14 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

 

 

4 hours ago, DD_Arthur said:

Hello Howard.  Although you now seem to be public enemy number one and this thread has taken some weirdly hilarious turns into speculative nonsense; I have to say I broadly agree with you.

On release. I was absolutely knocked out by what the sim was capable of displaying - especially on my ancient pc that I'm still using - however, there is no doubt that things did change fundamentally when SU5 was introduced. We've obviously come a long way since then but I really don't think there's any doubt that compromises were made to shoe-horn this thing into the Xbox enviroment. For me the change in our original, crisp ground textures was the most noticeable thing;  along with the change to the overall lighting scheme that's given us the "nothing washes whiter than Daz" colour palette we have today.

Of course something was done to the clouds at the time too.   Obviously, these are not popular opinions but nevertheless, in my opinion, they're true. I for one can only hope that as development continues these things can be looked at again...

A couple of vids I made in August 2020; the first above Portsmouth and the second an evening flight from Henley around the Surrey hills. I think they both demonstrate what has gone missing.

Interesting frame rate counter for my i7 3930k rtx2070 ddr3 system....  

 

 

I'm not sure I like being public enemy number one!  Althouygh I do seem to have stirred a bit of a hornet's nest.

2 hours ago, Noel said:

Howard, if you would like some optimization to get you up to where you want to be PM me.  We have similar systems.  Do you have a Gsync monitor?

Hi Noel, that's kind of you. Most of the suggestions I have undertaken anyway, but I am more than happy to take advice from someone more knowledgeable as yourself. No, I don't have a Gsync monitor.

 

3 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

I sympathise with you Howard. Thats the solution. Instead of finding why you have this blurry mess nobody else has after the update, going back to P3D is the good way to handle it. Look at the v6 trailer. Now, doesn't it look like it is a really nice improvement over FS9 ?

Hey Dominique, it would be wrong to call it a blurry mess, just that the textures are not crisp like they once were, not by a long shot 

Edited June 29, 20232 yr by Rockliffe

14 hours ago, Stoopy said:

You did make sure that your online functionality didn't inadvertently get disabled, right?

No stoopy, if it had, then the terrain would look like an obvious mess, with really bad textures. The textures I am experiencing don't make the sim unflyable, they are simply lower resolution than previously. This is only a guess, but it looks to me, almost  like the texture resolution has been decreased to maybe help the load on performance elsewhere. Just a guess it may have found it's way in one of the more recent updates.

15 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

Hi Noel, that's kind of you. Most of the suggestions I have undertaken anyway, but I am more than happy to take advice from someone more knowledgeable as yourself. No, I don't have a Gsync monitor.

With the method I use, at least from my own experience, a Gsync monitor (or maybe Freesync), is needed not for the usual reason, but to get rid of a graphic artifact.  Let me know if you ever get one of these and we can give it a whirl.  There is no question IMM you have what it takes to have sterling performance, as defined by ultra low frame time variance which equates to the perception of ultra smooth animation at modest frame rates.  After the announcements re MSFS 2024 I'm pretty confident I again won't need to upgrade to a 4000 series GPU.

14 minutes ago, Noel said:

With the method I use, at least from my own experience, a Gsync monitor (or maybe Freesync), is needed not for the usual reason, but to get rid of a graphic artifact.  Let me know if you ever get one of these and we can give it a whirl.  There is no question IMM you have what it takes to have sterling performance, as defined by ultra low frame time variance which equates to the perception of ultra smooth animation at modest frame rates.  After the announcements re MSFS 2024 I'm pretty confident I again won't need to upgrade to a 4000 series GPU.

Very interesting Noel. I am in the throws of upgrading my sim to a Ryzen7 7800x3D so with DDR5 and my RTX3090 I really shouldn't need to go any further. I don't chase frames, (as long as I have 30 at airports) with a smooth experience, I'll be happy.

37 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

The textures I am experiencing don't make the sim unflyable, they are simply lower resolution than previously. This is only a guess, but it looks to me, almost  like the texture resolution has been decreased to maybe help the load on performance elsewhere. Just a guess it may have found it's way in one of the more recent updates.

