It’s not thermals, it’s not related to my throttle, it’s not realism. It’s just busted. As I said I’ve done 85% of a world wide tour with the 172 G1000, over the past 4 months, and it’s all been fine.
Started up my latest leg with SU9 and it’s basically impossible to fly with the same aircraft regardless of the weather or wind speed. Best thing I can equate it to is if I load up the 172 on a Clear Day, take off, give a friend the yoke, and I show him “how bad” the wind can get. So I adjust the weather to make it ridiculously overpowered and watch them struggle to control the plane, just to show him how wild the simulation can get.
Unfortunately, regardless of my weather preset, that’s what I’m seeing all the time in the 172 with SU9. As I said, I take my hand off the yoke at 3KT wind for 15 seconds and I’m in right turn roll at 60 degrees, which is far, far more than anything I’ve experienced in the past few months during my endless hours of completing this world trip. The only way I can maintain straight and level flight is by keeping my hands on the yoke the entire time and ignoring trim, because it both pulls and bounces so much trim is useless.
It’s really frustrating because I have a limited about of time to play MSFS2020 and besides the aggravation of being 85% done with my months long world tour, it clearly worked a few weeks ago and now is just messed up. I tried to convince myself “let’s just simulate avionics failure!” but I can barely take off and maintain course, let alone even land the plane with it this messed up.
Another way to describe it is if you crank up the simulation speed to max while running some zig zag autopilot course. The autopilot would work great even at this zig-zag course, at slower simulation speeds, but will always fall apart if you crank up the speed. That’s the same thing I’m seeing at normal speed without autoilot.
Turbulence is not only depending on wind, even with zero wind it can be extremely turbulent in the summer. Could you post a video because all I’m able to get would qualify for light turbulence. You are comparing your experience pre and post SU9, but that does not say anything about realism because previously the atmosphere was way too smooth.
Hi all, apologies for the late reply — life got in the way and I was only able to launch FS2020 again yesterday.
First of all, thank you all very much for your advice and suggestions! I suppose that playing with the Xbox controller adds a further layer of complexity, given how sensitive certain operations are. (Plus I’m getting the feeling that FS is really meant for PCs, rather than consoles… but that’s another story.)
I find it quite interesting that there are such polarized opinions about the turbulence effect, but hopefully Asobo will indeed add a selector for that. I don’t mind some turbulence for added realism but as a newbie it can be genuinely overwhelming. I’m still at the point where I think I have the basics down, and then I find I can’t get the plane to do what I want.
Noted, I always leave the fuel to 50% + 50% (the default) with the “infinite fuel” setting turned on, so I never gave weight much thought. I’ll be playing with those values! Out of curiosity, would the changes to the 172 make it more sensitive to the new turbulence system, or are those things unrelated? I’m wondering because I’ve taken the opportunity to try other planes, and the Diamond DA40 seems to be less sensitive to turbulence, in equal conditions. I’m not sure if that’s actually the case or just an impression of mine, though.
I’ve been fiddling with the G1000 just last night, after watching a few minutes of a YT tutorial just to get a sense of how it worked in general. I mostly fiddled with the altitude hold and heading controls, and sort of got it to work. It was a revelation, definitely more pleasant than fighting pitch trim and so on. The downside was that dealing with the tiny softkeys using the Xbox controller is basically a nightmare, and mouse control is jerky (which I assume is an issue with FS’s Xbox port, because I tried it on Edge and it was much smoother). In any event, the infamous roll was still there, and after about a minute zoomed in to the G1000’s central panel I found myself rolling at an almost-90-degree angle…
I do have the NXi update, and believe it or not, I have no idea what’s different.
I’m the last person who can call for bugs given how little experience I have with flight simulators and flying in general, but I do think something’s fishy with the rudder control. Since my original post I’ve completely uninstalled and reinstalled FS2020 + all world updates just to be sure, and disabled auto-rudder. Once, after applying full throttle, I very gently squeezed RT to add a tiny bit of right rudder, and the rudder went the wrong way pretty hard. I changed cameras and I could see it was basically glued the wrong way.
I’ve been giving the Diamond DA40 a try and I still get a right roll when trying to fly level. It’s not an issue with the controller, because I’ve added a generous dead zone and neither the yoke nor the pedals seem to show any movement at all.
Still, I don’t know if it’s me or something’s indeed wrong, but it was definitely NOT the case before. With SU8, I flew a 172 completely by hand (granted, with a bit of help from autorudder and so on) from a small airfield near Vasto to LIBP, since I’m very familiar with the local landmarks. Hardly a difficult flight for any simmer worth a dime, but I got to practice getting trim right, controlling airspeed more or less like I wanted, getting a mostly decent descent, etc. I stayed relatively low during cruise on the Adriatic sea, just a few km from the coast, and it would stay mostly level, with very minor corrections.
