This may be an unpopular opinion, but the “missions” in 2020 are currently deleted on my install. Here are the simple reasons:
Some of them never worked right to begin with - Monsoon, for instance, was bugged from release.
I loved Bush Trips initially. Many Bush Trips were not kept updated and deprecated via sim updates (airports removed or renamed thus rendering the trip not-completable)
Landing Challenges - the worst idea in a sim that claims “as real as it gets”… Let’s put it this way. You find yourself 1-2 minutes away from landing in a 747. Or an A320… or CJ-4… Depending on the “challenge” you selected, the system implies a drunken chimp set up a random config and passed out so it’s up to you to figure out what the idiot did or didn’t do. Are your flaps up? Down? Gear? AT? Speedbrakes (probably not)… Sound stupid enough yet? It absolutely is. The entire idea is that you plan these things out and should never frantically search around the cockpit in a desperate effort to figure out if you are configured. In an added insult to the poorly thought out scenario? Your ND has NOTHING on it. That’s right, folks… No airport. No runway, no flight plan, no waypoints… It’s the EXACT thing you experience when you need to land an airliner with less than -100 fpm vertical speed, right? Yeah.. PLEASE make these go away. They are embarassing.
The whole arcade deal just took too prevalent of an element in these “Activities”… I get that you are catering to the X-Box clientele (not that there aren’t simmers there, but that there ARE (and a lot of them) gamers who are gonna go fly in GTA6 next and it will be just as useful.
Ahhhh… it’s good to be the king, right? Establishing marketshare dominance is sure to create some sense of achievement, and why shouldn’t it? Job well done! MSFS looks better during the day than most competition… except for winter trees. And night lightting of airports is… not good. So… not REALLY a cause to rest on laurels. Take a page out of what Laminar Research does well. While Bing Maps are fun and photogrammetry is too, and my house looks really good, but… sometimes there are valid points in “bashers”. Those who call it a Microsoft Scenery Simulator DO have valid grounds that could be used for self-improvement. It does scenery well (except seasons, but you already have that coming, so great…) But ground handling? The scale of visuals? Let me give you an example. One of the big revelations in XP was that when I was in a 737, I could FEEL bigger than a Cessna. I could also FEEL much smaller than a jumbo jet. All of these scale issues somehow get equalized in MSFS. I don’t feel the grandiosity of a jumbo jet while in a Citation! So… something is off.
This whole thing is meant to say the main point - hey, job well done. Also, you guys are kind of kings, so ACT like them. Go fix these glaring things that make MSFS not be taken seriously by some… (I am not one of them, because MSFS does MANY things great).. But the weather API deal, the ground handling, the night lighting. Please slow down on those Famous Flyer 58: The Flying Spaghetti Monster things. Focus on fewer things, but do them better. Stop chasing volume, you ALREADY have it. Start investing in user loyalty. I have flown MSFS for about 10 hours in the last week. For a person with 2000 hours, that’s low. Guess where the rest was spent? XP12. Don’t shut down discussion of differences and HOW MSFS can capitalize further and improve. Take a page from their book - there is a reason they persevered while Lockheed Martin’s sim pretty much folded in the home sim market.
I’m with you on the landing challenges for the exact reasons you list. They are terrible and after a few tries I’ve never used them since. I would love to have a proper landing practice mode though, where I could set up a scenario such as an airliner configured on a particular approach at a certain point and then fly it repeatedly from there. That of course is exactly the kind of function a professional simulator would have.
As to missions, HPG have shown the way with their heli action packs, these are fantastic and feel more real than game based, I hope that MSFS 2024 will learn from these good examples.
You might be able to do that after a fashion by saving an FLT file. Get the plane configured how you want it, and save that file out.
When loading it in a new session you would need to make sure any physical cockpit switches are configured correctly, levers as well so that there isn’t too much of a jump when their current positions are read.
I’ve played around with these files before, and it makes it possible to do a C&D start from anywhere in the world, using lat/long if you wish. It would also be possible to do mid-air starts this way. After landing, you should be able to just restart your flight to have another go, though I’ve not tested that specifically myself.
