Horrible interface. 

My dad, in ~1962, joined AOPA and got his PPL at KSBP.  With 6 kids on one modest income, that lasted just long enough to pique my interest as he simply couldn't afford to fly enough to stay safe.  I was 9y/o at the time.  Me and my pal Scottie took his dad's old wooden sawhorse that had plywood sides on the top half drew avionics on the plywood panel and would play pretend pilot. FF to 1979 or so when me and my wife moved to Washington State, where my brother had a new Apple2 GS, and had installed FS1.  OMG I was smitten!  Monochrome green screen and you know the rest!  I didn't have a PC and wouldn't until circa 1993.  It wasn't long before I found MSFS 5.0.  Smitten again, and it's never left.

I'm 70y/o now and my primary hobbies have been Cooking, Golf, Motorcycling and Flight Simulator.  I've been an avid golfer w/ a lifetime low handicap of 5.2 which isn't great but it's very decent.  I have owned a 2016 BMW R1200RT and put 52K miles on it since buying it new, and will ride it today!

Here's the telling part:  since MSFS 2020 debuted, were I to have to give up any of those 3 hobbies, it would be the motorcycle and golf.  We won't count cooking as that's hardly a hobby!  Anybody but other simmers would scratch their heads at this, and you all know what I'm talking about.  People look sideways at me when I tell them how passionate I am about flight simulator.  I never became RW pilot and don't regret it.  I would never have been able to fly enough to be safe enough and putting two kids thru grad school made RW piloting hard to afford, just like my dad before me.  Prior to retirement I had put away motorcycling while we had kids, but as retirement approached I remembered my enjoyment for riding so jumped back in 9 years ago w/ a used BMW F800GT and put 23K miles on it in 3y.   But FS, yes very affordable by comparison.  And...it keeps getting better!  

MSFS to me means:

Comical, suicidal pushback guy walking through propellers.
Airport vehicles frequently in the way while taxiing to the active.
Above ground taxi lights often in the middle  of taxiways.
Aircraft taking off towards me on a runway where I was just cleared for takeoff.
Awful clouds (compared to P3D with CloudArt).
Often inaccurate weather depiction (compared to P3D with ActiveSky).
Forced updates.
Nice scenery.
 

..Lloyd

 

 

^^ Cup is 88% empty...

P3D w/ Cloud Art is still stuck in non-volumetric rendering, which definitely beats the CURRENT state of voxel-based rendering in terms of cloud depiction.  But it won't last long as hardware improves and software exploits it.

Well, it's NOT some religious experience, but a game. MSFS just makes it ok to be somewhere/someone else for a while, then reality sets back in.

I'm going to take this into a different direction, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of you feel this way as well.  I find MSFS theraputic.  I have mild OCD, and sitting in my plane pre-flight (my favorite part of sim flying), following the checklists, creating the flight plans, checking out the charts, etc. is VERY relaxing for me.

For me it is (was) mostly a disappointment…

16 minutes ago, Noell said:

MSFS to me means:

Comical, suicidal pushback guy walking through propellers.
Airport vehicles frequently in the way while taxiing to the active.
Above ground taxi lights often in the middle  of taxiways.
Aircraft taking off towards me on a runway where I was just cleared for takeoff.
Awful clouds (compared to P3D with CloudArt).
Often inaccurate weather depiction (compared to P3D with ActiveSky).
Forced updates.
Nice scenery.
 

..Lloyd

 

 

Love to read such positive comments. 🤪

Coming from every flight sim since 1985 and ending up with XP11 and DCS and real life flying, MSFS for me, is mostly disappointing.  GFX, sure, they are mostly great, but the aircraft are far too sensitive in yaw, far too sensitive in pitch, especially at low speed on approach, rudder movements of airliners on the ground is miles off, no feeling of mass or inertial like XP11 or DCS.  Put the DCS flight model in MSFS and the sim would be out of this world.   I'm hoping A2A bring something special that can kick off a world tour. 

 

For me, it's an outlet that helps to satisfy my obsession with commercial aviation. As a private pilot, it's unlikely that I will ever get to fly any aircraft beyond single-engine land. MSFS, and flight simulator in general, allows me an opportunity to at least "pretend" that I am flying a 737, etc.. Another great thing about MSFS is that I fly mainly Piper Warriors IRL, and Just Flight has provided a pretty good Warrior to fly around locally. Of course, you don't get that "seat of your pants" feeling, but it's still pretty cool. One other byproduct is that it's a great place for me to spend too much money! 

Cheers, Pete

When Flight Sim World (seemingly our last hope at that time) was cancelled, I thought that Flight simming would never reach its full potential given what other sim genres were producing with graphics, performance, realism etc. Despite any missteps FSW made, they were the only developers invested in consistent development and a vision for the future of flight simulation. I can remember Steven Hood’s enthusiasm as he talked about upcoming features and their approach to missions etc.

Fast forward…..MSFS 2020+ offers more than I ever thought was possible. And now they will be heavily invested in missions / activities (although we now have access this through HPG and other addons), MSFS is not perfect, blah blah blah, but it far exceeds the lower expectations I had grown to accept from other / prior sims.

Its going to get even bigger and better….MSFS…simply a new hope for the future of flight simming.

 

18 hours ago, Sky_Pilot071 said:

What is your take?

It is available on Xbox.

It is a game, this type of posturing to start a ridiculous conversation happens here far to often.

I'm not sure why a question like this is even asked to be honest.

This thread is more like starting a feud. game vs. simulator, or like study level vs airplane, etc!

 

 

Getting back to what the thread is about.

I am not the last to complain about MSFS flaws. Don't count me among the worshippers. But this thread - at least so it seems to me - is not about doing a laundry list of what is bad. It is about to look at the forest, not to count the weakly trees, to look at the moon and not at the finger.

 For me MSFS means, for the first time since FS1  flying all over the world over a realistic terrain, exploring the planet with some reasonably good aircraft -  at least as good as with its predecessors, sometimes better - in a reasonably realistic weather environment. And have a lot of fun doing it. Things that the competition will not allow me to do. 

It means also, that  there seems to be a strong push from the MSFS team to do flight simulation with new technological perspectives and not add an umpteenth layer on worn-out engines.

Edited June 27, 20232 yr by Dominique_K

Simple!, it's the acronym for "Microsoft Flight Simulator".

Has been in use since the early 80s of the last century, and that's it. Give or take it, love it or hate it, preferably learn to taste it 😉

It's still, after all these years ( I used fs2 in an ATARI for the first time ), my preferred flight simulator, all taken into consideration, and in this last version it provides me for free with a worth of features some of which I never had for previous versions because they were too expensive for what they provided.

It offers me, in the Premium Deluxe version, the best set of default aircraft available for any civil flight simulation platform.

FS 2024 is going to become my next version of MSFS 🙂

Edited June 27, 20232 yr by jcomm

It offers, for me, the most current and enjoyable method of enjoying my PC flight simulator enthusiasm. The seed was planted with me on FS2 on a Commodore 64 and it has grown ever since. My professional career exposed me to more real-life dangers, drama, excitement and adventure than many experience in their lifetime and also showed me some of the best and worst sides of humanity. Flight sims and MSFS as of late have given me a reprieve from some of the hardships I've experienced and an entertainment outlet where I can enjoy my love of PC hardware, PC gaming and PC flight simulation. I look forward to many more years of this enjoyment 🙂  

Edited June 27, 20232 yr by sniper31