Absolutely. But there is more interest in flying 737s and A320s. I agree with you, I’d rather nose round the Scottish Highlands or something with a road atlas on my lap.
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Indeed it is not. Even the basic autopilot in a 172 isn’t trivial, especially if there’s no documentation. I can’t speak for P3D but X-Plane documents it and so, as far as it went, did FSX.
The odd thing is that I actually hardly ever fly IFR, I know plenty who do, but me, just now and then.
Apart from a few really duff bits which are easy enough to fix, it suits me, VFR, C172, that’s mostly what I do. I just objected to being charged for something that doesn’t actually work properly.
I mean it was fairly obvious things like the autopilot weren’t working correctly ; you could turn it on and it would suddenly smash you into the ground or launch you into space, that’s with just the boring old six button LCD C172 autopilot. Some of it is pitiful - the destination airport not being remembered in the drop down, the back buttons on the map screen not being consistent. None of these things are big problems, it’s what they’re indicative of that’s the problem. Rushed code, not tested properly either by the developers or the testers, if they have any.
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I have never used FSX, but I again raise you this… How is P3D any better? Or X-Plane? Same issues exist there. I mean, X-Plane doesn’t even have a FLIGHT PLANNER! P3D’s default G1000 system doesn’t have a functioning knob that lets you zoom in and out of the map. There is NO synthetic vision, unless you buy a plane with it! And Carenado sells their planes there with G1000 that doesn’t have Synthetic Vision! If you want it, that’s a SEPARATE Carenado product you have to buy (it enables Synthetic Vision on all their G1000 aircraft!) I don’t know about old versions, but I am talking about version 5.1 (the first one I bought, the latest one)… That sim has been in development for 10 years!
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It’s quite interesting. I flew round Lynton and Lynmouth (because it’s complex and varied and I know how it is supposed to look) while back in FSX, XPlane, XPlane w/OrbX TE and MSFS. XPlane w/OrbX is fairly close, far closer than I expected, though clearly not as good. The roads are squarer and don’t map to the mesh as well (probably the mesh). MSFS has this weird obsession with trees that are far too thick, and turning it to low doesn’t really fix it. Buzzing around at low level you can tell the difference. If you fly at higher levels, the mesh becomes important as do the clouds, but basically you can’t see the details at 10,000 feet. It matters when you get down to airports, but the detail level at the airports is a different matter. The taxiways are a pain in MSFS. FSX is comfortably behind, but it is old tech.
With P3D, XP and DCS it’s pretty much these: you get the base sim, and then dump a large, a very large load of money on them to buy all these addons you speak of. So to answer your rhetorical question: they are not better, but get better when you open your wallet 
And they get better in terms of complex airliners, a few GAs, IFR avionics etc.
In terms of VFR, things most of the time don’t get better even after dumping a lot of money. Case in point: I wanted to find my house in Prepar3D.
Bought ORBX Global for £60. Nope my house ain’t there.
Bought ORBX Vector for £40. Nope my house ain’t there yet.
Bought ORBX OpenLC for £30. Nope no dice. My house still ain’t there yet.
Bought ORBX England region for £25. Nope…no sight of my house.
In MSFS 2020 my house was in the base sim on 18th August, 2020 right out of the box even in an area with exactly zero photogrammetry.
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P3D is an improved version of FSX, mostly the graphics. It’s the same code base. As with any other 16 year old (at least because FSX is an upgraded FS2004 at least) code base you are stuck with the limitations of that code base. P3D will have those pretty much period. I very much doubt it was engineered to be built on any more than has already been done. (There’s probably no 6502/Z80 code from Bruce in there, but with MS it wouldn’t be a surprise)
X-Plane’s flight planner is there, it’s pretty basic, and you can import flight plans into the aircraft or put them in directly of course. It doesn’t have MSFS fancy one, (which is the old FSX one with a pretty front end on it and SIDs and STARs bodged in)
MSFS is also built on FSX but they replaced the audiovisuals. (I’ll try to dig up the accurate list if you want), which is why it looks so good. Though it’s not as good as people often claim it is. Much of the rest has serious commonalities ; so for example there exists a program which has a pretty good go at converting FSX aircraft models. Simconnect pretty much worked from day one because it’s the same. That sort of thing. Some things have been thrown entirely. Some things are still there.
As for the systems. FSXs are undoubtedly limited. Nobody would question that. What was there worked as far as it was supposed to. MSFSs aren’t up to the standard of FSXs let alone the likes of the more expensive sims, they just don’t work properly. If they can make them work, they may be great. But they aren’t yet. They aren’t remotely comparable with X-Plane’s in the standard aircraft. (and X-Plane could be bothered to document them).
Exactly what I mean… I spent in a neighborhood of $2000 on P3D add-ons since getting it about a month and a half ago. So, it’s not fair to compare MSFS with all those add-ons. MSFS add-ons will come (complex ones), people just need to be patient. And then they will complain about how expensive PMDG planes are. Ha! Queen of the Skies II with its expansion is $200.
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Yep. Problem is the avionics and so on in X-Plane works way better than the avionics in MSFS. (Even the ones in FSX do, because they actually work albeit they are limited).
GA autopilot (e.g. Basic C172) is now useable. The A320 etc is still hit and miss.
No, you can’t expand FSX with ORBX products to that degree. It’s not possible, and the size of the download should make that obvious.
X-Plane is somewhat different. My (rural) house is there, but in large cities X-Plane uses flat projections for some houses because it has nothing like the VRAM/GPU/CPU power requirements of MSFS. It can do it - it’s just replacing a 2D flat graphic with a 3D model, it just limited the market too much.
