ThrottleUp

@737_800 if you have an X-Box Series X then you might wanna consider getting MSFS from the MS Store as I gather the PC version includes the console version when it comes out. Or maybe this applies only with Game Pass? I dont know much about it. Just a thought if you plan to play it on console also. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/12/10/microsoft-flight-simulator-coming-to-xbox-series-xs-summer-2021/

Hello friends 😃 So I just hammered the credit card and got the Premium Deluxe on Steam. Just wanna share first impressions & observations and also give feedback as a user with a low-spec PC. Installation from Steam went flawlessly. First off (no surprise here) the visuals are amazing 😲 - and this is coming from someone who has a dislike for photo scenery. I still cant help notice Google imagery is better in some places I've been too but I know the Bing imagery will be updated. I set the time to early evening and droned around in the C150, absolutely stunning. What they have achieved with the 1:1 virtual earth is something else. Having said that I cant shake the feeling that now and then it does have a bit of a cartoon look to it but I only get this feeling on rare instances. Desperately needs sliders for brightness, saturation, gamma, contrast & vibrance. The landscape has a whitewashed bleached over-bright feel to it. I will get ReShade to help deal with this, or I can use GeForce Experience filters. I realize this is a subjective issue but having sliders would be great. Needs a "Universal Autopilot" pop up window, FSX had these via mods and they were so useful. No doubt one will emerge in the mod scene. Putting aside the amazing virtual earth & visuals for a minute a couple of things jumped out at me. Here and there the UI interface feels just like Dovetails FSW. Even the light GA planes "feel" like they were dropped in from FSW. They have that slight FSW jiggle , I cant explain it. That title never got to completion but had some good ideas (notably the UI) and I have no doubt MS noticed. The UI tiles are too big and they need an option to show a compact List View in the Airplane Selection menu, Market Place etc. It all seems designed for a tablet! I miss the FSX ability to switch airplanes at any time. I just cant seem to find the Quick Look function to look down! When it comes to trees, bushes and buildings I see next to no difference between Medium & Ultra There needs to be an option to completely disable (turn off) glass cockpit displays. Not just a visual turn off but a background calculation turn off. All of us mostly fly from the left seat - the right seat PFD, NAV display are no use. I was in the TBM and wished I could turn off the right seaters PFD. Same for the airliners like A320. Let us us turn them off will save resources, specially for those of us on weaker systems. Anti Aliasing: FXAA gives me smoother lines than TAA The built in Dev Mode display for FPS & resources is excellent and I strongly advise using them, tells you everything. Shows not just FPS but VRAM and sys RAM use. Extremely useful! Observations from playing on a low spec (see my sig) 2008-era PC @ 1920 X 1080 This demanding new title runs better on my system than FSX. In areas where FSX (with Orbx) gave me single digits MSFS is throwing out 25+FPS. Pleasant surprise! Make sure Windows is on Game mode Use just one monitor, disable the others if you use multiples. Check that security software is also in Game Mode Turn off needless background stuff - do you need OneDrive, CCleaner etc running? In nVidia card settings you can set the Texture filtering Quality to High Quality, Performance or High Performance. See what works for you (sue Dev mode FPS feedback). Also experiment with the Power Management Mode , I have mine set to Prefer maximum performance. From pressing Play in Steam to arriving at the Welcome screen takes 5 minutes. Launching a flight takes 2.5 minutes. This is from slow old school spinner HDs These are all disabled/turned to minimum: volumetric clouds, all traffic, reflections, live weather, photogrammetry, glass cockpit refresh rate. Play with Texture Res and the other Texture options to find the sweet spot When flying out over the boonies I get up to 45FPS Flying near mid size towns it drops to 30FPS Large cities are unflyable on my PC, drops to single figs . But no surprise, I expected this. I cannot fly airliners either, drops to single figs ☹️. Its clear that I can only use the game for light GA flying out in bush country. Which is fine by me, its what I had planned. Analog panels not surprisingly give much higher FPS Conclusion: even on a weak machine this title is playable however you need to drastically disable/reduce/turn off some elements. Yes that means elements that make MSFS outstanding like the volumetric clouds, live weather etc. But, heres the important bit : even on the low settings with the major eye candy reduced this game looks a trillion times better than FSX can ever hope to be. Looking forward to learning a lot from other users on the forum, specially those who got the title at launch and have become familiar with it 🙂

You could wait for the Summer Sale but I will be very surprised if this game goes on sale. If it does not I'll say without hesitation that $24 extra is worth it for not having the pain of needing the DVD in the drive. The things scratch easy, and you could misplace it. Of course if you're careful its doable using the boxed version but one less hassle if you get it on Steam.

Does the store sell Steam Gift Cards? If so drop the $50 on that then use it to get Premium Deluxe on Steam with the remaining $45 from your credit card.

I was wondering exactly the same thing but since all my other games are on Steam I'll just get this game on that platform too.

@flyblueskies thanks 👍, I totally forgot that ICAO is more sim friendly 🙂

Reading all this makes me wonder if MS should have released just one version instead of all these "editions" 😶 Here is MSFS with 40 handcrafted airports and 30 planes. Done.

Thanks for all your responses. One more question - the sounds are FOMOD? I would just right-click and zip it with 7zip as a backup! 🙂 Oh I see good point I forgot to note that , the wingview cam is derived from the flight deck position so it will play cabin sounds. Thanks for clarifying, that is a lot like FSX if I recall correctly. Cool site, bookmarked!

