Excellent work. Painful to see.
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Some sample bias in that, though. I mean, I don’t disagree, but flight model is an area that requires a lot of experience and/or expertise. The vast majority of users don’t know what they don’t know about how the sim interprets things, much less aerodynamics, etc. Additionally, we’re sometimes flying aircraft in which very few living people have any experience, and/or those which little documentation exists, and with facsimile control setups that run a wide gamut of quality and fidelity, none that match reality.
Weather has a similar issue in that a lot people simply don’t know how it all works together, just the end result they observe (usually from the ground).
Gameplay and graphics are much more accessible to most gamers, and have more valid points of comparison (other games), so it stands to reason they’d get the most attention. 
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All of which is true - the forums only represent a tiny fraction of users and within that those who are either real pilots or engineers with enough knowledge to recognise a problem and talk about it coherently are even smaller. (Yet still, you might have thought anyone who bothers to fly in live weather might have noticed their crosswind landings were awful)
But when it comes to wishlist items a vote is a vote. There is no system where votes by ‘power users’ count for more, or where there is any heirarchy of priority applied with certain classes of wish getting elevated. Perhaps Microsoft do in the background, but if so the methodology isn’t obvious.
It a bit different with bug reports - there the votes don’t really count so much. It’s getting the bug marked as ‘logged’. I wonder if most of the physics questions are in fact logged as bugs?
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I wouldn’t say they’re awful — certainly not until you hit the deck during a pretty strong crosswind — at which point the aircraft seems to lose all mass and behave more like a kite! But during an approach in a 10kt crosswind, for example, I actually feel it’s not too wide of the mark.
The thing that needs work in my opinion is the post-touchdown behaviour in crosswinds.
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Yes, it’s everything that goes on once the wheels hit the ground when you land. The approaches are fine. Explored comprehensively in this bug report, with it’s paltry 164 votes despite it being a near universal issue:
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Just voted. It’s an issue that greatly takes away from the crosswind landing experience. It’s pretty awful with the ATR.
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The good news is that it is ‘solvable’ (improvable may be more accurate) with a bit of ‘self-help’ and some light editing of the aircraft flight_model.cfg…if you can access that file, which you can’t for Marketplace purchases… like the ATR I suspect (but worth checking)
For ‘how to’ and deeper background as well as info on what aircraft are less affected by the problem see here:
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I’m on Xbox so not a possibility for me.
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Then for you my friend, the war is over.
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I’d open a bug report for this on the ATR. Given you can only get it through the Marketplace it will be the only way of getting the ground handling variables implemented by the Dev.
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That’s a possibility. Also, physics/flight model questions may go directly to the 3rd party devs on their discords, forums, etc.
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Great work , thanks for sharing that.
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That is a masterpiece of understatement!
That also underscores the big “problem” with things like this:
The vast majority of people who buy flight sims are (usually) not full-up pilots who want to keep their type ratings current, they’re usually wannabe punters like me who will NEVER be allowed anywhere NEAR the controls of an aircraft if anyone has any brains at all.
Instead, we vicariously live the life of a pilot, (GA, tubeliner, corporate jet, fighter-jock, etc.), because that’s the only choice we have. We do what we can and do the best we can to help improve the sim to the best of our ability.
And for those of us who are wannabe punters, (as I am), how would we know that this is “wrong”? I try to take off and I end up flying off to my left, (rather rapidly I might add), unless I turn P-factor and Torque all the way to “Wazzit?” or less. Is flying down the runway smashing the right rudder pedal hard to the floor correct? I don’t know, though I wouldn’t think so.
IMHO, it seems to me that, (at least in some aircraft), the ground-effect is a bit exaggerated, but then again, I’ve never, ever, EVER flown anything more complicated than a kite in my entire life, so what do I know?
What I DO know is that I don’t know squat about this, so I try not to complain about things I have no knowledge of.
I DO recognize scenery defects and since I know what trees, rivers, lakes, bridges, and such like are supposed to look like, these are the things I talk about.
