bonchie123

Havne't seen any either. There's a lot of stuff that was in the preview build that is disabled for this Alpha test.

I guess it's possible they don't turn on the biggest bragged-about feature so far by the developers (the procedural ground detail) and they leave the photogrammetry loading at a lower resolution than MSFS 2020. I just doubt it.

Then don't buy it. Doesn't matter to me. I loved the world airport portal in XP because it was so much better than anything developers could do. I'm happy MSFS is going that direction. I don't really appreciate the claim that I'm being "childish" by suggesting a developer team can't possibly fix the taxi light locations at 40,000 different airports. But whatever. I think my comment is perfectly mature and realistic.

My assumption is the photogrammetry is turned down right now just like the grass, bushes, and other ground details compared to the preview videos we saw weeks ago. I can't imagine they won't turn it all back on for release. Probably ramping up the stress test for the data streaming.

I get the idea their solution to those issues is the world airport portal that's going to go live at launch. Its gonna be like X-Plane where users fix and submit airports to be placed in the sim. That's really the only viable way to do it. Whatever ambitions they had with 2020 to hand-correct all airports was never realistic. There are too many of them for one development team.

Watched some of the streams that went up last night. Real-word career jet pilot for what little that's worth watching some videos and judging them. Things that are definitely improved IMO: 1) The ground detail (as in how it interacts with the plane) and the ground physics are night and day compared to FS2020. Visually, it's going to look much better when they re-enable the grass and bushes and such. Bush flying will be great in this sim. Even small ditches seem to be modeled and interact with the plan, and that's something I didn't think was possible given how small they would appear to the AI on a tile. 2) Turbulence is a lot better. You can tell it's affected by the terrain below. Lots of bumps over mountainous areas, etc. and when I saw a streamer fly into a thunderstorm, he was getting rocked and caught a 2500-3000 foot per minute updraft. They've done a lot of work there and it should finally be dangerous to fly into storms. 3) The night environment and lighting in general are unmatched. The clouds look very good, at least below them (not a lot of on top by the streamers that I saw because they are using the 172), with great light scattering. Weather detail is also improved insofar as how rain reacts to surfaces, wet ground reflections look amazing, rain drops on the plane itself and not just the windows. Pretty crazy stuff. 4) Can't really judge in-flight physics from watching, but you could tell some of the twitchiness and wonkiness on takeoff and landing is smoothed out. What that translates too as far as realism? I'll have to play it to see how it feels. 5) The trees and their placement look much better than 2020 and, of course, the seasons look great. You can tell the AI reading of the tiles has been taken to another level regarding accuracy. 6) CPU and RAM usage seem to be well optimized, i.e. all cores being used and plenty of RAM to spare with details cranked up. GPU is used hard, but that's not surprising. Things I saw that need improvement? 1) I saw some data streaming issues, including artifacts on the ground and some blurry textures (rare, but I did see some). 2) ATC just isn't very good, but I think that was expected at this point. 3) The 172 kept saying "don't sink" in situations it shouldn't for several streamers. I'm sure there are similar bugs with other airplanes that need to be fixed. 4) Didn't see a lot of water masks, though I never saw any flights at truly tropical areas. 5) The control interface needs work. Overall impressions: I think it's a big step forward graphically in ways that really matter in sims, i.e. the lighting and ground detail. The people in the comments of these streams saying it looks like 2020 are blind. Even the change with the trees is a big step forward, never mind the other things I mentioned. On the sim side, the way the planes interact with the environment, both the weather and on the ground, is completely redone and seems to work well. That's good news for the hardcore crowd. Most of the issues I saw could be fixed before release. It's an Alpha, and I assume the entire point is to stress test the servers. The failures will hopefully be smoothed out and more detail turned on as far as data streaming goes (there's 100% some stuff disabled right now). A few things like the ATC, I expect just won't be very good on launch and will need a 3rd party addon.

(Had to make a new account because my old one "bonchie" wasn't working, couldn't recover password, didn't have any record of my email...) Real-world career pilot that flies jets...my thoughts. Just watched CptCanada's video. I'd recommend it over about 95% of the other videos out there because he goes into far more depth about a lot of the questions people are asking. He's also a legit simmer who does things properly. He says the flight model is far better and the ground handling is night and day. His landing in the MAX seemed to show that. It was really cool to see how the plane stayed dead center in the touchdown until the nosewheel touched and then there was a little wobble to correct with the rudder. That's exactly how it is in real life and shows that the ground handling is far more detailed and multiple points of contact are being moddelled. My biggest grip with 2020 (and why I haven't played it in years) was the twitchiness of the flight model. Even a C182 has weight when you maneuver it. CptCanada said the new flight model delivers that, that it's far smoother, and the planes feel substantial when you turn. As to there being no difference with ground textures and photogrammetry, he says the draw distance is much further and the PG wasn't smearing in the distance for him like 2020. Take it for what it's worth. He said the AI traffic is improved. Seemed to gloss over the ATC and said he didn't try it. I think that's the one thing we can just assume you'll need a 3rd party for. The ATC is probably not going to be much better. I definitely see a huge difference in runway textures, ground quality (will be great for bush flyers), and basically everything you see when close to the ground. Not expecting perfection of course. Lastly, don't forget that we are getting World Hub, so while the default airports are probably not updated much (except for the hand-crafted stuff), that should be fixed rather quickly by the community, especially with the more popular airports. Color me happy with what I'm seeing. Maybe it'll draw me back in. The flight model improvements are what I'm most excited about. P.S. I know that BluGames is the one guy who kind of poo-pooed the flight model. Keep in mind, he's not a real pilot, and there's a bias toward constantly comparing everything to X-Plane. The way he was flying the MAX in his preview didn't give me much confidence that he really has a solid, realistic basis for what flying a plane feels like. Again, we'll see, but it's definitely changed.