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

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?

Good question; my “main” plane is the one with the rear-facing propeller. I did try a plane with no cabin lights aside from the instrumentation and it was fine. I’ll test some more after work.

I took off from Yakutsk and made my way West the other day, back towards Lake Baikaal. I used live weather and timing, and the sun was just setting, and the whole city was covered in Snow in the simulator. (No screenshots, sorry). Orange sky on white everywhere! Gorgeous.

I saw some climate related thing the other day that listed the energy needs of Russia being really really high, and that makes sense. It’s a low population country but it’s soooooo vast, with people spread out so far. As I flew over so much of it, I realized what a Herculean effort it must have taken to build those railroads and power lines to all these regions, and eventually roads. Some of the roads to these places are still being built.

You don’t need to tell me that, I played Snowrunner.

Huh. This does seem to be specific to certain plane(s). Flew in on a Cessna jet and played around with the lights all the time; no issues.

edit - just played around with the graphics settings and now it’s back on the new plane. Weird. I’m going to do the painful thing and reinstall the game. Who knows; maybe it’s faster now than it was when I first installed? (j/k)

Oh hey, they’ve added some kind of jet, an F18. Awesome :) Now I just need it to have infinite fuel.

So I decided to do a “quick” reinstall and just did the Steam portion instead of the roughly 170GB from Microsoft, because that would be a relatively quick test. Even though the files verified beforehand, reinstalling seems to have completely fixed the issue; the most-offending plane (the Icon A5) was just flown through Manhattan with nary a flicker or blip on ultra settings. Speaking of which, the Brooklyn Bridge can really sneak up on you if you’re not paying attention.

Anyway, I wonder if some lightmap or DLL or whatever got overwritten and the reinstall solved the issue. I’ll never know, I suppose. Well, back to flying!