Why MSFS must be XBox like or die

[ha5mvo 259]

2 hours ago, Krakin said:

Please explain why the default Garmin and Boeing avionics in MSFS are garbage.

Because they are not attached to anything of significance!

Suppose the garmin is great. Mount it on a default 172 and its no more than a lipstick on a pig.

The list of decent addons for the MS/LM sims is fairly short. Historically it would start with the PIC 767 and include the PMDG boeings, the Labs busses, Lago/LH MD and majestics dash 8 and since V2 the bus from Fenix. The freeware Tu154 for FS9/x also deserves an honorable mention. Might have left out one or two, and there are probably a couple of decent GA planes but personally I have interest only in what I don't get to fly normally in real life.

Anyway, the point is, there are very few top quality addons as they require an awful lot of research,  labor and eventual refinement. For that reason you can not expect, nor get those out of the box.

Historically the default stuff was no more than bloatware and I don't really expect that to change. 

For some reason I don't foresee PMDG using WTs  boeing avionics for their next project. Time will tell, I suppose 🙂

[Damian Clark 1,272]

4 hours ago, eslader said:

But I would love a better depiction of real-world weather, which is something that AS was also quite good at in P3d. If it was snowing at my home airport, it would be snowing in the sim. If I was under a severe thunderstorm warning, I'd have an... exciting flight in a GA prop job in the sim. It was right every time.

That's always been Active Sky Wx engine's focus.  Weather data assimilation, synthesis, curation, presentation and control for the most realism and best experience possible within the existing visual weather depiction system in the sim.  Not to be confused with ASCA or other visual-enhancement products we've done in the past.

Most of the time, that focus indirectly results in much improved visuals, but visuals themselves are not what we work on with AS.

Edited April 5 by Damian Clark

[urthgental 181]

26 minutes ago, ha5mvo said:

Because they are not attached to anything of significance!

Suppose the garmin is great. Mount it on a default 172 and its no more than a lipstick on a pig.

The list of decent addons for the MS/LM sims is fairly short. Historically it would start with the PIC 767 and include the PMDG boeings, the Labs busses, Lago/LH MD and majestics dash 8 and since V2 the bus from Fenix. The freeware Tu154 for FS9/x also deserves an honorable mention. Might have left out one or two, and there are probably a couple of decent GA planes but personally I have interest only in what I don't get to fly normally in real life.

Anyway, the point is, there are very few top quality addons as they require an awful lot of research,  labor and eventual refinement. For that reason you can not expect, nor get those out of the box.

Historically the default stuff was no more than bloatware and I don't really expect that to change. 

For some reason I don't foresee PMDG using WTs  boeing avionics for their next project. Time will tell, I suppose 🙂

I would also appreciate some standards in respecting different views about quality and improvements in MSFS. The default aircrafts and its avionics have improved significantly in recent years. Already in x-plane but especially with MSFS. The various Garmins by WT are excellent for its purpose. Calling this garbage or bloatware is a slap in the face of the developers and all those who are happy with it. 

[HiFlyer 9,363]

1 hour ago, urthgental said:

I have interest only in what I don't get to fly normally in real life.

I've always thought that the purpose of the sim was so we could pretend to be pilots, or recreate some of the feeling of being one for actual pilots. I can't believe anyone actually thinks we're gonna essentially get "real" plane fidelity on our home computers from a $60 entertainment program......

I think it's to their credit that Asobo is going to the lengths it already has, for what numerically probably amounts to a niche of a niche. (And an ungrateful one at that!)

[ha5mvo 259]

1 hour ago, urthgental said:

I would also appreciate some standards in respecting different views about quality and improvements in MSFS. The default aircrafts and its avionics have improved significantly in recent years. Already in x-plane but especially with MSFS. The various Garmins by WT are excellent for its purpose. Calling this garbage or bloatware is a slap in the face of the developers and all those who are happy with it. 

There is a rather vocal group that had made it their vocation to sing the praises of MSFS whether those are justified or not, so those "different views" hardly ever get underrepresented around here.

To the point... the only "slap in the face of developers" as you put it, is coming from MS to the likes of Damian by shutting the door on an undoubtably better weather engine, on a weather radar, historical weather, a user friendly camera system and similar features we all grew accustomed to with non-sandboxed platforms.

