps. 

[Fiorentoni 4,156]

1 hour ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Definitely, Fenix A320 is not the best option if flight modeling is all you care about, X-Plane Airbuses would likely be a better option for that purpose.

However for people like me who also value systems simulation, a more complete implementation of flight computers, practicing failures etc. Fenix is currently quite ahead of any Airbus available for X-Plane.

So I guess it is a case of pick your poison - do you want better flight modeling or better systems modeling?

That's only the first part of the question. When deciding (if one absolutely has to decide for one sim only), one should also think about the future - what can even be reasonably expected to be fixed and enhanced?

I'd argue that developing deeper systems is much harder and costlier than fixing a flight model. So I'd bet my money on the Fenix, because they've already done the "hard part".

[Biology 1,347]

26 minutes ago, ha5mvo said:

I wouldn't know about x-plane as I don't use it  but why is it either\or ? what's stopping one from having both?

Human factors - perfection is impossible to achieve and every implementation has its own shortcomings. I’m a huge Airbus fan so I tried all major Airbuses (Started with FF, got Toliss, FSLabs and now Fenix) and all had some shortcomings.

FF was a huge disappointment as its ECAM and FBW implementations are pretty off outside normal use cases.

Toliss was significantly better, however it was still disappointing in various aspects.

I was quite impressed with both FSLabs and Fenix on the other hand - FSLabs has excellent navigational capabilities and flies by the numbers a bit more while Fenix has an excellent modeling of ECAM actions, failures and many edge cases which FSLabs simply didn’t get right.

Edited June 24, 2022 by BiologicalNanobot

[Fiorentoni 4,156]

43 minutes ago, ha5mvo said:

incorrect! watch the video again!

Okay so please tell me at what time he changes the pedal disc option in the EFB and it still doesn't work? I already watched the video when it came out but I cannot find him even looking at that setting in the EFB.
That said I always decrab before landing (as by the SOPs) so I usually never need excessive rudder before the nose wheel touches down.

I do know there are people on discord that say none of this is working, and others that share my experience with pedal disc OFF. Anyway let's agree this has to be fixed ASAP, so anybody can do crabbed crosswind landings.

[lwt1971 7,348]

When it comes to flight models and dynamics in terms of airliners, there are none better for MSFS currently than the Fenix A320, PMDG 737, Maddog MD80, and Bae 146. The iniBuilds A310 will join that group in November. Given these products are just a month+ old, yes there are still some corner-case issues already acknowledged by the devs (like Aamir) and it's only going to get better. I realize detractors and the usual suspects would love to cling on to these specific bugs and then try to portray that the flight dynamics in general are bad for these birds, but guess they're getting more desperate as MSFS is clearly now in a state where the cake can be had and eaten too 🙂 ... I want the best in visuals and world rendering, flight dynamics, systems, etc etc and I get all that with MSFS now with these stellar add-on birds... Oh, come November we're also going to get realistic high fidelity aircrafts for free in the core sim like the iniBuilds A310. And in the world of GA, alongside the Milviz C310, really looking forward to the flight dynamics of the coming A2A Comanche!

The key is to note is that "flight models" are *per* aircraft in a sim, and it all comes down to how the aircraft developers have implemented and fleshed out their flight models on top of the sim's core aerodynamics engine. Unfortunately up until May 2022, all MSFS had were the default aircrafts which have sparsely and poorly implemented flight models (understandably, since Asobo are not experts on each of those aircrafts). These default aircrafts were then always picked on to bash MSFS with respect to flight dynamics by the usual suspects. With the arrival of birds like the ones being discussed in this topic, well, all that is absolutely moot now. And as these aircraft developers get to be more familiar with the capabilities of the core MSFS engine and how to best implement on top of that, it's only going to get better. For 1+ month old aircrafts, to be at this quality already, we're in for good times 🙂

In addition to what all the expert IRL pilots have lauded about the flight dynamics and handling of these birds (Fenix, Maddog, PMDG, Bae), good to remind ourselves of some great insights that Matt Nischan of Working Title shared earlier on aircraft flight models and a sim's core aerodynamics engine (and this was even before the propeller physics and CFD advancements), w.r.t MSFS and XP:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/more-physics-more-real-winds/372656/256

"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."


https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/601526-msfs-has-the-most-advanced-flight-model/page/12/?tab=comments#comment-4549236

"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."
 

Edited June 24, 2022 by lwt1971

[ha5mvo 241]

3 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

Okay so please tell me at what time he changes the pedal disc option in the EFB and it still doesn't work? I already watched the video when it came out but I cannot find him even looking at that setting in the EFB.

2:13:30 for the next minute or so

[jcomm 5,890]

Airbus lover here too...

FBW-wise I believe Toliss in XP and both FBW and Fenix in MFS are the best I have tried, I'd say better than the feedback we get from the FSL.

Systems detail / complexity wise I believe each has it's own pluses, with Fénix now apparently the most detailled at least in the number of failure scenarios it allows for.

In my passion for the Airbus I explored yet another - Airlinetools A32x - which is incredably detailled / professional in terms of failure scenarios, and even systems real time visualization, but has very "plastic" flight dynamics, and bare nones scenery....

I keep using the Toliss in Xp11, looking fwd into how it adapts to XP12 FM, and in MFS have been concentrating solely in the Fénix...

[Fiorentoni 4,156]

14 minutes ago, ha5mvo said:

2:13:30 for the next minute or so

Alright you misunderstood. I was not talking about pushing the button on the pedal disc; I was talking about the EFB setting, where you can set "seperate pedal disc" to OFF. This works for me, full rudder authority with main gears touched down.

[Bobsk8 12,584]

5 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

Alright you misunderstood. I was not talking about pushing the button on the pedal disc; I was talking about the EFB setting, where you can set "seperate pedal disc" to OFF. This works for me, full rudder authority with main gears touched down.

So apparently the person that made the video, didn't have his aircraft set up properly. 

[jarmstro 2,402]

11 minutes ago, jcomm said:

I keep using the Toliss in Xp11, looking fwd into how it adapts to XP12 FM, and in MFS have been concentrating solely in the Fénix...

The Toliss planes were great for their time but they are looking very dated now and the EFB thing is a clunky mess. The modelling was never anything to write home about and the jaggy shadows ruin the cockpit. Then there is the price. I paid about £90 for the A321 and I'm going to have to pay more again for and updated version if I decide to buy XP12.

[Bobsk8 12,584]

1 minute ago, jarmstro said:

The Toliss planes were great for their time but they are looking very dated now and the EFB thing is a clunky mess. The modelling was never anything to write home about and the jaggy shadows ruin the cockpit. Then there is the price. I paid about £90 for the A321 and I'm going to have to pay more again for and updated version if I decide to buy XP12.

What decade is XP 12 going to be released?