I’m 51, and I first got into flight simulators when MS DOS PCs and “Microsoft Flight Simulator” for MS-DOS had been out a couple years, circa 1986, on a 386 PC with a VGA card, and MS-DOS.
I took a bit of a break after university from that hobby. I earnestly disliked how awful the analog era (15 pin) flight yoke connectors worked, and never bought FS software or flight controller hardware in the USB era. Then I saw a review of Microsoft Flight Simulator and watched a few videos, including one on how it was made, and the role of big-data and machine learning in the modern sim’s terrain modelling. A huge factor for me in whether or not a sim is fun or “feels realistic” isn’t just the physics, its “does this look like I’m flying over ground, which is accurately height mapped, covered in realistic trees and reasonably realistic buildings”. Even on my mediocre hardware, the experience is incredibly fun.
I flew over my house last night (tell me you haven’t done this yet? If not why not?). The roof is the right color. The building itself is a “best guess” by the AI. But one of my horse-shelter outbuildings is also visible from between the trees, and the area is reasonably close to the right elevations and contours, even though it’s just a “nowhere” section of the interior of British Columbia. The major geographical features of the valley I live in are done perfectly. The look of the sun setting over the Pacific Coast mountains flying from CYLW to CYVR is perfect, even on my laptop’s 1080 ti maxQ graphics.
This is insanely fun. A helpful person on reddit suggested I buy a $30 Logitech Extreme 3d max pro, and that has made controlling the planes as fun as you could want, and since the flight stick is cheap, and works fine for me, I’ve been having a blast landing and taking off, and wondering as I fly around the world, how accurate the stalls in this thing are, as I hear conflicting reports from real pilots as to how good these are. But these things do stall, and when damage is taken due to flying outside the plane’s operating envelope, which you can turn on if you want to know, at least it does make me think about operating within safe operating parameters. All huge for immersion. I’m a noob and I’ve been ignoring the communication aspect of the hobby thus far but just having any air traffic chatter is so hugely important to the experience. I don’t know why it says half the stuff the ATCs say, and it seems to have a lot of boilerplate. I don’t know why someone who is probably meant to be me is always asking for flight following, but it seems legitimate and realistic default behaviour, like putting up trees on a terrain, it’s creating a mood and a piece of the experience for those of us with no idea what real ATC chatter sounds like.
I find myself saying “rotate”, and wanting to do procedural checklists again, which was literally 99% of the fun for me back in the early DOS days. The simulator DOS graphics were so bad, that all I cared about was a kind of a mental state of "check my attitude, check the visual horizon, check the instruments, vertical speed, speed, throttle, engine healthy, whatever, in a loop. I would supply a lot of “imagination” in the MS DOS days and wonder what it would feel like to fly over the grand canyon, or downtown Las Vegas. Now very little imagination is required, and the results are breathtaking. Even just flying over the green valleys of the interior of British Columbia, with fairly realistic sunlight and shadows, and trees, and weather, and even little scratches on the cockpit glass.
I grabbed a demo of XPlane 11 and it just doesn’t do it for me. I mean, I wish I could do a three monitor setup on MS FS, and would probably buy three or four big TVs if MS FS added a three monitor setup mode with custom angles/orientations for each monitor. I’d like one pointed at the cockpit controls, one straight ahead, and one directly left and one directly right of the pilot. I wonder how much GPU horsepower this engine would need to handle a four monitor setup, since folks are buying GTX 3080s just to run XPlane with 4 monitors.
Anyways, well done Asobo/Microsoft y’all are making the GPU shortage worse, but what a way to do it. I’m amazed.
Cheers from British Columbia, where things are still sort of on fire, but we’ll be okay.
Warren
Why don’t you try Track IR instead of VR or 3 monitors?
