11 hours ago, David Mills said:

• Have you explored any of the Bush Trips?
• Have you enjoyed a Discovery Flight?
• Are you perfecting your piloting abilities by tackling the Landing Challenges?
• Have you undertaken the superb in-sim Flight Training?
• Have you ever participated in the weekly Community Fly-In?
• Are you learning to fly the new gliders in the Soaring area of MSFS?
• How are your skills progressing in the new Helicopters? (Please don't ask about mine!)
• Have you even installed the free Top Gun Maverick add-on? (And to those of you who believe your piloting skills are "above" such Top Gun "game play," then I assume you'd have no problem whatever landing that F-18 on the moving aircraft carrier at night. No problem at all.)

Yes, no, yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes

As I am interested not only in aviation, but also in geography, maps, history and even culture, bushtrips imho are a great way to visit and explore regions. Piloting skills might indeed not be super challenged when flying bush trips. But you still can make great use of the WT NXi avionics (e.g. by programming a visual approach when nearing the destination). And learning to navigate based on the information from the flight log and maps by looking out of the window is very rewarding. Not having planned the route by myself results in this special "I am so curious what follows next"-feeling. Many times after the flights, I opened google maps to recap where I flew, looked the up visited places, learned about history and geography. The routes flying down the Balkan or from Bordeaux to the Mont Blanc (and others) have engraved in my memory (flying with VR) in a way that I could repeat the flights precisely as long as I will live without looking again at a map. I remember these flights as if I had flown there with a real little GA aircraft.

To some degree bushtrip are like an inbuilt offering of the same you would get from certain virtual airlines...

And, as this kind of replicating real flights was so fascinating to me, I have created this addon, which lets you fly real flights that happened in 1960 with the PC-6 prototype to support a Himalaya expedition. Still standing world records were broken (landing above 18000ft), the crew flew an air show over Kathmandu downtown, there were glacier landings mixed with long range desert flying, a flight from Europe to Nepal, an engine failure, ..... It was and is an incredible adventure and I was absorbed for half a year to create the bushstrips exactly as as Max Eiselin (the expeditionleader) described the flights in his book "Ascent on the Dhaulagiri" but I can tell you, the user interest is basically zero, therefore I consider this small hint also not as advertisement, just a little heads-up whats possible with bushtrips.

This is the addon.

12 hours ago, David Mills said:

But I'm also willing to bet that a lot of you, again like me, have long overlooked some really enjoyable stuff MSFS has to offer. For example, ask yourself these questions:

I think avoiding a lot of that stuff has become almost a cultural/social thing at this point amongst many simmers who consider themselves at the higher end....

I mean, how many times over the years have I seen people boasting, as a matter of pride, that they never did any of the FSX missions, or that missions/tasks/goals were elements of games, and should be confined to shooters and other pastimes for the (Place random pejorative describing the masses, here)

Even rolling debates on that subject, when Dovetail was asking for community input.

We couldn't exactly stop Asobo from implementing those things, but I suspect some large percentage still believe themselves above anything that might smack of games and/or gaming mechanics.

2 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

but I suspect some large percentage still believe themselves above anything that might smack of games and/or gaming mechanics.

I suspect you may be right, but the beauty of MSFS is that it allows those folks to do their long hauls and press all those FMC buttons and do all the other stuff they love to do and at the same time I can cruise aimlessly around at treetop height anywhere I fancy, or fly my B-36 under the Golden Gate if I want, and we can all get our respective thrills in an incredibly realistic and great looking environment.

This is the part of direction MS/Asobo have taken with the sim that I don't like at all. Too much game, not enough simulator!

There are still so many short comings in the simulator starting with weather, especially clouds, home cockpit features, silly airport traffic, unfished AI, flight dynamics etc etc, that I wish they would have taken the $$$s to 'finish' the sim properly and not spend it on all the 'extras' you have listed.

But maybe the 'game' part of the sim keeps it alive, I don't know, I am a relative 'old fart' with close to being 60, simming since 1983....

If I want to 'explore' the wonderful world of MSFS I take up any GA plane and explore on my own. I don't need any 'prefab' extra to tell me where to go or what to do.

Back to building my A320 home cockpit.

Just my 2 cents (Canadian).

 

3 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

I think avoiding a lot of that stuff has become almost a cultural/social thing at this point amongst many simmers who consider themselves at the higher end....

