It seems like MS Flight Simulator 2020 might hit the right place at the right time. Like many people quarantined, I’ve got a wicked sense of wanderlust right now. Going through MS Flight Simulator 2020 is different than just fooling around on Google Earth because it requires a tiny bit of effort to discover things and I think it will make it a little more rewarding. Looks like it’s time for me to build a cockpit.
It’s been interesting - I was a “gamer” for whatever that means many of my teen and early 20s years.
Gave it up almost entirely with career/starting a family 7-8 years ago. We’re talking cold turkey, gave the systems away, deleted steam etc.
Ever since quarantine started, I’ve been gaming like a fiend every night. Big, open world games especially. Partner has been chill about it as I wait until the kiddo is asleep, but it’s been one of the most sanity-saving activities for me while we hunker down.
One multi-player game that is a surprising amount of fun is Naval Warfare on Roblox.
When you login you join a team of 30 (60 players in total). One team is USA one Japan.
You can choose Bomber, Sub, Aircraft Carrier, Battleship. Each craft is manned by multiple players (ie one player controls guided missiles, one flies and has a regular gun etc).
There are 3 islands on the board in the middle and anyone can control them.
When you control an island you can teleport to it and spawn a plane from there which is a shorter run to bomb the enemy. You win the game by blowing up the enemies main naval base at the other end of the board.
You can also change the balance of war by spending a few cents on spawning aircraft carriers and battleships.
Any time you pop in, the server is always full so it's always a great game, but also you can create a private server and bring your own group.
A lot of kids play the game so sometimes the strategy is not the best BUT if a group of adults played on a private server the strategy is very deep.
Graphics are totally basic but it's a great mix of real strategy, action/skill and randomness of playing with 60 real people.
Works beautifully on any mobile or any pc no heavy graphics card needed. SO much fun!
Perfect game for a group of hackers/colleagues looking for easy to learn fun over few beers. Also perfect for these remote times we live in.
I played Minecraft from an early alpha on (paid five bucks for it I think?).
There was the year where I set up a server and played with my flatmates and, in another country, a sibling and his close friends. A big part of my daily routine was coming home and checking out what they'd been up to. Some built elaborate structures and 'cultivated' their home, others mostly went for massive railway projects, and yet others just wandered around exploring.
After a few years of no Minecraft, what with the quarantine, a friend of a sibling set up a server again, and I've started playing again.
The game got more expensive, and there are other versions now. And there's a ton of new stuff.
But the experience has been just as much fun. The server I'm on provides a handy map of the world, and apparently I decided to set up base quite near the edges of the 'explored' (generated) world. The owner created a massive base at the spawn point, and I spent a good few days finding a place of my own, getting the resources I need, and then making a railway to the spawn. My younger brother did the same, and has also been working on a railway to spawn. He got distracted though because his gf might want to play, so he spent a bunch of time making his home safer.
What strikes me most is that feeling of immersion and comfort that so far only the best of Metroid(vania) games give me. I've become intimately familiar with my home area, which now has cows and chickens and pigs. I've been landscaping it a bit with massive trees. And under my home there's a sprawling cave system, parts of which I've explored and 'tamed', and parts of which are still full of resources that I keep getting lost in.
I 'know' much of my home region and cave system by feel, and I can tell when I start getting lost. There's a weird 'bubble' feeling when I take my minecart to the spawn point, because I am unfamiliar with all but the area directly next to the tracks, and the 'town' at spawn.
It feels a lot like the real world, but blockier and entirely virtual. It's one of those 'gaming' feelings that I often wish I could convey to others. I've had similar feelings about WoW, the culture and familiarity of de_dust2, and Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley. It's difficult to argue with 'well why don't you just go walk in a real forest'
I brought Terraria on Google Play like 5 years ago, and re-downloaded it recently. It's like 2D Minecraft with extended element that to give you a longer main storyline.
Yesterday I was planing to randomly dig a hole in the game to mine whatever there is before go to sleep. Two minute into the digging, I found something blinking, it's "Sliver"! So I mined the whole chunk, look at the time (23:20) and decided to call it a day. But just before I quit the game, I noticed another chunk is blinking, turns out it's "Gold"(!!!) ... The pattern repeated until my clock says 1:40(!!!) Man! I'm over 30 years old now and that little game tricked me out of my schedule (!!!), again!
I think game like this is definitely designed to do that. They always trying to create an attraction loop so the player don't have chance to break out and quit the game.
Half-Life is not designed like that. In Half-Life, you have break points, for example, every time the loading screen shows, player may start to think "Hey, maybe I'll just pause here?". Plus, Half-Life gives you a lots of "Solitude moments", allowing you to break out the game during that.
Another thing I guess, is games like Minecraft and Terraria requires player to be able to immerse themselves into the game. Many people I know thinks Minecraft is a game that lets you "Cut trees and build houses. Boring!", not a single one of them would play the game for more than 5 minutes.
If you can pass that 5 minutes test, I guess then you probably have the ability to find some interesting things to do in the game all by yourself (Meaning you are a self-immersive kind person).
I took part in a survival server around 2010 where everyone slowly got to know each other and their quirks. Built a giant base with a friend with a 100x100 hole down to bedrock and a glass top which you could walk on. The main entry to the base was a large pyramid.
We were raided multiple times a day but it was so much fun. Never quite got that again.
I just started Earth Defense Force 4.1 and realism has no part in it [1]. It's a b-movie type video game with hilarious so-bad-its-good dialogue and "story" that is the work of a complete nutjob.
100 million things are constantly happening on screen while gundam type space robots fire plasma at you, some Independence Day ship in the background blows up a city and a horde of ants charges your troop.
All at consistent 60fps with early PS2 graphics and gameplay (almost all weapons have infinite ammo).
It's a true video game at heart and realism doesn't stand in the way.
Weird, that's how I play it. I do remember it took a bit of getting used to. Ping me an email jv at vip dot ie and I'll jump on and voice/play it with you if you want to have a go.
I'm in a similar boat. I tried the cold turkey thing, deleting games etc. Cloud makes it harder now see e.g. WoW. Once I thought I solved my game addiction with the clever idea of leaving my Diablo 2 CD at work, thinking it would stop me from playing all night. That night I spent until midnight searching for NoCD cracks (successfully) and then played anyway until it was time to get up.
Nowadays I just figure if there weren't video games, I would be drinking or doing hard drugs with much worse effects on my health. I'm also able to moderate better, going through dry spells when I find something else to do for a while, and now and then playing nights (not too late) for a month or two at a time.
I love Diablo 2. However, I was never patient enough to pass Hell level of difficulty myself. I think I was running mods after I discovered them. Do you play offline? Or do you play on-line? Are there many players online still?