I DO recognize when a plane is objectively impossible to fly - the Long EZ being an example. I could not get that airplane to fly in any way resembling reality until @cyclicalobsessv mentioned that I needed to be in the “Modern” flight model instead of “Legacy” for it to work properly.
Can I say that the “XYZ” aircraft’s flight dynamics “don’t have enough friction”? No.
Can I say that the “Such-and-so jumbo-jet’s” take-off power or something else isn’t correct? No. How would I know that?
Is it correct to say that “people don’t care about the flight physics of the sim”? I don’t think so. IMHO the big problem isn’t that they don’t care, it’s that they really don’t know what it should be unless they’ve done this IRL and know what should be happening.
In Hosea 4:6 it says “My people are destroyed by a lack of knowledge”.
If we really don’t know, (and there is really no possible way for many of us to know), then it isn’t right to criticize us for not knowing what we cannot possibly hope to know.
What say ye?
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I’m not a pilot, therefore I have no clue as to how a particular plane should feel. As an example, the newly released PMDG 737 on Xbox “feels” correct. It actually feels heavy…as it should be…compared to most of the other airliners. Based on this fact, it will be the yardstick to compare all others.
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I think you’ve hit the nail on its head. That’s why I think relying purely on wishlist/bug votes to determine development priorities may not be the way to go.
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I agree, but is there a better, more efficient and objective way?
When I was busy doing software QA, there were often two different groups of “experts”:
-
People hired by the software company who are subject matter experts in the various facets of the software’s functionality. (i.e. People who are pilots, or accounting experts, or know tax law, or how to run a server, etc.)
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The people who actually USE the software in their day-to-day tasks, who know what they expect from the software, and how they expect the software to help them do their jobs, etc.
Though both groups, and their associated use-cases, are valid, they don’t overlap 100%, and sometimes the “users” expectations aren’t what the “experts” think their expectations should be.
So it is here. Most of the people who bought the flight sim are not pilots and have little to zero real life experience flying anything. (Completely subjective statement that I have no factual basis for, but it’s my gut feeling.)
So. . . . How do we prioritize bugs/feature requests?
Should MS/Asobo have two groups of analysts:
- A group of known-pilots with thousands of hours in each aircraft.
- A group of wannabe punters like me that enjoy playing the game.
. . . . to help them categorize and prioritize the issues?
Like I said above, one way to solve this is have a separate flight model category for wishlist and bug reports that gets its own prioritization. There could of course be other categories, but ultimately it’d be a sad state of affairs if we only get graphics/gameplay updates from here on while the glaring problems with the flight model go unaddressed.
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Hello @MetalSalmon3852,
The Feedback Snapshot which is compiled via forum votes is only one input source the dev team uses to prioritize their work. We use it to better understand what the passionate and enthusiastic flight sim fans who post to this forum are most concerned about, but forum votes don’t 100% determine what issues are addressed and when.
Thanks,
MSFS Team
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That’s great to know. So I guess there’s still hope for flight model updates?
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“Leans back in chair”
“Lights pipe”
Well now…the question was about simmers generally. I’d say, then, that users of MSFS are about a 50/50 mix of RL pilots and “wannabes”; I’ve no evidence to back that up, it’s just my intuition.
The people who complain about the flight physics of the sim must be the RL types; otherwise, how would they know? The remainder, if they complain about anything, do so about other stuff like scenery glitches, poor performance and the like.
The wannabe group also includes people like me; I’ve no wish to be a real pilot (I’ve had lessons in which I did rather well), as it’s a bit too much like hard work. Have non-pilots seen the work a pilot has to do? And not just in the cockpit! (I have an airline pilot in the family.)
Speaking for myself, I don’t give a flying flamingo about realistic physics, as long as I get a feeling of flying a plane; it’s the closest I’ll ever get and I’m happy with that, and I’m guessing I’m not unique. I’m on the sim most days (I do have a life) and I love it.
So I suppose the answer is, “Some do, some don’t”, and you can’t generalise on that. Asobo have a tricky job: “Whom do we please today?” Overall, I think they do well.
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