Agreed, even the relocation fees don’t hurt. They are supposedly working on lots of features and will include fines and stuff…the sooner the better if you ask me.
As long as they don’t go overboard, that is. A friend of mine just started flying for an Austrian VA and their flight tracker is ridiculous. She gets penalised for ending the flight before the engines cool down enough, for example. That’s a little too immersive for my taste!
Dejin
4050
What’s the current state of VR on MSFS? I seem to recall when VR was first added it was pretty rough for anyone not on high-end hardware – I would be running on an RTX 2080 on an original Oculus Rift.
I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get a better understanding of how flying actually works and going through Stick and Rudder which I saw recommended in multiple locations as a real classic on the fundamentals. I thought flying in VR might give me a better sense of what’s going on. The book really emphasizes how angle-of-attack works and how the pilot feels a sense of sinking or slipping as the direction of the plane diverges from where it’s pointed. But I’m not really feeling these sensations at all in 2D.
For those with more simulator experience, is moving to VR likely to help with this?
With the caveat that I’ve not flown VR in MSFS, only in P3D, the main thing I found that it improved (aside from the general “wow, I’m really flying!” feeling) was being able to more accurately perceive height above ground. You get a lot of depth cues when you’re landing from your 3D vision that go away when you’re in 2D, which can make landing precisely difficult. That got a lot easier for me in VR.
In the end I gave up on it because performance was meh, and my old Rift’s resolution was low enough that trying to look at gauges with it gave me a headache before too long. Still a cool feeling, though.
On another note… I caved and bought the DC6. (Had it for P3D and loved it, but for some reason wasn’t super-excited about its MSFS release. Then it came out and I had to have it.)
Just had a nice flight EBBR-LSGG. Most of it was in overcast so I didn’t see much scenery, and trying to time descent over the mountains into the VOR at the start of the ILS approach so that I didn’t have a CFIT, but also didn’t end up needing to descend sharply and go way overspeed on the approach, in a plane I’m not used to, using altimeter, VSI, and DME only, was a fun challenge.
What I was looking at on my descent.
Finally broke through the ceiling when I entered the valley.
Made for a nice final approach.
Gratuitous glamor shot:
I had the same thing over this weekend flying the RNAV approach into Kathmandu in the A32NX. Clouds were as low as 5000ft (runway elevation is around 4400ft). As if that approach wasn’t stressful enough!
Lovely shots @kaosfere . Happy with the DC-6 then?
Thanks! And yeah. I was pretty frustrated at first, because my first few flights all ended up with unexplained engine failure, almost always in the #1 engine. Posted on the PMDG forum about it, got a couple other folks with similar complaints. Seems like it might be related to the autofeathering. One guy said his brother had the same sort of problem, and the only thing they did different was that he always pushed cold and dark when it hit the tarmac. Whereas his brother was just loading in on the ramp and going right to the AFE’s pre-flight checklist, which was what I’ve been doing too.
So my last two flights I’ve made sure to explicitly set C&D when the plane loads, and on top of that I’ve disabled the autofeather system after the flight engineer turns it on in the before-takeoff flow. The two combined have made my last two flights trouble-free. Now that I’m not fighting issues, I really like it, yeah. The radials sound amazing, and I love going old school VOR to VOR at 20000’ with old birds like that. (Turned that optional GPS off the first time I got in it :D )
Next time I fly it I’m going to leave the autofeather system on and see if just hitting the C&D button is enough to keep it happy for me.
Shot from my second flight of the day, Olympic Air over Athens on the way to Rome.
Ouch, glad that’s sorted! Yeah they did a particularly good job with the sounds, that much is clear even on Youtube videos. I don’t think it’ll be long before I buy it too.
Reddit has had a few posts about the DC-6. It’s not just the #1, some have had #4 problems as well. Someone suggested a few things to prevent the issue from what they’ve seen but I apologize I do not remember the details. That being said, the solution was to treat the offending engine a bit different from the others, which fixed the issue. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or a feature based on the complexity of their models. It may be a little of both.
