VFXSimmer

Got it. By all means you're free to pony up your money, or not, for anything you see fit. I guess it just surprises me that it seems like people expect a company to spend a huge amount of time and effort to create a product that greatly improves our very niche hobby, .. and deliver it as charity? Or even imply that the company just "wants your money" - the implication being that it is undeservedly doing so.

What a silly thread. If one were truly a Hard Core Simmer (tm), you would forego a lunch one day a month, if that's what it took, to pay the $15. You would do it in a heartbeat If it meant you could get the type of immersion this product seems it will provide (assuming it delivers as promised). If you can't make that kind of sacrifice then you're in the wrong hobby.

I can confirm that this works like a charm. Got it all done last night during the worst of it in about 1/2 hour

... subscription.. not subscription.... Webster's definition of the word... Does it really matter? If this thing is as good as it sounds, is there really anyone that frequents these forums that isn't going sign up and pay for it anyway?

Actually those issues are well known and documented. And most are not listed in the changelog for SU13, so not much of a bombshell to bring them up.

Flight simmers are a weird bunch, aren't we...

The update had a lot of fixes to various aircraft systems (I hit "V" before updating which showed the list of changes). I'm at work and cant do it now, but I'm sure someone here could point to the changelog. Sorry I cant elaborate further because I was in a rush and didnt stop to read it in detail.

I have a full AIG install along with FSTL and FS Traffic. I DO get Hawaiian 717s .. not sure which is providing that but reading the above responses leads me to believe its AIG.

I'm going to buy it! FYI, if any of you happen to have some spare time in Atlanta, GA .. specifically at KATL .. there is a Delta Airlines museum on the property, and in that museum is a retired, but fully functional full motion Level D simulator of a 737-200. It was an actual simulator used for pilot training back in the day, now its part of the museum. A as member of the public, you can rent it for an hour, get a little training, and see how well your MSFS sim time prepares you for something closer to reality. I did it.. and well.. the passengers wouldn't have been happy ... but I did manage to land us in one piece. After that experience I'd happily buy Blackbird's offering to relive the experience and practice a bit more with the older instrumentation to possibly do better if I find myself with another opportunity at the full motion sim. BTW, the museum itself is really great - you get to wander around up close and personal with a DC-8, 767, 747, and several other older planes.

The amount of polygons needed for a typical airport terminal interior pales in comparison to the amount needed for the exteriors, clutter on the apron, AI aircraft, etc, and is an even smaller fraction of the amount needed for photogrammetry. If your machine can handle a typical PG city, terminal interiors are not the problem.

In answer to the OP… me

Omg - been away from Avsim for a week and this drops! I am gobsmacked. The activities look amazing enough but I would plunk down more money just for the the rotorwash amimation of grass and trees - something very important to a helicopter pilot and something I’d asked for on Zendesk in the past. I will have to break the bad news to the family and friends that I’m going to be unavailable starting in 2024 😉

I'm a fan of PG. For me, however, the best option is a combo of things like Samscene 3D and PG. The great thing about the photogrammetry is that you get recognizable representations of every building, not just the iconic ones. For cities that I know I've clearly recognized places I've been by features like signage on the side of the buildings (for example). I assume I must be lucky enough to have an internet connection that's fast enough that I havent had to endure an excessive amount of the melted look issue that plagues others. So I'm sure that's affecting my opinion, but with the combo approach I feel like I get the best of both worlds in that hero buildings are rendered in crisp detail that you can fly right up to, but I can still recognize everything else that is "off the beaten path" and get that deja vu feeling that this sim is so good at delivering. If you're just 100' away from the PG buildings, to me they lose the wonkiness that you get up close and do the job of recreating the real buildings they represent. The nice thing is that PG is a selectable option, so everyone can choose what works best for them.

It’s taxing but still works on a 13900k/4090 even in VR for me (with motion smoothing). One thing to double check is to make sure you’ve disabled Asobo’s LAX because otherwise it still gets processed even though it’s covered up by iniBuild’s replacement.

