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Yes, perhaps it's sacrilege to show xbox footage here, but This is me playing flight simulator on my HD 8 Fire Tablet thanks to the Xbox App. The AI Pilot certainly hasn't improved in the last year.😄

I just finished the discovery flight in New York City on my 8 inch Fire HD tablet. It was astonishing. It was being streamed from my Series X and it was amazingly smooth and easy to fly. That being said, it wasn't perfect. There was quite a bit of sound cutout due to network connectivity on my wireless. Moving my tablet to the 5.0 ghz wireless network helped alleviate that a bit, but not completely. Yes, There's still work to be done. But this is almost worth the price of Game Pass Ultimate alone. But being able to fly the Cessna using an xbox controller bluetoothed to the tablet, and land successfully at KLGA was unbelievable. This particular flight wasn't quite as successful. The AI pilot isn't very good.

Yes, our perceptions always change the more jaded we become. When I was 10 years old, I thought the acting in Star Wars was tremendous....."But I was going to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.....". Wow... such depth of feeling, such intense character.....uh huh....

I watched a review from Digital Foundary and they found that the Series X is running natively at 1440p and upscaling to 4K. They also said the graphics were set to Ultra with a FPS lock of 30. They said that if you had a 120hz TV/Monitor that you could enable that on Xbox, and Flight Sim would lift the 30 FPS cap to try to sync best with the monitor. But it's not anything you can define> For series S, it runs natively at 1080p and their guess was graphics slider at "medium". It also is locked at 30FPS. You could definitely tell a difference in some draw distance and textures on the photogrammetry, but considering the series S is a $300 console, that level of performance is pretty sick. One thing they did notice, is that for "smoothness" the series S was better. They attributed that to the time it takes for photogrammetry to load. The micro stutters that tend to occur as you approach urban centers, or when the flight is loaded smack dab into one (like discovery flights). Over all they were really impressed considering the fact that a Series X is $500 and the Series S is $300. Control mappings are customizable, and you can add a keyboard/mouse and a compatible Yoke. I've got a Hotas One coming in on Monday. You can tweak quite a bit, but as far as graphics go, the only allowable option is turning HDR on or off.

Yes, but amazingly, several of my payware airports that I purchased for the PC were compatible with the console. That's cool, and that's a game changer for Marketplace. If I purchase an FSDT airport on the PC, and it's unlocked on the console, I get both versions for the price of one. Pretty sweet. I was able to find a Series X for a "normal" price as part of a bundle that included 3 months of game pass, the series x and the 1GB expansion card, which were all purchases I was planning to make anyway. The Series S version runs at 1080p native and looks stunning, but you can tell that the draw distance, especially in cities has been lowered. The Series X is running 1440p upscaled to 4K and is really impressive.

Except that much of it isn't your own computer/software. Almost everything you see is being generated in the cloud and being downloaded to you in realtime. Flight simulator is NOT stand alone software anymore. It is client/server software. And for client/server software to properly work, everyone needs to be at the same version. PC gamers who have played MMORPG's like World or Warcraft, or multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty have resigned themselves to mandatory upgrades now for years. And I don't expect that to go back. In fact, technology is moving towards 100% streaming. With Xbox Mobile, I was able to stream from my Xbox, Cyberpunk 2077 and play it through a Fire HD tablet. I'm actually going to see if I can launch Flight simulator from my Series X through my tablet to see what it looks like. Microsoft has already stated that they are working on a 100% streaming version of Flight Simulator to release to last gen Xbox One consoles. As internet connections continue to get better, developers are going to want more and more control over the hardware they develop on. (Within a decade) I imagine your home PC will be nothing more than a streaming box, and you will have to deal with whatever you get from the developer. I have both a PC and a series X, and am glad to see flight simulation opened up to the masses. The nice thing about Series X version, I don't have to tweak a thousand things trying to eek that extra bit of FPS. I played that game my entire adult life. It's nice to jump in and get smooth as silk performance with no fuss. Those of you still tied to the past. Enjoy your simulation of choice. But don't expect MSFS to ever get rid of mandatory updates. It's simply not feasible given how the real world streaming of scenery is required.

