Glider races would be Awesome!

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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I am very excited as I found an excellent and easy to implement way to make gliders really popular in MSFS!
I remember Jorg talking in one podcast to Helisimmer that they are looking to add more purpose to flying.

Well best high performance gliders purpose are high-adrenaline races!

Most spectacular real life glider races are World Grand Prix Gliding Championships - high speed ridge races in amazing mountain scenery.

To whet your appetite just watch:

How awesome is that!

People love flying, people love racing, glider ridge racing is

  • spectacular (mountain proximity, high speed, risk taking!)
  • easy to understand (wind blowing on ridge deflects up and rise - sailplane can rise in this air too!)
  • easy to fly (when you are not risking your life :wink:
  • byt also very challenging to master - as you must do the energy management, spot good ridges, thermals and often calculate risk!

As someone said - glider races are 3D chess in air!

With increased difficulty “missions” it would also help novice people to learn how to fly gliders the most fun way of all!
First missions could be simple ridges, advanced - a labirynth, or more separate slopes, advanced would require efficient thermalling over flatlands for good score.

What is also amazing implementing glider races in MSFS in its basic form is very simple - all building blocks are already there!

You don’t believe? - then do you remember this:

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obraz1678Ă—902 217 KB

Here you have it!

Yes Maverick low altitude missions challenge can be awesome glider races!
Just change F18 to a glider, set good ridge wind and you already have it in its basic form!
You race with time - against leader board and “ghost” replay functionality would be very helpful for novices to “catch the drift” :wink:

If you would add ability for people to create new races - it would provide endless replayability!

If this basic race format would catch on it could be expanded to a paid add-on with additional paid high performance gliders, multiplayer live competition like Reno just way more interesting as you don’t simply chase in circles - your track is made from waypoints - different for every race, must account for many factors (wind, thermals, shape of landscape - will you manage to pass that ridge?, waypoint location) to win.

Maybe you could even partner with gliding organizations like FAI to promote MSFS 2020 to real live competition glider pilots.

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Nice idea. Voted!

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Love this, and looks simple to implement. Voted!

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I like this idea too, Sounds like fun. I do this on a slope, we have a sort of Pylon race with gliders, and flying wings too. We also do attack flying with foam wings that are mostly indestructible (Combat Wings). A lot of fun!

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I have to be honest I was kind of expecting some kind of online leaderboard based challenges at launch, nothing too crazy but some basic glider tasks with high scores to gamify it a bit. Come on Asobo, you can get that in there easily enough :slight_smile:

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Indeed that was also my first thought, But then I realized that Asobo had already put great effort to provide all those new mechanics/kinds of flight for 40th anniversary so it is quite understandable for me that more engaging activities/challenges making use of gliders, helicopters will be simply spread out on further updates.

But glider races that simply reuse already implemented Maverick low flying challenge is a “low hanging fruit” worth implementing soon to continue the hype around 40th anniversary new kinds of flight :).

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I’ve already voted here, but another part of the situation here is about actual flight plans for said races. What is also important here is the ability for someone on an XBOX to import the plan they need - without needing to have the sim installed on a PC. At the moment, XBOX are second class citizens here, which means any racing capability would also need to address how these community flight plans are addressed. I’ve posted in OneDrive to import .PLN files from Xbox - Community Support / Wishlist - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums but will re-post this.

FS community, please consider voting for the .pln portion of the problem as well.

Asobo/Microsoft, please address this gaping deficiency.

The sim is fantastic for the ability to do cross-platform gaming. Unfortunately, for anything other than a relatively simple flight plan, xbox users are left out when it comes to flying in cross-platform multi-user events because of the inability to easily get a PLN file (and potentially weather preset) into their sim.

Many events are driven from complex flight plans, that are not necessarily simple to recreate in the world map, if at all possible. Specifically, complex bush trips with many waypoints along a flight path down a valley, or these days glider “competition” tasks that have height restrictions at varying waypoints - these two examples are not possible to exactly recreate in the world map.

Sure, if they own a PC they could install the sim on that, and sign in, do the load-from-pc and save-to-xbox-cloud. But if you don’t have a PC that’s capable of having the sim installed, you’re stymied. Not every person using an xbox for MSFS has a PC sitting alongside it, and that cuts down the usefulness of the sim for xbox users.

There’s clearly a couple of ways that this could be dealt with.

  • One way is for the sim to allow a load-from-onedrive rather than only the closed xbox-cloud location that is currently in place. The xbox user can load the file into that from the browser or OneDrive app on their chosen device, and retrieve it in the sim.
  • Another way is to expose the xbox-cloud save location to OneDrive so that you can do the above but direct into where the Sim looks for plans and weather.
  • Another option would be to allow the sim to load plans and weather from external https locations; this in my mind has a greater set of risks to it but would allow for community event hosts to load a plan somewhere, once, and have anyone access that same plan without the download&save/load process.
  • Another option (and in my view the most palatable) would be to provide a MSFS specific webpage that will allow a signed in user to load files into the xbox-cloud locations. This means it’s completely within the MSFS ecosystem and control, doesn’t need to touch OneDrive, and means the xbox simmer doesn’t need to install a 100+Gb (and growing) sim on a PC even when not capable of running more than the world map for loading and saving…

Please, make this happen so we don’t have two communities that can’t really participate to the same level in each other’s events.

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Even earning badges (like in real life) for 45 mins, 2hrs etc of unpowered flight (from preset launch locations and weather) would be awesome - kind of like the landing challenges but gliding challenges. Leaderboards for longest unpowered flight times etc…

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Shareable task setting is a good idea .
This would also sync the weather I’m guessing and it would be the exact task for everyone .

The other ideas of the leader board and achievements is what i thought may have been included .
Hoping they can look at this for sure in another update . Other sims have a great external system of scoring and badges , MS/Asobo should be able to achieve this

Having fun with what i have at the moment though , improvements will come .

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A possibility to record glider flights to be used for glider competitions.