March Hare

Meanwhile... "Compare that to the new X-Plane weather system". Seriously, though, you can't legitimately start a critical topic about software you don't use and have never used, especially to say: You can't comment on how braking feels by watching YouTube videos. Ignoring the logic of your writing, if we consider the points holistically, you can't compare one simulator to another without understanding the different complexities of each in relation to the limitations of current hardware. For example, the visual simulation might be of a higher quality on one simulator compared to another – X-Plane and MSFS, for example – because X-P has the processing resources available to present a more realistic windshield-rain interaction because MSFS is using the available resources to do something that X-P isn't. Take weather and sky simulation on its own. What MSFS does with weather and volumetric clouds, especially taking into account the world and aircraft simulation combined alongside it, is nothing short of phenomenal. True, realistic volumetric cloud simulation – with absolutely nothing else going on; no weather, no world; no avionics or cities or rainbows and rain; just clouds with accurate light scattering – is not even possible on current home computer hardware. Think about that. So I'll say again, what Asobo have done is stunning, even if not perfect. So, what one simulator chooses to prioritise may not be what another simulator prioritises. No simulator can currently do absolutely everything and do it completely realistically.

For me it was simple: I found parking brake and reassigned it to a HOTAS button not already in use. It works now. Prior to that the sim had assigned it to the same button that also switched between cockpit and external camera views, so changing camera enabled and disabled the brake.

I found – with my HOTAS – it had remapped the parking brake to the same button that switches between internal and external camera views. Discovered this by pressing every button on the HOTAS in turn, until I switched to external view and the 172 finally moved; parking brake reapplied going back to cockpit view. So check that. This is the first time I've had my controls remapped by an update. This one I can't figure out: the thumb stick on the top of my main stick looks left and right when I push it in those directions. Push left, the view turns to the left; push right, view looks right. Inside the cockpit. In external camera mode, pushing left looks right, and right looks left. It never used to invert this for external view. I can't find a setting corresponding to this. It was late last night when I was looking so I might have been tired and overlooked it, but if anyone can point me the right way (no pun intended) before I have another chance to search through every setting, I'd appreciate it greatly.