But that’s really all humans beings do too. New knowledge is not synthesized out of the ether. It’s nothing but an original recombination or extrapolation of existing information. Humans screw up a lot of things too until they learn to correct them over time which is exactly how the tech behind these new search engines work. Its also important to distinguish “intelligence” from “consciousness”. A system can be intelligent by providing ‘correct’, ‘productive’ (choose your superlative) answers to questions even if it can’t internally reflect on them. And these systems don’t have to be “perfect” to gain traction in our society. They merely have to be better on average than their human competition and you will see society switch to their “expertise”. The fact that we aren’t there today does not mean this won’t happen in the not too distant future. These neural nets keep learning and improving at a frightening pace and their database of knowledge to draw from is literally larger than the Library of Congress.

Thanks Doering, it really was. I’m here in Atlanta for a few more months and am considering giving it one more go before I leave. The Delta pilot said he would set me up with an engine out.. as if it wasn’t hard enough 😉 And absolutely a 2 person job!

Funny timing this thread… 20 years of flight simming here, I just happen to be working in Atlanta for a few months. It just so happens that Delta has a great museum at KATL and they have a level D 737-200 sim that they allow the public to rent out for an hour ($475). Once in a lifetime chance I booked myself a spot. A retired Delta pilot who flew that plane for real was my guide and copilot for the session. I told him my story, that I had simmed a lot but my only experience as an actual pilot was 2 discovery flights in a Cessna. I’m guessing to “see what he was dealing with” he set me up on a short flight from KATL to Birmingham. Weather was set to clear on takeoff but full thunderstorm with a 15 knot crosswind at the destination. It was pretty amazing how familiar it felt to start the engines and taxi. The tiller was a bit more sensitive and you could really feel the whole thing sway if you pushed too hard or braked too suddenly (my passengers would not have been happy). But through taxi and takeoff I felt really good and it went well… Then came the weather… This was an old aircraft - no glass cockpit and we weren’t flying with autopilot. The Delta Captain said he actually hand flew a lot in his day .. or maybe that was just to test me (then again, what’s the point of just letting the sim do it all when you paid $475 😉 ). It took 100% of my effort just to keep the plane following the flight director. I also didn’t know how to read the localizer indicator on that older instrument which all ended up With me way off the runway when I came out of the clouds. Missed approach fail. We tried again at 6 miles out.. this time I had no excuse … and no Bueno. The feel of the thing is totally different then a desktop sim when the weather is brought to bear. After this however, the Captain took pity on me and returned us to clear skies. I did three approaches, straight into KATL 8R, Then KDCA Potomac North approach, and finally the Expressway approach to KLGA 31… and i managed to land all of em. 2 landings were a bit harder than my passengers would have Iiked (flaring feels different than i expected) but i was told It was well within normal landing tolerance. My takeaway is that under clear conditions, an experienced summer could possibly do it. You will have no problem with the switches and controls - so if you have a glass cockpit and use autopilot to minimums you’ld have a better shot. But you will be totally unprepared for the feel … so those last 200’ are going to be a prayer. The other thing is that it is definitely a 2 person job. In my inexperienced ‘heart in the throat’ feeling it was all I could do just to fly it. Just looking up to turn the course dial could get me off the flight path. You would need another summer who you could delegate at the very least. All that said, that was an absolutely incredible experience and gave me a whole new perspective for my next pc sim session!

As was mine. We are on the same farsical page my good sir 😉

Oh I don’t know, then we’ld spend all our time talking about why everyone’s taste in settings other than mine is wrong…. (tongue firmly in cheek..)

I think it should be assumed that if you upload something to the gateway you relinquish the rights for it to be taken down. It’s more like a donation so it’s not really “yours” anymore. A little different than submitting a freeware mod on a website imho

What I usually do is shut off copilot assisted communcations before I start a flight. I initiate and handle the clearance request, start of taxi, and arrival at the active runway. And then right after i acknowledge takeoff clearance I switch the copilot radios back on so he/she can handle the rest of the flight. I do this to avoid the same issue you’re experiencing in fact. I would absolutely welcome a more elegant solution from Asobo, but this workaround is easy enough for me to get by for now.

Did the original authors of the two examples here (the livery and the performance calculation excel) ask flightsim.to to remove the infringing files themselves? And we’re they denied?

Well said!

