On 9/5/2025 at 1:30 AM, MrFuzzy said:

Who cares when you have this?

I get it. At first I was like this is really stupid, but when I started doing ag spraying missions and there were cows and horse and livestock I was like "woah cows and horses running around!" With the cars on the roads and the cows on the field it felt really immersive as I was crop dusting. Eventually we will have "animated cows and a weather radar just give it time. 

It does have wx radar and I for one are happy with it.

If I had top hardware, then I would be interested in flying during bad weather where fps performance drops drastically. But I have medium hardware and therefore avoid bad weather which kills fps almost as much as having lots of traffic running. 

5 hours ago, Noel said:

Because it would be a colossal waste of my time!

Simple option to enable/disable damage … similar to P3D setting to disable crashing into objects.

Yes this seems to have gone in another direction towards Asobo add features priority.  As such I’ve registered 10,000 IP/accounts and posted on Asobo’s feature request thread for adding more damage support and more weather radar support native to the SDK so as to require minimal 3rd party effort 🙂

 

1 hour ago, SayAgain said:

… similar to P3D setting to disable crashing into objects.

Which, to be fair - many of us had to disable as there were too many hidden "things" that you could unknowingly bump into and "crash".

I do value realism and generally prefer 3rd party aircraft which implement at least some well implemented failure modes.  And I certainly wouldn't mind things like flaps getting damaged and causing issues if often extended beyond Vfe and so forth.  However, the problem is not just implementing such, it's implementing it properly.  Take the aforementioned flap damage, for example.  Extend them a bit past Vfe a time or two IRL, and you'll probably never know the difference.  Do it often, or well past Vfe and you might see an in-flight failure, but you'll far more likely discover some damage at annual that'll cost you (or your employer) $$, or at worst during pre-flight.  You really have to push things hard and/or often to get a real in-flight failure.  So, you've got a feature that cost development time, and produces what is, for most, yawn inducing results unless the developer goes overboard.

I think Black Square, for example does a great job of striking a good balance with their implementations of failures in MSFS and I'd love to see more developers doing similar systems, while some other planes I've flown in the past - and I'm not going to name names as there's no real point - get carried away when they try to do this and it just gets... annoying, resulting in me disabling the feature as the "realism" becomes unrealistic.

Bottom line, a lot of these things would either give diminishing returns as you'd so rarely see the failure (assuming a realistic implementation), or you'd get failures that are simply not realistic, as the cost of most common "abuse of airplane by pilot" mistakes result in $$ spent after the flight, not actual failures in flight.

As for actual crash damage modeling... well, I kinda don't see the point from a sim perspective for most kinds of damage.  If I bounce a landing and careen off the runway, I don't need to see stuff falling off or crumpling to know I blew it.  If I recall, in FSX/P3D RealAir used to model a real spark fest if you landed one of their planes gear up.  I never had the heart to try it, and made sure I never did it accidentally - just as I did with every other retract I flew which didn't have this feature.  So, yeah.

Of course, none of this has much to do with radar in XP or MSFS, so my apologies for the extended ramble.  🙂 

Scott

23 hours ago, tttocs said:

Ummm... No.  Could not disagree more.

The entire point is that the consequences don't cause real world injury/death/destruction of property, not that there aren't any.

 

Scott

Wouldn't these things be included in real simulators then?  Heck, many of the very newest level Ds don't even include crash detection anymore because we'd all just turn it off anyway.  A crew knows if they crashed.  Or if they broke something.  No need for gamey "consequences", unless the point is the game. 

I'm not opposed to adding this stuff as options, but I'd certainly expect them to finish the "simulation" aspect first.  How long has it been now, over 5 years?  And we still can't even specific a visibility value?  Now THAT'S a missing core function.

27 minutes ago, Stearmandriver said:

Wouldn't these things be included in real simulators then?  Heck, many of the very newest level Ds don't even include crash detection anymore because we'd all just turn it off anyway.  A crew knows if they crashed.  Or if they broke something.  No need for gamey "consequences", unless the point is the game.

It's not about crash detection. It's about failures. E.g., if the rudder fails, can you counter it with aileron (or vice versa)? If there's contamination in the fuel and the engine dies - are you helpless, or can you look for a suitable landing site on the field - at least with GA, it's more difficult with airliners. With the latter, you can also try to land in the Hudson (birdstrike, as that was mentioned further above). Of course, this is not necessary for home use by hobby pilots, but why not give it a try? Of course you can also just fly from A to B without being affected by failures, there's nothing wrong with that. But that's the special attraction, whether I can do more than just fly from A to B and watch the scenery (also nothing wrong with that).

Oh ... and real simulators are usually used for exactly that: train beaviour in case of failures, not simply flying from A to B - that's the (relatively) boring part.

27 minutes ago, Stearmandriver said:

How long has it been now, over 5 years?  And we still can't even specific a visibility value?  Now THAT'S a missing core function.

Agreed ... (why isn't it done yet after more than 5 years?)

