Civilian Flight Sim thread

Games
122

Try DCS world. They have interactive tutorials. Either way prepare for a learning curve like mount everest. Its a challenge.

Fuck msfs. Its old. Decrepit. The past.

123

Youtube is your friend. I really found this playlist useful:

124

There you go. Learning to fly, real or simulated is not a problem solved by throwing cash at it. Throw time and (mental) energy at it.

125

DCS World has good tutorials and it’s free so give that a go. IL-2 is a fine place to start as well (it features WW2 prop planes) and honestly is the closest flight simulator to an actual game. There is a career mode in IL-2 that lets you fly generated missions which gives you purpose and direction if DCS World and the civilian flight sims makes you feel aimless or a little bored. You can pick it up for cheapz on steam at the moment:

For civilian flying, FlyInside is still early in development so I would not use it as your first flight simulator. Aerofly FS2 has decent tutorials, but you might start yearning for a more complicated sim before long. I have not tried the X-Plane tutorials.

126

They’re enough to get you into the cockpit, but are pretty bare bones. They are interactive though.

127

Well, I’ll give it a go as it’s free, although I’m not sure I’m interested in combat flying.

128

How to kill any potential flight sim newbie’s interest in flight sims forever:

  1. Direct them to IL2 BOS et al
  2. Have the navigate the endless configuration options
  3. Have them launch what is probably the simplest, most straightforward mission in the game: the Yak-3 taxiing “tutorial”
    4 …

Better way:

  1. Have them grab the ANCIENT, CREAKY, RHEUMATIC MSFSX Steam Edition
  2. Make sure their joystick and throttle are plugged in
  3. Point them toward a quick flight with the hangglider thingy over beautiful Washington State Friday Harbor
  4. Zip around until they decide they’d like to up the ante (may take days/weeks)
    5 …
129

That was my thought. I get it that msfs is old etc, but I just want to take off in a light plane, fly around a bit and than see if I can land it.

Now if msfs has easy scenarios or better yet built in tutorials than that’s the ticket for me.

If I get hooked no doubt I’ll move on to better things.

130

If it’s still available I’d actually recommend Microsoft Flight. Its missions and tutorials are awesome. And you start out with a dead simple Icon light plane.

131

… yeah perhaps you have a point there Sir.

132

You made me laugh, that is the first thing I did in IL2 BOS…

133

In my defence , a major part of flight (simulations) is crashing and there is no SIM that does that better than current il2.

134

FSX has lots of really good interactive lessons, taught by a real instructor (Rod Machado). Assuming they’re still included/working in the Steam edition.

135

Yeah, I was going to say… FSX may be old, decrepit, and the past but I don’t think anything has a finer ‘learn to fly’ system built in. :)

136

There was even a book for people working on being real pilots:

137

Jeff Van West is such a pilot name.

138

I’d say buy the academic edition (you’re learning how to fly the planes, legit use) of Prepar3D V4.3. It’s basically FSX 2018 but DX11 graphics, 64-bit, etc.

139

Doesn’t have FSX’s flight school/tutorial stuff though.

140

FlyInside flight simulator is now on steam early access and comes along with a big update:

I bought it directly from their site a month or so ago, and have had a good time with it. The performance in VR is fantastic (note: you can play this 2d as well), the game is smooth and pain-free to operate. The planes are also really nicely detailed. The one big drawback up until now was the very simplistic WIP scenery, but in today’s update that has supposedly been vastly improved. I have yet to test it but looking forward to doing so.

141

Interesting survey of the FlightSim community. AFAICT they don’t actually specify how they chose who got surveyed. So it’s a bit hard to evaluate exactly how accurate this is. But they do have a fair number of sponsoring companies, so I presume it’s scientifically valid.

One interesting data point. VR use went from 3% in the 2017 Survey to 11% in 2018. It will be very interesting to see where that number is next year. Is that going to plateau or keep rising. VR costs have gone way down (I certainly wasn’t going to jump in at $800 but at $350 that’s much more doable), on the other hand, it’s possible at this point, everyone who is interested at anywhere near the current price (and usability) points has jumped in.

Full results here: