I wouldn’t despair. I’m doing my PPL too at the moment and I’m finding MSFS is very good for procedural practice and also flying training in terms of ground reference maneuvers, cross country navigation and a whole host of other things. Using the WB-SIM C172 -with some of my own tweaks- I’m getting adverse yaw nicely. And yesterday my new Turtle Beach rudder pedals turned up…and it was only then I realised just how bad my Logitech ones were.
4 Likes
You’re implying I’m completely ignorant of the technical issues in flight model development.
No, I’m not a “professional” flight model developer but I’ve spent more than enough time prototyping flight applications in game engines (oh, I can hear the laughter now;-) and other open source flight apps to have an understanding of the complexity and other issues.
I hack around with the MSFS SDK enough that I can understand the issues developers are facing, and enough that I can tweak some issues I have with some planes on my own.
So I’m no expert, and never claimed to be. But again, that’s not the point. It is what it is. It’s “under development”.
No amount of jumping up and down shouting about how “unrealistic” it is is going to change that is my point.
“realistic” to whom? It seems that is an open topic as much as this one is.
I’ll double down and say that despite all the issues the sim currently has there are at least a handful of planes that exhibit good enough flight characteristics and systems depth to satisfy someone after the fabled “study level” experience within a bounded box of use cases.
And there’s plenty more throughout the range to have a lot of fun with, at various levels of depth.
If none of that floats your boat, or raises your wings, then you’ll just have to wait until it is.
Anyway, I’m signing off this argument. The OP is great research to feed back to the devs, as long as it’s kept rational and objective, is really the whole point I keep making.
2 Likes
When its your own money on the line, I think it is prudent to be selfish.
Very true. You don’t really know until you’ve tried something better.
2 Likes
+10 to that. I stopped buy release planes some time back for exactly the same reasons.
The only exception I’ve made is the GF Astro One purely because it’s:
- Cheap enough to risk a loss on if it’s total ■■■■ (it’s not, it’s ok for a V1 for what it is)
- It supports a good team that is trying to innovate despite known issues and risks
- I’ve done a fair bit of drone FM prototyping in other engines & want to test their implementation
- I’m interested in radical flight experimentation that’s non-traditional
- I can give some focused feedback that might improve it [RELEASED] Astro ONE | Got Friends - #46 by Sonicviz
Onwards, upwards, & sideways!
It looks like ridiculous fun. GG are worth all the support they deserve.
There is nothing nefarious or conspiratory in what I‘m implying. If you have any experience dealing with the inner logic of corporations, it‘s a normal business reality that the MBA bean counters or external consultants suggest to follow the money trail and not „waste“ money on costly aeronautical engineering man-/brainpower, which said bean counters can not understand as a tangible investment against revenue at the point of sale. And if the majority of customers are gullible enough to buy the stuff without having a chance to try it first, hey, even better! High fives all around at the way to the bank.
It‘s different in the actual aeronautical industry, because aearonautical engineering excellence there means life or death, both literally and economically…
4 Likes
Please tell me about the “try before you buy” that has been in place over the 40 year history of the MSFS franchise throughout all the 1st and 3rd party marketplaces. Oh, wait…there hasn’t been…ever…afaik. Neither has their been one for DCS, P3D, X-Plane, Aerofly or any other flightsim afaik. I’m happy to be informed differently.
What I disagree with is your false framing of it as some unique conspiracy on the part of MSFS to defraud you. It’s just a standard game industry DLC business model. There is no MBA conspiracy.
It’s no different on Steam or EGS or Amazon etc etc. It’s a standard DLC model that has been in place for the game industry for a long time. Refunds even on steam/EGS are typically only given for the base game, rarely - if ever - for DLC for said games.
That doesn’t necessarilly make it right, but that’s how it’s been and how they work.
I also don’t disagree with the need to be able to demo this type of content either.
I’ve stated that many times, not just in this thread. I’ve even eaten my own lunch releasing a free lite version for my own addons.
But that’s a game industry wide issue as much as an MSFS issue, and changing it takes a community pushback effort.
There’s no need to make stories up about it though. Understanding industry economics also means understanding the history of said economics, especially in times of technological change. Of course they’re going to do their utmost to maxmise their profits. That doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.
A pushback effort needs to be accurate for starters, as you’ll never get taken seriously in the first place.
Epic’s legal case that resulted in Apple/Google reducing their developer cut from 30% to 15% for small business is a good example of +ve change that can flow from a spotlight being thrown onto exploitative business practices. Microsoft never followed through there, however, so read into that what you will.
PS: You are also discounting the regular SU and WU + other free content that is released. Sure, that’s a loss leader for MS, but that is a cost born by them, as is the ongoing development of the flight modelling, weather engine, living world, etc etc for the supposed 10 year life cycle of this version of MSFS. Whether you personally value that content (I suspect no, generally!) is irrelevent, because the market is not just you, it’s everyone.
You want change? Start a movement. But base it in fact, not fiction.
I’ve checked this, there are actually not that many aircraft with CFD activated on vtail and also elevator/rudder lift coef is 95% of the time default 5.
So there is some unused potential of the flight model.
Maybe other people can check their content as well for it, would be nice.
A reminder to keep this thread civil, and avoid posts aimed at other users, or their views/opinions. Active discussion is encouraged, but don’t let it become argumentative or drift off-topic.
4 Likes
Yes, would be nice if we could stop the emotional off topic discussions.
To find out if an aircraft has vtail CFD activated search in the flightmodel.cfg for:
- CFD_ReinjectVTailX
I always believed every aircraft with CFD activated would also simulate CFD on the v and htail, but it’s completely seperate, would be interesting to see how many developers actually using it.
additionally interesting for the other two important values, also in the flightmodel.cfg:
- elevator_lift_coef
- rudder_lift_coef
4 Likes
Can you share your tweaks of the WB-SIM C172? I would appreciate it.
I’ll share once I’m confident that they are not a regression! 
1 Like
Thanks for the information as always. Couple questions. What about with sweep of the stabilizer? Would you consider control surface percentage of the longest chord, mean chord? Also, what about if you have a rudder that is longer spanwise than the fin? Does the sim base its chord on the span of the htail since you can’t specify a span for the rudder? Perhaps this parameter is useful for those situations, like with a p-40, where the rudder wraps around the back of the tail lower than the fin. The sim probably thinks the rudder’s chord is too long.
I think there is indeed for DCS.
See this thread…and a good place where any further discussion of purchase models can be discussed and keep this for discussion of how adverse yaw has been modelled.
My understanding is that CFD for the htail is often disabled because it can create some wonky results, but I am realizing more and more this probably has to do with bad combinations of htail and elevator dimensions, lift coefficient, up down limit, max angle scalar, and effectiveness scalar. That’s the other important thing to pay attention to - elevator and rudder effectiveness under flight tuning. They scale the lift coefficients. I’ve seen some where the lift coefficient is set to 5 and effectiveness is scaled down. It seems like the best approach would be to calculate the lift coefficients as shown by
and then set the effectiveness scalars to 1, or only adjust them only if something still doesn’t seem right. Talking more to people like me - not a developer and I’m only doing this to experiment with planes and see what I can learn - the combination of the above seems really important to pay attention to. I changed some of the above on the new Maule M-7 over the weekend and was very pleased with the results. Yaw stability with CFD enabled is indeed more reasonable. Pitch sensitivity is no longer through the roof. There is noticeable adverse yaw even when I reduced the aileron drag coefficients down to .05 for down and .025 for up. I have never flown an M-7, so I’m comparing my results to an imaginary judgment, but at least now I know the numbers I adjusted came from a solid basis and weren’t just left at default. Now, if only there was a scalar for the size of the visual model, because it is a bit too big!
2 Likes
I still think a chunk of the yaw stability (and lack of adverse yaw) is coming from much-oversized vtail area values. I’m still waiting for an answer from Asobo on that.
2 Likes
Or perhaps if they are defined with accurate geometry, the flight model amplifies this somehow in a way we cannot discern by simply looking at the config file.
1 Like
definitely would make much more sense that way, but so far I can only see default numbers all the way through, don’t know how it looks with most 3rd party developers, but probably the same.
How did you came up with these numbers?
I was just reducing them proportionally to see what effect it had on adverse yaw - mostly out of curiosity, but also based on the idea that if they are parasite drag scalars(edit: coefficients, not scalars), there’s little reason they should be so high other than to artificially produce adverse yaw in the sim. They aren’t final numbers and there’s nothing technical about them, except that they are proportionally based on the default values.
I haven’t played around with them that much, but I still experience adverse yaw when they are that low along with the other changes I made to the FM: geometry and elevator/rudder limits (based on M-7-235c maintenance manual), elevator and rudder lift coefficients (based on AR and sweep of htail and vtail), fuselage lateral cx (based on width to span ratio of fuselage, haven’t tested), max angle scalars of elevator and rudder (based on their geometry), enabled CFD with default values. Set elevator and rudder effectiveness both to 1.
1 Like
I’m able to get quite a bit of adverse yaw on some aircraft without any aileron scalars. I still think the vtail is the key.
3 Likes