Is Flight Simming an Addiction

[guenseli 1,577]

5 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

Unfortunately, sometimes I mistime it, and then when I come back, I am 100+ miles past the dest airport.

Happens to the best of us ...

Pilots Fall Asleep While Flying At 37,000 Feet, Miss Landing (ndtv.com)

[guenseli 1,577]

sorry. double post

Edited November 3, 2022 by guenseli

[cianpars 1,164]

6 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

I'm slightly afraid of heights (get dizzy), so that kind of rules out gliders I imagine. Doesn't seem to affect me as much in small-medium sized planes, maybe a little. Might go up in a Piper in a few weeks just to see. Overall real flying is a bit too expensive to do all the time, suddenly those $50 addons don't seem that bad anymore.

 

 

I am terrified of heights and can almost blackout overlooking a cliff but you don't really get the same impression of heights in an aircraft.  I was very nervous when I took my first glider flight and have flown hundreds of times since and eventually got my RW PPL in a Cessna 152.

Give it a try and you might be surprised.

[VBHB 298]

I do it for stress relief until something else comes out that's better. 

[Swe_Richard 1,172]

Well it sure hits the Dopamine that's for sure, so I guess it is addictive. One can be addicted to worse things, TBH.. 😉

Nice to see Civilization mentioned as well. Played that since version 1. Love the game even though IMHO Civ 5 was the last of the great versions. Even got wifey hooked on Civ 3 some 20(?) years ago, and she still fires it up from time to time and she's become good at it as well.

She always goes for domination victory though, that little warmonger. It always cracks me up when during the first turns she says she'll try to be peaceful and an hour later just mumbles 'who am I kidding, I'm going to kill all of you' to herself.  🤪

[tull 290]

I fly every day 1 to 2 hours and I don’t consider it a game

[jcomm 5,890]

Games arte addictive....

Sometimes work can be addictive too, which in some way merges the both of two worlds 🙂

There are other addictive activities for humans and most other animals....

There are weird variations like the addiction of Uninstalling 😜

[Cpt_Piett 4,538]

1 hour ago, Swe_Richard said:

She always goes for domination victory though, that little warmonger.

That's funny, I got my daughter hooked on Civ a few years ago. It's great when we play it together, except she want to go the cultural route, which doesn't go well with a warmongering dad 🙂

It's a different type of addiction I feel. I cannot stop playing once I've started. I have periods every now and then when I play a lot of Civ over a few weeks. Then it sort of just burns out. 

With flight simming, it's more of a hobby. I like the learning part of it - learning different aircraft etc. And I like the tech part - tuning the sim to get the best experience. It's a great escape from a busy work schedule. 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

9 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

It's a different type of addiction I feel. I cannot stop playing once I've started. I have periods every now and then when I play a lot of Civ over a few weeks. Then it sort of just burns out. 

 

Likewise. I once built a top of the range rig, only to go and sit looking at CIV for 2 weeks. Super addictive game. 

[flying_carpet 657]

13 hours ago, Sky_Pilot071 said:

... I luv this game.

 

[Mace 1,902]

18 hours ago, TravelRunner404 said:

That’s funny that people are mentioning Civilization. There must be a certain wiring to the brains of people who enjoy flight sims. I think I have 2,000 hours in that game. 

Oh easy 2000 hours going back to 1991 I bet.  If you talk Civ1, 2, 3 and 4.   I'm gonna finish my current Civ4 game and focus on the C414 in MSFS for a while though.  And I have forgotten how to fly the PMDG 737, so I need to pick that one up again.

FYI -- @Cpt_Piett it is possible to be warmonger AND also culturally win.  On Emperor level.  Rise of Mankind mod.  Civ4.   Once you warmonger out and get a buffer around your core (Cultural) cities, you're set.  Fight wars on the edges, while your core collects cultural points.  It can be tough on Emperor as the AI gets tons of units, but a key is always attack the top dog, or 2nd place civ if you are the top dog.  Don't allow an AI to get rolling, or they'll steamroll you on Emperor and above level + Rise of Mankind + Revolutions.  It's tough.

18 hours ago, TravelRunner404 said:

Over the past 5 years I have watched basically zero TV outside of sports (which admittedly that’s a lot of time but it’s often social). You take the time that “normal” people binge watch TV and play on their phones/iPads and convert it to flight sim or games like Civ it’s not hard to find 10+ hours a week on average. Especially with 18 months of those COVID days. 