Has basic math comprehension taken a vaykay? Most of us would consider a 4GB card to be the absolute minimum card to use on this sim in 1080p. And pushing a 4GB card on ultra is a big ask, especially with the 200 LOD for Objects and Terrain. We all know it's easy to fill up all 4GB of VRAM on 1080p. I can often get close to 6GB on my GTX 1660 Super at 1080p, and that's with LOD at 100 and everything on "high end" except for clouds which is ultra. So filling up 4GB at 1080p is pretty easy to do. Yet then people say they go to 4K and get terrible performance on their 8GB or 10GB cards....uh. hello!???! Simple math. If you are at 1080p and you go to 4K, you are using 4 times the amount of VRAM to render the exact same frame. Double the width times double the height = 4x the pixels. So that means....16GB should be what we are using during 4K for the same quality settings. And actually if "Ultra" can push 6GB usage for 1080p, then 24GB at 4K is not an outrageous ask. Which is why 4K at ultra really is for the most part unobtainable in some areas. How is this a mystery? There is no "magic" voodoo in the video cards that suddenly allows 4x the number of pixels to fit in less than 4 times the space. Granted, if you have a high end card that can spit out those frames and clear the frame buffer faster, you don't need to store as many frames as older cards. But for a given GPU. 4 times the pixels = 4 times the VRAM usage. So if you are going to run 4K on a system that doesn't have 16GB on board VRAM, something has to bend. Which usually means your sliders or your frame rate. The ONLY way to make your frame use less VRAM is to decrease some of the things the VRAM is used for, such as texture quality, or texture resolution, LOD, etc...etc... Or you take the Frame Rate hit. Funny thing math. It's not really subject to people's opinions on this sort of thing.....😀

Like I said, With autogen, landmarks, due to their uniqueness will be missing and the cities will appear quite bland, unless there is a custom POI that is written for it. However actual structures, should be where they should be, but they may not look anything like the actual structure that's there.

From what is posted, there are only about 400-500 "photogrametric" areas in the sim. The rest is covered by satellite data and Autogen buildings. The autogen is impressive for Autogen. I mean for the most part, the size and shape of the object is accurate to the satellite imagery, but in many cases you get round buildings that suspiciously look like they should be oil tanks or office buildings that have a strange "sports Stadium" look to them. But as far as building placement, for the most part it's accurate. Vegetation and tree's look pretty good too, but some areas are definitely "overgrown" and much more "woodsy" than they are IRL.

I've seen both sides. When I worked under Ed Fries in Microsoft Games (circa Age of Empires, Midtown Madness, Close Combat III) the testing department was great. and we all read and used Cem Kaner's Testing Computer software as if it was some sort of bible. Wrote boundary cases, test cases for text box overflows, null values, etc. Really good stuff. We had our own software bug tracking system called "RAID". yeah....funny. But it was great. I was the first hired "full time" tester for CC3 the Russian Front, which really means nothing, except that I got to do a lot of the regression testing. We had thousands of tests already written for CC2 A Bridge to Far, and I had to start running those against what I could in CC3. As more and more of us got assigned the the game, I was primarily responsible for map data and movement. I had to verify that the artwork matched each of the map data, which was nothing more than numerical values in a dimensioned variable. each value matched a terrain type. WALL, ridge line, mud, pavement. Etc. We would take the variable and put it into an excel spreadsheet and then assign a color value to each number. So for instance I could assign "black" to all the walls. and then the output would show a very rough outline of all the walls. Which I had to hand match with the artwork. This wall of the Kremlin had 15 openings.....so count on the map data... 15 openings? and in the right place. Really tedious stuff. But there was nothing worse than putting your troops into a building and finding out there was no way for them to get out.... When I left Microsoft, I joined a company that was primarily into hardware, and testing and design of hardware is much different. I had to actually ask the Vice President of Engineering for about $2500 to buy a basic "bug tracking" software suite because up to that point they were using email to track bugs in the firmware. I said that won't fly for the Windows testing they had hired me to do. Eventually moved out of test (basement, windowless room....hahah) and into Technical Support, where I've been for the last 20 years. But we still work very closely with Test and Development. Unfortunately, my company has never invested into QA the way I think they should have. Now everything is based on SCRUM, but TS and Testing never seem to be on the early SCRUM meetings or if we are, our voices are drowned out, so by the time we get a shot at it, It's already "too late". Very frustrating. So I've seen both sides. I would think that Xbox Game Studios would have those resources, but I'm not sure they're really involved in the patching. Something tells me Asobo is more responsible for that and like others have mentioned, they might be a little overwhelmed by not only the "scope" of the product but also the level of accuracy demanded by the user base. I just think they underestimated how rabid the "sim community" can be over things most other people would "overlook". That's not an excuse. But if you have underestimated those things from the start, it's hard to dig your way out while you are in the middle of the blizzard. Hopefully monthly updates and possible beta branching will allow them to provide the time they need to provide better quality testing. And hopefully the sim community will provide the patience necessary for that to occur as well.

