fs4fun

My laptop's close to minimum required specs for this sim so most of my settings are turned down, but cloud rendering is at Ultra, because it's worth it LOL.

I've had some really nice IFR flights in MSFS lately, thanks in in no small part to the WT mods. The Bonanza with WT G1000 is good fun, and the WT CJ4 is incredible.

A working G1000 some time in the next 3 years would be nice. I still have FSX on my system for flights where working avionics are required.

Photogrammetry can give accurate building depictions and it looks good from the air but looks like garbage up close. For airports you are too close to the buildings for photogrammetry so they either need to hand-model the buildings or use generic ones.

It's a mixed bag, the scenery and models/textures are fantastic, and I'm astounded by the performance running on an old Haswell-era laptop with a GTX870M providing very respectable visuals. No crashes for me either. But then there's the ATC with a lot of legacy and weird problems, agonizing load times, twitchy flight models, popping terrain and autogen, pretty but dumbed down flight and weather planning, unsatisfying default airplanes, and small things missing like record/replay and progressive taxi (need something better than the non-controllable gigantic blue arrows please). It's gonna improve with time but like the OP I'm not abandoning other sims in favor of this one.

That's how I read it. LOL

Irks me they took away progressive taxi from the ATC menu. I know I can turn on the awful gigantic blue taxi ribbon via preferences but I prefer the way FSX works with relatively unobtrusive guidance that is easily toggled.

Thanks, yes this happened to me in the DA62. I'll try the G1000 C172. In my case I was cleared to the IAF after crossing my last enroute waypoint and I immediately activated the proc.

The new MSFS has a lot of flaws and limitations, but I'm spending most of my sim time with it just to learn all the ins and outs. Just an example I'm on autopilot and ATC gives me the approach/transition (which is pretty cool actually, not just defaulting to vectors to final), so I put that in the GPS and the plane turns way off in the wrong direction, nowhere near the the transition waypoint. The thing that most impresses me is the performance on my lousy old laptop is quite respectable while also looking really good visually with no tweaking, that's not at all the case with FSX which took a lot of extra work to look good and perform well. I'm not giving up FSX though, too many great addon aircraft, wonderful AI traffic thanks to AIG and fantastic weather simulation thanks to AS16.

I agree with the visual issues seen in the article, but before I start running out to pile addons into the sim and all the ensuing hassle of tuning tweaking incompatibilities bugs etc I'm going to give Asobo some time to address these things. On the positive side I've been pleasantly surprised with the performance on my laptop which just barely meets minimum requirements. Some visual issues I see might be due to using a low-end system but I've noted many of the same problems watching YouTubers with high end systems. What's been standing out for me is the very poor 3D drawing distance when looking forward. There are 2 elements, one is that I cannot look far ahead before all 3D objects disappear and there's nothing but somewhat blurry texture, and the other is that when 3D photogrammetry objects do appear in the distance they are oddly shaped. When flying toward an urban area it looks like a bombed out city up ahead. There is also significant popping of 3D objects and mesh. On the other hand when I look left or right the scenery looks spectacular in its detail and sharpness. It seems the emphasis is on drawing detail to the side of the plane and not so much straight ahead. I'm also seeing terrain mesh issues where areas in the ground (or water) break open and display a black seam that closes up as I get closer. Again this is mainly in the forward view.

Might also consider the freeware Project Airbus with FD-FMC, it's very nicely done. The CDU is not especially realistic but still it's impressive for freeware.

I'm not so keen on buying warmed over/ported over FSX/P3D addons, so I say let devs take their time and figure out this sim and how to use it to full advantage. How many years was FSX released before truly native aircraft showed up that took full advantage of the platform?

Software is nearly always released with known bugs that are classified as non-release-blockers, or with missing functionality that was deemed acceptable and not overly hindering useability. Holding software back over such things can be counter-productive because getting the product out there for user feedback is an important part of the process. You only get so much out of alpha and beta test. I've only done a few flights and I'm a bit surprised at the number of bugs and issues I have found in that short time, but I can still use and enjoy the product and the issues will be fixed eventually I hope, or I'll find workarounds. Overall it's about what I'd expect for an initial release and we're now on a much improved and modernized technology base so there's loads of potential.

Very cool. There are methods to extract 3d models from Google Earth or Maps, but there are also loads of models on 3D warehouse. It shouldn't be long before you can convert such models with MCX and place them in the sim very easily, it's already in the works.