You'd likely benefit by reading and applying the advice in the thread below. Your ISP appears to be selectively throttling high-bandwidth data streams, such as those used by MSFS. Other programs -- and Internet speed tests -- may not suffer this speed reduction because they're not being selectively throttled. Using a VPN will prevent your ISP from targeting MSFS or any other data-streaming program. Please read the thread:

 

 

1 hour ago, David Mills said:

You'd likely benefit by reading and applying the advice in the thread below. Your ISP appears to be selectively throttling high-bandwidth data streams, such as those used by MSFS. Other programs -- and Internet speed tests -- may not suffer this speed reduction because they're not being selectively throttled. Using a VPN will prevent your ISP from targeting MSFS or any other data-streaming program. Please read the thread:

 

 

Thanks David, I'll take a read. Cheers.

Edited June 29, 20232 yr by Rockliffe

7 hours ago, MarcG said:

Thank you for proving my point, just off the top of my head: iRacing, Reiza, Studio397, Frontier, multiple MMORPG developers....

Nothing "entirely false" at all, open your eyes beyond flight Sims.

Absolutely none of these developers provides updates and content *most of which for free*  at a similar pace and scope to what Microsoft does with MSFS. So yes, your statement is entirely false and a misrepresentation of the industry.

Funny you'd bring up iRacing, for instance, which requires a $13 monthly subscription, which in the time MSFS has been out would have been $442. Yeah. It's pretty obvious that a developer that is asking a constant flow of money from its users would also offer a constant flow of content. They wouldn't get any money otherwise. You're comparing apples to escalators. 

Look, you may be able to deceive simmers who don't poke their nose outside of flight simulation, but not someone who's worked on the gaming industry for two decades (but it is hilarious that you encourage me to open my eyes beyond flight sims😂😂😂😂). Absolutely none of the examples you brought is anywhere comprable to MSFS. 

One of the very few viable examples would be Hello Games with No Man's Sky, but that wouldn't make the situation any less rare. So no. This isn't commonplace at all. 

Edited June 29, 20232 yr by Abriael

I feel like this would have been a much better conversation if the original post had been, "Hey everyone, some of my textures and LODs have really fallen off since launch. Any suggestions?"

4 minutes ago, Abriael said:

but not someone who's worked on the gaming industry for two years

It's only been two years!? I feel like I've seen you covering the industry since the PS4 days.

1 minute ago, Krakin said:

It's only been two years!? I feel like I've seen you covering the industry since the PS4 days.

 

Lol, sorry, over two decades. Much before the PS4 days lol. 

12 minutes ago, Abriael said:

Absolutely none of these developers provides updates and content *most of which for free*  at a similar pace and scope to what Microsoft does with MSFS. So yes, your statement is entirely false and a misrepresentation of the industry.

Funny you'd bring up iRacing, for instance, which requires a $13 monthly subscription, which in the time MSFS has been out would have been $442. Yeah. It's pretty obvious that a developer that is asking a constant flow of money from its users would also offer a constant flow of content. They wouldn't get any money otherwise. You're comparing apples to escalators. 

Look, you may be able to deceive simmers who don't poke their nose outside of flight simulation, but not someone who's worked on the gaming industry for two decades (but it is hilarious that you encourage me to open my eyes beyond flight sims😂😂😂😂). Absolutely none of the examples you brought is anywhere comprable to MSFS. 

One of the very few viable examples would be Hello Games with No Man's Sky, but that wouldn't make the situation any less rare. So no. This isn't commonplace at all. 

Ok I'll agree to disagree 👍🏽

2 minutes ago, Abriael said:

 

Lol, sorry, over two decades. Much before the PS4 days lol. 

Ohh my man you had me thinking I entered the twilight zone 😆. I followed you on twitter around the time the PS4 launched. I really appreciate the work you've done to regularly expose MSFS to the more mainstream side of gaming journalism.