Hell was easier to beat in the original game, but later was patched to be much more unforgiving. If you want to beat it solo, and without access to items from other players, you need a really good build and be lucky when it comes to items. Some characters are less dependent on items, for example a necromancer can solo hell naked using skeletons, sorceress is also less dependent on items because most of the damage comes from spells. The worst characters are melee characters because you need very good weapons (crushing blow does wonders on Hell) and very good armor/shield to survive (high resistances are a must because all monsters deal extra elemental damage).
Hammerdin isn't that good in singleplayer. Main strength of Hammerdin is that it skips most monster immunities and paired with Enigma runeword (gives teleport spell to non-sorceress classes) you can quickly skip to the boss and kill him with few hammers (very bottable too). But Enigma runeword is almost impossible to get in singleplayer, and while Hammerdin is great for killing bosses and all, it's not good for general gameplay because it struggles in tight corridors.
there are people in battle.bet ladder. you can’t use mods there. you could play open but it’s all hackers. if you want to beat hell mode you have to go as a firewall / frozen orb mage or a necromancer that uses skeletons and corpse explode. you’ll need an act 2 merc as well. good luck lol. if you can get one friend to tank you can do it much easier.
It used to sorta blow my mind that people would come up with such things. But if you're playing these games repeatedly in a competitive setting, this stuff is bound to be found.
Exactly the same for me.
My thinking is that I needed gaming because in the daytime, I have no room for myself as we're all cooped up in a small apartment. Games have become my own space where I make the rules, a huge contrast to daytime...
There are certain people for whom “balance” and “moderation” are nothing but fleeting and elusive ideals (I am one of them). Usually it is much easier to just draw a red line around certain activities altogether.
Exactly - I come from a long line of addicts, some recovered and some dead. I am (now in my thirties, less so when I was younger) always extremely careful when I notice an unhealthy behavior taking a hold of me.
I’m making an exception for video games during this time because honestly it’s pretty low on the unhealthy scale in my current usage, especially with the accountability of a spouse who knows I can be this way and will call me out if it gets bad.
A kindred soul, as I suspected. I had to quit drinking and video games cold turkey once I got married and had a baby on the way. Still don’t drink but gaming is occasionally okay. As long as I stay far, far away from solo world builder and 4X type stuff.
I do actually, but I had no idea for the first ~34 years of my life. Medication has certainly helped some things but I still get pretty obsessive about stuff.
And I got downvoted to -4 for suggesting it, lol. I’m in exactly the same boat, diagnosed and treated at 34 too. Glad medication is working for you, as much as it does. It’s not perfect.
Speaking for myself, it won’t. In “normal times” I gave up video gaming because it didn’t feel like a good use of my time. When (if?!) things return to normal that’ll still be the case.
Certainly I can't argue with what you deem worthy of your time but I'm surprised by this - obviously it's a question of moderation, but would you feel the same way about reading books, watching films or listening to music?
Sure, there might be different grades of quality and value but I think it's all just culture and feeling guilty about filling a free evening or two with such activities seems quite alien to me. However to each their own.
Another interesting thing about gaming is that it taught me at a very early age that reward requires effort. Even if the process as a whole, and we as humans, are still insignificant. Well, it taught me that, and I was blessed with an extended vocabulary of middle age weapons. Gaming these days and especially playing old games can be quite relaxing.
Same for me, except with first person shooters. I used to play Counterstrike back in the day but long since lost interest, but now I’m playing the free to play games like Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone.
I think the main reason is that it’s an opportunity to turn my brain off (or parts of it off). TV isn’t doing that for me any more, too much opportunity for idle thought!
I moved away from the UK at the end of last year, and honestly the best anti-homesickness thing was Forza Horizon 4. I don't even race much, just drive around and listen to Don Thompson doing a perfect imitation of the radio back there.
My gaming level has also gone up significantly, although I also took on new hobbies to get some non-computer time (for the record, I don’t have children).
I bet the devs of KSP 2 are pissed that they’re not yet ready to launch. This would’ve been the perfect time to release that game.
They should release a Google Earth VR style app. There's a lot fewer places modeled in detail compared to Google Earth (sadly, my region in Belgium is an example) but having animated sea/weather/traffic etc would probably be spectacular.
Side note: try Google Earth VR if you can, it is not possible to explain how great it is with words, it's the killer VR app for non-gamers IMO.
When I first got my VR headset and had exhausted the usual killer apps, I popped open Google Earth VR and was kindof blown away. I managed to find one of the old neighborhoods I grew up in, popped into street view, and proceeded to literally walk down memory lane.
It was really something. Sure the quality's not that great, but what's there works well, and you get a sense of presence with the headset that is considerably more convincing than viewing the same scenes on a flat monitor.
Same. I spent hours as a ghost gliding around a frozen world. Then I suddenly had to throw the headset off and lie flat on the floor and take deep breaths and try not to throw up. Took an hour for the nausea to go away. That was it for Google Earth VR, unfortunately.
I get a light version of it sometimes, though it depends on the game. One thing I learned to not skip is the IPD adjustment on the headset; it needs to be pretty close in order for the difference in perspective to fade into the background for me. My SteamVR config likes to reset it from time to time, and I can tell instantly when it's wrong; it's like looking through a fisheye lens, but not as pronounced.
For me, any game where the camera moves independent of my headset can trigger nausea. Blade and Sorcery's jump implementation is really bad about it; anything that lets me "fall" when I'm not expecting it. That at least makes sense; if I suddenly fell in real life I'd freak out too. Of all things, the non-teleportation option in Minecraft's popular VR mod, Vivecraft, trigger motion sickness most consistently. But I can teleport around Skyrim VR for literally hours and be totally fine. I get the feeling that with a bit of practice, I could build up a tolerance to it, but it's definitely a persistent danger. It's got to be frustrating for developers, since it seems like there's such a wide range of individual variance in sensitivity. If I get around to making a VR experience, I'll stick to teleportation simply because that's what I personally find to be "safe" and comfortable.
I mean, you’re wearing a VR headset for hours without a break and expect no ill effects? Doesn’t seem fair to blame the equipment, you’d probably get sick from watching a roller coaster or flyover video on a flat screen for hours on end.
I can play Elite Dangerous in the space ship for nine hours straight with no ill effects, but 30 minutes in a rover in the game destroys me for days. It depends on the setting.
Yes it's really something you have to try to understand. My dream VR app would be a Google/MS cooperation to bring together the best of Google Earth VR and MS Flight Sim rendering in a single package :).