 

[Krakin 5,810]

Calls things garbage but the real garbage was that post. Sounds like another disgruntled P3D user.

[scotchegg 4,211]

4 hours ago, ha5mvo said:

Because they are not attached to anything of significance!

‘Something is bad if it’s not attached to something good’ is pretty low-quality logic.

edit: and imho, the msfs 172 is already pretty good.

Edited April 6 by scotchegg

[abrams_tank 7,445]

9 hours ago, ha5mvo said:

Because they are not attached to anything of significance!

Suppose the garmin is great. Mount it on a default 172 and its no more than a lipstick on a pig.

So the COWS DA42 is "lipstick on a pig" because it uses the Working Title G1000 NXi?  Is that what you are saying?

Or the A2A Comanche is nothing of "significance" because it has the option to use the Working Title GNS 430 and GNS 530?

You just keep putting your foot in your mouth.  There are a lot of quality airplanes (ie. COWS DA42 and A2A Comanche) that use the Working Title Garmin avionics.

Edited April 6 by abrams_tank

[Lonesome Cowboy Burt 166]

8 hours ago, ha5mvo said:

There is a rather vocal group that had made it their vocation to sing the praises of MSFS whether those are justified or not, so those "different views" hardly ever get underrepresented around here.

 

Whilst I disagree with a lot of your posts this is a fair comment. But this has always been the same in forums and I think especially so in flight sim forums (I have theories why but thats not for here)

There will always be Gatekeepers but they are easy enough to recognise and their posts can then be weighed appropriately.

To me this forum is well moderated and healthy because of the wide range of views allowed (within limits of course)

 

[g-liner 388]

On 4/1/2024 at 10:03 PM, CO2Neutral said:

You wouldn't find it in a commercial simulator either ... I got that opportunity and it was very much the same as what we have now with the exception of every system implementation (almost) and more variety in failure simulation ... in most cases it seems commercial simulators are about procedures/checklists and working emergencies and keeping pilot's trained on new equipment.  Perhaps military use simulators are more full coverage, air, land, sea.

I believe we have the processing power to accomplish this at "affordable" costs for those of us very "serious" (don't take that the wrong way) about our flight simulation.  But the development cost to accomplish is why I may never see it in my lifetime.  Maybe the Elon Musk's of the world will spend the money on such development adventures rather than on meaningless social media development ... I'm sure $44Billion would be enough for the type of flight simulator I'd like to see 🙂 (good tax write-off)  ... but instead we got an endless hate exchange tool called X (aka Twitter).

I know some might think just go buy a real aircraft and keep it maintained, certified, stored, fuel, and licensed as a cheaper alternative ... unfortunately cost of aircraft ownership is MUCH higher (unless you fly unlicensed and in experimental aircraft).

The commercial simulators at Boeing I use at work for my checks capture weather, particularly crosswind and turbulence and rvr depictions FAR more realistically than flightsim 2020 does. 
 

These are zero flight time sims. Even real “commercial simulators”  do vary massively and not all have the same fidelity. 
 

 

[g-liner 388]

36 minutes ago, Lonesome Cowboy Burt said:

Whilst I disagree with a lot of your posts this is a fair comment. But this has always been the same in forums and I think especially so in flight sim forums (I have theories why but thats not for here)

There will always be Gatekeepers but they are easy enough to recognise and their posts can then be weighed appropriately.

To me this forum is well moderated and healthy because of the wide range of views allowed (within limits of course)

 

Flightsim does seem to attract some interesting personalities and types of people. I think it’s the constant focus on fidelity and then wanting to defend the products you enjoy or identify with for their fidelity. I.E. the need to believe what you’re doing in the game/sim is ultra realistic and getting upset when others suggest it might not be. 
 

This manifests itself in the following types of behaviour, getting upset when it’s called a game. Upset when someone says PMDG (insert other Dev) isn’t that realistic in a certain area, getting upset at “gamification” of the product, viewing other users as not being as serious, particularly console users. 
 

MSFS is pretty good but it was limited as a new product by what’s come before,  FS2024 looks like it will be the first true next gen sim and will evolve as fs2020 has. Jorg and the asobo people are clearly VERY passionate and knowledgeable about the sim and to me it’s all going in the right direction. 
 

It’s a fantastic time to be into flightsim and the more attractive it becomes for everyone, yes that’s casual simmers,  the more money and free content and new devs will arrive into it.

