Dear diary,
Another week of fun flying around in my new flight simulator.
The developer released a patch yesterday too! The release notes were quite lengthy. Maybe they read my forum post about the overly generalized notes that they had before? Still though, I think it could still be better though since on many of the list items, they don’t really talk about why it was broken. I think this community is technical enough to handle a little more information, and gaining a deeper understanding of how the game works would help the community help the developer more.
I fired up my newly patched game to do my usual run from KPVG to KGEV. It seemed to load a little faster, so far so good. My biggest interest was the newly fixed not-so-live weather system. I alt-tabbed and checked out meteoblue’s site, looked at NOAA’s website, looked closely at the pre-flight screen, cycling through the various views clouds/precip, and made sure the flight conditions button matched. And hit the fly button! Launching into the game was pretty normal again. When it finally loaded, there were clouds… yes!!!
Excited to get aloft, I quickly flipped on the battery so that I could start entering my flight plan into the computer. Suddenly out of nowhere, a very handsome man appeared inside the cockpit, obstructing the screen! This beautiful man had driven his truck into the lap of my female pilot avatar. It seemed overly presumptuous of him, especially given my benign parking spot on the apron, but I didn’t mind. After a few moments he pulled out, and I was able to continue entering my plan.
Taking off and beginning my climb to 7500 feet, I noticed that the terrain looked a bit… off… not really detailed. I noticed a new and beautiful active pause button on the pull down menu, but others on the forums had warned me not to use it so I just pressed escape instead. Paging to the graphics menu, all of my settings had changed, wtf??! I painstakingly reset everything back to where it was and continued my flight.
I couldn’t help but marvel at the beautiful clouds and how accurate the weather looked. As I entered my next flight leg from the FKN to LVL VOR, I flew out of the clouds into a vast, clear night - beautiful! But wait, I thought there were supposed to be clouds the whole way, what is happening?!? Arghhhh it must not be fixed. Okay whatever.
The game seems smoother and is performing well. Looking around at the night lighting, the runway lights in the distance seem brighter (still not directional), but visibility seems different… The roads which used to have cars, no longer have cars. Wait a minute, did these “performance improvements” come at the cost of something else in the game? Hard to know since it doesn’t say what they actually changed. Flying past giant, towering spires of land at the foot of the Blue Ridge, I head over Smith Mountain Lake. The lake still has odd, terraced steps in it, like ■■■■■ ■■■■■■ himself had been at work parting the sea. Oh well, according to people on the forum, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I can hear lady voices on the now much quieter ATC channel. Not so many people are continuing as planned I guess? But she sounds… off… I guess Cortana was unavailable. But what can you expect from a $60 to $120 game right? LOL.
There wasn’t nearly as much turbulence on my little XCub as there has been in the past. They mentioned something in their notes about reducing horizontal turbulence… I guess it seemed more realistic before? Who knows. Coming to a stop at my destination, which was perfectly clear, I alt-tab out again to check the weather… OVC 017?!! How is this possible, it is clear here. Ugh, they must not have fixed it. I guess I’ll have to wait until the next patch, which will clearly fix it. That’s enough for now, until next time!