I made a game using Mapbox GL to have a 3D plane that drops you somewhere in the world, and you have to get home before fuel runs out. No compasses. It’s very much V0 and there’s only one level for now. It’s just a normal map for now, but I think it could be replaced for a map with better features.
That was brilliant - I don't know the US that well it seems. Ended up on the wrong coast and ran out of fuel. Keep hacking - its got something brilliant at its core :-)
Is it possible to get a destination that's impossible to reach with the given fuel?
The game started me roughly over Washington DC and told me I had to get to Dallas, and I barely made it past Nashville (which is almost a straight line) before running out of fuel.
That was a lot of fun! I was very bad at it. The map was slow to load for me, but I think the fuel continuously ran out even when the game was stopped to load? I'm not sure if I would have made it even if I was on the right track
Glad to hear you had fun! Yeah, I’m loading the mapbox stuff as it goes. There didn’t seem to be a good way to preload all the tiles. Thanks for calling out the bugs. I’ll take a look
Turning is really frustrating it is way to sensetive to make small adjustments. I would suggest 'turn while holding left' rather than 'increase left turn rate while holding left'
I’ve heard mixed feedback on the turning. I think I was caught between 360 rotations vs larger circular rotations. Maybe this will have to be a setting, or I can introduce a rudder.
pretty cool idea. Bugs I found: the airplane is stopping in mid air, the steering is too sensitive, should be much much slower so it feels like a big airplane not small toy
I meant the FlightSim team not microsoft in general, pretty much the whole point compared to GE VR would be to benefit from the advances they made in the visuals department, dynamic weather/water/traffic is a big chunk of it.
About Outings, I should not judge by its cover but it doesn't look very impressive and seems to be AR oriented (mixed reality headset or hololens required).
While there are flight simmers who use VR, somewhat counter intuitively it's not really a good match. Also, it's a tiny market from a $$$ standpoint.
In a flight sim you have lots of dials in the cockpit you need to look at, and long viewing distances outside the window. None of the VR headsets I've tried have had good enough resolution to have a clear view on the cockpit instruments. The combination of cockpit very near and long viewing distances is also a bad recipe for motion sickness.
And then there's the controls. With a VR headset you can't see your hands or your controllers. With a hands on throttle and stick controller (HOTAS) you can fly around just fine, but when you need to toggle flaps or landing gear or navigation instruments, it's difficult to find the right button for that with a headset on.
So VR is ok for casual flying around, maybe even some dogfighting or aerobatics with simplified aircraft models. But once you need to deal with aircraft systems or navigation instruments, you're better off with triple screens and/or head tracking.
I’m curious: in racing sims, in a three-monitor setup, the side view is extremely skewed due to perspective. They are there just to provide a sense of space and peripheral vision, but you’re supposed to look to the center monitor the majority of the time.
Is that not the case for flight sim setups? I can’t imagine looking at a horribly stretched image on a side window to be a nice experience.
While I've never set things up that detailed for myself, I'm aware of many multi-screen flight sim setups. The general effect aimed for is that each screen shows the accurate perspective that you would see if you turned your head in that direction from the cockpit seat you're 'sitting in'.
Edge of screen mappings can be a little tricky but the higher level rendering engines can make near seamless transitions.
Military and commercial simulators try for displays that absolutely minimize visual artifact distractions so the experience is as close to sitting in the seat as possible.
> None of the VR headsets I've tried have had good enough resolution to have a clear view on the cockpit instruments.
Have you tried the Index? It used to be bad on the Vive, but Xplane with the Valve Index finally made it possible for me to see the instruments without squinting.
It sounds like you're expecting VR to make a difference to the landscape or such. If you're in a flying plane, everything outside the plane is so far away that you don't get any depth information from stereoscopy. VR could be nice for the cockpit and takeoff/landing, but it doesn't seem essential.
There's more to immersion than stereoscopy. All the different elements of VR (3DOF tracking, positional tracking, 360 imaging, hand/controller tracking, stereoscopy) work together to flip a switch in your brain that tells it that you are in something rather than merely looking at something.
Even simply covering the entirely of your 360 range of view is enormous on it's own for flight sims. Think of the $$$ that sim enthusiasts spend on multi-monitor setups.
VR makes a big difference if you don't have one of these crazy multi-screen setups. It is not about depth perception, more like just being able to look at your sides naturally.
The advantage is in being able to move your head to see more than what is directly head of you.
Maybe they could do something like how in Elite Dangerous you hold middle mouse button(? can't remember exactly what the control is) to freelook, but that's not as good as being able to control your PoV directly by moving your head.
For more context, the head of the FS 2020 program has said it's "very high" on their priority list. So while they won't block launch for it, it sounds like they aim to introduce it not too long afterward.
The thing I love most about flight simulators is the avionics. I would happily exchange flight realism for more depth in the avionics systems.
I especially love the 90's / early 2000's style with a mix of analog and digital instruments. Lot's of physical buttons, multiple small screens, a somewhat poor UI compared to modern standards, etc.
I'd love to play around more with these types of simulated systems. I almost literally would just like a button pushing simulator. Are there any other games / simulators which might scratch this itch for me?
Go check out DCS! It's free to play this month due to COVID-19.
They have everything from WW-II steam gauges up to modern glass cockpit jets like the JF17 and things in between like the Mirage or the F14 tomcat. They're all extremely accurate simulations and you'll be reading 1000+ page manuals to learn what all the buttons do. It's literally button click simulator
X-Plane is pretty good. Several of the default small aircraft have a Garmin 530 GPS navigator from that era. It simulates interacting with the with buttons and knobs. Entering waypoint names is realistically slow :)
Falcon BMS. It has F16 incredibly well modelled. Uses core engine of old game (5$), but overhauled by free mod in very active development.
The depth of avionics and world are unmatched even today. The only lacking area is graphics, but is expected to be upgraded to direct x 11 in following patches
> X-Plane is the most advanced flight simulator in the world. The product of 20 years of obsessive labor by a hardcore aeronautics enthusiast who uses capslock a lot when talking about planes, it actually simulates the flow of air over every piece of an aircraft’s body as it flies. This makes it a valuable research tool, since it can accurately simulate entirely new aircraft designs—and new environments.
I splurged and subscribed to X-Plane's global scenery and all planes option on Android.
While it's a limited experience compared to a 3-axis stick and throttle on a mid-high end PC, it's still a lot of fun to pick out places like Gibraltar, Saint Maarten, and other unique situations and fly in and out on HUD / trail view.
(I had my toe in the door, did three hours of PPL instruction, never could follow up on it. And many hours of sims all the way from Sublogic days.)
