Great idea, thanks! I’ve been ill this week so I don’t have the energy to set it up today but I may have questions for you guys later in the week. Or hopefully not, and it all goes smoothly.
You don’t actually use the in-game ATC do you?!
Depends on my mood. :D Although, more recently I’ve been making heavy use of P2ATC when I feel like pretending to actually care about following sky-rules. The stock ATC is… better than prior versions, but still needs a lot of work.
And down and down little Alice fell, deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
Next stop: VR and rudder pedals.
Hold up. What’s P2ATC?
Also, first solo today.
It’s one of the better third-party ATC programs. Main downside is it’s heavily built around voice, so you have to get over feeling like an even BIGGER dork talking to your computer while you sim. But I have little shame in such areas.
Nice! How’d it go?
VR’s optional. I honestly thought I’d use my Rift a lot in P3D but the quality was never what I wanted it to be. Maybe with the newer generation of headsets it would be different, though. Definitely takes it to whole other realm in terms of immersion, though.
Rudder pedals, OTOH, are mandatory. :D Especially if you fly tail-draggers, but more for having two full brake axes than anything else. My CH pedals are plain looking as heck but have held up to years of being kicked around on a dusty floor without a single complaint.
On P3D with a Rift, VR was a cool tease.
On MSFS with a G2, it’s pretty freaking amazing.
@IkeVandergraaf, can’t wait to hear about the solo!
I agree, the g2 has enough of a resolution to be truly playable. You get about the same pixel density as a monitor, but also mad immersion and depth perception. I don’t think I could even land IFR without VR anymore, let alone do things like aerial refuelling or gunnery.
VR is a game changer for flight Sims. I don’t think I could go back. As far as talking to my computer, I already use voiceattack, which is incredibly helpful when you can’t see the keyboard, so I will definitely look into P2ATC.
Solo went well. But it’s really the ultimate pass/fail. Did a few laps with the instructor and then one by myself. Full stop, was going to do another, but I had a wonky mic button and I was shaking with adrenaline so I decided I should get to the office instead. :)
Flying a real airplane is much more difficult than flying a Sim, and much more terrifying. Takeoff and landing I was fine, but tower extended my downwind for 3 miles and that was what got in my head. Airplanes are powered by flimsy Magick, which depend on your belief that they work. 3 miles is enough time to doubt the airplane magic, which is very scary. But then tower called my base, and I overshot final, and with tasks to do, I was able to get out of my head and had a really smooth landing.
Thanks for asking. A buddy of mine from work who is also a pilot came to the airport to watch, what ch was really nice. Apparently it’s a big deal.
Congrats on your first solo! I’m interested in getting my PPL as well, and hoping to start on it this year.
I’ve heard some people say that real flying is actually easier than sim-flying in some ways, primarily because you can actually feel the g-forces, inner ear sensations, and yoke pressure which you can’t get in a simulator. I know that I find adjusting elevator trim to be extremely tedious in the simulator because I can’t feel how the yoke is responding, and therefore it ends up being a lengthy process of trial and error, making tiny adjustments and then waiting to see how the plane drifts, then adjusting again.
Not to mention that, since I don’t do VR, just turning the camera to look around at the instruments and out the windows is kind of annoying in the simulator.
Do you find any of these things to be easier in a real plane?
Yes. Adjusting trim for example is easier as you mentioned. A lot of the tasks that are awkward in a Sim (adjusting radios and displays for example) are easier in a real plane. Communicating with ATC is a lot tougher. I find the task saturation to be more difficult in a real plane. I also found landing to be challenging - it took me weeks and I’m still not great at it. There’s also the pressure of potential death that I find somewhat exhausting. There’s also the exhilaration of flying over the Arizona desert which is just breathtaking.
There’s also the studying. Learning to fly is one part of getting a private pilot license. There’s a lot of book learning. The FAA doesn’t want to make this easy.
Approaching Irkutsk, over 100 miles out.
And as I get closer, about 30 miles out. What’s this? Is that a really tall building in that town up ahead? An obelisk?
Hmmm, getting closer, maybe a skyscraper?
Yes, I guess so! Seems really isolated and strange place to have a skyscraper. An AI error perhaps.
Looking it up in Google Maps, it looks like a really tall silo. So not bad Flight Simulator.
That was Angarsk btw, a very interesting city. I wonder if it accidentally evolved the way it did with large green spaces right in the middle of the city? Anyway, very interesting to fly through.
And then I finally got to Irkutsk, which is gorgeous.
Nice. Making good progress over there. At least Russia looks fairly normal; I did a couple of flights over China and it looked pretty terrible, but I need to explore further to see if that’s just a badly rendered area.
Got to do a few flights yesterday with the new stick and throttle, remapped a couple of buttons etc. It feels a little bit more immediate, I guess? Definitely there were times when I was going, this is great, but I haven’t pinned down what that is yet.
One disappointment is the trim wheel on the throttle is ridiculously sensitive - to the point that I had to turn it off because every time I put my hand on the throttle I would nudge the wheel and the plane would point straight up into the air. I haven’t identified if I can alter that sensitivity yet. I really only bought the throttle because of the trim wheel :P
But good overall. It’s the way to go! Will have to start thinking about VR sometime down the line, like @schurem says :)
I have the exact opposite problem. I’d love to use the wheel on my X52 throttle but I have to spin it dozens of times per one percent of trim, it’s totally unusable. I didn’t see any way of adjusting the sensitivity. So I’m forced to use a hat switch which really isn’t ideal at all.
That’s a pain! There is some configuration software with the Thrustmaster and I’m hoping I can do something in there, but at the same time it’s a faff.
I never actually thought of trying the wheels, which I now use for ALT and VS, but I had all sorts of issues when I had trim bound to various other rotational axes on the throttle. It couldn’t seem to remember the neutral setting, so often it would go crazy until I did a full range calibration in flight. I don’t think I have anything bound to trim at the moment, which isn’t ideal, but not such a huge issue in autopilot planes. Now I’ve got the rest of my controls settled I might have another go at rebinding trim.
If y’all will forgive me a little bit of self-promotion, we were guests again on today’s Developer Q&A, and Matt revealed that we’ve been working on a completely new, ground-up simulation of the G1000 NXi. It’s going to include a further evolution of the flight plan manager we have in our CJ4, and bring to the stock systems features including procedure turns, DME arcs, RF legs, holds, manual terminations, coupled VNAV and full RNAV simulations.
It’ll be a drop-in replacement for the G1000 in the current base game, and will serve as the testbed for bringing this and other functionality to everything else in the sim, too.
We’ve released a tiny little teaser which shows the work-in-progress system flying a few of the new leg types. We’re hoping to have a longer demo video out with a more comprehensive walk-through some time in the coming weeks.
That is all! 8D
Oh, that looks super cool! Soooo glad they pulled you guys in as official help.
Never hesitate to promote the cool stuff y’all are up to. Gonna have to watch the Dev Q&A recording!