MSFS: My 2 Year Review

[jcomm 5,938]

27 minutes ago, him225 said:

Good question isn't it, if you draw a clear line between release features and time for fixing those and then feature additions thereafter?

AI system 2nd to none what are you talking about? The AI engine is badly downgraded even for default content, it just makes it less noticeable. The splattering touchdown of AI, the silly taxiing roundabouts, bankless turns in air, cruising AI spawning at your altitude than their cruise level, etc its like a high school project to look at, the whole thing feels worse than FS2000 fidelity in motion which didn't even have a proper AI engine.

Have a look at this at 18:44, you call it 2nd to none? :

BEST Freeware AI TRAFFIC For MSFS | Tutorial + Guide! - YouTube

Yes, I could never find anything better in default AI / ATC so far.

Is it buggy ?  Sure it is, but truth is that whenever I play MFS with one of the airliners I own ( Fenix A320, FBW A32N, PMDG 737-700 ) and make a full flight accross Europe from gate to gate, using injected RW traffic, I can easily close my eyes to the innacuracies of the shapes and handling of other aircraft, or their liveries - I am not using MFS as a plane spotter simulator !

What matters is that I get really plausible ATC from initial contact to delivery to shutdown at the arrival  gate, and I actually get very realistic traffic patterns around me when departng / arriving. Whate more could I ask from a DEFAULT and still under development - I haven't heard ASOBO saying it is finished ? 

 

Edited August 30, 2022 by jcomm
typos

[him225 51]

7 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I see you use P3D.  And you keep harping on what little MSFS has done in the last 2 years. So maybe let's reverse the script. Nevermind the last 2 years for P3D. What has P3D done in the last 10 years?

LM is not MS, it develops for different purpose and never raised expectations. Most importantly it didn't downgrade anything that it inherited from the ESP engine, so those who wanted an improved, slight modernized FSX went down that line and it serves well for what it is.

[abrams_tank 7,419]

10 minutes ago, him225 said:

LM is not MS, it develops for different purpose and never raised expectations. Most importantly it didn't downgrade anything that it inherited from the ESP engine, so those who wanted an improved, slight modernized FSX went down that line and it serves well for what it is.

So LM has had 10 years now.  Why didn't LM implement 3D volumetric clouds like MSFS? Why didn't LM implement streaming satellite and photogrammetry for the entire world, including using a company like Blackshark AI to convert 2D satellite objects into 3D satellite objects? Why are the graphics for P3D still not up to modern standards, what was LM doing? How come when you add all the graphical add-ons to enhance P3D, why are the FPS still subpar, why didn't LM tune the graphics engine to render FPS better?

See, it's easy to criticize.  Even in the last 2 years for P3D, the amount of progress that LM has done for P3D is probably not even close the progress that Asobo has made for MSFS.

But I'm not criticizing LM though, because software development is hard.  In fact, LM may actually be doing a pretty good job, given the the degree of difficulty it is to make changes to P3D.  But if you apply your standard of criticizing how much progress a developer has made on their flight simulator, it's pretty easy to just look at P3D, your choice of a flight simulator, and look at how much progress LM has made in the last 10 years, and also the last 2 years.

Edited August 30, 2022 by abrams_tank

[him225 51]

8 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Yes, I could never find anything better in default AI / ATC so far.

Is it buggy ?  Sure it is, but truth is that whenever I play MFS with one of the airliners I own ( Fenix A320, FBW A32N, PMDG 737-700 ) and make a full flight accross Europe from gate to gate, using injected RW traffic, I can easily close my eyes to the innacuracies of the shapes and handling of other aircraft, or their liveries - I am not using MFS as a plane spotter simulator !

What matters is that I get really plausible ATC from initial contact to delivery to shutdown at the arrival  gate, and I actually get very realistic traffic paterns around me when departng / arriving. Whate more could I ask from a DEFAULT and still under development - I haven't heard ASOBO saying it is finished ? 

 

A 3rd party does not influence this aspect, they can only add content to it which ultimately are subject to the downgraded AI system fidelity which is the issue here. I do not understand, why be satisfied/word not allowed with compromising on something missing that was already accomplished 16 years ago? Yes you are not spotting planes but you are not walking around the accurate streets either below are you, but you still get the immersion from it. Similarly it adds to immersion if AI aircraft behave reasonably realistically, and don't tell me it doesn.t break immersion when you see that happen at the airport taxiing or waiting for departure.