I mean, how many times over the years have I seen people boasting, as a matter of pride, that they never did any of the FSX missions, or that missions/tasks/goals were elements of games, and should be confined to shooters and other pastimes for the (Place random pejorative describing the masses, here)

Even rolling debates on that subject, when Dovetail was asking for community input.

We couldn't exactly stop Asobo from implementing those things, but I suspect some large percentage still believe themselves above anything that might smack of games and/or gaming mechanics.

I think you're exactly right. Let's take the Reno Air Races for example -- which I forgot to mention in my OP. If you're a real-world pilot, and you compete in the real-world Reno Air Races, then you are among the elite of the elite when it comes to hands-on piloting mastery. Yet, in a sim, we consider it more elevated to sit idly in an airline cockpit and watch (or nap) as the plane completely flies itself on autopilot. In an ironic but truthful way, if you really want to fine-tune your hands-on piloting skills, you should put aside the PMDG for a while and download Reno Air Races. It requires a lot more actual, hands-on flying ability in the real-world. My understanding is that one of the main failings airlines observe when re-testing their pilots in simulators is an overreliance on automation. The airline pilots sometimes get very rusty at actually flying the plane themselves. So if you truly want to be among the elite of the elite of pilots, you should download Reno Air Races. Don't listen to those PMDG "gamers." 🙂

Edited March 7, 20233 yr by David Mills

By the way, I own and love and frequently fly my PMDG 737. Not everyone appreciates my sense of humor. 🙂

16 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

Haven't done any of them. Really not interested. 

Isn't free will amazing? Enjoy it while it's still available 😉...............................................

1 hour ago, David Mills said:

By the way, I own and love and frequently fly my PMDG 737. Not everyone appreciates my sense of humor. 🙂

Well David, I understood you were humorous when saying that the Reno addon required an elite hand flying ability 😅.

8 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Well David, I understood you were humorous when saying that the Reno addon required an elite hand flying ability 😅.

I meant that flying the real-world Reno event requires elite hand-flying ability (I'm sure).

FSX had similar missions and challenges too. Not sure what is wrong with MSFS having them.

Heck I think the Acceleration expansion had Reno as well. 

 

  

3 hours ago, Silicus said:

This is the part of direction MS/Asobo have taken with the sim that I don't like at all. Too much game, not enough simulator!

There are still so many short comings in the simulator starting with weather, especially clouds, home cockpit features, silly airport traffic, unfished AI, flight dynamics etc etc, that I wish they would have taken the $$$s to 'finish' the sim properly and not spend it on all the 'extras' you have listed.

But maybe the 'game' part of the sim keeps it alive, I don't know, I am a relative 'old fart' with close to being 60, simming since 1983....

If I want to 'explore' the wonderful world of MSFS I take up any GA plane and explore on my own. I don't need any 'prefab' extra to tell me where to go or what to do.

Back to building my A320 home cockpit.

Just my 2 cents (Canadian).

 

I doubt the devs making the missions/challenges are the same ones working on the core systems. These don't take away from that.

Edited March 7, 20233 yr by Tuskin38

2 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

I doubt the devs making the missions/challenges are the same ones working on the core systems. These don't take away from that.

Correct, but if they would hire more core programmers instead of mission programmers they would focus more on core stuff. Again, it is all about the budget and the direction they are taking things....

Deleted...

Edited March 8, 20233 yr by Noel

16 hours ago, Silicus said:

This is the part of direction MS/Asobo have taken with the sim that I don't like at all. Too much game, not enough simulator!

There are still so many short comings in the simulator starting with weather, especially clouds, home cockpit features, silly airport traffic, unfished AI, flight dynamics etc etc, that I wish they would have taken the $$$s to 'finish' the sim properly and not spend it on all the 'extras' you have listed.

Without these "extras", we'd still be flying P3D. Extras = Money

11 hours ago, Silicus said:

Correct, but if they would hire more core programmers instead of mission programmers they would focus more on core stuff. Again, it is all about the budget and the direction they are taking things....

Programming does not work that way.  Throwing more devs at a specific issue will often make little to no difference or even be detrimental.

As an analogy, imagine your car has a weird noise the auto shop is struggling to track down. Sacking the sales people, auto electricians, panel work guys and girl that does the accounts and hiring 25 more mechanics is unlikely to get your car fixed any faster and may actually make things worse.

 

David,are You Overlooking Enjoyable Stuff in real life?