First the Bad: I purchased a CH Products Yoke in anticipation of MSFS 2020. Notably, I
tested it in Prepar3D and even an Xplane demo that I downloaded. In P3D it works
beautifully, without my having to do any adjustment or calibration at all. In the Xplane
demo, it took less than five minutes of adjusting preferences, and the yoke worked
perfectly.
Yet it would not work at all in MSFS 2020. I learned how to map it not via any Microsoft
documentation, but via YouTube. Having mapped the yoke, I found its effects on the
controls in the sim so sensitive that the aircraft were unflyable. I spent no less than
two hour tweaking the settings in the interface, testing, tweaking again. Yet the results
remained–turning or pushing/pulling the yoke beyond a very small degree would cause
the sim to abruptly ram the ailerons or elevators to the maximum limit; there is no way
to center the controls, and the aircraft invariably either flipped over in the air and went
out of control, and crashed.
Fortunately, I have a Thrustmaster stick and throttle peripheral that work after a
fashion, but even they are too sensitive, even after my attempts to adjust them in
the provided interface.
Many of the keyboard assignments did not work; for example, the key combination
that the program itself advised for me to choose to release the parking brakes did
not work. The interface to change the keyboard assignments is confusing, and
all the attempts that I made to change some resulted in their remaining the same.
The Good: I have a very good rig that the MSFS 2020 program deemed best suited
for medium settings. Yet I’ve tweaked some of the scenery categories to high, and
the program has run as smoothly as butter, even over my native Chicago. I restarted
the program several times, changed planes while the program was running, and noted
no significant degradation in performance. The VFR spin I did over Chicago was
simply breathtaking. I’ve not yet loaded weather into the sim, which might impact
things.
The good aspects of the program make the bad aspects all the more disappointing.
Given that the program was rewritten from the ground up explains, I imagine, why
the keyboard interface bears no resemblance to the past version of FS, or to P3D’s,
which I think are very good.
I understand that Microsoft will be making tweaks and improvements to the program
in time, but to me the issues with the peripherals and the controllability are basics
that should already be working without issue.
While I’ll keep working on learning about MSFS 2020 I’m for now I’m very happy I
still have Prepar3D.