Let’s not be upset the hobby is becoming more mainstream, nobody here owns it or the right to control how it evolves. For most this evolution is bringing huge benefits. 

 

[g-liner 388]

On 4/2/2024 at 3:43 AM, Tuskin38 said:

Last Q&A they said they’re working on fixing that 

It’s seems to me there’s a huge commitment to keep improving everything including the weather.

[eslader 1,803]

3 hours ago, g-liner said:

The commercial simulators at Boeing I use at work for my checks capture weather, particularly crosswind and turbulence and rvr depictions FAR more realistically than flightsim 2020 does. 

I should hope so. I imagine the ire in these forums would be fairly extreme if MSFS 2020 cost 7 figures and required you to upgrade your electrical service. 😉

I've been lucky enough to fool around in some Level-D sims. MSFS beats them, hands down, in graphics (though I'm sure they're better now than the last time I was in one). But the flight realism was something I'd not expect a $60 or even a $600 desktop sim to match. And, of course, no desktop sim is going to have the motion fidelity of a level-D sim even with all the home motion rigs coming out now.

I don't think anyone with a relatively healthy sense of reality thinks flying in MSFS should count for training time. I also disagree with the poster you responded to over the idea that we have the ability to make MSFS as realistic as the commercial sims. For one thing, casting aside the simulation accuracy for a moment, no D-sim I ever messed with stuttered. Ever. They're run by computers that vastly outstrip anything we can reasonably get our hands on at home. Those irritating little pauses and glitches we get when flying into somewhere busy like O'Hare simply didn't happen in any of the pro sims I was in.

 

But I also think it's silly to worry about all this. Of course we aren't doing real flight training. Some of the stuff we're doing can help - I know at least one pro on this forum is using PMDG to work on flows - but I'd be very happy if people would stop making post after post arguing over whether it's a sim or a game. Who cares? Almost every one of us is doing this for fun. Go virtually fly.

 

[Tuskin38 6,590]

14 hours ago, ha5mvo said:

user friendly camera system

How is the default camera system not user friendly? I use it all the time, there’s nothing difficult about it.

It’s a lot better than the default camera systems in FSX and P3D

17 hours ago, ha5mvo said:

Because they are not attached to anything of significance!

Thats not true at all. When was the last time you flew the C172 (g1000) or the SR22?

Or the 787?

Edited April 6 by Tuskin38

[Noel 4,531]

1 hour ago, eslader said:

But I also think it's silly to worry about all this. Of course we aren't doing real flight training. Some of the stuff we're doing can help - I know at least one pro on this forum is using PMDG to work on flows - but I'd be very happy if people would stop making post after post arguing over whether it's a sim or a game. Who cares? Almost every one of us is doing this for fun. Go virtually fly.

Let me offer up another take on "training", game v sim, and "who cares".

If you look at EVERYTHING you can potentially learn about flying anything from lightweight GA to full blown so called study level airliners, you will get essentially the same experience out of ALL so-called flight simulators.   The one glaring missing difference is of course weather-related impacts on flight behavior, which is clearly greatly reduced though by no means missing in MSFS.  I think we will see this improved w/ 2024 as the physics involved becomes much more accessible w/ the greatly enhanced multithreading we're reading or hearing about, and "greatly" isn't an exaggeration.  So once again, ALL of the things one can learn in MSFS is going to be almost identical to what you will get out of XPlane or P3D:   basic flight dynamics, very or fully effective controls, simulated very complete avionics, everything and there is so much.  And here is the other ginormous reality that feeds into the next segment of this comment:   until your butt is on the line in the real world as a pilot, until you can fully feel/see/hear (we get the latter 2 in all the sims, and none of the sims give you the real "feel") what actual flying is, you're simply pretending, sorry, that's all it is be it XP, P3D or MSFS.  

So the "game v sim" discussion, driven 100% by those "who care", is a delusion based on their belief they are actually much closer to being a RW pilot, because they use something like XP over MSFS.  XP has had some 25y to fine tune aeronautical esoterica of course, but it's a delusion nonetheless.  To put it where the goats can get it:  until you strap yourself into a real plane and go fly it, you're another "sim-gamer", any way you slice it.  Those who object to this simply are stuck in this phony, elitist identity.