I'm extremely interested in the UFO subject, but I'm another one who can only offer anecdotes, not evidence. My parents told me when I was young that they had seen a UFO (UAP, these days). Every time I asked, over the years, their story never changed. More importantly for me was the genuine excitement recounting the event elicited from them. It was a few weeks after they were married, out in broad daylight. My dad saw a triangle of red lights in the sky. He told my mom to look, but as my dad has always been a joker she told him to stop being bloody daft. Luckily he convinced her to look up so they both saw it. After hanging there a while in the daytime sky, it appeared to tilt and shot up and out of sight in the blink of an eye. Being their son, I don't doubt what they saw. It sounds anomalous. And I went through life with a kind of envy, having not seen anything weird. Until a few years back. I can't recall the precise time this happened, but it was the same night an out of control Russian rocket plummeted back to Earth, so early January 2022. Somewhere between 9 and 10 p.m. For a brief moment, because I was messaging my brother immediately afterwards, he tried to convince me it was the Russian rocket that I'd seen. I'm not convinced. That went down somewhere over the South Pacific; what I saw was almost directly above me in England at the time the rocket came down. My wife's friend had loaned us stargazing binoculars. They were phenomenal. Through these, where I could see only a few stars with my naked eyes, the sky was suddenly populated with hundreds. I could also see the dust cloud in Orion. So I sometimes went out after I'd put my baby girl to bed just to scan around in awe. That night in 2022, I'd left my wife in my daughter's room and wandered outside. I scanned over towards the west with our rooftop at the bottom edge of my view, then slowly moved the binoculars back eastwards when something moved into the edge of my view from the west. So I quickly scanned back and saw a hazy tic-tac shape (I may as well use that analogy because that's how it was shaped). It really was just a blurry shape, but I was stunned because, wow, I've managed to catch sight of a spacecraft – and, to be clear, by that I mean man-made craft such as a satellite or shuttle because my mind doesn't jump to the paranormal or extraordinary. I tracked the object as it moved eastwards, wondering what it could be, when my wife joined me. She couldn't see anything with her naked eyes. I was reluctant to lose sight of it by handing her the binoculars. I was telling her about it when it started rotating. From my viewpoint it was the motion of a seesaw rocking back and forth, but erratically – quickly and with instantaneous change in direction, while still travelling along a horizontal path. Then it stopped moving; levelled out again. I got more excited because I thought that looks odd. I have an interest in all things space and physics, and I thought the motion and instantaneous change in direction was unusual. But I'm no expert. Then I was trying to adjust the focus but couldn't get a view any clearer, going through all the focal ranges – I was stuck with a blurry tic-tac shape. Watched it a few seconds longer without adjusting the binoculars any more when it suddenly popped into view. Now I could see it more defined, with slightly straighter ends than I'd perceived before, whitish in colour, a black diagonal strip towards the forward end, and a tiny triangular nub on top of the opposite end like a disproportionately tiny aeroplane tail, but facing the wrong way. My excitement increased, then it went blurry again. As I watched it a while longer, it popped in and out of view a couple more times. Then it stopped moving, seen in relation to nearby stars. And it disappeared – more like a fast dissolve to noty. For a moment I thought I'd lost focus, but I could still see the stars and also a slight, circular haze where the craft had just been. That's my personal sighting. I have no idea what I saw, but I've checked many videos and images. I can't find anything that resembles it visually nor anything that behaves in such a way in terms of movement, like instantaneous change in direction. And the popping in and out of focus – I can't think of an explanation. Make of that what you will, because I have no idea. It's still open to an earthly explanation, I simply haven't found one yet.

Absolutely. Beta tests are a bug finding and elimination process. There is a big game in beta right now, and I know that the beta version has more bugs than the internal build has, with certain bugs already fixed even before the beta went live. I know it won't make sense to the user why that should be, but there are reasons why a beta can be even more buggy than internal builds. I don't have all the answers, because I'm not a developer myself, but I think sometimes it's to make sure broken code isn't interacting in some negative way with something else, or to see if the bug behaves differently on live servers with many players, before the existing internal fixes officially go into a full build.

Until very recently, my PS5 (even my PS4) was more powerful than my PC – but my PC ran MSFS 2020 at a smooth frame rate, 1080p, and full ultra settings. Releasing on another console means only one thing: a larger commercial base.

The most helpful place to "post" issues, of course, is via the official reporting channels for bugs/issues, especially when participating in a beta test.

People have opened a complaint thread about bugs in the beta? Bizarre. Everyone in the beta signed up to find and report bugs. It's literally the point of a beta test build. You expect it to be broken and dedicate your time to being involved in identifying the areas where it's broken.

To my recollection, and in my experience, only updates to already installed World Updates show up like that... If it's an entirely new WU, I have to go into the marketplace.

I don't have 2024 yet to check (I'm hoping it shows up in the Steam Spring sale, which starts tomorrow), but it has been said by MS and Asobo for some time now that world updates happen on the server side and you don't have to do anything because it will stream. But when the marketplace arrives, you will then have the choice to download and install them to your drive as you did in 2020. So if you don't want to do that, you can ignore the marketplace and should still have the world update streaming when you fly over that region. It would be good if somebody can test this to confirm.

I've stuck with 2020. Only because I'm hoping 2024 is in the imminent Steam spring sale. It's been a painful wait.

It wouldn't work as an expansion because it's been fundamentally redeveloped from the core, primarily to ditch Microsoft's legacy code and make it a properly multi-threaded architecture.

This might be because there are particular established techniques for volumetric cloud rendering, discussed in industry papers, that give good results within the performance allowance of contemporary technology. I think there needs to be a leap in home computer technology to see any larger step towards better realism.

