Well. Tonight went better

Decided to give it another go and see if anything improved. And it did! Flights were virtually lag-free, including in career mode which yesterday had been a slideshow with the same settings as the relatively smooth free flight.

Career mode definitely has potential, but it needs a lot of tweaks. I was glad it stopped holding my hand so much after the first few flights by getting rid of the box trails in the sky. It only put them in the MFD which was much better. It still hasn't stopped putting the stupid pin markers in the world yet, which is really immersion breaking. Hopefully they come out with a toggle for people who know how to use a GPS.

Whoever's writing the dialog for career mode is hilariously bad at their job. "Look outside the plane! You will not regret it!"  "I didn't expect the roofs to be like that!"

I haven't really figured out why it has you choose an airport at the beginning because most of the missions do not begin and end at the airport you picked. I would like to see it reworked so that if you are at airport A and the mission is at airport B, you have to fly from A to B to take the mission. And maybe you pick up a mission going from A to B on the way. It'd be better than the only option being to teleport all over the world to fly missions.

The commercial checkride was stupid easy. Take off from an airport, fly for about 15 minutes following the GPS line, land at a second airport. Done.  The cross country lesson just before the checkride which I took just to see how they do lessons was stupid hard. You have to start the stopwatch on the EFB. But in VR, it pops the EFB out of the plane and sticks it on the cowling. You can't click anything on it, including the start button for the stopwatch. So every time you have to change the stopwatch settings, you have to drop out of VR, click the button, then start VR again. Just... Dumb.

After I got my commercial ticket, in the first mission I took it stuck me in some dorky little light-sport aircraft which first off is dumb because it's illegal to use an LSA in commercial operations and second was annoying because this one has a -12 degree flap setting and when I was checking that out on the ground with the parking brake on, I got dinged for flap overspeed.

So when I say it has potential what I really mean is that we need someone to mod the hell out of it if that's even possible, because I have my doubts that Asobo will bring it up to the level of, say, Air Hauler any time soon.

And I'm definitely going to want to get rid of the walkaround garbage. It's just a gimmick. It's not a complete walkaround and the click spots are often very hard to hit. Spending 90 seconds trying to remove the chocks isn't a great time.

Also did some free flights. Draco is really well done (no surprise there, it's a Got Friends release) but it, and most of the other light aircraft, suffer from realistic ground handling from a physics perspective but *really* twitchy from a controls perspective. It was the same in the air for Draco. Just barely moving the stick left or right almost snap-rolled the plane. If it's an axis setting, then the control stick animation is weird because the stick animation shows it barely moving as well.

Still, I had a good time. Some of the new scenery is really good looking. Some, no better than 2020. I suspect this time next year it will be significantly ahead of 2020 in every category.

Edited November 21, 20241 yr by eslader