You don’t understand scharmers. It’s only on sale for a limited time!
They should have listed the price at $50 and had $40 be the sale price.
That looks absolutely incredible. Will have to put it on the list.
Ah, I realised later we were probably talking at cross purposes. It’s a bush trip, so all very basic VFR I’m afraid. Turn right at the large tree, that type of thing :P
There’s quite a bit of text too, so I dunno how that will look in VR.
Very hard le nope’o on that F-15. I already have it in DCS and it’s one of the boringest jets in that. And that’s with it’s radar and missiles usable!
If I bought a premium plane for MSFS I would want all of the detail in FM and cockpit interaction, but also a great big bubble canopy and preferably awesome short-field performance. An AV-8B for example would be perfect for sight-seeing and cloud-surfing.
That said, I own the MB-339, for the simple reason that the Cessna’s were too dang slow for my taste, and the bigger default planes were too unfamiliar. The pit of the -339 felt immediately recognizable to me, felt comfortable. But if that level of FM and systems modelling is the state of the art for MSFS, I don’t see why I’d buy every remotely interesting machine available.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t sneering at non-rivet-countery models. There’s a lot to be said for “jump in and fly” planes and there are some that I hold dear. My main point was that, given the pricing trends in MSFS, $40 for “just” a casual model – and not a great one at that – is a bit hard to swallow. Wanted to make sure that didn’t come off snottier than intended. :)
Scharmers I would steer clear for now …
So I picked up the F-15 because I owned the P3D version, so it was only $14.
FWIW, I’m not seeing the FPS issues some are seeing in VR. Perhaps because I rolled back my Nvidia drivers based on the recent issues and I’m using the ones the guy who’s spent dozens of hours researching VR performance on the Microsoft FlightSim forum recommended. I did some VR flying from Edwards AFB to Palmdale and all was nice and smooth.
This wasn’t an option for me since since the F-15 is one of the half-dozen real planes I actually have stick time in – I was totally going to get it. But given that my F-15D flight was 26 years ago, I’m not about to judge the flight model accuracy. :)
Agreed the price is too high for MSFS. The going price on planes seems to be $15-25, and that seems reasonable for a more mainstream crowd. $40 when Dean is 100% direct that this is a “fun” recreation and not study-level is out of line.
If anyone picks it up and does have frame rate issues in VR, apparently finding and disabling the HUD in the config files cleans it up. But I’m not having problems here.
How does she fly, Denny? Any screenshots inside?
I like it. The flight model feels good. I do have about 20 minutes of stick time in the back of an F-15D, but that was in 1994 so I’d be lying if I said I could judge the accuracy now. :) I will say that without G forces threatening to black you out and make you vomit, there’s very little that flight sims have in common with real high-performance aircraft no matter how much switchology they master…
But the cockpit looks good, the exterior is great (keep in mind that there might be some distortion in these shots due to the ridiculous 5120x1440 resolution I’m playing in), and the roll rate, etc feels similar to what I remember. The plane feels powerful but has “weight” to it, which feels right.
It does max out at Mach 1, and Asobo’s flight model video they released today does note that supersonic flight support is in the wings for later this year.
(Note these screenshots came from an ultra-super-duper-widescreen monitor, so you have to click them to see the parts that the forum software cropped out.)
Then, without supersonic flight support, how is that the Eurofighter which appeared today in the MS Store for a mere $19.99 can support flight up to Mach 2? Not sure, but I can tell you it feels WAY more video-game-ey than the F-15. Never been in an Eurofighter, of course, and it’s FBW which the F-15 isn’t, so there might be some reality to it, but I get the impression the current flight modeling is about as realistic as its high-res C64 cockpit:
It does look good, and it goes super-fast, and the sim does keep up with the speed; no issues streaming in terrain at Mach 2.
That said, if I was buying one or the other, the F-15 feels a lot more like a real plane, both with regard to the cockpit design and actually flying it.
Both models look a hell of a lot better than I expected. We’re getting beyond ports at this point, these look quite legit. Wonder what the BROE livery stands for?
“Broe do you even Mach 2?”
Separately, judging from the Reddit, they seem to be making decent progress on the shallow water masking, at least in the Caribbean. I hope they publish something official showing what areas they’ve covered and what they’re planning to do next.
