Scottoest

10 million people having at least tried MSFS is huge. Of course that's not MAUs - 10 million MAUs would make it one of the more popular 'games' in the world. But 10 million people trying a flight sim in two years is a huge amount of reach for a hobby that usually goes pretty unnoticed by the mainstream. .

I always just get the impression the Asobo guys are very tired - Seb in particular always looks like he could sleep for 8 years.

I honestly don't care what sim people use or like - it's a hobby we engage in to while away the hours of our fleeting lives, not a holy war. What gets annoying are the XP (and it's almost always XP) evangelists who seem to lurk this subforum like a loitering UAV, waiting to find some mention of their software of choice that pays it undue reverence so they can swan dive in and gleefully garbage up the thread in question.

Nothing says "this is a serious guy with serious opinions" more than spelling MS and MSFS with a dollar sign like it's the Slashdot comment section circa 1998.

The Wright Flyer. I want to see how detailed the model is, what the new sound package sounds like, and how radically different it flies.

As with a lot of things in the sim, I'm sure a gusts/turbulence will require some dialing in. What we have now is a good baseline for future improvement.

They laid off ~1000 people from a company that has approximately 220,000 employees worldwide. It's really unfortunate for those poor souls who lost their jobs, but it's indicative of absolutely nothing for Flight Sim lol.

Or people are just, y'know... having different experiences than you with their hardware and settings configurations.

True physical "realism" could essentially be broken down into near-infinite complexity computationally, so no. And beyond that, are you calculating the drag from every bit of grime on the fuselage or wings? No? #gamenotsim 😄 The trick with flight sims is just to have the computational fidelity to provide a dynamic and "realistic enough" experience, and then do some fudging around the margins to get the rest of the way there in terms of specific "feel" for the individual airframes etc. More surface-points being processed in that approximation of reality is certainly always better, but ultimately a good flight model is as much a work of art as it is a work of math.

They'd need a quantum leap in the quality and granularity of their geographic/photogrammetric data to use MSFS's twin of the world for ground-level simulators. It works now because you're typically flying over it hundreds if not thousands of feet in the air, and the fine details matter less than an accurate looking overall picture. The models their AI-assisted autogen populates would also have to be orders of magnitude more complex and varied. Don't mean to be a debbie downer, but yeah... we are nowhere close lol.

The fact that they delayed the update after beta testing because of reported issues is an extremely positive development. It signals a shift in how they view these updates, and that they aren't going to hit that tick-tock cadence just to keep on schedule any more. That's great. Sounds bizarre, but I think that delay was the best news out of the entire Q&A for what it represented, lol.

Asobo have said a dozen times by now that their aspiration for MSFS is to make it the best possible high fidelity sim for simmers. I consider that pretty much the beginning and end of the conversation on what their "mindset" is. That doesn't mean it isn't also predominantly entertainment software, which most consumer-grade "simulators" are intended to be regardless of fidelity. In my experience with sims it's generally only with flight simmers that the whole vapid "game vs. sim" debate is a thing - I assume because the audience skews older, and old guys recoil at the idea they are playing a "game"... in their computer chair with their plastic yoke and pedals.

I don't know what the servers could be serving up that would cause a CTD, but it's certainly not impossible. It'd be especially weird if it was related to a specific area of the world.

Are there any consistent details for when it happens? On the ground/in the air, only add-on airports, only when going to external looking at the terminal versus somewhere else, etc. If your frames recover after a few seconds my immediate reaction is that it's some kind of caching issue.

LOL - I had this exact same thought the other day, as a lapsed Gentoo Linux diehard who used to spend lots of time on Slashdot ages ago. A lot of XP diehards remind me very much of those loud and proud Linux "advocates", as you say. Your description of the minority mentality is spot-on - I'd imagine there's an element of sunk cost as well. Most people aren't like this of course, but the loud ones sucking up the most conversational oxygen are. PC storage has never been cheaper... there's no reason why people can't just use multiple sims for whatever they think each brings to the table. Those sims will live on or fade away depending on how many people feel the same, not based on who gives the snarkiest and most dismissive rant on AVS. (Side Note - I discovered a certain "sparky" XP advocate is literally one of those Linux "advocates" too lol)