(Of course, in FSX and X-Plane you can fly gliders and helicopters about your house, and you always could)
Yeah, fine, if you want to VFR fly at 1,000 feet it’s great. If you want to IFR fly at 10,000 feet, it makes no real difference. Then boring things like basic systems working matter.
Didn’t someone say what amounts to “don’t you have any other arguments other than look at the pretty graphics ?”
What do people do when they’ve finished looking at things (which you can do better on Google Maps/Earth anyway)
MSFS add ons are delayed because the core is still broken. PMDG et all will want to launch 737s and so on, but not until the core is stable (writing code for a moving target is horrible).
Once the B sales group has gone - the X-Box users, then sales will drop in the usual curve. There’ll be special deals and so on, but raw sales are over. Then Microsoft may well dump it, it wouldn’t be the first time or even the thirtieth time. And of course, it is server dependent, where as FSX was stand alone except for multiplayer (and that protocol is fairly simple). It wouldn’t be the first or last game where “oh, the servers are off line in 3 weeks, hard cheese”.
I reckon it has to either charge for them or go rental at some point. I’m quite surprised it didn’t at the start, because once you’ve shelled out £100 for something it doesn’t go down well to say, oh well, we’re going to charge £7.99 a month so you can use it. Especially if new content dries up. Maybe a few quid from sales on the market.
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Incidentally, if you bought those products expecting to find your house, you don’t know what you were buying … OrbX will tell you BASE doesn’t change anything outside visuals, “Vector” and “Land Class” should be a clue as to what they do.
It’s like buying a DC3 and complaining you still can’t see your house. It’s not supposed to do that.
The thing is what made FSX and P3D good for IFR, the third party airlinerer like PMDG and FSlabs. Without these, surely the platforms will die.
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Not so sure. Eventually perhaps. There’s no helicopters yet and that’s a market. If you are a beginner, for all its faults there’s an argument for buying FSX, because it’s cheap and it has a large amount of documentation, tutorials and missions/tutorials.
I know whatisname says Microsoft are committed to 10 years blah blah blah. I’ve been coding Windows since 3.0 and they’ve said all sorts of things. We were also supposed to be using ActiveX plugins running Visual Basic apps for the web, I recall. One wonders if they are so committed to it why they rammed through the untested beta release. I doubt Asobo were impressed !
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Indeed it is. I haven’t ever seen a flight simulator developer display this kind of commitment. Not only it’s receiving consistent updates at a pace that’s quicker than the industry norm (even for gaming in general), but the amount of regular free content is much beyond my expectations. 
Listening to Jorg talk when I interviewed him, made it absolutely obvious that he cares, a lot. But you see that in the livestreams as well.
Lemme just share an anecdote. When we had the interview, it was 9 AM at Jorg’s place (I’m in Europe and Microsoft is on the West Coast), so I apologized for having him wake up early, and he mentioned that he had already been in meetings with various parties for hours. That’s what I call dedication.
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Just curious as to which map you bought. There seem to be quite a few free ones, and there is Little Nav Map.
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The initial heavy investment followed by a huge spike in revenues followed by slower sales will have been built into the original business plan. There is a 10 year business plan for the sim, that no doubt has contingency for reducing the headcount substantially from the initial development levels. They know how to run a business and I’m sure they went into this with their eyes open.
Someone just made a post indicating that MS are taking a very substantial cut from market place sales, so that will be another revenue stream for them.
Loving the tolerance of the simmers crowd. So nice to see. Let’s keep all this riff raff away from our hobby and passion to make sure it dies out with us. We certainly wouldn’t want anyone else enjoying it. /s
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Actually I want people to enjoy it. It’s essential to get more simmers. And that’s the basic problem.
A rookie buys MSFS. They do the 8 training exercises. They do the 2 very limited A320 exercises. They do a bit of VFR flying, the “bush missions” and some of the landings. Then it grinds to a steaming halt. They try to fly the A320, but half the time it doesn’t seem to work properly. Is it them , or is it the program. Unless they are psychic, they’ll have no idea, there’s no documentation, no tutorials, no training, no real admission of what does and doesn’t work on one half of the product.
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If actually read the interview before posting 23 times in a thread about said interview, you’d know they have extensive plans to address this.
As a matter of fact, they have already started by adding new tutorials in December.
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Interesting that. I am a rookie. I bought x-plane 11 a while ago - couldn’t get started with it at all, couldn’t get into it. Stone age graphics didn’t help of course. I’m sure the planes were accurate, but I didn’t enjoy it. Roll along MSFS and I’m hooked. Until August last year, I’d never even heard of IFR, VFR, Garmin, flight plans, HDG, FLC and all the million other acronyms and terms that aviation likes to use.
Guess what, I’m having a blast. I fugured out most of it by trial and error. The rest I googled, or asked some of the people on this forum who are willing to help. And you know what, the learning and finding out was all part of the fun. I had no idea of the depth and complexity and amount of work that goes in to flying a plane before you even get off the ground.
I like user manuals. But I’ve never read one for any game or simulator ever. That’s part of the fun - you mess it up and you don’t crash, burn and kill passenders for real! That’s why it’s a simulator.
So maybe you and others like you on this thread and these forums need to stop underestimating and typifying the “xbox crowd” the “gamer crowd” the “I just want to shoot people crowd” or whatever label you like to stick onto others who aren’t in “your crowd”. You might just learn something - maybe a bit of humility would be a good start?
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