reizak on 21/8/2020 at 16:50
I haven't seen any mention about gliders in the game. Do they exist? Is there a proper dynamic thermal model with sun incidence, ground features, ridge lift, things like that? Or is the game just about uncouth noisy smelly things :/
henke on 21/8/2020 at 17:55
Nope, no gliders. I'm guessing they'll show up as DLC.
And I'm no connisseur of flight dynamics so I can't say how realistic they are. I've certainly stalled a few times tho.
Anyway, I've been playing it for a few days now and, uh, I'm getting kinda bored! Once the initial thrill of seeing real-world locations has passed, there isn't much of an actual game here. Besides just flying around there are only 2 "activities" available. Bush Flights and Landing Challenges. Bush Flights are sightseeing trips where you follow a series waypoints. No visible checkpoints, just headings really. Kinda like the races in Dakar18, or orienteering, but in mid-air. Not as much fun as it sounds. I played 15 minutes of one of these before realizing there was another 45 min to go and noped out. The other activity, Landing Challenges, is fun tho, here's video of one of em:
[video=youtube;PrIyFFFD-lo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrIyFFFD-lo[/video]
It's not as easy as it looks!
Anyway, I hope they add some meatier gameplay content in the future.
edit: y'know what actually, this would be my DREAM DLC. :D
[video=youtube;PfyxThcqF3I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfyxThcqF3I[/video]
demagogue on 22/8/2020 at 03:02
They have videos on the flying dynamics and they are ridiculously detailed.
They (claim to) simulate ~1000 surfaces on a plane for their individual contributions to lift and drag, and in one video you'll see all 1000 little arrows on the plane fluttering in flight, and the plane reacting accordingly (e.g., less lift on one side and it dips just in that direction). And another video was showing individual narrow air currents flowing over a row of mountains (streams of arrows every 10 feet), and showing that when you fly near a mountain side you can feel the individual little eddies, boost, and drops. Then they were comparing it to other flight sims and showing (claiming) it was modeled in orders of magnitude greater detail. Looking at all those little dynamic arrows fluttering in their videos I believe it.
I've flown a lot in iL-2 Stalingrad, and it feels authentic to me, at least I'm used to feeling out the exact stall point for different aircraft in different maneuvers with different levels of thrust and flaps, etc. So I can at least be able to say if it feels more realistic to me than that. You know, when I can finally get it downloaded. lol. Only 12 GB left now!
....
Edit: At its base, it's definitely a flight sim and not a game. A challenge I see a lot of vlog simmers doing is VFR flights, which is to say flying using only visual cues from the ground, and seeing if they can really fly from like New York to Chicago just by following highways, landmarks, and eyeballing the angles for shortcuts. But it's for the experience of flying before anything else.
If there's going to be gameplay, it's going to be custom missions that come out over time, which some people are already talking about turning into entire careers. So in that respect, you're probably okay to hold off until a good number of those are out if that's the kind of thing you want to do.
But I imagine people will come up with a lot of clever missions. One guy was talking about timed supply missions under bad conditions in random places. Military planes are confirmed to be coming at some point, and I was thinking it's only a matter of time until someone mods it for dogfighting. It's multiplayer, so I'm sure people will be organizing races and acrobatic contests.
But it can get even more meta-game-like, like the little orienting games people put on Google Maps. Some of those have been really clever. One of my favorites is a game where it drops you someplace in the world and you have to figure out where you are, stick a pin in a map, and it tells you how far you're off. That would be a cool kind of meta-game for this flightsim. Things like that.
heywood on 22/8/2020 at 18:44
Quote Posted by Meowdori
Ok, everyone is going haywire over the graphics (which i don't deny, is stunningly good), but what about the most important thing in any flight simulator, the actual flying physics and other nuances?
Do planes stall properly, enter spins, do they have increased stall tendency during steep turns at low airspeeds, how does the ground handling feel, etc?
Either way, for now i'm sticking with X-Plane 11, as i prefer their licensing model by a long shot, plus the physics of the simulation are really nice and pretty realistic. I just wish the ATC wasn't utter crap in XP, but oh well...