I posted my results of my playing with these files in the following thread:
If you wanted to try out multiple approaches, at different airports, once you have your plane configured how you want it, that FLT file could be a master you would use for other approaches. You can make copies of that file, and change your lat/long, altitude, and heading to match any approach you wish to fly.
That might work for default Boeing airliners but not the Fenix which is the one I mostly fly. Currently I use FlightControlRecorder on record to fly it once, then rewind to my restart point, take control, retrieve the flight plan from secondary, reprogram the arrival weather and fly it again. The repeat step can be done multiple times. It’s something of a faff but is quicker than flying circuits. A proper scenario save and restart would be much better.
I don’t think it programs the FMC though, and work with Fenix? There is a tool which does it this and works with Fenix but it’s very expensive and I can’t justify its cost for a single feature.
Thanks @Baracus250 . I use LM a lot myself, currently for STOL landing training. Great fun!
Tubeliner scenario training
The only one that does complex landing scenarios for tubes is FSIPanel afaik, but they also seem constructed to be flown at pre-set locations. Less flexible in location, but allows them to set up in depth scenario training.
Location Manager is more focused on quick repetition interleaved training for Landing/TO phases for any aircraft anywhere ( see The Power of Repetition and Interleaved Learning in MSFS - Sonicviz ) so you can punch a button to teleport to a preset location on the pattern (configurable), run your landing/TO, then punch the button to instantly go back to the start point and do it again with same config, or change some up and punch it to repeat (weather, height etc). That said, you can also set it up further out and at any height/distance/speed with the following ranges at stepped increments:
No, it doesn’t touch the FMC. If you can load flight plans in the planes FMC you can just reload it when you cycle back to start, as you can set whether you restart paused or not. For airliners if you’re using the FMC then you would typically be setting up quite some distance away in order to run full approaches, and LM lets you do that as well as close in pattern positioning. Details on the tips link above.
LM is set up for shooting ILS approaches, there’s some demos of that towards the end of the video in the C208.
and work with Fenix?
Should work with Fenix, but I don’t have it so haven’t tested it, and as we all know unfortunately there is no single source of a/c truth being adhered to in MSFS at the moment due to custom implementations of different functionality, so some planes may require some extra manual config when you restart. Again, details of what settings are configured are in the tips link above.
Missions
I have lots of ideas to expand this area, but I’m on hold pending MSFS 2024 feature set and SDK info for now.
Agree completely with your summary.
Item 1, Missions? We don need no stinkin’ missions! At least I don’t, lost interest soon after they were introduced.
2. Flew and completed all the initial bush trips, but lost interest after completing a few of the following ones.
3, the landing challenges are terrible. As you said, a lot of preparation has to go into proper landing. I still manage to land on the first approach (after 3 bounces).
4, once again, they came close to making an arcade out of it, I almost expected to see bombing and strafing runs, dogfights, etc.
5. I rely on aftermarket products for better weather, scenery and seasons. It seems MS is busy with other things at the moment. Laminar Research (I had to look it up to discover X-Plane), can’t comment, never used it. Nor can I comment on the ‘size feel’ of the aircraft, never fly anything larger than a biz jet and they’re like sports cars compared to airliners. Lots of hours in everything else though.
Nice comments, Jeremy!
Question - what products do you rely on for “better weather, scenery, and seasons”? Here is my experience:
Weaher - well, you only have one choice right now - Rex. The problem with Rex is the same problem ActiveSky have with XP and P3D - when the weather is injected, it’s injected worldwide according to the latest local METAR. This is problematic because the weather changes are jarring and you will never see weather gradually changing because your geographic location changes. This approach completely kills the idea of flying in live weather, especially if your flight covers an area more than your local airport surroundings in a GA flight. It’s why I don’t use it in XP12 - I will choose live weather with its imperfections in both MSFS and XP for that very reason. P3D is different - there is NO live weather, so I used ActiveSky with P3D v5, but since switching to P3D v6, there is only literally one aircraft “officially” supported (Majestic Dash8 Q400) and it’s not enough of a reason for me to spend another $40 on ActiveSky for v6 (v5 version is not compatible and there is no upgrade discount). So I am stuck flying in whatever weather preset I choose throughout the duration of the flight. Boggles my mind why P3D never bothered with live weather.
