6 hours ago, tpete61 said:

Much of the MSFS2020 YouTube content is simply monetized paid content.

If he was paid to say this he would have to put it in the video and description.

So buzz off until you have proof.

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by Tuskin38

Let’s not go off topic and turn this into another topic comparing XP to MSFS. @blingthinger 

Topic has been flushed of those posts and anymore will disappear as well.

I have now two youtubers in my subscribed list, and one is 737NG Driver.

Already used to watch his very well done, free of uneeded speach, focused, well structured...

Is ability to express his observations in an honest and sincere, and above all informed way in the video that gave rise to this thread made me hit the Subscribe button for good 😀

MSFS is simply the best world simulator that I've seen or used. I've only been using flight sims for maybe ten years, I was never interested until the graphics started to get interesting / realistic. It's had its hiccoughs, but seems to be settling down now into an absolute feast for the eyes at least. I can't comment on stuff like the flight model (as long as it leaves the ground and returns ok it's fine by me), ATC (I have it turned off - I don't want some intrusive voice telling me what to do all the time) or live weather (if I want a bit of sunshine or snow I'll set it how I want it, thanks) as I have less than zero interest in procedural flying. I want to have as near a realistic world to explore as possible, and doing so from the air is the best way to see it all, hence a flight simulator rather than a train/car/donkey sim (although I do have little used versions of two of those!)

That's not to say I have no interest in the aircraft. I was an airfix child, and have maybe 10 - 20 feet of shelves loaded with aircraft related books and magazines here, but I just have no interest in sitting at the computer pretending to flip switches and monitor dials. I can see how it might appeal to a lot of people but it's not for me. I have bought a huge hangar's worth of aircraft for this (and most previous) sim, along with the massive amount of scenery I have (literally thousands of addons in my addon linker directories), but I have a couple that I'll never fly because they insist on me having to follow arcane startup procedures to even get the thing alive.

There was another (contentious) thread here recenty discussing the large number of users claimed for MSFS. I'm not looking to say anything about the actual number but it's pretty obvious that whatever that number is it's way higher than any previous or other flight sim. And personally, I doubt that the majority of those users are planning to be super serious study level pilots in-sim. MSFS is succeeding not because, or at least not just because, it appeals to the 'serious simmer' faction, but because it has appeal to a much wider potential audience.

The 'other' sim is also on my machine, along with stuff like DCS, FSX, AF2 etc, and all have their attractions, but nothing beats sitting in front of a 55 inch 4k HDR monitor watching the world unfold a few hundred feet below me in MSFS. I actually feel like I can smell the grass and the trees sometimes (but fortunately not any MacDonalds I might fly over)

I hope all you heavy 737 guys continue to get what you need from this sim (I have the -600 and -700 because I think they look great, and I can get them in the air and go cruising at 500 feet taking in the sights in them), and meanwhile I shall continue to get my "hello sky, hello trees" buzz, all in the same sim. Pretty remarkable, really.

Well, I'm certainly glad folks are finally coming around......🤒

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by Ricardo41

To me, it is very simple.

I was 15 1/2 years old in 1980 and was lucky enough to have access both Apple IIs and TRS-80s running Sublogic's Flight Simulator 1.0. I've been fortunate in that I have been able to fly nearly every version of Flight Sim on every platform with the exception of the Commodore 64, and the Xbox throughout the course of my life. For the record, I fired up MS Flight exactly once, and said, "Meh" and binned it forever. Frustrated with FSX's instability, I tried Sierra Pro Pilot. We saw how successful that was. So I took a hiatus. I noticed X-Plane when it came out, but it seemed like it resembled PP, which left a sour taste in my mouth, so I passed on it. I dabbled with FSX every once in a while, but kept uninstalling it. Then, there was Steam. When they fixed FSX, I started buying add ons and having great fun again. Which lead me to P3D (started with v4).   

Back in 1980, I was having great fun flying over a grid with the speaker droning away making the computer equivalent of a playing card in the spokes for engine sounds. There were relatively few people that had access to it back then (Wiki says FS1 sold "30,000 copies by June 1982"). Think about it. 30,000 total users in our hobby compared to 10 million having at least taken a cursory look at MSFS. Everyone I told how cool Flight Simulater was just looked at me cross eyed and said, "What?". Lol.

I thought it was great, but can you imagine the uproar on Avsim if our sims looked like this today? 😄

At the very moment I made my very first "landing" (I'm pretty sure the 2 lines I put it down between were a runway) I thought to myself how cool it would be to fly over something that looked like the real world and hoping that I would someday be able to someday fly that on a computer that I owned. Well... as we all know, MS and Asobo did just that. I can honestly say that they have fulfilled a "childhood" fantasy (hey... I couldn't drive yet. That counts.) with MSFS. I can die happy now. 😁

Even with all it's warts, MSFS truly is the cat's meow. We have nothing to complain about. We are never going to have perfection. We should just hope for steady progress. Fortunately, that's what we're getting. 

One day, we'll discuss the 10's of machines built and 1,000's of dollars spent trying to get a single solitary stutter free flight between 2 default airports without a CTD. Makes my head spin. Gotta give MS/Asobo props here, too. I've got my current system running great and MSFS is doing just fine. I think I'm going to sit on the fence for a while and see what happens with hardware in the future. Finally!

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by MDFlier

5 hours ago, jcomm said:

I have now two youtubers in my subscribed list, and one is 737NG Driver.

Already used to watch his very well done, free of uneeded speach, focused, well structured...