TV is overrated, I don't even watch any shows except the occasional sporting event.  I used to watch a show called "Wings" on the Discovery Channel.  It was great.  Why can't we have shows like that today?  It had Sepecat Jaguars taking off from bumpy fields.  What a sight that was!

[N6154Q 41]

Haha...addictive....yep.   I don't post much but this topic struck a chord with me - in a good way.   I've been flying the sim since the beginning of SubLogic and MSFS back in the 80's.   I remember when my dad had to take his computer back to work (no, it wasn't a laptop then) and we went without a computer for about a year I thought I went into 'withdrawl'....haha.   MSFS back in the 80's is how I taught myself all of the instruments or at least the basic six pack and the general understanding of what they did and how they worked.

When I got my private pilots licence in 1991 it made the flight lessons so much easier as I already knew what to expect from the instruments, I just had to get used to the 'feel' of the plane and the physics with it.   Ground school was a breeze with the help of my experience with the sim.   I flew for about 10 years and then had health issues to where I couldn't pass the medical.   To fill that gap, MSFS came to the rescue like a trusty friend.   Maybe I couldn't fly the real ones anymore but I could sure get my 'fix' of aviation with the sim.

My oldest son thinks he remembers his first word as 'altimeter' as I used to always have him on my lap when he was a baby and I was flying the sim pointing to all the instruments and saying what they were - LOL.   All of my kids ( and especially my wife) all know very well 'don't bother dad when he's landing' !!!  Still to this day also even though they are grown and gone.  If they stop by the house and come looking for me in the house and I'm on the sim they don't say hi, they don't say 'what's going on', they say - 'are you landing?'   LOL    

Anyway, thanks for this thread.   It's made me think of great times with the sim over many years and I've enjoyed reading your experiences as well!

Cheers!!!🛩️

Eric

 

[scanham 4]

Yes it is an addiction, but at age 72, having been flying virtually since the beginnings of FS, it has transcended from an annoyance to my wife to a great mental exercise which she now endorses.  We will know when I am “losing it” when I can no longer plan a flight in Simbrief, import it into the PMDG 737-800,  go from cold start to push back to taxi, takeoff, climb and cruise, descent, land, taxi and park. In the meantime it is keeping me sharp.

Addictions are not all bad!

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

RDR 2 is about the only other game I ever played seriously in the last 10 years or so, other than just loading up games for a few minutes.
I think I just enjoyed the graphics and scenery on that one (oh and DeathStranding had some insane graphics too).

The best graphics I've ever experienced in a SIM isn't MSFS (wait for it), but it was TileProxy. It was literally crystal clear perfection, but only looking straight at the ground (not looking from an angle), because obviously if you look at it from an angle you see the FSX limitations of the graphics, but straight down the PR was super unreal high quality. Since MSFS compresses it a lot more, it doesn't look the same as it did in TileProxy that one time (but it was only one time, hard to believe but I'm telling the truth). However, it only worked in super high res mode for a couple days before I got bandwidth tagged, and they tag your entire city or ISP or something so there is no recovering from it by changing IP's. Maybe a VPN, maybe, never tried.

There is also this Italy addon, cannot remember if it was P3D or FSX, and it was like 5cm downsampled to 30cm. The download was at the time silly big (don't remember, maybe 25GB - or even bigger or so), and it was only a small area, but the graphics were absolutely insane with the PR being so high quality. There was also a desert one, forgot where it was (a few years ago), somewhere in the Eastern part of the world, it was like 4.5 TB download or something, but the PR was silly high, like 10 to 15 cm across the entire thing. Now that was freaking high-res, you could pretty much make out the blades of sand, and yes you could read some things on left-over trash that had blown into the desert (that's how high-res it was). Unfortunately, I deleted it because it took up all my hard drives to download it, and it took forever to download.

 

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Alpine Scenery

[ThrottleUp 617]

Like any other game MSFS can pull you in. I play 3 or 4 games every day for about 8 hours. I start with MSFS then follow on with Just Cause 4, GTA5 and Mad Max.

MSFS really scratches that wannabe airline pilot itch for me and sometimes I go all out by playing safety videos on YT as I taxi the A320 and enjoy the wingview 😅 Its really a fantastic title , cant get enough of it.

I keep my airliner flights to 90 minutes or less with my favorite being the 30 minute hops - these are real world flights. Anything longer and it gets very boring for me.