4 hours ago, Noel said:

Of course, because they didn't do squat for scenery and default planes were garbage.  EA weather in P3D is worse than what we have here now and on day 1 and many like Ray and others don't even use it.   FSX was 27 years under essentially the same dev or a few discreet devs, and when P3D took it over for the next 14 years the pace of improvement was absolutely dismal, and unless you were willing to misrepresent your qualifications for an academic license were charged $200 a pop.  Go back and see just how dreadfully weak the improvements were from P3D v1 to v2 to v3 and finally 64 bit, ANOTHER TWO YEARS LATER, for another $200.  Yes, I would enjoy a couple of those trinkets we enjoyed back then, but in the grand scheme of things, they qualify as trinkets.  Asobo could introduce them with little development time.   Stand back and look at the Forest.

I was actually speaking about PMDG-planes, 777, 747 etc, with working weather-radar. For what are the better looking clouds for if they don’t impact your aircraft? As I said; it’s a step back.

6 hours ago, Soulflight said:

"The most successful flight simulator of all time" indicates a very well working PR machine at Asobos side. Not more, not less. it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the product from a simulation perspective itself. Imagine announcing "This is the new microsoft flight simulator" after the last serious installment in this series was 14 years ago. Of course its being sold well.
I have 500 hours of flight time according to my user profile. From a gaming market perspective, this is an absolute win. Most full priced games end up with something between 50 to 100h of play time. However, the way I use MSFS and the way I played f.e. Skyrim are completely different. I dont consider myself a "hardcore simmer" in every aspect, but I know what I had before and with flight simming, I look for the right, realistic "feel" of things. MSFS delivered, to some degree, in visuals, but lacked in other aspects.

"but also the most adopted by third party developers, by far." Again, quantity isnt quality. I cannot count how often some support agent told me "this is a known problem at asobos side", or I read news that a release "is delayed because of something asobo is not providing something", or, the classic, "we are not opening the weather engine to 3rd party devs". At the same time, I get new good looking, but strangely behaving aircraft with rudimentary systems and flight model on almost on a daily basis. Or MSFS gets new default planes where someone skilled is releasing a "realism mod" later. Again, I dont mind all that, but my subjective impression is that 3rd party devs hit walls in the moment they want to create more in-depth realism, making overall addon quality stall.

You are free to call my POV subjective but dont confuse quantity with "reality" here. You are referring to numbers, both in sales and 3rd party devs. Neither has to do anything with the quality they deliver otherwise we could all just play Call of Duty and thats it. Because CoD is good, seriously, because it sold well. But then again, why am i even argueing with someone who has a manga avatar.....

I'm not calling your POV subjective. I'm calling it unrealistic and completely out of touch. What you're doing is called "revisionism". You're presenting a history of this simulator that never existed, replacing the common sentiment about it with your personal one.

I'm not sure what idea you have of the gaming and software industry, but "very well working PR machines" do not make up for "disappointing" products. They can mitigate the flop, but they will never turn a bad product into a successful one.

In this case, we're talking about a wildly successful product that yanked back a genre that had sunk into a widely ignored niche back into AAA success figures. There is absolutely no way that it's simply marketing magic. It doesn't work like that. It never worked like that. 

PS: My avatar is not "manga." It's from a video game. Goes to show how much you know, but it's always funny to see that people who have no arguments always try to attack something completely unrelated to the topic to try to get out of the hole they dug themselves into. 😂

22 minutes ago, Krakin said:

Ohh my man you had me thinking I entered the twilight zone 😆. I followed you on twitter around the time the PS4 launched. I really appreciate the work you've done to regularly expose MSFS to the more mainstream side of gaming journalism.

Thanks for the kind words 🫡

Edited June 29, 20232 yr by Abriael

6 hours ago, Soulflight said:

But then again, why am i even argueing with someone who has a manga avatar.....

Considering how weak your arguments were, that attempt at a jab just made you look even worse. Even though it was a manga avatar it still wouldn't take away from the fact that your "PR machine" argument makes no sense at all.