[him225 51]

1 minute ago, abrams_tank said:

So LM has had 10 years now.  Why didn't LM implement 3D volumetric clouds like MSFS? Why didn't LM implement streaming satellite and photogrammetry for the entire world, including using a company like Blackshark AI to convert 2D satellite objects into 3D satellite objects? Why are the graphics for P3D still not up to modern standards, what was LM doing? How come when you add all the graphical add-ons to enhance P3D, why are the FPS still subpar, why didn't LM tune the graphics engine to render FPS better?

See, it's easy to criticize.  Even in the last 2 years for P3D, the amount of progress that LM has done for P3D is probably not even close the progress that Asobo has made for MSFS.

But I'm not criticizing LM though, because software development is hard.  In fact, LM may actually be doing a pretty good job, given the the degree of difficulty it is to make changes to P3D.  But if you apply your standard of criticizing how much progress a developer has made on their flight simulator, it's pretty easy to just look at P3D, your choice of a flight simulator, and look at how much progress LM has made in the last 10 years, and also the last 2 years.

Did you even understand what I said? They didn't promise any of this, only developed a slight modernized FSX for their own non gaming purpose that they saw fit. The issue here is of downgrade, did LM broke any of the FSX features? They didn't. MSFS did, when there was no reason to, and mind you its the same AI engine base as FSX not something from scratch. AIGTC traffic injector works on both without much difference.

[jcomm 5,938]

 

4 minutes ago, him225 said:

Similarly it adds to immersion if AI aircraft behave reasonably realistically, and don't tell me it doesn.t break immersion when you see that happen at the airport taxiing or waiting for departure.

Honestly, I can't find anything that bad about AI aircraft around me at the airports I have departed from / arrived to in my simulated European hops ?

Maybe I'm lucky ?

In previous versions of MS FS I seldom invested in ATC ir AI addons - all of them were expensive and troublesome.... I gave up bacause I didn't want to spend a little fortune in addons for thois and that...

Now I am getting it all for free and plausible enough for my needs.

 

[abrams_tank 7,419]

6 minutes ago, him225 said:

Did you even understand what I said? They didn't promise any of this, only developed a slight modernized FSX for their own non gaming purpose that they saw fit. The issue here is of downgrade, did LM broke any of the FSX features? They didn't. MSFS did, when there was no reason to, and mind you its the same AI engine base as FSX not something from scratch. AIGTC traffic injector works on both without much difference.

No, I'm asking you why LM didn't progress P3D as much as they could in the last 10 years.  It's easy to not break things if you don't make much change. It's when you make change in software development, that you start breaking things.  And Asobo is continually making changes to advance MSFS.

Using your own standards of criticism, LM has failed.  

 

Edited August 30, 2022 by abrams_tank

[mrueedi 702]

10 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Sorry, but they're not getting kudos for this long list of issues they created then fixed.

My question still stands... What area of the sim has improved in a substantial way that wasn't done by a third-party developer like Working Title, Fenix, or FBW?

Thats a contradiction:

• Either the sim was fine in August 2020, then you could say there was no progress but not harp on the bugs.
• Or the sim was in a bad shape in August 2020, then you could criticise the bugs but not complain about lacking progress.

The thruth is, that at release the sim was pretty much just fit-for-purpose and today it really became fit-for-future. At the beginning they said, that they basically had to stitch together three large and unrelated code bases: old FSX, new aviation related parts (like the js cockpits) and the digital twin of the earth parts. Under the hood this made it difficult to meet non-functional requirements like maintainability, performance, stability, repairability and extensibility.

So during the last two years, the code base matured a lot and all of the mentioned requirements are covered much better today. E.g. the last one (extensibility) is among other things about a capable SDK. It was fine at release, because thousands of devs started creating a never ending stream of addons right after release and I also haven't heard complaints about a lacking SDK since a long time which weren't excuses from the devs. But of course, filling the gaps there was a key enabler for feature rich addons which in return caused the overall functional scope of the sim to explode.

Imho people are also not recognizing the lifecycle of a complex software. If at release all the capabilities would have been there, what would remain for future upgrades? Nobody goes live with a software that is capable of 90% of what is theoretically possible. It should be no suprise, that a product like MSFS has a lot of untapped potential and areas to improve.

Edited August 30, 2022 by mrueedi

[him225 51]

4 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

No, I'm asking you why LM didn't progress P3D as much as they could in the last 10 years.  It's easy to not break things if you don't make much change. It's when you make change in software development, that you start breaking things.  And Asobo is continually making changes to advance MSFS.

Using your own standards of criticism, LM has failed.  