Scenery. I have invested heavily into scenery for MSFS in a way of airports, some city packages, and meshes from Orbx. I have stopped buying them because MSFS is changing its own scenery so rapidly via World Updates etc that I am not sure which product will get broken next. It’s probably an unpopular opinion but I wish they would stop. I know it’s free, but it’s killing the 3rd party market because you never know if MS is gonna dump some airport in the next WU or change photogrammetry of some city which will render airports (or city Landmark packages) for it useless. A good example is that Red Bull Landing Challenge. It’s a nice thought, except it’s not. You get a modified aircraft, which is cool.. Unless you own Orbx Dubai Landmarks. In that case you will get TWO of those towers and the one you see that you are supposed to land on will be clashing with the other one. Now you have to choose - do you want your cool aircraft and landing challenge, or do you want the rest of Dubai to look great? It’s not a good choice, because I want both. In my opinion, this is all 3rd party territory and MS should stop messing with the default scenery so much. The other part of equation is 2024. All we have is “most things should work with it”… Most isn’t all. For example, if they are tweaking scenery again, I don’t know if that breaks the better meshes for continents like Orbx. I don’t know if cities will have some different representation, so I don’t know if Landmarks will work. I have NO idea what airports it will ship with, so I just stopped buying scenery. That’s not very good for 3rd parties, but here we are. It just feels like MS just isn’t very graceful with their 3rd party devs.
Seasons. I have both Rex and Bijan’s. They are both decent, but the sim needs its own native support. I wish they spent time on THAT vs World Updates and a ton of Flying Boat #156,432 series. It should have been there from the start. P3D had seasons for a long time. XP11 didn’t but XP12 does. MSFS2024 will finally have that, but 2020 should have had their own. Again, a missed opportunity to have yet another win over the competition.
Finally, the general “scenery” comment. I was recently given a 1 month vacation from this forum because of my mockery of a screenshot contest of “airport lights”. It was considered unconstructive… the mileage may vary whether it was a bad joke or not, but I thought what a weird contest to run considering night lighting is a HUGE issue in MSFS. It’s present during the day too, but definitely felt more at night - and that’s airport lighting. Or the lack of it. Everything is super dark and dead. You almost HAVE to get 3rd party scenery. One of the biggest offenders are taxiway markings and the fact that those seem to be completely random. Most taxiways aren’t illuminated. Some are. There are random blue lights scattered EVERYWHERE, including on the very taxiways they don’t belong on. I KNOW it can be done better. How? I fly XP12. The night lighting in airports (and default airports in general) - impeccable. I don’t need to buy any 3rd party scenery for XP12 because the default airports are also accurate to the charts. This is largely due to the Scenery Gateway system they have and MSFS is going to implement it, thankfully… (See? We can learn from other sims without feeling all hurt)… The question is… will it be done right? As of now, XP has a practice of incorporating all the latest Scenery Gateway developments into the default sim scenery once every few builds as development continues (and it always continues, much like MSFS)… I hope MS does it in a similar fashion and people’s contributions to correcting the default auto-generated airports will eventually gracefully migrate into the sim itself.
