Do you buy these directly in game?
9/3 developer update
tldr: there is a second patch which is in final testing. They will provide additional information including patch notes and release date in next weekās developer update.
Hereās their top priorities and wishlist. More detailed list of problems they are working on is in the developer update.
Hereās a nice municipal runway in Carolina Beach, NC. Imagine having planes landing in your backyard.
I flew an approach entirely by autopilot in the Cayman Islands. 15 kt crosswind (which is impossible in most of North America given the 225/3 bug.) The AP put the plane down precisely in the middle of the runway, using the wind to push it onto centerline just at touchdown. But when I say the middle of the runway, I also mean the middle of the length of the runway too. Luckily the TBM has a short stopping distance.
We have a place like that right by here in Chandler called Stellar Airpark. A few of the houses over there have hangars.
Yes sir. Under the Marketplace tab on the main screen, then if you donāt see it on the highlighted specials content, select, āOfficial Content,ā tab.
Iāve yet to do this. I tired a few times this afternoon and just fell back into standard landings, which I need more practice at anyway. It just never, ākicked in,ā when I chose it.
That airstrip is quite cool. Carolina Beach is so small it makes me wonder where itās at there? Iāve been flying nearby there in Wilmington, KILM. There are some awesome views up and down the Eastern coastline. I should fly down into the Caribbean
Also a beautiful praise video:
4/5 from the Daily Star, the last bastion of games journalism.
We can laugh at a few of the ratings. They deserve the praise though. This is an amazing experience of a game. The number of, āwow,ā moments is pretty high.
Iām thinking about taking the plunge ā debating about GamePass, too. A few questions for you guys:
- I donāt expect the entire world to be in wonderful detail. But are there parts of the world that have gotten more attention? I used to fly on āPilotEdge,ā a network in which you have to talk to human air traffic controllers, and it was confined to the US southwest. It would be nice to have just that area in higher detail. But Iād settle for a highly-detailed Seattle area, say.
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Are the iPhone head-tracking apps better than TrackIR? I have TrackIR but I get annoyed having to wear a hit with the sensor, and sometimes the tracking is wonky. Do the iPhone apps work if the room is a bit dark? My screen still illuminates my face, so I would hope it works.
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I have a ProFlight Yoke system that I havenāt used for a couple years. I used to fly with it using XPlane. Any idea whether it will work well with MSFS? I imagine there are much better yokes by now?
Thanks in advance!
Here are the areas you can expect to be fairly close to real life. My experience is that the features that diverge the most from real-life even in these photorealistic / photogrammetric areas are bridges which often donāt look at all the same as they do in real life unless theyāve hand crafted them (they even sometimes appear underwater with cars driving across them anyway) and the shoreline, where docks and boats tied up actually are underwater š.
Rumor has it that Seattle and surrounding area in particular looks good, because thatās where Microsoft is located. I do know they have had batches of journalist fly out to Seattle for press briefings and demos, so that would also point to them wanting Seattle in particular to be well done.
Tucson is on the list of photoglamourized cities but you may be amused as I was to see that the rivers in town all have water in them.
Thanks for the info. I actually think 341 cities is a surprisingly impressive list. And yes, I mentioned Seattle deliberately, as I imagine MS would want to model that area particularly well.
Sorry to hear about those Arizona rivers!
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Strangely, for the vast majority of your time in-game itās perfectly fine even without the extended data. The game excels at about 500ft AGL on up. Everything will look amazingly REAL from that distance, and the weather will look light years beyond most other sims Iāve seen, at times anyway. Youāll see real rainclouds develop and from a distance see the rain, rainbows, etc. Massive thunderstorms are just crazy to fly toward up high, etc. Below 500 feet, things still look good, but we tend to see the things that donāt look right and focus on them: bridges that arenāt right, cars that drive on the dirt and not the road, roads that look like 2-D dark textures, sunken docks, houses or buildings with the wrong texture or height, etc. But there is still something there. Youāll probably see your house, or where you work, or grew up, or something recognizable.
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Iām able to manually add both my older joysticks. They were never great in the first place and I think I sadly threw away my older thrustmaster yoke, otherwise Iād attempt to use it. If you can plug in your yoke and windows recognizes it, all of the controls can be mapped in-game most likely. The thing you might miss is a BUILT IN mapping, and they have those for surprisingly few systems as yet (prior to this next patch anyway.)
Monsoon season! :)
The rivers flow for like two days out of the whole season, hehe, and if they were ever as full as MSFS showed them there would be problems.
Thanks for the helpful replies. So has anyone tried an iPhone head-tracking app?
Yes, Iāve been using Head Tracker. You can try it for free, and itās only $2. Found it works best with the iPhone on a stand or small tripod, behind the keyboard.
I havenāt compared it directly to TrackIR ā my TrackIR 5 is in a box somewhere in my scary office closet ā but it feels comparable. It works, but itās a bit weird now that Iām used to VR.
That HP Reverb G2 canāt come fast enoughā¦
For you and me both, Denny. I canāt wait. Do we have any clue when they are doing the full announcement? I know testing/review units went out many months ago.
The last rumors I heard on the G2 were October. I watched a livestream with the hardware team about a week ago and they were talking about tweaks they had just done to it, so Iām guessing we wonāt see it in September.
Iād rather them get it right before shipping out. I remember one of the reviewers who glowed about it did mention a few things he thought they should tweak. Head adjustment like the Valve Index was one.
Uptopic we had a discussion about loading speeds and I was going to post the performance of my new Sabrent m.2 drive. I tested it last week but forgot to post until I was reminded by someone claiming ssd performance doesnāt matter for gaming in the upcoming graphics cards topic.
| Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) tests | Crucial MX300 1TB | Sabrent Rocket 2TB |
|---|---|---|
| Load to āPress Any Keyā | 1:45 | 1:10 |
| Load to āPress Any Keyā skipping videos | 1:12 | 0:39 |
| Load to opening menu | 4:36 | 2:17 |
| Load Courcheval challenge | 0:45 | 0:39 |
Kinda feels like it matters. Newer SSD technology plus m.2 vs SATA makes a huge difference on my system. āSkipping videosā is using the -Fastlaunch flag on a custom shortcut. The āload to opening menuā numbers may not be directly comparable because the sim does an online check for updates and that time might have varied slightly between the two tests.