Edited October 2, 2025Oct 2 by flying_carpet

3 minutes ago, flying_carpet said:

It's not about crash detection. It's about failures. E.g., if the rudder fails, can you counter it with aileron (or vice versa)? If there's contamination in the fuel and the engine dies - are you helpless, or can you look for a suitable landing site on the field - at least with GA, it's more difficult with airliners. With the latter, you can also try to land in the Hudson (birdstrike, as that was mentioned further above). Of course, this is not necessary for home use by hobby pilots, but why not give it a try? Of course you can also just fly from A to B without being affected by failures, there's nothing wrong with that. But that's the special attraction, whether I can do more than just fly from A to B and watch the scenery (also nothing wrong with that).

Oh ... and real simulators are usually used for exactly that: train beaviour in case of failures, not simply flying from A to B - that's the (relatively) boring part.

 Control surfaces failure is very rare IRL but they  do happens. There was famous accident of MD-80 when they lost elevator authority and airplane crashed trying to figure our how to make an emergency landing. As for GA rudder failure  could be fatal. Here is recent 172 crash whether it autopilot servos or cable malfunction is yet to be seen

 

As  far as fuel contamination is not a thing for GA if you do careful preflight . You can spot water, smell if JET A accidently mixed with 100 LL, and see correct hue color ! I don't know how can you replicate smell in MSFS though LOL

1 hour ago, tttocs said:

Which, to be fair - many of us had to disable as there were too many hidden "things" that you could unknowingly bump into and "crash".

True, hence my desire for something better in terms of damage.

But either way, Radar or Damage or Failures, needs an SDK to support it and make it easier to implement, not just all up to the add-on developer.  Add-on developers aren’t going to implement features that are so costly as to not get any ROI … that’s where SDK support comes in.

25 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

 Control surfaces failure is very rare IRL but they  do happens. There was famous accident of MD-80 when they lost elevator authority and airplane crashed trying to figure our how to make an emergency landing. As for GA rudder failure  could be fatal. Here is recent 172 crash whether it autopilot servos or cable malfunction is yet to be seen

 

As  far as fuel contamination is not a thing for GA if you do careful preflight . You can spot water, smell if JET A accidently mixed with 100 LL, and see correct hue color ! I don't know how can you replicate smell in MSFS though LOL

That reminds me to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shootdown_incident

If RL pilots only trained to fly from A to B in the simulator, they would be dead in the case described above. Such an extreme case as described cannot/will not be trained, but if only fair-weather flying from A to B were simulated and no emergency cases ... aviation would be much less safe.

9 hours ago, aniiran said:

I get it. At first I was like this is really stupid, but when I started doing ag spraying missions and there were cows and horse and livestock I was like "woah cows and horses running around!" With the cars on the roads and the cows on the field it felt really immersive as I was crop dusting. Eventually we will have "animated cows and a weather radar just give it time. 

Plus the animals didn’t take any dev time from aircraft development, different teams.

the models are also from Zoo tycoon, they weren’t made by Asobo 

Edited October 3, 2025Oct 3 by Tuskin38

5 hours ago, flying_carpet said:

That reminds me to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shootdown_incident

If RL pilots only trained to fly from A to B in the simulator, they would be dead in the case described above. Such an extreme case as described cannot/will not be trained, but if only fair-weather flying from A to B were simulated and no emergency cases ... aviation would be much less safe.

Do you realize that XP12 or MSFS it's for entraining only? Even real level D sim proficiency doesn't guarantee that you will handle all kind of  emergencies IRL. These rare success case like you sited above are always mixture of luck and professionalism. So enjoy flying A to B because playing safety has nothing to do with actual aviation safety! 

 

8 hours ago, Stearmandriver said:

Wouldn't these things be included in real simulators then?  Heck, many of the very newest level Ds don't even include crash detection anymore because we'd all just turn it off anyway.  A crew knows if they crashed.  Or if they broke something.  No need for gamey "consequences", unless the point is the game.

Just an FYI but professional car racing simulators also don't have damage/failures etc, but that hasn't stopped the many (gaming) racing simulation Devs from implementing such features.

I totally agree BTW, there's far more important actual simulation aspects still missing from MSFS, but a better SDK with such features would still be a good step to have to help simulate those scenarios. 

I crave realism as much as I can, I love flying from A to B but currently the only failures I've had in MSFS have been software related (performance degradation, CTDs, huge FPS stutters etc), so again it's a nice thing to wish for but certainly not a top priority item currently.

13 hours ago, Stearmandriver said:

Wouldn't these things be included in real simulators then?  Heck, many of the very newest level Ds don't even include crash detection anymore because we'd all just turn it off anyway.  A crew knows if they crashed.  Or if they broke something.  No need for gamey "consequences", unless the point is the game. 

 

10 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

Do you realize that XP12 or MSFS it's for entraining only?

Who decides that and how (on which basis) if it is a gamey entertainment or a simulator? If I now say that XP is FAA-certified, then some people will get upset 😛 and say that this only applies with the appropriate hardware. And that is even true. But the software you have at home is the same (apart from the instructor station in the professional version). So you can also use it as a simulator if you want.

 

10 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

Even real level D sim proficiency doesn't guarantee that you will handle all kind of  emergencies IRL. These rare success case like you sited above are always mixture of luck and professionalism.

Interesting theory. So you shouldn't even have to train in level D simulators, because there's a lot of luck involved if you manage to get through the situation in real life anyway. Tell a flight instructor or RW pilot about that 😄.