FlightSim Megathread: Much of this is unfinished

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > FlightSim Megathread: Much of this is unfinished

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

I'm new to flight sims so I don't know enough to say what is and what isn't buggy but I have to say I'm having a real blast so far. I went on Sagebrush's VOR tutorial last weekend and a few days ago decided to fly from Telluride to Sedona using VOR only to navigate with the 152, with a sidestop passing over the Grand Canyon (Apparently this is not kosher according to the FAA!) and it was a blast. I wish the Citation jets didn't use so much more fuel than they're rated for because they seem like a nice long range option that isn't massive and could take off from smaller airports.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2020 20:32

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:20

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Just gave that PFD/glass cockpit JS tweak a shot. Before the tweak I'd get about 50 FPS on a clear day at Ultra at 1440p (9700k/1080Ti/32GB) at 40k cruising altitude outside the plane in a 787, while inside it was giving me 20-25 FPS. I reduced the glass cockpit refresh rate to the factor-of-two so it only renders every other frame and I get about 40 FPS on the inside now, and I notice zero difference in the responsiveness of the screens. I wonder why Asobo didn't just do this to begin with, this makes the 787 so much more usable.

I would love for there to eventually be an A350 in the ULR variant so you could make that EWR-SIN route or LHR-SYD. One thing I love doing is just setting a 8-9 hour flight and running it at 4x time compression while I'm watching Youtube or doing something on my second monitor. It's like playing American Truck Sim but you don't have to babysit it as much (except for the ATC calls). I would love if there were eventually an in-game thing where you could just set the # of passengers and pick a route, like a virtual career mode.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 00:19

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Anime Store Adventure posted:

There's a whole bunch of third party scenery launching from payware folks already, apparently. (see: https://fselite.net/tag/msfs/)

I'm not really at all interested in buying specific scenery unless its oddly specific local airports that I'm going to really get my moneys worth from (which I don't think have seen payware in any sim, ever). Fancy airports are cool but other than KOPF (because of OnAir) I'm not sure I've landed anywhere in MSFS more than maybe 3 times and I tend to move around a lot.

That said, I really hope that 3rd party devs jump on the official storefront. I'm worried they have 0 incentive to do it other than reaching a potentially broader audience, which hopefully pushes them to it. This sim is so close to having some of the things needed to break the lovely payware ecosystem of flight sims but I feel like it's going to miss the mark. If I were Asobo I'd assign a small team of folks dedicated solely to finding ways to make that a win-win-win for players, 3rd party devs, and microsoft/asobo.

Please don't make me use weird rear end DRM from a thousand solo highly protective idiot developers when the stuff I actually want to buy (new planes) come out.

I just keep thinking about that one story a year ago where a plane dev put some malware in their model that nuked your computer's OS or something if it wasn't authenticated properly and then bitched and moaned about being called out on it.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 04:31

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Anime Store Adventure posted:

Soft reboots are a plague for the reuse of the name. Like we get that it�s the same thing kinda, and still maybe use the name, but then add some new subtitle that lets us know that it�s new and improved and full of new and exciting features that we�ll be familiar with.

Maybe like, MSFS MAX?

Wait...

Considering some of my autopilot experience that certainly isn't inaccurate

# ¿ Sep 2, 2020 06:39

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

coke posted:

also a warning to people who want to fly near iceland, apparently it's a known crash to desktop bug if you try to depart or fly near KEF/Keflav�k, you can however fly from AEY/Akureyri though

Interesting, I flew from Heathrow to Reykjavik Airport because I didn't realize KEF was the main airport and flew directly over KEF without any issues, but I didn't know how to use the localizer/ILS procedures at the time so I was completely confused when autopilot was telling me to go way out into the ocean for the routing I had selected, so I just decided to land locally and was then confused at why my A320 was being told to park at GA Parking.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2020 04:25

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

dumby posted:

It seems like this game would be perfect for a streaming service like stadia or whatever the MS equivalent is.

For sure, you don't need to worry about 200ms latency for the most part if you're just flying an airliner.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2020 22:45

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

After watching a bunch of youtubers (that A320 Sim Pilot guy especially) I signed up for a Navigraph sub so I could make flight plans in SimBrief that could import into the sim. I get it, man.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2020 10:04

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Sebastian Flyte posted:

On the other hand, when I look at places like LAX in the sim where there's an incredible amount of private residences very close to one of the busiest airports in the world, I'm pretty surprised that so many can stand living there.

If it was Cities Skylines these people would go freakin' nuts living that close to the airport.

It's LA, not like people have much of a choice without spending massive amounts of money.

Appears the new patch just dropped https://www.flightsimulator.com/patch-version-1-8-3-0-is-now-available/

# ¿ Sep 16, 2020 18:10

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

what the hell? i literally just finished flying JFK - ORD in the a320 flybywire mod after updating the client and it was about as smooth as possible. frames seemed more consistent and the new option to change glass cockpit refresh rates is so much better than even that custom config edit with no loss in screen response. Wind was properly there, no 3kt 225 degree nonsense this time.