The slip and sink feeling you talk about is mostly tactile. Your inner ear, your butt and your brain work to make that happen. As good as simming is these days with VR and such, there is no way yet to put virtual input to an inner ear, and to the butt is… shaky at best.
VR does make a huge difference to flight simulation. Your sense of “being there”, your awareness of what is where, going what way and at what speed is tremendously improved through goggles. Even if they are myopic as fuck as the og rift is.
I personally mostly get my kicks from flying fighters doing the swirly tango or raging through a valley to deliver 2000 pounds of democracy. For that, VR is just the bees’ knees.
If your kick is to fly the needles precisely in order to get your twenty tonnes of rubber dogshit into Kai Tak through the soup, you may want to hold off until you get a G2.
The 2080 should have plenty oomph to make a rift fly.
Interesting. I had a quick look for those but couldn’t find them. (The ones about the engines, anyway). It was indeed the #4 for me one time. If you manage to remember/find more on that, can you send it my way?
Thanks!
No worries:
Hopefully something in there might help.
Interesting! One of the user mentions warm-up, but I had it happen at one point even after I made a point to perform a full engine run-up to make sure everything was nice and happy. Keeping the pumps on high is an interesting tidbit.
I’ll try my flight with autofeather off next and see what happens, then maybe play with some of those.
Thanks for the link!
No worries. I’m subbed to /r/flightsim and /r/microsoftflightsim on reddit. A lot of issues or notes get posted there but amount 3/4 of them both are screenshots. Nothing wrong with that but it’s nothing like avsim or similar with much more detailed discussions, etc.
I need my chunks of information in short bursts. Reddit works for that … sometimes.
JMR
4062
The PMDG DC-6 is got me back into flightsimming again. I can’t say no to an old school radial engine bird like the DC-6 with a cockpit of steam gauges and a thousand switches to keep Grogu occupied for hours on end.
The PMDG tutorials are filled with nuggets of info about radial engines that I knew nothing about like not cutting the throtlles to idle on descent like you would in a jet. As described here you could end up with metal spalling which leads to all sorts of maintenance issues - I like how he keeps a bag of metal as a reminder when he flies his personal DC-3.
If you’re interested in historical routes check out this thread over at PMDG forums.
You can find a bunch of timetables by former airlines at this site.. The list of airlines that operated at one time or another in the USA is just staggering.
I’d like to try my hand at flying The Hump through the treacherous Himalayas. . Although the DC-6 never flew this route the DC-4 did. Some of the articles about this route are quite harrowing with 24/7 operations in foul weather. It was all done by landmarks, dead reckoning or primitive radio beacons. A pilot today has immense flight planning capability that can be done with an Ipad and a ForeFlight subscription while those poor bastards in the China Burma India theater flew by the seat of their pants. I’m trying to find satellite imagery of this area from WW2 but no luck so far.
Someone made the PDF checklists into the in-the-sim format:
I sense this phrase must mean something different to flight simmers :)
https://thebuttkicker.com/
Way back in the FS9 days, someone did an amazing Hump scenery package which included airfields, historically placed navigation beacons, and flight maps and plans. I could never get the actual scenery to work even in P3D, but I think the flight planning info might be useful to you in this endeavor. You can get it at DC3 Airways:
https://www.dc3airways.net/flights/charters/the_ultimate_hump.htm
And, yes, Time Table Images is an amazing site. I’ve used it for years when doing vintage flying. To the point, actually, where I once made a local archive of it on my machine in case it ever went down. There’s way too much good stuff there to lose to the vagueries of the internet.
Every flight I’ve made in my DC6 so far has been pulled from a real route found there.
Looks like Sim Update 5 is bringing some serious optimisation (presumably at least some of this is a side benefit of the Xbox port). Demo starts about 8 minutes in.