Now I’m consistently having to pull the yoke (well, left stick really…) to the left, which just seems… wrong. As several have said in this thread, a left roll would make sense, but a right roll? And this is both with and without autorudder, so I’m genuinely not sure what I’m doing wrong.
Wow, thank you for that! I feel like Number 5 from Short Circuit when gets into the bookstore.
Thanks! I started watching this one last night and it definitely clarified the big picture. Er, no pun intended.
Well, it’s reassuring that I’m not the only one getting this! Do you get the bounciness in other planes as well? As I mentioned above, I’ve been trying the DA40 and it seems less vulnerable to the turbulence, though I do get the same right roll.
(Also, may I ask — do you use a mouse to reach the other controls on the plane, or do you do everything with the Xbox controller?)
I actually found that the C172S G1000 flies quite level at full throttle (no flaps, level pitch, no rudder assist) when up near Vno speeds (maximum normal operating speed, which is where the yellow line starts on the airspeed indicator).
I’m using the Turtle Beach Velocity One flight yoke. Calibration screen shows it centered and not skewing to the right, and the yoke works fine in other flight games (meaning, it doesn’t skew right). I’ve been using this yoke for months with the 172 G1000 without any issues like I’ve seen since SU9.
When I do need to control the G1000 directly, I’ll use the mouse to zoom in and fiddle with controls. But I do have just about everything mapped to the flight yoke’s many buttons so I rarely need to use the mouse.
I’ll double check that the 172 G1000 skews when using an Xbox controller and let you know.
In the real world, Newtonian mechanics imply that the plane has a certain amount of momentum as well as inertia.
A heavier plane will require more “turbulence force” (i made up the term to demonstrate an idea) to displace it from its trajectory. In reality, there are also confounding factors, like aeromechanics.
For this reason, a pilot report includes the airplane type. Moderate turb to a small GA plane might not even register as light chop to a 737 and might even be reported as completely smooth air by a 747.
I’m not sure how the simulated thermals/turb respond to aircraft loading. Be aware though that a matter of a couple hundred kg is different than several thousand - going from 172 to CRJ.
Turbulence wise I think the problem is that people compare post-SU9 with pre-SU9 or other flight simulators they flew. The comparison should be between post-SU9 and real world convective turbulence. Even that is not easy as in real life you can feel what is going on, unless you have a force feedback yoke at home the controls are gonna feel different (let alone a Xbox controller with tiny sticks ).
I find it fairly realistic, much more realistic than it was before. The atmosphere was too stable before SU-9. It would also be a mistake to think, there is no wind and no clouds so it must be butter smooth, not this time of the year, it can be really bumpy on a clear windless day and MSFS is doing a good job with that.
@anon50268670, good points, I can’t recall if you mentioned it before but are you a pilot in real life?
There is no point comparing pre/post SU9 as we know changes were made, I was one of those that posted early on, slamming the new wind effects but now I’m sort of ok with it apart from only logging very low hours due to the stability issues also introduced.
I would be very accepting of the wind effects if we can get real pilots to confirm they are actually pretty accurate - I had three intro lessons many years back but sadly wind is not one of the things I remember although it must have been pretty smooth as I had the controls as soon as we were straight and level and it was only a Cessna 152, if it had been like it is in the sim I doubt that would have happened. I do recall that it was fairly constant input though to keep the horizon level, was not allowed to touch the rudder pedals
In the sim I think we need confirmation of reality likeness from real GA pilots (there should be a badge for licensed pilots), it’s a sim after all, plus a strength slider so we can go into smooth dreamland if desired - range could be “Off - Realistic - OMG!” and variable.
We can already delete the wind layer - that is clearly not possible in reality, we can also model its strengths and directions - again IRL it’s fixed to reality - so we really need a slider for turbulent effects - both thermals and actual turbulence.
A slider in assistance settings for new pilots would certainly be helpful. Its difficult even for real world pilots to give an opinion on this as flying a full motion, Level-D simulator is already not the same as flying a real plane, let alone sitting still behind your computer screen at home with a none force feedback yoke or joystick. The head movements in the sim also affects the perception, you can’t fully turn these head movements off unfortunately and have a completely still picture.
There are so many variables that need to be taken into account, MSFS will always be a assumption of what could be possible. It is possible to have a smooth flight in the afternoon on a clear summer day but it’s very rare, you will need advection of warm air over a cold surface creating a strong temperature inversion, maybe intensified by a clear night where the surface looses a lot of heat.
I don’t think MSFS takes into account what air mass with what properties flows over a surface of x temperature, what the environmental lapse rate would look like going up, how much an air particle heats up near a dark farm field and subsequently how far it can continue to climb at the dry adiabatic lapse rate until it reached the same temperature as the surrounding air, or at what altitude it reaches dewpoint and condensates, then climbs at the wet adiabatic lapse rate until meeting the environmental lapse rate, depicting the base and top of a cloud.