Of course it is. That's why it is ludicrous to believe that they are intentionally crippling PC branch to "optimize for XBox". Xbox system X hardware exceeds much of the hardware that we are currently using. Current Xbox One hardware is 7 years old. If Asobo is doing this, then it is the first time in Xbox development that a PC title was intentionally crippled to shoehorn it to Xbox. I believe the individuals who partake in this conjecture are probably not "gamers" and so they are simply using this as some sort of excuse. I mean Xbox development has been blamed for everything from reduced visuals, to delay in bug fixes. And that type of conjecture is simply not founded. In many cases, ports are handled by completely different teams. So to blame everything on Xbox simply is not founded unless there is some evidence to support the claim. And the simple existence of reduced visuals or delayed bug fixes does not count as evidence that it is due to xbox integration.

but if you look in the UserCfg.opt file, there are two sections. One for VR and one for normal screens. There is no need to neuter graphics for normal screens when you can simply change those settings specifically for VR.

That is ludicrous. There are countless games that are released on both PC and Xbox Name ONE game ONE in which the PC version was specifically dumbed down or compromised to accomodate a console version. You can't be cause it doesn't happen. And there is no reason to think that it's happening here, other than to engage in hyperbolic conspiracy theory filled conjecture. If I were to "gander" my own baseless conspiracy theory, then I would say it's more due to the FS community who has always been trying to go sliders right since Day Zero of any flight simulator. release. Pushing for "Ultra" has been a goal of flight sim community since they were made available. When this game was first announced, it was hinted that "ultra" settings were pretty much designed for those systems that were currently unobtainable. Yet now, I can run 30fps 1080p in High End with clouds on ultra and 150 draw distances on an i7-7700 and gtx 1660 super. I'm not sure I call that High End anymore. If I were to believe any reasoning for decreased graphical fidelity, it's to satisfy owners of current PC hardware seeking to get higher performance and lowering the threshold of what each graphics setting represents, not some mythical xbox compromise. But of course that's just conjecture on my part.

Actually it gets longer and longer as more addons are added. If you have a big scenery area loading, that will add a lot. I use the addon manager so I click activate only the add on scenery I'll be travelling with. keeps load times down.

Where most of it comes from......US. Dust is mostly dead skin cells. Mmmmm. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? For the "deck" I imagine crystalized salt mixed in with other stuff from evaporated sea spray contributes, not to mention dirt from corrosion products on the deck from both the deckplate and deck equipment, not to mention, other "stuff" that gets left on the deck. I can also imagine a good share of it is also boondocker residue......But none of it comes from the officers, because we all know they float 6 inches off the ground and their stuff doesn't stink (grin). One of my most memorable moments on a sub, was when during a manuevering watch, I got to be conning tower phone talker. It was pretty much a tradition. Your last underway maneuvering watch, you got to be phone talker going heading into port. It was special. I had been up in the conning tower a couple of times while we were on the surface. It's magical. So little of the ship is visible while on the surface it almost feels like you are flying 20 feet off the surface of the waves. I also did my share of lookout watches on board LST Racine while I was in ROTC. Midwatch on the fantail, in the middle of summer. Wow..... My relationship was love hate, to say the least. Somedays, I'd wake up and wonder why the heck I was still here, and the next day I'd pinch myself and wonder how I was so lucky to get paid to do this. Going Port and Starboard during shiftwork in drydock was an example of the former. Getting paid to live in Hawaii, Spending Christmas Eve in the Vatican partaking in Midnight Mass with Pope John Paul II, or a swim call in the middle of the Caribbean were examples of the latter. ("Hey, what's that guy in the conning tower with the Rifle for?".......He's there in case there are sharks sighted....Sharks!?, he can hit a fast swimming shark?.....He doesn't shoot the shark, he shoots the swimmer furthest away from the boat....)