Heh, I had almost my entire body through the door, but stubbed my toe on the threshold! ~50 hours logged, a handful of "cross country" solos, did my night landings etc. Got sick for about a month, holidays, wedding coming up, just never got back into it. I actually lost my logbook for a number of years but I'm looking at it now on my shelf.... one of these days.
I have about ten hours and loved it but I just can't justify the cost. It's so expensive when I have so little disposable income despite making six figures
My programming apprenticeship back in 2006 was working for an avionics subcontractor. For one project, we had hundreds of thousands of USD worth of real cockpit electronics hooked up to a copy of Microsoft flight sim. It was... awesome.
Zibo 737 mod on X-Plane 11 will give you hell of a time. It's super realistic compared to stock 737 on X-Plane. Heck, I spend more time mucking about with FMC and inputting the flight plan than flying these days :)
I'm right there with you, I considered building my own home simulator cockpit for a while, but gave up due to ROI. They're so expensive and time consuming even for a low fidelity one, and I'd need to build a new one for every plane I want to fly.
If you're comfortable with and willing to spend the money on VR, I was able to buy a peripheral that allows interaction with 3D cockpits in simulators such as DCS. It's not as good as a real simulator, but it's an awesome experience at less than 10% the price.
I did the same but "unfortunately" my area in Belgium is actually modeled in detail in Google Earth and going from that to the AI interpolation in MS Flight Sim was a let down after the beautiful trailers. But really it's an impressive game, I just hope Bing Maps will continue to add more detailed areas (or someone is motivated enough to write a Google Earth plugin).
How much of the terrain is interpolated out to 3d structures? I believe they are using a combination of aircraft photography and photogrammetry for cities, but at some point they have to go back to satellite imagery for sparsely populated areas
Machine learning models are used for a large portion of the terrain. Trees, generic buildings, and other models are placed in the AI's "best guess" for what the fully reconstructed scene would look like.
From my understanding they use algorithms to form realistic looking trees and structures from the maps data. This is the real breakthrough in my opinion. This game is really an innovation on 3D maps, and they just threw in the plane simulation as the added bonus
I've been a flight instructor in my twenties but then got out of flying due to monetary and health reasons. I've just bought a honeycomb yoke together with X-Plane 11. It is close to perfect, when it comes to simulation. Back when I flew, we didn't have the sophisticated avionics, so it's been quite a challenge to adjust to the modern glass cockpit, especially in an IFR environment.
Now I just wish I could fly the Cirrus Vision jet in real life, like some Youtubers do.
Haven't tried the new MS flightsim yet. I hope they've put as much effort into physics as they did in visuals. Can't wait to give it a try.
Probably not in a cockpit. At least in my experience having that cockpit as a static frame of reference really makes it quite a smooth experience.
Motion sickness isn't something I experience a tonne of in VR unless it's falling from up high or those rollercoaster simulations.
There is a flying VR game I used to play for awhile. Controls were a little difficult but it was quite fun and motion sickness wasn't a problem (in my case at least).
I'm not an expert but I thought a large part of motion sickness comes from the fact that you perceive motion visually but there is no confirmation from the inner ear (as in real life these two sensory inputs work together to maintain your balance). The other way it's also true (sea sickness), where the inner ear registers motion (the ship bobbing due to waves), but you don't see that you are moving (doubly so if you are inside) so again there's conflicting sensory input.
I don't suffer from seasickness normally, but a few years back we had a knotted up anchor chain so I went in to service the winch and there was a bit of a swell outside. In about 30 minutes I was quite ill. Once I fixed the winch and went out it all dissipated quickly when I could see the sea & horizon moving again.
I have a steering wheel and pedal setup that I use in VR, and it's the lack of correct G-forces that really get to you. I'm pretty good with motion sickness in VR, but Asseto Corsa took me about 3 hours of 10 minute intervals before I could take a corner at high speed, or slam the brakes without getting very very nauseous.
I can see it being comfortable once you're in the air, but takeoff and landing might feel very weird :P
You just reminded me I used to play Dirt Rally VR quite a bit. That's amazing in VR. The sense of presence is incredible. Maybe I just don't suffer motion sickness as much?
Funnily enough I've been playing Satisfactory a lot lately and I keep losing my stomach whenever I jump off really high places. I guess even non-VR games can affect you too!
This is a best-case for VR -- sitting still in a cockpit. The sensory input should be almost identical to real life, so I wouldn't think nausea will be a big issue.
I think the lack of forces, especially in smaller, more agile plains, can introduce some motion sickness in experienced pilots who are familiar with, and their body expects, the forces they ought to be feeling when taking off, doing a roll, etc.
But still, until artificial gravity can be generated, this is the closest it will come for the vast majority of people.
There are some small/ultra light aircraft simulators that get pretty close, being able to rotate the cockpit left right up and down. Still, can't really simulate directional acceleration/deceleration with possibly short bumps like landing gear contacting the ground and similar.
But definitely, any pilot will tell you that feeling all the forces is actually big part of good piloting, as you can feel what the airplane is experiencing & act accordingly. I took a ride in some small planes (a 4 person two motor plane and a glider) as well as an advanced small plane simulator and really, the simulator was good but not really comparable.
Not to mention extreme cases like air racing or aerial acrobatics where the forces are so extreme that they might prevent the pilot from having enough strength to execute control input or possibly even make them black out.
> any pilot will tell you that feeling all the forces is actually big part of good piloting, as you can feel what the airplane is experiencing & act accordingly.
Going to argue against that generally. Vestibular disorientation is a significant killer of pilots. In instrument flying, you specifically train to ignore those sensations. Fly the numbers, not the feelings.
At Kennedy Space Center, the Space Shuttle simulation was pretty amazing. I believe the trick was to make us think we were sitting at rest at a 90 degree angle, when in fact it must have been less, such that when the shuttle did take off in the simulation the seat made an even higher angle (+ shaking). And the sudden lowering of the angle (when engine cuts off and we're supposed to float) was a pretty damn amazing illusion too. I definitely recommend it.
I had 30 min in a certified helicopter simulator earlier this year.
The sim was built out of an actual fuselage (Sikorsky S-76) with full controls, visuals were 8x projectors on a curved wall in front of and around the cockpit. Everything was bolted to the floor, no movement anywhere.
After 10-15 minutes I did a hard bank and my gosh, the whole world moved, and I could have sworn I was about to slide out of my seat. I panicked that I didn't have a harness on.
The instructor laughed and said that was quite normal and that many people get very motion sick.
So yeah, I can see that motion sickness, with the "right" setup, could easily be a thing.
Maybe not motion sickness, but I’ve yet to wear a VR set I can enjoy for more than 10-15 minutes at a time. I think some people just adapt to stereoscopic illusion better than others- I struggle during 3D movies too.