Is ability to express his observations in an honest and sincere, and above all informed way in the video that gave rise to this thread made me hit the Subscribe button for good 😀

I am always amazed at the arm chair pilots who have never flown anything in real life except paper airplanes, knock an airline pilot, acting like they know more than a professional pilot with thousands of hours piloting  a real aircraft. 

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by Bobsk8

@MDFlier THANK YOU for that great little morning story! This is what AVSim is and should be all about! Many of us have more years behind us than in front of us and it is super to refresh our memories of where we began in this wonderful hobby. Thank you also to the moderators for cleaning up and removing the nonsense/irrelevant/negative provoking comments! 

5 hours ago, andy1252 said:

 

MSFS is simply the best world simulator that I've seen or used

 

Agree on this. Although I also really enjoy the aspect of learning to operate many different aircraft and their avionics. I love the variety the sim has at this stage, and the issue is certainly not lack of aircraft, but rather lack of time. 

Having (mostly) excellent ground textures covering the whole globe is of course unprecedented in any sim, but MSFS has come a long way also in terms of weather depiction and atmosphere “simulation”.

The flight model is of course up to the 3rd party developer, but we have such a great selection of addon aircraft now, from the lightest piston aircraft up to the A310.

I’ve completed a GA world tour some months ago, and now I’m well on my way on my airliner world tour in the A310. I wouldn’t even have considered this in previous sims that I’ve used.

As for the shortcomings, especially ATC and AI traffic, I’m hopeful that Asobo will eventually look into this. As well as further improvements to the weather model.

To finish off, I’ll add that it’s ridiculous to refer to MSFS as simply a “game” or a “sightseeing simulator”, as there’s more than enough “study-level” aircraft addons now for even the most hard-core simmers.

8 hours ago, cmpbellsjc said:

Let’s not go off topic and turn this into another topic comparing XP to MSFS. @blingthinger 

Topic has been flushed of those posts and anymore will disappear as well.

Yeah but XP was really great, especially when compared to the hot garbage that was Vista.  I doubt it could have run MSFS though...  😉

I've been impressed with MSFS from day one, but I'm an older fart and can't stop comparing it to the subLogic days, or even FS4. When I consider how far sims have come... Well, I'm kinda glad they weren't this good years ago or I'd have been too distracted to make it through school!

 

 

I'll just say that I remember that in the earlier days of MSFS, there were many who tended to be almost super-critical of the sim; dismissive of any pleas to give things a year or two to shake themselves out.

(Name a sim that did not need at least the same)

And.... now here we are about two years later.

Sure enough, time seems to have healed a great many wounds, allowing the sim to gather a following capable of accepting reasonable criticism, while large enough to reject obvious FUD.

Pretty much as predicted.

Forwards! 🐎😝

 

17 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Sure enough, time seems to have healed a great many wounds, allowing the sim to gather a following capable of accepting reasonable criticism, while large enough to reject obvious FUD.

Well said.

I echo the many above who started out on MSFS II - mine was a Commodore 64 in the early 80’s.  Back then your imagination did an amazing job of filling in the details of the world around you.  I still remember flying from NYC to Chicago in the business jet (believe it was a lear?).  The scenery was available in relatively small (by todays standards) regions - In this case just the New York metropolitan area and some of Illinois.  To make that flight required dead reckoning between the zones, but you could still do it!  The fun part was figuring out where you were when you arrived in the Chicago area and making your way to Ohare.

For someone whom could be that enraptured by a flat green ground, blue polygonal sky and white lines for runways and taxiways, what MSFS 2020 gives is leagues beyond what I could have imagined back then.  It’s reinvigorated my interest in aviation to the point that my typical MO when I get on an airline is to pop in the earbuds and listen to liveatc to hear my flight callouts.  Usually works until the handoff from tower to departure before cel based internet cuts off.

I fall into the category of having more years behind me than in front and yet I’m still humoring the idea of getting a PPL.  I did a discovery flight and was truly amazed how familiar it felt - not so much the controls, but just the vibe and familiarity with the instruments and things like best climb out speed etc.  After that flight I went back and redid it in the sim and it was a massive deja vu.  Anyone saying they can’t use this for flight “training” is full of it 😉. You don’t need to be able to legally log the sim time as FAA approved hours to get something useful out of it.  The sheer result of having an environment that looks so closely like the real thing is enough to give you a leg up when you sit down in a real plane.  You just start from a more familiar place and know what the instructor is talking about so much faster. 
 

Asobo and MS … thank you so much for making this long time fan very happy!

 

10 hours ago, cmpbellsjc said:

Topic has been flushed of those posts and anymore will disappear as well.

Thank you for being consistent in said flushing.

 

I am still curious (as in my original post) about why thrust-pitch coupling is off. I see two possibilities: 

Either it's because Asobo isn't actually calculating forces on the elements

or

Asobo is using the balsa-glider geometry everywhere and the forces and therefore moments are eternally wrong.

Maybe a combination of both.

 

I bet the pitch trim issues could be resolved simply by changing how much the trim moves with each button press. In other words, the aircraft wasn't trimmed before it hit turbulence in the first place (to use video example). Originally I thought a trim wheel would solve the problem, and I still do, but thumb switches are just as prevalent as a wheel and that's what most desktop users are using.

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by blingthinger

2 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

I'll just say that I remember that in the earlier days of MSFS, there were many who tended to be almost super-critical of the sim; dismissive of any pleas to give things a year or two to shake themselves out.

If, one and a half years ago, or so, you predicted that MSFS 2020 would be a stellar sim, folks would jump on you. Now, most of those "early critics" have either departed or are singing the praises of MSFGS 2020. Kind of funny to observe.