MSFSis never gonna be able to do that accurately, it will always be a simplification.
Also note that I’m on the PC and just noticed this seems to be in the xbox part of the MSFS forum.
Confirmed with the 172 and the 152 that the sim still bounces me around in 1KT weather like I was in a thunderstorm, and still pulls to the right. Doesn’t matter if I use my xbox controller or my flight yoke, doesn’t matter time of day or location, throttle doesn’t matter. Literally pick any airport, take off to about 1000 feet, trim so you’re not climbing, and take your hands off the yoke and within 15 seconds you’re in a 45 to 60 degree right roll. Same thing happens in 1KT wind or 15KT wind.
This problem did not exist in SU1 to SU8 - I have hundreds of hours in the game with those two planes since release. If the answer is “but now it’s working as intended, it’s realistic now!”, I don’t believe that for a moment.
How was it so broken for nearly 2 years? How did it never get caught for 8 straight updates? Why is there no difference in the bouncing and the right roll regardless of if wind speed is 1KT or 15KT, or coming from any direction? If something this major is now “fixed”, why isn’t it in the patch notes?
Just like so many other things we’ve come to see in the past 2 years of updates, it’s almost certainly just another bug introduced in this game between updates like every other bug that pops up between updates. Really frustrating because I was hoping to finish that last 15% of my world wide tour this weekend but I’m not going to fight with the 172 white knuckling it on a clear 70 degree windless day just to maintain straight and level flight for more than 30 seconds.
For the 100th time, post a video of what you are seeing. On my system I don’t see anything off, it’s quite realistic now, it was way too smooth pre-SU9. In real life you can’t leave your hands off the controls either for 15 seconds during middle of the day with convective activity, during the night when there is no wind (mechanical turbulence), then sure.
Just confirmed the right roll problem using Clear Skies preset, using three different airports (Fresno CA, Dansville NY, NE Ohio Regional), at 8AM, 12PM, 6PM, and 3AM flight time. Using the keyboard for one series of tests, and my XB1 controller for another. Still just as bouncy as well, so time of day doesn’t make a difference. Cloudy weather preset didn’t make a difference either. Took over an hour to run all these tests for basically the same result. I don’t have the heart to run it all again on the 152 or the other 172. Pretty frustrating.
So if it is some brand new and intended realistic thermal activity, it’s now even further un-realistic because it’s happening during the day AND night, during clear AND cloudy weather. Plus, I get the right roll in the night time when I take my hands off the yoke and I supposedly should be able to do it.
I don’t have the capability to post a video of it and I’m pretty aggravated to keep banging my head against this. All the video is going to show is my plane bouncing around at 1500ft while it slowly rolls to the right. It’s easily duplicated on my system and my buddy’s system.
Sorry if I’m short about this, and I appreciate you trying to explain it in a way that makes sense. However, this is exactly the kind of thing that the devs are infamous for breaking between updates. Time and again since SU1 there’s been something that has just been flat out broken and we just have to wait for it to get fixed.
Thermals in the game, following a set of rules based on the ground being warm in the sun, creating a bumpier ride like I’m experiencing? Great. I’ll accept that even though I don’t love it from a gameplay standpoint, nor does it explain my right roll problem.
Thermals in the game, NOT following a set of rules based on the logic that at night time the ground is cooled off because no sun? So that’s just another bug. Which makes me wonder, based on previous experience with SU updates, is the whole thermal package broken, because it’s clearly buggy at night.
For me it’s super smooth in the morning / evening and night. Did you delete the wind layers? Maybe it’s caused by that. Also when I select a cloud layer or change the season to winter it becomes much more smooth.
No aircraft flies straight in real life, I have never flown a single engine prop plane (without rudder and aileron trim) flying straight hands off. Usually they fly kind of straight at cruise speed with cruise power set if correctly rigged.
Did you try to unplug all your peripherals in flight? Does it still roll, I’m seeing a left roll (as expected on a single engine piston).
This is a video I made during the beta, I didn’t had a joystick with me so I used the arrow keys on my keyboard, totally manageable with just a keyboard only experiencing light turbulence. You can see it’s smooth in the morning, evening and night, over water and with cloud cover.
Thanks for the video. Your video definitely looks a bit more stable than when I’m flying the 172. What I see in your video is a bit more choppy than I saw in SU8, but nowhere near how bad mine is. At about 7:41 in the video, I can see you flying pretty straight and level while you mess with the weather controls. If I took my hands off the yoke at that point, I’d be in a 30+ degree right roll within 5 seconds turning into 60 degrees with 15 seconds.
Since you’re on the keyboard, presumably, you’re not rapidly tapping left-left-left to keep it straight (unless you turned AP on?).
I’m intrigued now… I’m going to fire my sim back up and see if I can duplicate your results strictly with the keyboard.
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