eslader

That is a company that definitely deserves to get back on its feet. I'm amazed at the quality of the yoke. He could have charged a lot more for it (and I'm grateful he didn't!).

In fairness it kind of did die out. Xplane was never able to get the buy-in that MS gave up. There were still people running FSX in 2019 because they didn't want to switch. And P3d required some uh... Liberal interpretations of licensure to buy which some never bothered with. Plus, P3d was essentially MSFS (still is, but with many more improvements). Before MSFS'20 came out, finding a decent controller on a budget was pretty much impossible. Finding a good addon airplane that wasn't expensive was almost as difficult. It's come roaring back with a vengeance now that MSFS is on the scene, but I still think M$ screwed up firing the ACES gang and exiting the market. That's 10 years of development they missed out on, and they had to turn to a studio that had never developed so much as an addon for a flight sim before. That's working out well, but there were definitely growing pains that were an entirely unforced error on Microsoft's part. I absolutely think MS will abandon flight sims again in the future. But that doesn't mean I won't enjoy it while it's here. Every business abandons everything eventually, sometimes inexplicably such as when EVGA decided they weren't going to make video cards any more. I'll keep flying as long as the sim works.

Yep, MS Store, not on the beta. I did notice that it keeps the controller profiles, but switches them to default rather than whatever you were running. And this last time it trashed all my graphics settings, set all assistance toggles to easy-mode, and put me back on that stupid tooltip-for-every-control scheme. Interesting about the Xbox store. I'll experiment with that. You'd think if it wasn't finding the cloud saves on the Xbox store it would default to local storage but...

Getting pretty tired of having to re-set my settings every week or so because MSFS gets amnesia. Anyone figure out why this is happening and more importantly, how to stop it yet?

What's considered a toolbar mod for these purposes? Navigraph stuck its charts thing on my toolbar, but I suspect that's not the kind of mod that would interfere with AS, right?

Yeah, about that... I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess ActiveSky is going to be better than Ferraris. 😉

That's interesting. Anyone know exactly what the onboard processor in the regular Crystal actually does? is it only used for stand-alone or does it take some load off the computer when you're doing something like MSFS? I would guess it doesn't, which makes the price and not having a big heavy battery on your head rather compelling for our purposes.

Flying it now, and the only bugs I'm seeing involve camera position in VR. By default the pilot's about 3 feet tall, and several zoom spots zoom you in way too much. Otherwise, it's quite impressive.

I agree, and I especially understand because over the last few years, my sim time has been sharply curtailed by this annoying thing called real life responsibilities. However, I also don't drop $50 on products I'm not even going to fly once. 😉

Wait, you bought it, didn't fly it, have determined it's junk because some people in a chat room said it was, so you're going to boycott them? Without even personally experiencing the product you own? That seems... Odd.

Yeah, that's your bottleneck. That thing's more than 10 years old! Time for a new mobo/chip. Most have found the X3D series of AMD chips give them the best results in MSFS.

I remember saying the same thing about Fenix. Why are they developing it? There's a free version that's great. And now look at me. I have the Fenix. I think there'd be a market for PMDG to do the 787, but I'm not convinced that's what they're up to. Their schtick has for a long time been in the "Boeing doesn't suck" era of Boeings. The 787 is wildly different from a systems perspective from the 73/74/77 era. Not that I don't think they *could* tackle it, but I have my doubts that they *would.* If I had to guess, the "secret" project is that they're gonna release the 747 again, only this time they'll have a VC25 and VC25B in the package.

Does it sparkle? Because that's an indication your vampire is lame and should be quietly buried and never spoken of again. In seriousness, can you explain what you mean by fuel starvation BUT the fuel pressure remains normal?

I still vote Staggerwing and F-22, but there's also the Piaggio Avanti, which looks horrendous in most photos but in person? My god, it's like something out of Star Trek.

And slope. I've noticed that very minor slopes sometimes require quite a bit more power to ascend if you're starting from a stop.

"This thing is on sale and I'm on a metered connection. I'll buy it now, and download it when I have more data available."