TLDR Do you hear external sounds when using wingviews because the cam cannot be placed inside? FULL I dont have the game yet but close to getting it and I'm busy watching videos to get up to speed on tweaking and such. I just watched a good video on wingviews (below). To create the wingview the tutorial showed how to set a view, exit the sim, load the camera.cfg in a text editor and play with the XYZ cords to place the camera outside the airplane. Then load the sim and translate to the desired wingview. Unless things have since changed (the video is from Nov 2020) I cant help feeling a little 😕 as this means one of my biggest annoyances from FSX has carried over to MSFS: because the wingview cam sits outside you will hear external engine noise, external engine exhaust & external environmental sounds while the viewpoint is supposedly you in the cabin looking out the window. Is this still the case? If so why couldn't MS/Asobo let the user translate backwards from the flight deck to the cabin window position thereby keeping internal sounds like you'd hear as a pax? Secondly - back to tweaking text files to get cam views? Yes its very easy to do but I'm again left wondering - why? Hoping that future updates remove the need for setting up cam views. To be clear I'm still very much looking forward to and excited to get MSFS 😀these are not deal breakers for me but they still niggle. When I set a wingview on the A320 I dont wanna feel like I am strapped to the wing 😁

I will be facing this same situation in the near future. However I have never had to re-download any of my Steam games to transfer to another drive or machine. I just install the drive in the new computer, install Steam and point it to the existing game files and it does its checks/updates etc. Now, I do not yet have MSFS so seeing your post has made me curious - will this game not work if you do the above? The user has to download the whole thing again if they get a new computer?

MSFS is the new Crysis and it will be a while before we see a PC that can run it with absolutely everything maxed on a very high rez screen. I will be very interested to see footage of the game on XBSX, that is a powerful machine no doubt.

As others have said you cannot mod the Zibo in anyway. It will just stop working because of the protection. You can easily move in the VC using arrow keys and then memorize the view with CTRL + numpad (or any key you choose). So : Use the arrow keys to get the view you want Press CTRL + num 8 Thats it. The view is set & memorized. You can set many other views. For example if you want a view looking to the left you can turn the virtual head and press CTRL + num 4. Now if you are in another view and press num 8 you will go to your set forward view. If you press num 4 you will look left etc. Also you can go into the menu settings and play with the field of view.

I love X-Plane 11. I know it cannot match MSFS in the graphics dept but thats not why I fly it so much. Using tweaks and ReShade it can be made to look good. Some shots of mine:

Nice, do the strobe lights reflect off the clouds when you are in the soup? Do you see landing light beams in fog etc. Cant wait till I get this game, unable to source a new gfx card atm to build a new rig to handle MSFS.

I fly a lot in Asia having lived in several places in the region. I too like to keep my flights under 2 hours. I fly airliners on real world routes but you can fly GA in them too. Maybe in a King Air or bizzjet. These are a selection of routes I fly a lot. They are all about 1hr flight time in a jet. KUL-SIN CCU-GAU CCU-DAK DEL-IXC CJU-TAE CNX-BKK MNL-ILO CGY-CEB

Thats useful info thanks. Procmon is great, all the tools in that kit are awesome Systernals Suite if I recall.

Does the game generate a detailed log file after a CTD?

Hope you managed to fix it. These 3rd party AVs seem to be a nightmare, never used them but my roomates do (Kaspersky & Norton) and the things are forever locking up/quarantining/screaming about game files. I've used the default Win Defender only and never had any issues.

Hi friends, I plan to install the game on its own dedicated drive. When I get a new PC I would like to just yank out the drive and fit it into the new machine. I know there will be stuff buried all over Windows as MS loves to do, AppData and gosh knows what else. I know these will not be transferable but the core files will be? I wont have to download the entire thing again? Thanks for any info.

I use XP11 and I like it very much, I fly it for hours every day and enjoy every second. However I am not a fanboi and I know once I get a powerful new rig I will get MSFS too. It will live peacefully alongside XP11 on my system. I'll use MSFS for low and slow back country flying and XP11 for airliner (Zibo) flights. They will compliment each other. I dont get the rivalry on forums between simmers. Who cares - use the one you enjoy, dont get worked up. Ours is a very niche genre. This is not COD Warzone or PUBG with their gazillions of users. Each new sim that comes is welcome. It exposes many to aviation.

@peroni I will test it when I get a chance and if I'm wrong I'll definitely post on here acknowledging my mistake 🙂 Next question I have is - if this is true why is this the case? 😕 It would mess up so many things. Has anyone asked Laminar? Has this been a recognized issue? Why would changing just the GUI name affect other aerodynamic params? So for example I change the GUI name from C172 to Cessna 172 and the wing-lift params or engine power changes a little? On your next point yes you are correct and I forgot that aspect of it when I replied - 3rd party planes. Even more crucial that the .acf is backed up first. The only way to examine this would be to painfully do a side by side comparison of params before and after a name change, unless someone has a better idea.

There is never any "danger" - because it does not change other params unless you do it and also you can just make a backup. I use 7zip to right-click the .acf and back it up. Then you can go to town on Planemaker (which also creates a backup file). Even if you forget to backup and mess something up you can just run the updater and it will place a brand new factory fresh copy in the folder.🙂

@Sesquashtoo these are nice shots and Im debating wether to get this product as well since I want nice green dense verdant forests in my XP11. Just one question I had was - are you using Ortho in those pics? I dont have those and was wondering how this addon will look without it 🙂

Very nice and well written article thanks for sharing the link.

Totally agree! Without modders PC gaming just wouldnt be the same. Wether its Skyrim, GTA5 , Fallout 4, X-Plane 11 or MSFS its the modders constantly giving their valuable time to make the experience better for the rest of us. Shout out to the modder crew 🙂