There is a small fraction (iirc 10-20%) of the population for whom a disparity between accommodation (focus) and binocular vision (what 3d movies do) causes headaches and nausea.
This is why most 3d movies have very little happen in the virtual space between you and the screen. Since more than about 7 meters away is basically all the same final distance, it's fine.
That being said, it's the stuff flying at you that makes 3d seem worth the extra money, so they try to balance it. Some people will still get very ill even with the small amount that movies do.
I also think discriminating between motion sickness, flight simulator sickness and virtual reality sickness is splitting hairs, or at least a gradual difference. One could claim motion sickness requires real motion, but you have that in a good flight simulator, too, and most VR setups allow one to, at the least, move one’s head freely.
The term “motion sickness” describes the disparity between sensations that the mind expects to accompany what the eyes are seeing, but those sensations are not there. In a flight simulation, things like gravity, acceleration, etc. are not really possible to simulate.
The physiological basis is that a disagreement between the inner ear's sense of balance and the eye's perception of orientation is an early signal of having ingested a neurotoxin. Thus vomiting to expel whatever you just ate is a good first response.
My son is also working on his PPL and has been flying 172s in XPlane 11 for the last year or so.
At Oshkosh he jumped into a $250,000 Frasca simulator and did a complete flight with no assistance /and/ the sales guy turning off various parts of the avionics. He’s 15.
Uncoordinated flight (roughly, not being turned in the direction you're flying) feels very weird when you're experiencing it for real. It's also an ingredient of a deadly spin if you let other things also get out of control. On a sim, you won't experience much more than a certain dial reading a certain reading, and the plane will more or less fly as expected. It's important to learn coordinated flight "by the seat of your pants" to have the habit of adjusting the rudder ingrained in your muscle memory.
There are other feelings, such as buffeting before a stall, that you'll miss on a sim. But flight training is very explicit about those situations, so you'll learn them when transitioning to a real plane. Avoiding uncoordinated flight is something that pervades your whole flight experience; it might be hard to retrofit it onto a sim-trained student.
There are other habits, but that's the most notable one when I'm comparing the two environments.
While there is an instrument on panels that shows when turns are coordinated (a turn coordinator), fixating on it isn't really possible, and it's better to develop a feel for what coordinated flight is like, and be able to adjust automatically. Replicating this feeling in a sim is difficult because it's the interactions of motion and rotation that cause flight to be coordinated or not.
Vastly disagree. I am an instrument rated pilot about to take a commercial checkride and using the seat of the pants to determine coordination is a very bad idea. The turn coordinator is part of your instrument scan and “stepping on the ball” is a fundamental skill that you learn during primary training. In the clouds, you can be in an uncoordinated turn and not “feel” it because your inner ear is doing one thing, your eyes are doing another and using “feel” is a great way to crash. The FAA specifically advises to not fly by the seat of your pants due to the dangers of spacial disorientation. Teaching pilots to listen at all to physical sensations is teaching them how to die. Not hyperbole, but fact. VFR pilots can and should trust their eyes and look outside, but any CFI trying to train coordination through “feeling” is setting the student up for a very dangerous habit. Your inner ear lies to you. The majority of the airmanship training you get in the instrument rating is designed specifically to teach you how to ignore your body.
Thanks for the insightful reply, certainly not meaning to diminish the importance of trusting your instruments. For what it's worth, a turn coordinator isn't required equipment for VFR flying, and in either case (whether helpful or harmful), the inability of a simulator to faithfully reproduce turning forces seems like a weakness.
I'm about halfway toward a PPL myself and have been trying to practice with a simulator. My biggest complaint is that control inputs seem to be almost completely different from the real thing. Maybe it's the hardware I'm using, maybe it's my own lack of experience, probably some combination of the two... but it's been a mixed bag for me, largely due to the controller situation.
For example, I explicitly stopped using a supposedly more realistic yoke controller in favor of a HOTAS joystick because I repeatedly found that I just _can't_ translate the physical inputs to a real plane. Yoke controllers in particular seem hard to get right (or maybe mine is just bad), but more generally, PC controller axes have a surprisingly low resolution (just 256 steps on an axis) making them wildly less precise than real thing, plus there's no force feedback. Using a completely different (and more precise) type of controller seems to help keep my brain from drawing conclusions it shouldn't.
Simulators _do_ seem helpful for more abstract stuff, like going through checklists, practicing maneuvers, experimenting... so long as you're very intentional about what you're trying to learn. I think I benefited some from practicing ground reference maneuvers [0] in X-Plane with a VR headset, for example, since they're largely visual and aren't tightly tied to physical inputs. On the other hand, practicing stalls in the simulator has probably lost me a decent amount of time in the air with my CFI trying to un-learn the wrong ideas I picked up, due to both control differences and (I think) simulation differences.
Looked at that in the past, for a more realistic experience you probably have to buy yokes like https://www.brunner-innovation.swiss/product/cls-e-ng-yoke/, which have more steps and do have force feedback. Unfortunately they are quite expensive ($1000 and up..)
- no PC simulator feels anything like a real small airplane, but that's not really the main issue, which is:
- learning flying yourself means you will probably learn the wrong procedures, that a CFI would correct. For example, if you're not flying a landing pattern, your landing procedure is wrong. So use a real 172 checklist, POH and flight maneuver procedures. Also how to handle ballooned landings.
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot that used MSFS for 20 years.
Would you mind sharing what setup you have for the hardware controllers? I'm looking at getting this setup for a friend but I'm not sure where to go to get the peripherals.
I think the real cost will be the broadband. The whole map is 2 petabytes large, so each area has to be loaded seperately which will take up a lot of space.
Just because no one else seems to have mentioned it yet, but DCS (think MSFS but military aircraft modelled to similar amounts of detail) is still doing a free month.
DCS basically simulates as much as isn't classified and is played by an increasing number of RL fighter pilots.
It also supports VR. So you can go sit in an F/A 18c cockpit and click around. It is extremely immersive.
Must note that the graphics are a bit dated to me. (Cloud rendering is completely broken; lighting is very over-saturated and not accuratre). but still a very beautiful game and an extremely accurate simulation of awesome warbirds
Somewhat off-topic, but if like you these sorts of views and have some spare money, I recommend trying a drone with goggles. When it comes to safety, some new drones already have ADS-B receivers and hopefully remote ID transponders will come soon.
I haven't been flying for about 1.5 years, but last I saw, there were just guidelines from the FAA.
The problem for me has been city ordinance. My city is urban sprawl and it's illegal in my city to fly in parks, or over people. So that rules out pretty much everything interesting.
