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

Games
#4912

That’s fair. I’m not especially concerned about the flight models in general; never having flown a plane I’d never know the difference anyway. But, like you, I was concerned about the amount of hand flying required. I’m not a particular fan of GA at the best of times, and the really unstable ones just get on my tits. That’s why I’ve never bought the Kodiak despite all my friends shouting at me to do so.

I’m properly testing the Twin Otter tonight; I’m already on the second leg of a little Central American tour I hastily scribbled down earlier. I remain impressed aside from the sound issues noted earlier. It’s a very easy aircraft to fly, the GNS530 is competent (especially when modded), the autopilot behaves itself and it comes with a very generous number of variants, including a skydiving variant. Easily worth the 30-odd EUR I paid for it.

#4913

It does a little bit of everything. Passenger or cargo carry, skis for snow takeoff/landing, floats for water takeoff/landing, large tires and the ability to do STOL on land, even non-runway terrain. It’s a workhorse. Combined with that, it’s also a common entry in all of the add-on career games that play with MSFS 2020. There are tons of really cool videos on YouTube about how they perform.

#4914

So reading the official forum, which is always a gripe-fest, the Twin Otther sound is apparently preliminary because they only just got the real recordings, and they do plan to tweak the audio.

Only flat-out bug I’ve seen is that the outbound VOR doesn’t work properly. I usually use GPS if the plane has it, so not a huge deal. I got my “learn VOR navigation” out of the way with the Commodore 64 version, where it was critical!.

I bought this from Marketplace because they said it’s coming to Xbox. First time I’ve had a marketplace purchase work without intervertion from Zendesk in months.

#4915

The outbound VOR does work inasmuch as it will fly the radial you select in NAV mode, however the CDI will be fully deflected which is obviously pretty disconcerting and makes hand flying an outbound radial next to impossible.

It’s a pretty glaring bug but I’m sure Aerosoft will address it. I have a feeling the aircraft was released slightly too early…

#4916

The metro area of Manilla was in the news yesterday on NPR, so while listening to a podcast today, I flew around Manilla.

image
image1920×1080 517 KB

There’s just so much color everywhere! I didn’t even know what I should take a screenshot of to be indicative of the vibrancy of the colors of this city.

image
image1920×1080 698 KB

image
image1920×1080 739 KB

image
image1920×1080 692 KB

I always instinctively fly towards mountains when I see them in the distance. I should have known these hills would be just as crowded as the rest of the city.

image
image1920×1080 911 KB

I didn’t really do it justice, it’s very cool from the air. I’m not sure what it is like to be in a city that crowded on the ground, but seeing it from the air is really neat. The hills around the city are gorgeous too, some great views there.

I sort of want to go back there as part of a Bush trip that’s a guided tour.

#4917

A lot bigger than I expected. I know the Philippines have some great natural sights too, might be worth a return trip!

#4918

So this thing takes Bing Maps and topological data etc and feeds it through an algorithm to generate the terrain. Could it use a different algorithm and assets to produce a different planet…?

#4919

I mean, yeah? If you fed it the data in the right format.

#4920

Star Wars tie-in ahoy!

#4921

But we already have the Earth’s data with all its cities and mountains and lakes and rivers and islands. To make one for a fictional planet would likely take a lot of work, I would think. So I’m not sure if this would be a good method of generating a fictional planet.

#4922

No, it would be a terrible method. It’s designed for the needs of flight simulation, on Earth. So a lot of work has gone in to making it work with the data that exists for Earth, and with the limitations of the Blackshark algorithm, that have basically no relevance on other worlds which don’t have the same datasets, or landscape features, or buildings.

#4923

I few the Twin Otter on a couple of flights yesterday. The sound was jarring and very noticeable. Good to hear they are fixing that. I’m very unpracticed on it and was having to hunt around for what I needed. It’ll take a little bit of time to work through that.

One thing I noticed on my second flight was that I wasn’t paying attention when right up at my destination I still had autopilot on. It auto-turned as if on approach and I’m pretty sure I did NOT have approach on. Did something change on auto-pilot within the last couple of patches?

I also was looking at some other planes and based on descriptions, went and picked up pms50.com’s GTN750 GPS. Has anyone loaded it and have any observations with it?

#4924

Were you using radio navigation or flying a GPS track? If the latter, that might explain it as many flight plans include the track all the way up to the runway (and beyond, for the missed approach procedure).

If you were using radio navigation I can’t imagine how that happened, as NAV will disable after reaching the VOR.

I’ve been using that since it was a thing, so to be honest I couldn’t tell you what it improves because I don’t remember what stock was like! By the way you might want to try “MSFS Community Downloader” from flightsim.to. It keeps track of some popular mods and that includes all the best Garmin mods including that one.

One little tip for the Twin Otter: might not help anyone here but I wish I’d been told. When flying at night there’s only one cockpit light that will illuminate the power, prop and condition levers. On the overhead there’s a light marked “general”. Switch that to bright or dim and they will be lit up - without it you literally cannot see them. That made for a few frustrating flights before I figured it out!

#4925

I was indeed. I selected airport to airport, I just don’t remember it automatically turning for a runway before. It could be either that changed since I last flew, which has been a while, or I normally clicked off GPS for manual pattern and approach.

Much appreciated, I would have run into this on my first night flight.

#4926

Twin Otter update is out. Looking at the changelog hopefully it will sound a lot better, and it looks like the most annoying issues (outbound CDI, autopilot altitude hold) have been fixed. I’ll find out shortly!

#4927

Paradroid you purchased off the Microsoft store, right? I purchased from them directly. I’ll have to log in and check for the update.

#4928

No, I never purchase from the marketplace. Microsoft already have my money, I prefer 100% mod costs to go to the devs. :)

I’m performing my first post-update flight now; I’ll report back soon. I can already say sounds are better. And you can’t start the engines without the fuel pumps being on any more, heh.

#4929

OK, first flight done and on the basis of it alone, so far I am impressed. I couldn’t fully evaluate the sound because I wasn’t in a quiet environment but I think they’re better.

Other than that, great update. The aircraft didn’t blow through my target altitude in VS mode, it followed the ILS all the way down to decision height, and the outbound CDI on the HSI now works properly. There’s even a GPWS inhibit switch now for those who want it.

For my next flight I will try a full flight plan in the Garmin (eurgh) just to see. But yeah, basically it’s quite a big improvement.

#4930

I’m having a hell of a time getting Neofly to play nice with the Twin Otter. I’ve added it to the database, first just as “Twin Otter”, and when it didn’t like that using the full name the sim spits out. But the main issue is that whenever I hit “connect & fly”, it basically kills the left engine. It will spin up if I turn the starter on, but never “takes”, and there isn’t enough power to fly.

#4931

Sorry for the possibly insulting question, but are you switching the fuel booster pumps on? That’s now a necessity before starting the engines.