This is the correct answer. Though I will admit, I think the F-22 has some pretty amazing looks itself.

I've seen that plane in person a few times at Oshkosh. That paintjob is amazing. I keep waiting for the owner to get richer and buy a Falcon to do the same treatment. 😉

I'm loving all the "747 cargo planes will be scrapped" comments. In favor of what? The things carry more weight than a C5. There are only two planes ever produced that out-haul a 747. The AN-124, which you occasionally see at airports in the US because it's such a cargo beast, and the AN225, which you used to see every once in awhile until Russia destroyed it. The rest of the heavy-lifters are mostly military-only. So if you need to lift a really heavy load, in many cases the 747 is your only option. And people think we're gonna just junk 'em?! Yes, they're less efficient than newer planes. But then a train burns more fuel than a Honda Civic, yet if I need to ship 100 box cars full of something, I'm not going to do it in the Honda...

I mean, they did release the DC6 for MSFS. I know, it was a stopgap to give us something good to fly while we waited for better stuff to come along, but they have historically released historical aircraft. I can't imagine they wouldn't release the 747 for MSFS. I'm actually surprised they're bothering with the MAX. I won't be buying it. Why? Not for ideological reasons, although let's admit, if Boeing were half the company it used to be, the MAX would never have been built and an all-new 737 replacement would have. But because the entire purpose of the MAX was that NG pilots wouldn't have to get a different type certificate. What does that mean? It's gonna feel very similar to flying the NG. Yes, the engines will be different and it may or may not simulate trying to kill me with MCAS, but for the most part, it's gonna be the same flows and characteristics of the old plane. I already own the NG, so I'm good.

Yep. And I know at least one airline used FSX to train its DC3 pilots because, well, there aren't a whole lot of level-D DC3 sims out there. 😉 (Buffalo, if you were curious). All that said, whether it's Buffalo or the Air Force, the desktop sim training is supplemented by getting in a better sim in the case of the Air Force, or getting in a DC3 and having Joe yell at you for a while in the case of Buffalo. I understand why real pilots scoff at simmers who sit in Economy fantasizing about the pilots both dying and they heroically land the plane; It's simply not realistic. I've been doing this since the 80s and maybe, if I was very lucky and had a really good controller helping me, I could get the 737 set up for a Cat III autoland and convince the passengers I'm a genius. If I had to land it manually, we might possibly survive, but I wouldn't place any bets on being able to use the plane afterward. 😉 But I don't understand the real pilots who scoff at simmers for saying "I'm doing this for fun and to learn more about aviation," and the response is "well strap on a real airplane then, loser." In short, there's stupid on both sides. The simmers who think their obsession with PMDG/Fenix/Leonardo makes them undiscovered Sully Sullenbergers are foolish, and the pilots who think we're all just playing a video game and that's somehow an unworthy pursuit are also foolish. Thinking of sims from the approach that they have to be "more than a video game" is bad thinking. There's an almost uniquely American approach to life that most of what we do needs to be "real" or lead to something real. NASCAR workers scoff at sim racers. "You'll never drive a real race car just from sim racing" (yes, one actually told me that once). Erm. OK. That's cool and everything, but you'll never become a lawyer by racing real cars. The goal isn't to "become" something, the goal is to have fun and maybe enjoy a learning curve. Do you enjoy simming? Then it's a worthwhile pursuit whether you "get something real out of it" or not.

Based on the specs, I don't see the need to spend money to change from my current Reverb G2 to the Bigscreen Beyond. The FOV, which is really important for giving you a sense of motion when flying, is actually *narrower* than the G2. https://risa2000.github.io/hmdgdb/ I wouldn't take less than 100 degrees in a headset I bought today.

Fly the Icon in the mountains near sunset. It's pretty amazing.

I know some landing rate monitor systems (such as the one in Neofly) only consider actual rate of descent, which means if the runway isn't 100% horizontal, you either get rated higher or lower than actual. I stopped paying attention to such things, at least until there's evidence they're looking at the data they should be looking at.

I've started using it on every flight. Because getting used to the awfulness again means when BeyondATC comes out it will be even more of a great upgrade. 😄