Last point - the Working Title debacle. These guys and gals have revolutionized the “default” avionics further than any other sim can be proud of. The implementation they and Microsoft have rolled out of making their GNS and G1000 suites part of default sim is HORRENDOUS. No one is clear on whether those Marketplace addons are needed or not and when. If these are your default suites now, just let them be default suites. There should no longer be any default Asobo GNS but there seems to be some ghosts of it living somewhere in MSFS. The fact that some of the Local Flying Monster releases that were out before AAU1 (too many update categories too… hard to keep track of Sim, World, Avionics, whatever updates - JUST STICK TO VERSION NUMBERS!!!) don’t support the now-default GNS530 is bizarre. The fact that there is so much confusion on whether those Marketplace GNS530/G1000 are necessary or not shows just how shoddily this was merged into the sim. I wish they would just commit to it and remove those addons from the Marketplace. Ship these with the sim and force the developers to support the new versions, period. Sometimes inflexibility is beneficial for users.
Anyway, these are my thoughts on the general sim direction and development. I remain optimistic that at the end of the day, these are “growing pains” and it will be worth it. In many ways, it’s worth it now… But there are definitely areas in which MSFS just doesn’t satisfy the way XP12 does. And to be fair, the other way around too - I can’t mention often enough what an oversight it is for Laminar Research not to include polar North regions (no Greenland in XP) or Antarctica in the sim. There is NO mesh for it, so if you want to fly there, you need to buy 3rd party mesh, otherwise that part of the world is just an ocean. That is a HORRIBLE oversight that continues to plague my enjoyment of XP - even P3D has those regions covered!
So… it’s healthy to look at where we are and where we wish we could be. For everyone.
Fwiw the Red Bull Landing challenge customised XCub is great, on a par with the Carbon Cub and Shock Ultra for those slow feather drop landings.
Perhaps they should split it into a plane & location package so people can uninstall the location part if they don’t want it, but I’d totally keep the plane variant if you like STOL.
Scenery, bought several city packages, Orbx and a coupe of others, an independent who developed a vastly improved version of my home airport, KLBB. The world updates generate acceptable improvements in large cities, so I haven’t made any purchases for a while.
Seasons. Same, but I find myself using Bijan mostly.
Scenery? There are lights at the airports? I’ll look closer… . For the first 1000 hours or so, I used to use LittleNav Map to negotiate taxiways leaving and arriving, following ATC instructions. Tedious to the point I had a few airports kind of memorized. I finally succumbed to the garish blue taxi guide arrows and made my life easier (technology, who knew?). Now if they’d just make them about 1/3 the size, any color will do. I can’t see very well, but I’m not blind. I can follow arrows and stay in my lane on the highway.
Working Title? Huge shout out to that team, nothing but great work and I suspect they’ll be fully integrated into the MSFS team soon. Agreed, the implementation of avionics was poorly handled and MSFS should have made it clear what was and wasn’t needed in the Comm folder. Fingers crossed for better communication regarding changes.
When I found turboprops, small jets, business jets and the like, scenery became less important to me because at least 90% of the flight was looking down at cloud tops. You can only simulate clouds so many different ways. I think that’s why I never really got into airliners, FL450 for hours on end must be a mind numbing job, even with monitoring weather, aircraft systems, communication, etc. Major tasks are getting into the air, staying there then getting back on the ground in one piece.
Eagerly looking forward to FS2024, it’s only forward and up from here, look how far the sim world has come since the first simulators. I was there and loved every minute of those crude graphics.
Cheers!
In my opinion, this is all 3rd party territory and MS should stop messing with the default scenery so much. The other part of equation is 2024. All we have is “most things should work with it”… Most isn’t all. For example, if they are tweaking scenery again, I don’t know if that breaks the better meshes for continents like Orbx. I don’t know if cities will have some different representation, so I don’t know if Landmarks will work. I have NO idea what airports it will ship with, so I just stopped buying scenery. That’s not very good for 3rd parties, but here we are. It just feels like MS just isn’t very graceful with their 3rd party devs.
. For the first 1000 hours or so, I used to use LittleNav Map to negotiate taxiways leaving and arriving, following ATC instructions. Tedious to the point I had a few airports kind of memorized. I finally succumbed to the garish blue taxi guide arrows and made my life easier (technology, who knew?). Now if they’d just make them about 1/3 the size, any color will do. I can’t see very well, but I’m not blind. I can follow arrows and stay in my lane on the highway.