Its not that much of a coincidence. The website started specifically to host MSFS addons. In fact the .to is a nod to the events of MSFS's launch which was realeased sequentially per time zone on that first day. The Polynesian state of Tonga (.to) is a county right on the international dateline so if you vpn'd to make it look like you were from that country you got to download the sim at the earliest possible moment. A bunch of multiplayer planes flooded the island naion that morning.. I made a really early addon that had been uplinked on /reddit. I was asked if I'd consider letting the site host it. I think at the time there were only 3 pages of mods being listed. It grew quickly from there because it was really easy to upload and download mods and had an easy enough search filter to find things. Scenery categories, maps, etc soon followed and then the simple addition of making it easy to see which of your addons had updates made it the go to site. Those early days didnt suggest a huge "investment" for the site to get started. The initial site behavior was relatively simple. I dont think there was much of a risk in the event MSFS flopped on release.

Because you dont program these types of AI systems that way. You dont program them with a fixed set of rules and that say given X,Y,Z, do A,B,C. You teach these types of programs the same way you do people. They have access to as much data as you give them. In the case of chatbots, for example, that's the entirety of text that is available on the internet. And the people who "teach" them don't specify a direct correlation between inputs and outputs. You run trials. You set inputs "X,Y,X" and see what outputs it gives. If you like it, you say so, and the internal connection (or 'neurons') that were used in that trial are 'strengthened' to make it more likely to choose the good answer again. The algorithm "learns" and keeps doing better and better over time. This is a very simple example. When the number of inputs and outputs starts getting really large, very 'complex' behavior can result, often giving unexpected results. These can be deemed 'bad' (just like errors when teaching a person), or even surprisingly good. In these more advanced neural networks, there are so many virtual neurons, that the coders no longer directly know exactly what is going on inside, just like we don't have access to the exact connections and synapsial affinity of the connections in a brain. While it seems crazy to want to write a program where you don't know all the internal details, these systems are actually much better at doing complicated things like identifying objects in a computer vision scenario than trying to write a program to do so by hand. That is there power and why they are seeing so much use lately.. but its also why they are a little scary. If one were designing an AI to "be a pilot" you wouldn't JUST give them the rigid set of procedures, just like the pilots did JUST know them either. They had their years of experience flying planes, knowledge of how all the systems of the planes worked (hydraulics, variable thrust, etc). They also had their senses, eyesight, hearing, touch. Their heroic decision to fly the plane using the only set of controls they had left didn't just pop out of nowhere. Their minds weighed the options, and chose the best path they could think of to try to get the plane to the airport. IF one were to try to develop a similar AI (and I'm not saying that its a good idea, we're just contemplating the prospect), you would give it access to the same set of information that the pilots have, complete with teaching it how to fly (with probably years of simulation, followed by actual monitored flying). Given artificial "senses", cameras, motion sensing, probably additional sensors all over the aircraft, its not inconceivable to me at all that if a catastrophic failure were to occur, an AI developed in that way could at least try figure out a novel way to land the plane that didn't follow procedure. While you are certainly correct that there is no computer flight control system that has yet been put into a plane with that full set of data, I dont think its current flight control computers we are talking about. You're suggesting that computers would NEVER be able to do what human pilots can. That is where its get a lot greyer to me. There is nothing inherently unique about how our brains work, short of the sheer complexity of the billions of neurons we have, that would make me think a similar artificial system couldn't eventually do the same. We are NOT there yet to be sure. But rate of change, just in the past year is even giving me pause. What makes me nervous too, given what I've seen in the AI i've been exposed to (synthesizing art) is that it doesn't take an army of people to write these things. People are literally creating them in their garages and making major strides on an insanely fast basis. This "cheap cost of entry" will make it hard for governments to rein this stuff in if we aren't careful. I should be clear at this point. I'm not advocating for AI control of planes at all. Given what I've seen, I suspect I share your concern. But its not because I don't think they could. They could actually be really good at it, imho. I think the issue is that we'ld need a lot of time with them before we really trusted them enough to take control - not unlike the time it would take to trust a student pilot before sitting them down in an A321. But the pace we are moving forward is not giving me confidence that we aren't rushing TOO fast, and that is my fear. *** MY apologies to anyone reading the thread who doesn't appreciate the degree its drifted from the OP. Its just a current interest of mine and got quickly long winded. My bad, will leave it here.