If you are into the whole racing quadcopters thing, there are options, but FPV exploration was what I liked.
What's a good entry level setup that can connect to head tracking fpv goggles and has a camera rig that pans and tilts in sync with that head motion?
My dream is a setup like that which can truly transport me to the drone as if I was flying fpv but with the ability to move my head and camera independently of the drone.
What a great idea. I have a mavic mini and I love flying it around. I never even thought of using a headset but I was out in the desert yesterday and could've used some isolation from the sun. Just bought a cheapo headset on amazon!
There are a lot of video games that are like this. The first time I saw Fifa 2020 on a big screen was a demo in a shopping mall — I thought it was just a group of people watching a live football game. Also, Gran Turismo on the PS4 has a whole bunch of racing tracks rendered in such precise detail that you forget you're just looking at computer generated graphics.
But the difference of Flight Simulator is the realism of the world data. They used Bing Maps data to get an accurate replica of Earth and not just the terrain but the buildings and the major airports as well.
Yes, and hidden therein is an important distinction - basically all of the previous games that looked quite close to real life (from relatively close to the ground, that is) did it by extensive handcrafting.
In a very large part, the "level designer" for FS 2020 is an AI, or more exactly, a team of humans who use AI as a tool to increase their productivity and reach by orders of magnitude. This is particularly visible in open-world games, where it is not feasible to hand craft everything. The results do seem quite spectacular, and put similar games to shame.
It's early days yet, but I'm quite excited about the prospect of using code to fill in the blanks and generate content like this; it could be a great way to limit game development costs in the future.
Every time i see this quality of computer graphics i ask myself: how do i still know its not real, what little detail is still missing to photo realism...
Yes, and particularly the way light reflects off of different materials is often still in the uncanny valley. Perhaps ray tracing will finally get us there in the next few years.
That's the thing, light doesn't just reflect off materials. A bunch of lights gets absorbed by it, changing the color and the amount of light that is reflected back, from a deeper surface area. There are just so many things happening with light, most of it we don't fully understand yet, but we seem to instinctively see when it's off.
Actually we do understand all the things which happen during normal conditions with light (i.e. when we speak about: bunches of photons and not a single one; objects big enough so that quantum effects can be neglected; relatively low intensities, so that self collimation and other effects related to it don't play a role), at least from physics stand point. Maxwell equations do a good job for us to explain light and its behaviour. Though, obviously, there are so many effects coming from those equations: refraction, reflection, diffraction, interference, dispertion, scaterring, etc, which just are numerically complicated all to be taken into account for a rendering engine.
The general principles maybe, but also you also need to know a bit about the specific materials being modelled.
There are some neat papers where they do very high resolution CT scans (microCT) to examine the microscopic structure of different materials, like the size and orientation of fabrics. If you model that, the material takes on the appearance of the fabrics, which is amazing:
The future(well now too) is machine learning. Don't have to understand. Just feed pictures of what you want it to look like and out comes materials that look like that.
Many techniques like this highlighted on Two-Minute Papers
Path tracing can replicate that effect, including things like an object near a window lighting the room with reflected light in its colors, and refraction effects through some materials.
Path tracing with colors still presents some challenges. Most mainstream renderers use RGB model, but of course real world has the full EM spectrum.
For example for the Cornell box scene, imagine that the wall was pure green material and the box pure yellow material. Then there shouldn't be that visible secondary bounce, but with naive RGB path tracing there would be, because it wouldn't be able to distinguish between pure yellow and mixed yellow.
Yes, there's definitely more going on than just reflectance. That's why most virtual materials appears too glossy to me. From what I understand, ray/path tracing will enable better materials modeling as well, given enough processing power. But I'm not a graphics person, so would be happy to be corrected.
There are some lighting differences but in this case the main 'disparity' seems to be that everything is in focus at once, since they are not attempting to simulate a camera photograph.
Guys, partially related but, I would like to upgrade my workstation at home for running this when it gets released. Do you have a best value GPU in mind to recommend for running this at an acceptable fps?
I have been out of the gaming scene with PC so your thoughts are welcome!
Also, what kind of controller for PC is the recommended?
I've been playing on a GTX 1070 just fine. It's not at the highest settings but it still looks amazing.
I have a Honeycomb Alpha Flight Yoke and a plethora of Logitech gear for everything else (throttle quad until Honeycomb drops their own, rudder pedals, and some super basic avionics). I bought all this just for 2020 and it has worked great so far.
The yoke is pricey @ $250 USD but it is completely worth it. The build quality is phenomenal. Better than any real yoke I've ever used, plus it has a lot of basic switches already on it that replicate a small GA aircraft faithfully.
Are there any alternative to Logitech's switch panel and radio? I see people using them but I find it strange that there's no mid-range alternative to these without having to step in the big boy shoes of RealSimGear stuff.
Not that I know of, but sure some things probably exist(ed). It's kinda sad because I think most of Logitech's stuff is pretty low-quality. The throttles and rudder pedals are just kind of sad when you see the build quality of nice products.
Select two GPUs from the list there (checkboxes). It will take you to the comparison page where there are two search boxes to type in the GPU you want to compare. It'll show price (usually decently accurate) as well as performance comparison.
On the AMD side you have the 5700xt as the top one at ~$430 (once you select it the website lets you quickly move between the products in the line - 5600, 700, 700xt). I think they have a newly released 5500/xt which along with the 5600 are probably good value.
On the Nvidia side you have the 2060[ti, super] and 2070[ti, maybe a super variant too?].
Never forget, nvidia is very evil :) I didn't even consider buying nvidia for that reason so I bought a Sapphire Nitro+ 5700xt* in November. Had to RMA the first card due to hardware issues but the replacement works great in Windows and Linux. It had driver issues but those have been resolved for a while. I think OpenCL support is still not great in Linux (and maybe Windows) but I don't use that so I can't tell you more about it.
* Nitro+ has factory overclock and upgraded cooler which is silent when not gaming and cool and relatively quiet when gaming. Sapphire generally considered the best AMD card maker; their Pulse and Nitro+ are competitively priced with other variants.
Just a caveat that userbenchmark (while pretty useful) is banned on several hardware subreddits for _very_ questionable scoring methods, which seem to indicate bias towards certain manufacturers (most notably, drastic changes to CPU scoring just after the new Ryzen chips were released which seemed deliberately designed to keep Intel's enthusiast parts ahead). I believe their GPU benchmarks are more trustworthy, but I would skip them entirely still.
