Shocker to run across this mentioned on an Oculus site as I had no idea it was in development, but AeroflyFS 2 is out on Steam Early Access now. And it has VR support!
The original Aerofly FS was pretty limited in scope and never grabbed me, though I did buy it. This one, though, looks to be aiming at an in-depth sim with a variety of plane types and full VR support. With a modern graphics engine!
Bought it at lunchtime and started the download… I’ll post impressions this weekend.
Still downloading it on my Oculus-equipped PC so haven’t tried VR yet. But I flew it on my 3,440x1,440 Dell and it was beautiful! Sooo much better looking and smoother than MSFS.
The flight models in general feel pretty good. Some are better than others. (I need Richard Ordway to confirm a Corsair can roll that fast.) Systems modeling is pretty good, and the visuals are stunning outside of the plane. With the Switzerland add-on and the optional high-res textures for the SW USA, the full sim weighs in at a whopping 101GB!
Some of what’s missing: Air traffic, ATC, system failures… But for an Early Access game, color me impressed! Can’t wait to try it in VR.
Shot below is the P-38 Yippee! flying over Sedona, AZ.
Oh, wow, I never followed up on this topic. Too busy playing.
Guys, if you have a Rift or Vive and you like flight sims at all, you must get this. It’s going to be a long time before the feature set reaches FSX/P3D, but the VFR flight with goggles is by far the coolest VR experience I’ve had. It’s all I’ve used my VR setup for since I got it. The flight is sooo smooth, and it really feels like flying a real plane. It’s by far the closest experience to real flying, even if all the IFR/ATC stuff and other advanced features aren’t there yet (they’re planned down the road), there’s so much here to entertain an aviation enthusiast now.
It’s beautiful on a traditional screen, too. But the VR experience is just spectactular.
Oh, no, on my Rift at least, it’s silky smooth. (980Ti). That combined with detailed elevation data and pretty good photoscenery makes it feel very real, especially if you add a little haze by dropping the visibility a little. That make the scenery look less photographic.
I’ll get an occasional hitch (one or two little jumps on a flight), but for the most part the performance is wonderful. I haven’t used a frame rate counter in VR, but it keeps a steady 60 fps at 3440x1440 with all settings maxed on the same system. So it’s probably doing even better at the lower Oculus resolution.
Trying to run P3D at those settings would be a slideshow. And the DCS framerate on that rig is nowhere near as smooth.
Some shots from a Corsair test flight. The scenery looks significantly more realistic if you add a little haze, but I was doing “texture tourism” and wanted to see all the detail.
How different do the aircraft feel? Do the older aircraft like the Corsair pictured fly like you would expect something built in the 1940’s to fly or does it fly like a Cessna?
Sure. First, you can start in the air, so no worries about getting off the runway. Also, it has tutorials that start with very basics (like banking and turning and stuff). And this is a flying sim, not a switchology sim, so no worries about having to find a checklist to start the engine, etc. (Though there is a “cold and dark cockpit” mod from one of the devs for the Cessa, for people who like that kind of stuff.)
The Rift is obviously lower-res, but it still looks great, and unlike the other sims I’ve flown on the Rift I can actually read the instruments without leaning my face 5 inches from the panel. It doesn’t look as sharp as those screens (taken on my ultra-widescreen monitor), but it looks as good as the best stuff on the Rift does.
Oh, no, the flight models vary dramatically between planes. The Corsair has a ton of torque and is very maneuverable, you can stall and spin the Extra and the Pitts easily and hang on the prop like the real things, and the big jets fly like big jets. Turn up the turbulence a bit and I find the flight models are noticeably better than Flight Sim X (though perhaps not up to the most sophisticated FSX add-on planes that essentially include DLLs to add new flight model complexity not in the base sim).
Yeah, this was my first flight simulator, SubLogic on the C64:
[From watching youtube video] the texture detail certainly looks nice, and little things like depth haze look better than MSFX, but I’m finding the lack of autogen (beyond major landmarks) and details like moving traffic, wave animation, specular highlights on waves, traffic and highway lighting etc a put-off since they’ve been around so long in vanilla and/or FTX/Orbyx. It kind of feels like the old google-maps streaming texture mod TileProxy for FSX of a decade ago, albeit with much better resolution and performance.
That said, they have done a very good job on the SF city center, something my NorCal FTX pack doesn’t really try to do.
Don’t mean to pooh pooh this though, can’t have enough options for flight simming. But I hope one day we’ll have the best of all worlds…
Well, in action I can tell you that the photoscenery, smooth frame rate and responsiveness, little bumps you get from turbulence, etc. (and the ability to run at a steady 60 FPS (my monitor’s max) at 3,440x1,440 at Ultra detail!) do a lot more for immersion when playing than boxy generic autogen and car traffic does in FSX.
And remember FSX/P3D is literally a code base that was in development for over 30 years! This game is still in Early Access. Night lighting, water modeling, traffic, etc. is all on the developers’ lists, but they’re just getting started.
The problem with holding everything to the standard of FSX is then we get stuck with nothing but FSX. :(
@Editer … one thing I am not clear on is the area covered by the detailed terrain. Where are there 3d objects? Just around airports and major cities? Does the photo scenery cover a contiguous area of southern California, Nevada and Arizona? What happens beyond the edges of the “map”? Are there any maps that show the actual flyable area?
Glad to see that they’ve finally joined the download age! I remember having a great deal of difficulty obtaining the first Aerofly sim. It was a physical release only, and you could only get it from one place in the USA, and their ordering form was hell to get through. And they had very limited quantities. IIRC, I finally had to call someone to get my copy.
Yes, it covers all of California (Northern too, I’ve flown around SF, Marin county, Tahoe, etc.), Nevada, and Arizona. There are 3D objects throughout the area (such as autogen trees in the mountains), but they’re more concentrated in the big cities and at the airports.
There’s also Switzerland as DLC.
If you leave that area, there’s lower resolution photoscenery. It’s blurry down low, but I placed the A320 at 30,000 feet over Seattle and I could make out SeaTac airport, downtown, and there’s even less detailed terrain mesh outside the core area, so Ranier was looming ahead. The textures outside the core area aren’t tweaked so there are some seams at times and stuff, but it’s not like flying into a land of blank, flat polygons, at least.