I got my Twin Edge Super and fit it into my Micro ATX case. Chose it for features vs price. Higher VRAM than other models too.

So, for context, I was on MSFS 2020 with my GTX 1070 card, and TAA antialiasing, 1080p. I've since bought a RTX 4070 Super but have only used it to test VR flying briefly. I keep meaning to go back and compare 2D flying and see if the grid is noticeable with my new card in the same scenarios, with the same TAA native 4K. Then try DLSS. Then it will be interesting to compare 2024 when I upgrade to the new sim in hopefully the next month.

As I understand it, volumetric clouds are created using a voxel grid, which algorithms eat away at to form cloud shapes. Based on observation, my presumption is the size of individual voxels and therefore grid "density" is dynamic, with individual voxels becoming more noticeable when processing resources are allocated to more and more certain tasks. I rarely noticed the voxel grid in 2020, but I really noticed it during stormy conditions with lightning.

Well, I did say locked from the start. Obviously a variable frame rate isn't smooth or fluid or whatever when it's jumping around.

I'm not disputing anything, either. I was only making a passing remark about my experience with FPS. I'm not sure how you're differentiating between fluidity and smoothness, either. Again, I'm not seeing any issue with 30 frames locked, so terminology is irrelevant to my subjective user experience, which MrBitsFlyer can't comment on.

I was being a little tongue in cheek, while also hinting that context matters. So I can see a difference between a 30 and a 60 FPS character action game. Conversely, I don't see any motion issue at a locked 30 frames in MSFS; it's perfectly smooth to me. The game context is different between the two genres. Just as Hardcore Henry is a different context in the movie world.

And the thing is – from my perspective – I can see the difference between 30FPS and 60FPS... in a game with complex character animations, that is. But locked 30FPS looks just as smooth in MSFS (again, to me) because there really is not much in the way of animation to focus on. I mean, my eyes have been doing fine watching cinema movies at 24FPS all these years, too, without thinking dear god, this is just a horrible slideshow giving the illusion of motion.

Although, as Seb said a long time ago, you only need 30FPS for smoothness, so long as it's a stable 30. My locked 30FPS looks perfectly smooth to me.

I thought this when I saw the first MSFS , but bought it anyway not expecting it to look anything like the videos I was seeing, for me with my GTX1070. Then found, with just a RAM upgrade, I could run it on full ultra settings, albeit at 1080p resolution. I've more recently upgraded my GPU to a RTX4070 Super. The only real difference is I can now run it in native 4K, so it looks better in that regards. I can also run it in VR with my Quest 3 (main reason I upgraded). I'm looking forward to MSFS 2024. As it's properly developed for modern multi-threaded hardware, I probably could have got away with my GTX1070 (the devs did say, if you can run 2020 on your current hardware, you can definitely run 2024).

Echoing what a couple of others have said, Asobo's Seb pointed out in a past developer stream that various physics systems are in place, but it's the individual developer's responsibility to implement and apply them to their aircraft models, and how well they are utilised. So you can't analyse the sim's core ground physics on an aircraft that has clearly not had the required systems applied by its developer.

The next Steam sale (Spring sale) begins 13th March, so I'm holding out just in case it's discounted then. If not, I don't think I'll wait any longer.

I can state for a fact it's the publisher, Microsoft, and their sales-related teams/executives who set the release dates and stick to them regardless of bugs, not the development studio, Asobo. I can state this for a fact because my brother's been a games developer for years, across all platforms, for various studios, working under various publishers (including Microsoft), and so I know this is how the industry works. And I see the stress this causes developers. It's quite rare that release dates get pushed back for extra development time. It seems most publishers are quite blinkered and don't think about reputation, they just think, well, the devs can just fix these problems and patch it later. Which is absolutely true, but it can be hard to recover from negative reviews of a launch state. First impressions...