Blackthorn

The thing I'm most interested in is the terrain mesh. Just checked the white cliffs on the south-east coast of England and they're fine. Vertical white cliffs are pretty much the acid test of a terrain mesh.

Slightly random observation this ..... but there's one thing about flying MSFS in the UK that's rarely mentioned: the Bing aerial images are probably the best in the world. They're certainly far better than most of the US ones in my experience, particularly in terms of resolution. OK they drop off a bit in quality in some parts of Scotland etc, but on the whole they're excellent.

Yes - sounds like a good workaround for normal flying. Flying with an ultralight is a bit more informal as you imply - so I don't have a flight plan or anything like that.

Yeah - it's frustrating and makes absolutely no sense - and you'd think it would be a relatively easy thing to put right. I used to get round the problem by avoiding save and load altogether. I would fly to an airport and start again fresh from the same airport. However with the ultralight that I now fly I'd prefer to have the option of landing in some random field etc at the end of the day. The same would apply with a helicopter or hot air balloon (though we don't have any yet).

Unfortunately I don't seem to have the option of doing that after saving and re-loading. The cloud symbol in the toolbar has disappeared. (This is a well-known limitation I know.) That in itself doesn't really bother me as long as the weather stays live. It looks as though that may be happening, but I'm not yet 100% sure. I probably need to check with sources of weather data or set up another flight in the same location.

Yes - I can't understand why it's not possible to do that. However I'd be perfectly happy if the weather just stayed live, since I always fly in live weather anyway. (It may not always be true to life but I like the randomness and changeability of it.)

A few weeks ago, if I saved a flight with live weather the weather would revert to clear skies when I loaded the flight next time - and there was no way to change it back to live because I no longer had the cloud symbol on my tool bar. I tried saving and loading again today and this time I did seem to have live weather after re-loading - ie it was cloudy, and not clear skies. The weather also seemed to change a bit when I flew to another place. However I'm still not sure whether I really did have live weather. I'm wonder whether I simply saved a "snapshot" of the way the weather was at that time - which explains why it changed from place to place. (I still don't have the cloud symbol on my tool bar after re-loading.) Does anybody know what's supposed to happen to live weather now after saving? Has there been some change to the way it works?

The sim is great, but in the spirit of trying to make it even better ..... 1. Water climbing up steep coasts and shores 2. Scenery spikes 3. Large waves on small bodies of water 4. Low res and/or discoloured satellite images (probably inevitable in some regions) 5. River water reflections seem a bit overdone to me, and sometimes end rather abruptly at what is deemed to be the "source" of the river. The one that really bothers me is #1 - it's very ugly. Scenery spikes are ugly too, but thankfully quite localised. #1 is ubiquitous.

OK thanks - I’ll investigate that.

The area just north of Manchester city centre (UK) is particularly bad. I counted about 25 spikes/pyramids/mounds within a few square miles - and there were probably quite a few more that I didn't count. I would go so far as to say that they completely dominated the landscape. A little further north (in the Pennines) was fine, however. I haven't seen any in my home area (Sussex) so far.

Thanks - that’s very useful. If I can get a noticeably better image (ie better than any amount of supersampling) I will be happy. If I can get a better image with no performance hit that will be the icing on the cake.

That’s useful to know. I’m hoping that the improvement will be in a different league from increasing supersampling (say). (I often wonder with SS whether it’s just my imagination.) In other words, would the Rift S without SS be better than the CV1 with SS?

OK thanks. Do you think it’s a worthwhile upgrade in terms of image quality?

Interesting. I hadn’t previously considered upgrading to the Rift S because I’d read quite a few comments (like yours) on various forums stating that it didn’t provide a significantly better experience. I know the screen door effect is quite subjective too. I used to doubt that increasing supersampling made any difference (to my eyes). Now I’m not so sure about that either.

I currently use the CV1 with a rather underpowered PC (i5 6600 + GTX1060) - and it works pretty well (apart from the inevitable screen door effect). However I’ve been hearing some very good things about the Rift S lately and am wondering whether it would be worth spending a bit of money and upgrading just the headset. Would my computer cope or would the performance hit make it not worthwhile? There wouldn’t be much point if I could only get it running by reducing settings - particularly the settings that affect image quality. Of course the ultimate answer is probably to spend a bit of money on the PC too - and I might be able to do that on the cheap because don’t think I would need to splurge on an RTX 3090 or some such to get really nice performance from the Rift S. However in the short term I’d prefer just to confine my spending to the headset if I possibly can.