Hell, the plane even engaged dual autopilots as I was going in for an ILS autoland procedure (CAT 3 on top and Dual below, with both of the AP lights on). I can't tell if that was because of the mod edits or because of something they did to the A320 systems but it was probably the smoothest landing I've made in game yet. The only problem I encountered was when I shut down the engines and turned off the battery, the end screen didn't register in my logbook that I completed a flight which is a little bit of a bummer.

Shipon fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Sep 16, 2020

# ¿ Sep 16, 2020 22:38

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Charles posted:

Outpost

still waiting on that usable road system

# ¿ Sep 22, 2020 20:55

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Source4Leko posted:

gently caress this hits so hard such a good basically unplayable game.

I must have been a dumb kid because I enjoyed playing that game and maybe wasn't bright enough to figure out why the manual was wrong. Still would love to see like an indie remake of it with the same gameplay with the name filed off.

I think that's still a trend to this day tbh, judging by the complaints I see in this thread about the game being unplayable. If there's any killer bugs, I certainly haven't noticed them post-patch. Haven't had autopilot try to kill me or anything even when I walk away from the game on a long flight. If anything, I think the 787's FMS is a bit weird because it appears to simply not even have a page for the landing procedures and apparently doesn't want to pre-load the ILS frequency when you load a flight plan with the world map.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2020 21:46

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

One thing I've been noticing as I fly the airliners more - the A320 seems to have higher fuel consumption than I'd expect given the map range (I tried flying from EGLL-KJFK but ran out of fuel about an hour before the flight so I had to cheat in-flight refuel), while the 787 seems to last forever. I timed my fuel consumption on the 787 at cruise and got something insane like 30 hours of remaining flight time.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2020 05:48

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

i am kiss u now posted:

~~Microsoft~~ Asobo is basically taking a page from Eagle Dynamics' playbook except doing a way worse job at it. "We'll just keep adding new content without fixing the abhorrently broken content that we already released and maybe people will forget! Why is the community mad at us this makes no sense! Surely they don't know what they want and we certainly won't respond to any of it or provide any transparency because we're stuck in the past and that's how you run a software company."

For what it's worth, at least ED addressed the massive patch/QA issues and put their foots down when people were expecting patches on a weekly basis, but they still continue to develop new content without really fixing the underlying issues and that's why people get upset. Yes, F-16's finally got HARMS and MAVs but 6 months after they were "suppose to" and even then in a very limited fashion. Plus, I will give them credit because Nineline and BIGNEWY basically take the brunt of the community but still, in my opinion, do a pretty good job of keeping the user base informed given what they're up against.

Asobo has none of that. Their community moderators are garbage if completely nonexistent which is why the official forums are such a poo poo-show. If the flightsim community wasn't as heavily involved as it is, this game would have tanked just as hard as Microsoft Flight and they need to acknowledge that.

if everyone on their forums is as whiny as you are they're probably in the right to be non-communicative

# ¿ Sep 25, 2020 06:20

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

soggybagel posted:

Is ILS fully functional? I know there have been effort posts here but I�ve gotten distracted with other stuff. Might try to do that as my next weeks goal. Learn ILS.

I had one botched ILS approach at KBOS where the localizer was misaligned with the runway but other than that it's been pretty reliable. TBM 930 is a good plane to get used to them, and I've found that the A320 flybywire mod helps the autopilot work somewhat better and have had good luck. Even managed to get it to do an autoland procedure once.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2020 04:42

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Sagebrush posted:

Sure, I don't mean that they'd make their own versions of the sectionals, but that Microsoft could buy a digitized and georeferenced version of the FAA charts from one of the providers (rather than doing it themselves). Companies like Garmin already have that work done to include the charts in their GPS systems. I don't know if a G1000 can pull up an official FAA sectional but you can in their Garmin Pilot software at least.

I mean hell they could just pay the Skyvector guy $10,000 a month to scrape his site and rehost it on Azure.

Didn't Navigraph already talk about working with MS to allow the subscription to interface with the game? I mean other than the simple location tracking it currently does.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2020 07:08

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

CaptainEO posted:

They have a �Marketplace� built into the app itself and yet it seems they�re already failing to make it the central hosting point for anything but random bits of hand-picked content . I was so looking forward to not having to download a thousand addons and their dependencies by hand a la X-Plane or P3D.

my guess if if they open it up to free user submissions they could land in real hot poo poo copyright-wise if people upload models made off google earth exports

# ¿ Sep 29, 2020 21:19

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Combat Pretzel posted:

Oh neat. Now the tail number needs to propagate in-world, too. Because right now, on other players, they're just blank rectangles.

That and ATC calls to players need to be heard by everyone. That still doesn't work, I still only hear NPC traffic.

this sounds like an absolute nightmare that would make it impossible to get through to ATC in any crowded server

# ¿ Sep 30, 2020 05:47

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:20

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Got about 2 hours into the Japan tour when my game crashed out around Mount Fuji. What a shame.

Not as annoying as a few days ago when my game crashed on a KORD-KLAX flight as I was on the glide slope into KLAX.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2020 08:48

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > FlightSim Megathread: Much of this is unfinished