I also have XP11 and might just stick with it. One tell-tale that the flight physics might be watered down in MS FS2020 comes from watching how responsive the aircraft look to ham-handed control inputs. In some of the YouTube videos, single engine light aircraft seem to respond like aerobatic aircraft, like making fairly rapid changes in pitch without porpoising. And I've yet to see any sign of oscillation around the yaw axis in flight. Granted, I haven't played it yet, so I might be judging it prematurely. But it looks arcade-like to me.
Quote Posted by henke
The other activity, Landing Challenges, is fun tho, here's video of one of em:
[video=youtube;PrIyFFFD-lo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrIyFFFD-lo[/video]
It's not as easy as it looks!
I noticed at the start of the video you were flying above max Vfe with full flaps, but the aircraft wasn't bitching at you. Also, it seemed like there was no ATC, no traffic, no wind. Are those things you can turn off, or are they just not part of the landing challenge? Do they have challenges that require a precise instrument approach? I'd love to try something like this:
[video=youtube;qKWZwPqfSkU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKWZwPqfSkU[/video]
Anyway, it's kind of odd that they spent the effort to include a detailed model of the Sydney Opera House, but nothing else. It looks weird to see the opera house without the Sydney Harbour Bridge right there with it. One of the first things I was hoping to try if I got the game was skimming the water in an A320 right under the bridge. I can do that in XP11, and it looks like they're using the exact same community-made model of the opera house that's in the Sydney scenery pack released by ISDG, so why not take their model of the bridge too? Ah well, I'm sure the community will get onto it.
Meowdori on 22/8/2020 at 18:55
Actually after having watched some videos, i wouldn't call MSFS 2020's flight physics anything near arcade, it seems very good with few exceptions.
Look at the stall+spin behaviour of the stock Cessna 172 in both these sims, compared directly one after another in this video, at the following timestamp: (
https://youtu.be/HY93GQ73aXU?t=357)
Here, MSFS 2020 is the absolute winner and made me shake my head in disappoinment that no other simulator seems to have gotten it right with a default aircraft and on default settings.
But, on the contrary, here's a different video of someone trying to stall a C152 in MSFS 2020, and it's very unrealistic in comparison, so i'm kinda lost as to why there's such a discrepancy between those two playtests. (
https://youtu.be/Fvw4grJ6B8Y?t=693)
I'm really baffled by this, i'd need to test it myself, no idea what to make out of it.
The first video made me definitely jealous of MSFS though, that spin was pretty much very faithful to the real thing.
Anarchic Fox on 22/8/2020 at 20:23
My opinion as a physicist is that you people are weird.
demagogue on 23/8/2020 at 08:05
It looks like after 88 GB, my external HD finally threw a fit and now it's completely stopped with 3 GB to go. If I have to start this mf over, I think I'm going to punch a hole in something cheap and disposable.
Edit: My theory now is that every time I restart it, it has to roll through the previously downloaded part to check if anything needs to be re-downloaded before it event starts, and that takes more than an hour or two by itself--I don't know how long, just longer than I've attempted it so far--because it has a "please wait" message blinking. My playtime on Steam already says 78 hours and I haven't even been able to start it yet!
henke on 23/8/2020 at 12:06
:[
Quote Posted by heywood
I noticed at the start of the video you were flying above max Vfe with full flaps, but the aircraft wasn't bitching at you. Also, it seemed like there was no ATC, no traffic, no wind.
The plane certainly bitches about a lot of things: not climbing enough, sinking too much, nothing having landing gear out when you're low enough, flying too fast at too low altitudes. If it isn't bitching as much as it should it might be because of my realism settings. I have piloting set to Hard but everything else to Medium. As for ATC, no you don't need to request landing permission or anything like that(on my settings). I have seen some other aircraft flying around, but there's never been any packed traffic at airports. Wind is certainly a factor, but maybe not on that particular landing.
Here's me (
https://twitter.com/Henrik_Hermans/status/1297510003776126985) nailing one of the "Strong Wind" landing challenges. :cool:
Quote Posted by heywood
Queenstown video
Hey I recognise that! Queenstown is one of the landing challenge levels! :D Here's someone (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlR2wkcXKuc) doing a terrible job at it.
Renzatic on 23/8/2020 at 16:29
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
My opinion as a physicist is that you people are weird.
I guess it's official now.
PigLick on 24/8/2020 at 02:48
Quote Posted by demagogue
My playtime on Steam already says 78 hours and I haven't even been able to start it yet!
holy crap are you on dialup or something