3Dmark is still fairly standard, and most reviews will include a suite of gaming / rendering tasks as well that can give much more useful real-world benchmarks. LinusTechTips is usually very good - e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoDPTJ-3qCM
Good writeup. I was in same decision process some half a year ago, went with 2070 super at the end. At that time, Nvidia was marginally more powerful (10% on average), had much more quiet implementation (Radeon heats up much more by default), and had raytracing (questionable but still an added bonus). Price difference at my place was maybe 50$ between most quiet 3-fan variants. So at the end, pretty much same price/power ratio.
Went with Nvidia since noise under load was very important, and for windows their drivers are generally are super stable and just work (don't have that great experience with Radeon from the past). Good to see Radeon side catched up, we all benefit from competition.
Nvidia's new 2060 and 2070 should be enough; I've been shopping for a gaming PC and have a 1060 from 3 years ago. You can pick up a laptop in the 1500-2000 range with this GPU built in.
Don't they have recommended/minimum spec on the product? I haven't checked...
The 2060 laptop and desktop pack the exact same chip. Provided you can cool it well enough, you can just overclock your laptop GPU and get the exact same performance.
Thanks!. I am hoping they have a more concrete requirements spec by the end of the year. I cannot even find a release date but only teasers. I have a Dell T5800 in need of upgrade in the graphics department, but it's on great condition for everything else I throw to it. I come from a NVIDIA NVS310 so I have a good margin for improvement!
My base workstation is a Dell T5800 series and it has a 2x Gen 3 PCIe x16, do you think it would need more upgrades? like power supply? It has a Dual Xeon E5 and all memory banks are full at 256GB of sweet RAM :)
Both Nvidia and AMD are releasing new GPUs later this year. Even if you don't buy one of those the old ones will get cheaper then, so don't buy anything until you actually need it.
>>what kind of controller for PC is the recommended?
Depends on budget and goals:
* If you want to fly something realistic like a Cessna etc, get a yoke. Saitek offers a good combo Yoke/Throttle Quadrant/Rudders, which are a great way to start a fun yet relatively realistic experience. You can then upgrade it with instrument panels etc, but that is if you get quite serious about things. The basic combo is MORE than enough for a long time.
Alternatively, CH has an "All in one" yoke with hand-controlled rudder and attached throttle. Slightly less realistic (as the rudder is not via feet), more space-saving & compact :)
* If you are not looking for realism of that kind, or want something good value, and/or might fly fighter flight games as well, the Thrustmaster 1600 combo (joystick + throttle) are a reasonable "solid entry" pack.
* Finally, if you are really on a budget, OR play in living/family room on a couch but don't want to fly with gamepad, Thrustmaster HOTAS/Ace allows you to physically connect throttle and joystick, so you can hold it on your lap or similar and play from anywhere :)
* Note also, TrackIR adds a huge amount of reality and fun, if you don't go the full VR route. It LOOKS like it'd be gimmicky, but once you put it on, it's quite natural and huge amount of fun. I was honestly giggling first time I've put it on and looked to the side and below my plane just by moving my head around :)
Years ago, before there were better ways to do it in the Web browser, I implemented animated flight/mission review from aircraft flight data recorders, using the Google Earth Plugin, a bunch of JS and HTML&CSS, and some custom 3D assets.
Today, for a desktop tool, the scenery and platform would look much better with MS Flight Simulator (though that's not the point of review), and presumably it would also render weather (which could be useful).
When practical, I'd prefer to work from an open dataset and engine, so I'd lean towards using FlightGear, even if it isn't as slick in some ways.
I know many buildings/landmarks/statues have their likeness "copywritten" (however ridiculous that may seem).[0]
How does MS Flight Simulator get away with reproducing the likeness of these structures so accurately? Do they have to get some kind of permission, or are they covered by some sort of artistic license?
It's well known that in many other video games, statues (like Chicago's cloudgate "Bean") are replaced with some similar stand-in that doesn't infringe on the original structure.
"French doctrine and jurisprudence allows pictures incorporating a copyrighted work as long as their presence is incidental or accessory to the subject being represented,[96] a reasoning akin to the de minimis rule. Therefore, SETE may be unable to claim copyright on photographs of Paris which happen to include the lit tower."
Also this only covers the illumination in particular and not the landmark.
What landmarks are copyrighted? I've never heard of such a thing.
Wikimedia had to remove all pictures of Swedish 'public art' (statues etc) after a ruling. I think laws and rulings like that could be a lot of trouble.
Ever since I've seen the first trailer for FS2020, I've been more and more interested in flying. I took a plane once in my life, 20 years ago. Now I really want to discover this world, and maybe take an initiation lesson. It's such a bummer that the PPL is so expensive.
One thing is for sure, I'll buy this game and learn more about flying thanks to this.
It's not "prohibitively" expensive. It's expensive. Besides, it's not just the $10k, it's the $150/h every time you want to take the plane. That adds up quickly.
The $150/hr is the bigger cost. I got my PPL a few years ago but haven't flown once since then. If you're going to fly, you need to do it regularly to maintain proficiency - you can't just take out the plane after 4 months of not flying.
So a PPL is useless unless you're willing to spend $2k+ per year to maintain it. Do you need to go somewhere far away, often enough for that to be worth it?
I’m pretty excited to try this - I played lots of Flight Simulator X as a kid. I’ve read a ridiculous amount of physics - from wind patterns to cloud generation has been programmed to create a realistic simulation. Part of the appeal of course, is being able to fly anywhere on the planet and explore.
XPlane 11 has Ortho4XP which will build maps from online satellite images. It's interesting that most Ortho4XP users use Bing as their satellite image source because they are more uniformly colored and have fewer "stitching" lines between areas.
They do. MSFS was Bill Gates' pet project. He loved it, and even though it was a money losing division, it soldiered on. Once he left, it shut down. This is a (very cool) advertisement for Azure Maps. It won't make any money, but as a proof of concept goes, it's going to be hard to do better than this.
> MSFS was Bill Gates' pet project. He loved it, and even though it was a money losing division
It's true that it was Bill's pet project.
But it was one of the best-selling PC games for 20 years and sold millions of copies, so "money-losing" is unlikely - maybe in a weird enterprise accounting way. It's also a useful standard game for their games division.
Also, MS could probably get the DoD to fund all development. MSFS was used in a lot of military sims over the years, so it's a useful thing beyond gaming. (Lockheed resold MSFS for several years during the hibernation, calling it "Pr3par3d.")
If you look at AW&ST around 2000, you can spot MSFS being used for terrain generation in full-page ads for military sims.
MSFS is one of the most underrated software products of all time. Even with MSFS5, I was able to get my IFR rating in the minimum amount of instruction time. I would call it the first true virtual reality product.