So I’m guessing that everyone here agrees that the MB339 is currently the best “wot goes fast” plane we’ve got in MSFS
I believe the technical term for “wot goes fast” is this:
And it’s not even that fast, it just feels fast. Maxes out at about mach 0.6, 0.7 maybe? Cruises at 0.5. A big tubeliner is considerably faster.
Yeah, the MB-339 remains my most-flown plane, with the Savage Grravel my go-to for bush/slow flying.
That Eurofighter livery is an anniversary camouflage based on a WW2 Spitfire paint.
I though the Eurofighter cockpit was overly simplified, but turns out the real plane is really light on switches, etc. too:
I’d say the MB-339 for speedy sightseeing, but the F-15 is nicer if you want to fly at Mach 1. (And it’ll get a speed upgrade later this year when Asobo supports supersonic flight.)
I wonder if they’re also working on a way to stream in scenery faster from the server too so that your game can actually handle going through pretty scenery at super-fast speeds. I suppose you can always download a whole bunch of the terrain you’re going to fly over to your local machine first.
I think I’ll grab the MB-339 then.
Looks like a big update coming for the F-15, enabling a realistic top speed… From the DC Designs Facbook page:
FRIDAY UPDATE:
So, this week has been a bit “manic” to say the least. The feedback from the launch of the F-15 Eagles package has been overwhelmingly positive and equally vast, literally hundreds of messages both here and to Just Flight. There have been a few bugs of course but they’re being ironed out, and a lot of uses had their simulators on “Legacy” flight model mode, hence the control difficulties. Thanks to all who have purchased the Eagles so far, and I hope that you’re enjoying them!
I have a bug list of fixes for an update next week, but first I want to share a huge piece of news with everyone: I have worked out how to reach Mach 2 in MSFS using the Modern flight model. I’m not actually the first to figure this out, but I now know how it’s done so the Eagles will be Mach 2 capable ( at altitude ) by next week! This also paves the way, of course, for Concorde
I am also working hard on upgrading the cockpit textures. This was stated as the one thing most folks wanted to see improved, so it’s underway. Resolution is being increased, lots of detail added, and this work will continue steadily until the Eagle cockpits are fully up to MSFS standard.
For those suffering from sudden loss of FPS in the cockpit, this has been traced to the HUD – not all suffer it, and it doesn’t appear to have any “pattern” to it that I can see, so I’m working on that right now. There is something unique about the HUD which, given how the sim wasn’t supposed to be able to support third-party HUDs, is probably understandable. I’m hoping to fix this soon! I will also optimise the LOD models for multiplayer and AI a bit, and see what’s wrong with the AI sound – the files are there, but folks say they’re not hearing them so will figure that out too,
There’s a huge amount of work for me to do, so it’s a short update this week – hope that you all continue to enjoy the Eagles and I’ll be back here with another update next week as always. Happy Friday!
ETA: The HUD issue might be down to it using .BMP projections, as with FSX and P3D. MSFS prefers .PNG and they seem to work the same, but have tiny file sizes in comparison. This might solve the FPS drop issue
Doing the Balkans bush trip for fun now. It’s decent, but I’m relying way to much on the magenta line as the instructions aren’t always clear. Had a nasty moment just now when it wouldn’t load (10 legs in); no other bush trip would load either, CTDs all round. But deleting the contents of the Community folder worked, thankfully, even though I had made no changes to it recently that might cause this.
Albania is surprisingly nice from the air :P
There’s a bush trip over on https://flightsim.to/file/5160/medieval-transalpine-trade-route that has some VORDME exercises built in; looks like it’s a bit beyond me at the moment but it might be interesting to some here.
I have not really been using FSEconomy as much as I used to, and almost never my DA62. I’ve been doing some flights in a rented 172 mostly out of practice for my RL education, which I am continuing. But half the time I forget to “start flight” so I don’t get credit for it.
Point is, I put down a down payment and a couple of payments on an expensive DA162, which I almost certainly will not be able to pay off. My preference would be to turn it over to you guys. My other options are to sell it, or surrender it to the bank. Do you guys want it?