Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) - We're really sorry about Microsoft Flight

I’d love to see them add more capability to the King Air via the mod for that Garmin unit.

Those night screenshots are fantastic. The small graphics details are really what makes this game. You can do drone view completely outside an aircraft and if you get close enough outside behind the pilot/copilot, you can actually see the correct indications on the displays in the cockpit, charted path and all. I have no idea how they did that, but it’s amazing.

Happy to report that all QT3 FBOs have been sold. We’re millionaires!*

*Can’t remember if we have been millionaires before; based on my own circumstances, I doubt it.

I’ll take my share in Neofly bucks, thanks.

In continuing my MSFS binge, flew a bit around Tokyo today.

The main highlight of the flight is when I went to land back at Tokyo airport I was told to come into runway 34L following the traffic about to land. I got to follow a jetliner in.

I turn to get on to his tail. (may be a little hard to see in the reduce pics but fortunately the plane is orange)

Even though I’m a VFR flight and didn’t file a plan, since I can look up the ILS frequencies anyway you an see I have the locator tuned in and I’m about on the glideslope altitude. The Nippon Air flight I’m chasing looks quite above it. It actually waves off and goes a go around. Since this is using live traffic I can’t help but wonder if that actually happened or if it was an irregularity of the sim. Either way pretty cool to see. Was too busy flying to get more pics as it happened.

Made a not terrible landing. Cool airport.

The vastness of that city is both cool to see and kind of unnerving.

We should possibly consider disbursing the v$ to the group members actually.

I mean, FSE is a pretty fixed experience; it’s hard to imagine a group experience capturing our imaginations in the future, to the extent where we play as a group again.

More random flying on the other side of the world. Abu Dabi

I know I’ve asked this before, but to check on the current state of things, anyone playing mainly in VR? Anyone try out the VR controller support? I so wish there was some way I could play this when I travel. Not exactly a laptop screen friendly game, and lugging the yoke around everywhere is prohibitive.

Live weather is broken yet again - if you plan to fly above FL250 you’ll need to use preset weather.

I fly primarily in VR, but haven’t had a lot of interested in using VR controllers. However, that’s a good point on travel, particularly since it’s so hard to control with an Xbox controller.

However, currently VR controller support is broken – it only recognizes one controller at a time. But the hotfix they’re working on should address that.

I was getting very jealous of @Thrag’s gorgeous pictures from his trips, so I bought a new hard drive and installed Microsoft Flight Simulator on it. (My C: drive, which I used to use for the game wasn’t big enough to run the last update, so I had to uninstall).

Now I just have to decide where I want to go. Do I want to continue my planned trip from Yakutsk down to Lake Bakaal, through Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert and through the Himalayas down to Calcutta?

The only problem with that trip is that it follows the journey of the escapees in the book “Long Way Home”. But I’ve discovered that I don’t like trips in MSFS that don’t follow some kind of human made structures. A road, or railroad, preferably. It might still be worth trying. Maybe I can follow a river, or I might discover that this trip has more human structures than I was expecting? I kind of doubt it though.

The other alternative is one of the early trips I started last year was to start from Darwin Australia and follow the railroad line towards Perth Australia.

I could also continue my Padagonia Bush trip, but I had a heck of a time in the one I was stuck on, I think the landing strip was really small, and redoing that trip over and over got tiring.

Heh, I also bought a new drive not long ago mainly to be the MSFS drive. MS really should have had some sort of SSD bundle deal with Samsung.

If you’re going to do a small plane, I’d follow a shorter route along a famous roadway or river, like maybe the original Route 66 path.

If you’re going to do something faster, turbojet or jet, I’d recommend a hotspot to another hotspot kind of travel. PNW to Alaska maybe. Great scenery. Or a coast to coast trip as it would require at least a stop or two. @Ginger_Yellow and @Pedro posted some fantastic shots in their travels, you might want to ask for a location that is great for that.

Finding the original Route 66 path from the air would be challenging. But North America is a great idea after exploring Russia.

Looking at the Class 1 freight railroad map of North America (that I can’t currently post, thanks to Discourse). Lots of options for me here.

Please ignore, testing image uploads yet again.

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Okay, Thrag, just for you, I tried the VR controllers with my Oculus, er, Meta, Quest 2 last night. I also wanted to test how well wireless connections were working nowadays with the Quest 2, so hey, two birds!

The VR controllers worked really well with the test version of the hotfix to the latest sim update. You can grab the stick and then use motion control to move it around, or you can us the stick on the controller. The latter was too sensitive to me – like flying with an Xbox controller – but motion control of the stick worked pretty well. And it was really cool to be able to operate the switches, mixture and prop levers, etc. with the motion controllers instead of having to fumble for my mouse.

I safely landed it, but it wasn’t pretty. But hey, I got it down and was somewhere near the runway still at the end. :)

It definitely looks like a viable option for control on the road with a laptop. Way better than an Xbox controller, for sure.

If you want to follow roads, Carretera Austral in Chile might be a good one, though it might get a bit same-y what with all the volcanoes and glaciers and what not ;)

But it’s really a northern extension of the Patagonia bush trip, so may not be ideal. There was also a Ewen McGregor motorcycle show based on it that you could watch on your way…

Alternatively, somewhere with deserts could be good - they are really spectacular in the sim. I flew a small plane from Turkmenistan to Germany, that was quite good (Turkmenistan, Caspian Sea, Baku, Armenia and Georgia, Sochi, Ukraine & Poland.

Thank you for checking it out and giving impressions. Is readability of the small print in the g1000 decent with the Q2?

Now to figure out a VR headset that will accommodate my enormous melon (72.5 IPD).

I have to lean in to read the G1000 in some planes with the Quest 2, or use the “VR zoom” function. With the Reverb G2, I don’t.

So I’ve decided to dive back into this, but I’m having the weirdest issue with this game; at night, the shadows flicker in the cockpit.

I’ve tried DX11 and DX12, verified my Steam files (not sure how to do the MS-downloaded files). I’ve tried all settings in the graphics options. I’ve tried both displayport and HDMI, different monitors, G-Sync on and off. I’ve shut off the factory overclock on my GPU. None of it makes any sense. Temps are perfectly fine (my 3080 won’t hit 70 even with everything maxed out).

The weird thing is, that’s the ONLY place and time I see anything weird; even when looking from outside of the plane, I can see the “light” flickering inside the cockpit. When back in my pilot’s seat, I can look down in the cockpit so I just see the controls, and no flickering so it seems an issue with the transition between the cabin lighting and the world. This lines up with also turning off the cabin light and still seeing it (albeit less-pronounced). I can fly during the day with zero flickering.

I’ve noticed several complaints online about this, but nobody seems to have come up with a sure-fire solution (and I’ve tried all I could find).

Anyone have ideas/suspicions?

edit - and yes, I have the most up to date driver

I updated my Darwin Airstrip add-on. Now compiled for SU7, and the power poles that make the landing challenging had somehow gone missing at some point.

https://flightsim.to/file/16401/darwin-airstrip-near-death-valley-national-park

Let me tell ya, lining up the power lines was a bitch!

Worth it, though. Check out this real-life approach.

@Dan_Theman, is this in all the planes?