>But it was one of the best-selling PC games for 20 years and sold millions of copies, so "money-losing" is unlikely - maybe in a weird enterprise accounting way. It's also a useful standard game for their games division.
I guess "loses money" might be stretching it, but it was never profitable at the level that normal Microsoft software is profitable. It stuck around because BillG made it so.
On that note, Prepar3D is fabulous. I am an "academic" user who has spent thousands on addons because I am a goof. I am so excited for MSFS2020.
This is an urban myth I'm afraid. This was not Bill Gates' pet project nor was it conceived by anyone at Microsoft. Like many other MS technologies, it was initially conceived by a small company that was first supported, and later bought out, by Microsoft. It's been around since the 80s.
I have a Linux desktop and Mac laptop. I am considering installing Windows so I can run this simulator. Maybe that is the real business motivation for its release :)
While this version looks amazing, I'm not sure I agree that MS loves the series. There used to be a new one every few years, but the last one was about 15 years ago.
I find it interesting that the perspective feels off still. Beautiful images, but it feels like the game almost rises up too quickly. Almost like the horizon line isn't quite where it should be.
Then again, maybe it's just an effect of the particular camera lens, or the slightly off angles in the comparison pictures.
FOV and perspective are the easiest variables to tweak to your desire. There are many things that make the images too perfect, especially the sharpness of the waves in the water. But people may prefer it like that, too perfect.
Anyone got any idea how well (or not) this is likely to run on a MacBook 16" with 5300M? It looks amazing, but I'm not a gamer and really I'd probably just play it for a bit out of curiousity so wouldn't make sense to invest in a proper gaming computer!
The 5300M is a low-end GPU though and it will struggle on anything close to the native screen resolution. Even the top-end configuration will have issues running this game at native resolution to achieve sharp UI and visuals.
Yeah, due to the way I was buying the laptop (it was a replacement for my 2017 which failed three times, which they let me upgrade) the 5500m would have been quite an expensive upgrade, can’t remember specifics but it was something to do with equivalent spec for my old machine - I was just relieved they were replacing it so didn’t argue - but I did also figure that the difference between the two wasn’t likely to be enough to make a really significant difference (between unplayable and playable for example) if I did ever fancy trying the odd game.
I had pretty poor experience running at lower resolutions on my MacBook - macOS exposes a very strange set of resolutions which are either too small (causing very obvious pixelation and poorly readable text) or too big (causing unplayable performance even in strategy games).
It might not look that stunning, but it should run. I've been gaming on a couple-generations-old MacBook a lot recently and it works surprisingly well if you're willing to drop the settings down a bit.
The main problem with flight sim on a portable is the input method though. It's challenging to fly manually without a joystick or yoke, and proper immersion really requires a throttle too. You can get something enjoyable enough going with the mouse though.
Not too good, but affordable for occasional play or if you want to try out a game to see if it's worth investing in a gaming rig.
I use spot instances which average at around $0.6/hour (I set the maximum bid to $1, if the price rises beyond that the instance is terminated). Bandwidth ends up being more or less the same cost as the actual instance per hour if you cap it to 100Mbps which is enough for 1920x1080. If you remove the bandwidth cap (in the Steam settings, for example if you want to play in 4K or higher) the bill can go up dramatically - last month I spent over $70 and more than half of that was actually bandwidth rather than compute. I'm now exploring Oracle's cloud as they seem more competitive on the bandwidth front.
The main concern would be your network connection and latency. Unlike latency between the game client and server (where the client can and does compensate for it), we're talking about input latency here. You can get used to a certain amount of latency and predict it as long as it remains consistent, though I'd say for multiplayer shooters a few milliseconds is the maximum before it becomes unplayable. For single-player games I'd say you can get away with 20ms or so.
Can't wait to try it out. I think after FlightSim this could make an awesome google maps competitor. Would love to get directions on streets that have great landmarks like this.
Security issues, I think. Russia is very centralised, and many, many things of strategic importance are in the city. Many areas around it (near state residences, army bases, etc.) are also no-flight zones: https://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5902/214603206.b7/0_139f47_d...
Some source state that it is possible to fly over Moscow in certain corridors, but only on the altitude of at least 8100m.
I was so excited to see side by side pics of cockpits and planes in great detail and compared. But no, all it was is landscapes. I mean, who looks out the window when flying? :) Except for the Citabria, not me, much!
If you're looking for a more accurate, 'real' simulator it has a lot to offer. MS Flight Sim will be more than real enough for the vast majority of us but if you're interested in contributing to a product you can improve and have fun modelling/texturing additional planes, cities etc this is a project to get involved with.
> but if you're interested in contributing to a product you can improve and have fun modelling/texturing additional planes, cities etc this is a project to get involved with.
Again, MSFS 2020's SDK is already with all of the major third-party developers and will be publically available upon its release. A couple have even swapped to almost purely working on MSFS products instead of X-Plane or P3D.
X-Plane's flight model is decent though obviously things like turbulence, left-turning tendency at takeoff, and behavior during eg; crabs and front-slips could always be more realistic.
If you're going for extreme realism IMO one of the best tools out there is Pilot's Edge (https://www.pilotedge.net/). Real air traffic controllers tower some airspace (currently california) and it lets you practice things like getting flight following, IFR clearances, taxi instructions, etc. without burning $150/hr (cessna 172) (+$60/hr instruction) to practice radio work in your private pilot or instrument training.
Works with X-Plane and MS Flight Simulator X (though I'm sure when 2020 comes out it'll be supported).
X-Plane has been around so long it is kind of unreal - I remember buying a copy in ~2000 and it was already 5+ years old then. Pretty amazing longevity.
I guess there's a lot to be said for having a good community of users who love the product and want to help contribute to it to make it better. Active creators rather than passive consumers.
Sort of off-topic but I realized the other day that the transition from active contributors to passive consumers is when online gaming went off the rails for me. When people managed the online servers there was always an admin around to kick bad actors and to set the tone for that particular server. When you found a good one you saved it because you knew you would always get quality time there.
Matchmaking killed that.
I don’t think game publishers realized they were essentially firing a free workforce that was making their online play great. I think private servers is one of the reasons Minecraft has such staying power.
I think you can apply this same principle to so many areas of hobbies. As soon as you get more involved and be more of a creator than just sitting there and letting everyone else do things for you, you get so much more out of the experience.
X-Plane is beautiful in terms of graphics but gets lost when dealing with environmental details, such as other air traffic and dealing with traffic control.
Compared to 2020, X-Plane's graphics are pretty...bad. Their planes are great but the rest of the world is extremely bland. I love X-Plane but not at all for the graphical quality.