 

What major changes did they make that broke the AI this badly? I don't see any, and till now Asobo has done nothing to fix the AI engine which looks complete lame in comparison to FSX AI engine.

I don't care LM has failed or not, they took care not to break anything and fixed when they did as far as they are concerned here.

[abrams_tank 7,419]

3 minutes ago, mrueedi said:

So during the last two years, the code base matured a lot and all of the mentioned requirements are covered much better today. E.g. the last one (extensibility) is among other things about a capable SDK. It was fine at release, because thousands of devs started creating a never ending stream of addons right after release and I also haven't heard complaints about a lacking SDK since a long time which weren't excuses from the devs. But of course, filling the gaps there was a key enabler for feature rich addons which in return caused the overall functional scope of the sim to explode.

Yup, I agree with you.  It's very weird that people say Asobo did nothing in the last 2 years. But because Randazzo was very vocal about the development process for the PMDG 737, we have on record, all the issues PMDG had with the SDK, and how Asobo worked in the last 1.5 years to get the SDK up to standard so that the PMDG 737 could be released. We also have on record, Aerosoft saying Asobo had to make some changes to the SDK for the CRJ to be released back in 2021.

The fact that we got all these study level airliners back in spring, is a testament that Asobo has worked pretty hard to get the SDK up to speed.  Yes, the SDK wasn't perfectly ready for study level airliners back in August of 2020, but nevertheless, Asobo worked really hard in the last 1.5 years since release, to get the SDK up to speed and they got there, as demonstrated this last spring.

[abrams_tank 7,419]

1 minute ago, him225 said:

I don't care LM has failed or not, they took care not to break anything and fixed when they did as far as they are concerned here.

LOL, it's easy to not break stuff if you don't make any changes, or you make very few changes 🤣

 

[him225 51]

Just now, abrams_tank said:

LOL, it's easy to not break stuff if you don't make any changes, or you make very few changes 🤣

 

Again, what changes around the AI does MSFS has that you know of you say broke it, and why have they not fixed it to this day to fsx standards at least?

[Krakin 5,766]

1 hour ago, him225 said:

Again, what changes around the AI does MSFS has that you know of you say broke it, and why have they not fixed it to this day to fsx standards at least?

Haha you're funny. You want us to give LM a pat on the back for being lazy? Also, FSX didn't have real world traffic. This is something new developed by Asobo and it comes with its own set of challenges.

[him225 51]

32 minutes ago, Krakin said:

Haha you're funny. You want us to give LM a pat on the back for being lazy? Also, FSX didn't have real world traffic. This is something new developed by Asobo and it comes with its own set of challenges.

I didn't bring LM/P3D into this the other guy tried to just to turn into who is worse match, its not even relevant as LM is not even developing a game and its about preserving something that worked well, not some new feature. Real time traffic cannot match what offline AIG already does due to coverage issues, model matching etc and things like taxiing, takeoff, arrivals will always look silly and up to the sim traffic engine. In anyway it has nothing to do with offline AI system and should not affect what was inherited from FSX.

[lwt1971 7,417]

2 hours ago, him225 said:

Real time traffic cannot match what offline AIG already does due to coverage issues, model matching etc and things like taxiing, takeoff, arrivals will always look silly and up to the sim traffic engine. In anyway it has nothing to do with offline AI system and should not affect what was inherited from FSX.

You seem to be rather fixated on AI and it appears to be a deal breaker for you in MSFS... perhaps best for you to stick to FSX and/or P3D +/- add-ons. You can try to keep harping here about how MS/Asobo has not focused on <insert pet issue X or feature Y> since release, but they're gonna keep speeding along based on their own prioritized backlog that also takes into account various user-voted items/requests (if not already you should go and vote there on the AI related items: https://www.flightsimulator.com/feedback-snapshot/, i.e. #9 in lifetime wishes table which at least appears to be in "Started" state).

For a great many of us, that progress since release is more than adequate even if areas like AI or ATC are lacking, and also apparently to almost all the 3rd party developers that are exclusively focusing on MSFS now or prioritizing it as the main platform they develop for. Like others have said here, MSFS's development pace and engagement with the community is orders of magnitude better than other sims where months/years would go by without *any* updates... thankfully MSFS come back to the flight sim scene two years ago to upend all that, and showed unprecedented use and mixing of modern technology stacks like AI, cloud, satellite data, CFD, live weather data, photogrammetry, etc etc, all in the core platform as default. No brainer then for a lot of us, as to why we've stuck with MSFS for the last two years even if <insert pet issue X or feature Y> is still not fixed or implemented perfectly.

Edited August 30, 2022 by lwt1971