Alpine Scenery

Flysimware Cessna 414 and HondaJet are the two I ended up flying more than any of the others. Certainly there is no real best as it is more of a personal preference, but commonly those two are often cited as favorites. Just Flight 146 if you want something big, fast, and heavy and a bit challenging to land at times (though easy to stop).

This looks excellent, cannot wait until release. Have very few airports on my radar lately, but this is one of them. Maybe I'll add some further stuff to UE to go with it, make sure I blend it in and all that. Cannot wait!

Not sure what part of the US your in, I'm thinking Key West, because most other places - winter is the most drab looking time.

I used it for years training on IFR to vector me in, but I guess I didn't fly around mountains that much when I was using it.

I remember the Unigine demo with Port Angeles. Those were hand designed areas and they got away with a lot of the terrain mapping because it was covered in trees, so they didn't have to worry about how the ground texture looked from up high that much. FS could be better, but it's a performance issue. How much of the performance is an inherent design problem with the graphics engine, or how much is simply just what the real limitations are is hard to say. However, I don't think the FS-2020 engine is nearly as optimized partly because of all the custom textures used. Most games use more repeat textures, whereas when you load FS 2020, a lot of the textures are custom which strains the GPU more. So it would be hard not to make the world very repetitive looking using the Unigine technique and it would take too long for placement.

It seems like the ATC in MSFS is a bugged version of the original FSX one to me, yes with a few different features or changes. Not saying there were no changes at all, but seems like the changes were things not connected back properly causing more issues than solving. FSX ATC wasn't perfect, but I don't recall it vectoring me into the mountains very often or changing elevations like crazy.

ATC programming would be about a 3 of 10 in difficulty rating in the programming world. It is slightly tedious because it's working in the confines of a game and the confines of different air spaces. However, you don't need to know how everything works, you use common sense in this case. Something like real-time image manipulation to enhance imagery isn't common sense, because the level of improvement varies with different types of problems in the images. ATC is nothing like that. Asobo just didn't spend any resources or time on the ATC at all. They never bothered with coding any of it so it appears. Someone just randomly added the FSX ATC in the game and changed it up a bit without properly adjusting it.

I leave it on but just don't get too close and it won't look as weird. Viewing it from a distance is kind of the point of the MSFS PG, it's not meant for close inspection. It's just to represent it from a distance for the most part. The California coast around San Diego up through Monterey looks good in PG, very good I think. As you go inland from the coast, it does get a lot sketchier though, but at least you have the coast.

I think that would be a near impossibility given the aerial coverage, and I would expect only minor graphical differences overall comparing the same places, but if they fix the tile coloring and contrast balance, that might help quite a bit.

I would personally have fun coding an ATC library for Asobo or MS (with help of course), but don't think they'd hire me for that role. I'd really push to invite a group of about 50 testers to help though, people like Ryanbatc and other knowledgeable folks. For the ATC, they are definitely going about it wrong or they have the wrong coders involved. I mean I'm not the greatest coder in the world or anything (very experienced though), but I am sure I could fix it, it's really not THAT hard. I struggled trying to code AI recognition of buildings and autogen to get a good result when I tried, but that is a LOT harder. Image recognition is a general PITA, so is automated color correction to try to get rid of side effects at the end (the post-post remastering I guess you could call it).

Doesn't sound like a difficult thing to fix for the AIR part of the ATC as far as elevations and what not (simple). IMO, the difficulty pales in comparison to some of the things they've already accomplished. Throw something together and let the community critique and then make corrections, no ATC expert even needed. You are talking about some proximity coordinate checks and an elevation map, not that difficult 😛 There is not even any graphics work or game engine coding, so relatively basic. Now enhancing the aerial imagery automatically with AI where it looks wrong, that is difficult.

Maybe, but most are going to assume its basically the same game with some bonus features. The anticipation is not going to be anywhere near what it was with FS-2020 release. This isn't really a different game, that's why I don't think that point applies in this situation. They didn't have time for a rewrite, it's going to be a major update, but minor compared to like FS2004 > FSX. Few people are anticipating this in a good way, as we've seen from the threads.

This middle shot looks awesome. Yah, you can download stuff like this from FLightsim.TO such as Zion National Park which is pretty high-res like this is. I hope they replace ALASKA with PG mountains where needed 😛

That's all only true if there wasn't already a product available to buy. It does affect third party developers, absolutely, a lot of people psychologically will hold off on purchases until they see what happens with the 2024 release. A percentage of those holding off (often a high percentage) may lose interest in an addon they were going to buy. It's called urgency, and it is why every single company in the world wants you to buy something NOW, not later. Not speaking to the state of third party developers overall, yes they'll be fine, but it does do some weird stuff to the sales temporarily for some people. Not so much for planes, more for airports or those more casual purchases, people will be like, oh well 2024 almost here ---- just wait and see before I dump a bunch of money. Your suppositions assume that people respond to marketing with their wallets in a rational way, and I assure you, they don't. A high percentage of people aren't going to care in the back of their mind whether an addon is supposed to work in 2024 or not, that doesn't even factor into the psychology of it (barely even).

They should have waited and just surprised us at the VERY last minute. They are going to severely hurt addon and 3PD sales if people are waiting on a new version.

This 2024 thing was well meaning, but poorly advertised and executed is what I was thinking as well. I'm not concerned either way because if this is what needs to be done for them to keep going forward, then I'm ok with it as it's not a lot of money. Yah, too many questions. The trailer was interesting but it doesn't seem to focus on addressing the things I am most interested in, but the issue is everyone has different priorities. For myself, it would be increasing the resolution and color fidelity of the terrain, and second would be changing the ground physics a bit.

It makes a lot of dumb errors, but it has its uses and it is still in the somewhat early stages. It requires human assistance and intervention. In its current state, I don't see it doing that much with Flight Sims, but who knows in the next version or the one after that. It's in the early stages, and I'm not going to pretend to know how far it's going to be or at what year that happens. However, the eventual implications are far reaching and concerning. I've had a lot of disturbing arguments with ChatGPT.

Before AI gets into sims too much, we will all probably have been killed by some genius that decided an AI based "mother drone" for a drone army was a good idea. War of the Drones, here we come, keep those pellet guns readied.

Alaska has some beautiful areas if you know where to go. Yah, some of it is mis-colored and poor resolution, but some of the most interesting looking scenery, airports, and approaches in the game are in Alaska.

Yes, I grew up in that area, though it's not a place I would want to fly back to 🙂 That said, the eastern side and SE Houston have a lot of industry, so you'll want the We Love VFR - Region 2 mod from flightsim.to. They are basically alien mini-cities of never-ending chemical plants.

Much of the aerial imagery in the Appalachian area has pretty good PR quality, higher quality than a lot of the Western US, though some of California is also pretty high quality (around the cities especially).

Yes, they are both amazing, so is the Utah area just east of Salt Lake City (from Park City to Huntsville to Logan in May or June). Been to all these places and I can say they are all about equal, but possibly you could say Glacier National Park in Montana is the most scenic overall if you had to pick one place.

Oops, I will add it. Now added at the bottom of the list, also added Florida separately. Had to add them at the bottom after a poll is already created, otherwise it messes up the stats.

Just curious what parts of the US people are flying in most lately. I realize I could have broken this down differently, but this is just how I decided to do it. For myself, it is usually Alaska lately, though I do fly in almost all areas fairly equally excluding the NE and Central US (not much in Kansas or Nebraska). If I had to choose one, I would probably pick Alaska for myself.

For MSFS, how good the lighting is - a lot of it depends where you are flying. However, XP looks terrible in general, so even if it did look better at night, it looks worse in every other way.