Just a thought

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Hi!

I don’t mean to offend anyone, but some comments in this forum about the last couple of updates are irritating.

As a long time simmer I‘d like to share some thoughts with you. Back in the old days with FSX the community complained about missing updates and we had to accept all the flaws and bugs that the sim included. We moarned over Microsoft’s decision to stop supporting the flightsim franchise.

Then they decided to take a different approach. They announced 10 (!) years of ongoing development and support. That leads to what I would like to say:

I understand the frustration when things stop working the way they did or when every update introduces other problems.

But: I appreciate every update and the way the sim looks and feels. It has very little in common with FSX and P3D. This sim is a gigantic leap forward. We are at the beginning of a hopefully long journey.

The common hardcore simmer has always been forced to spend endless hours tweaking the sim, nursing various files (scenery.cfg, FSX.ini, FSX.cfg and so on). Then we ran out of memory. I remember that completing a flight without a problem was close to a miracle. Flying online with VATSIM or IVAO led to stuttering, planes jumped because of the low speed of the networks and when there was too much traffic, the sim often broke down.

Where are we now? The world looks like the world! Cities have become cities and forests are forests! Every road on earth can be used for orientation when flying VFR. And the weather is simply breathtaking. Do you remember seeing those rectangular cloudformations in FSX not a single addon could really fix? Well, I do.

I couldn’t imagine seeing a flightsim like the one we have now.

When great developers like PMDG and others release their products it will be near perfect.

I‘m just asking some frustrated simmers to be patient and constructive. Things will get better. I have the feeling that all of the developers, especially Asobo and Microsoft are very dedicated to fix bugs and please the community with their work.

But progress has its downsides, of course. We‘ll simply have to accept, that we‘re part of a development process, meaning that problems occur and need to be solved.

Just a thought…

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I tend to agree with the OP, but it doesn’t mean I’m any the less frustrated by the realization that - and let’s be honest - MSFS 2020 is never really going to be ‘finished’. It’s going to be an ‘always in development’ deal until, presumably, at some point, Microsoft loses its financial commitment to the project and we’re all forced to move on to whatever, by then, is the next big thing in flight sims.

What I’d give to jump ahead 3 or 4 years and see where MSFS 2020 has got to by then. Maybe by then, Indonesia might actually have one or two water masks. Maybe.

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You‘re absolutely right. As long as they keep up their work things will continue to be this way. But I’m willing to do my part as a consumer and to move ahead. Let’s wait and see where we are in 3 or 4 years from now! Exciting, isn’t it?

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Hi Flusingo,

I agree,

Like it or not the nature of a flight simulator is a never ending cycle, as technology increases so will the demands of the flight simmer and as you say you have to accept that constant tinkering such as you and I have experienced, which in my case goes all the way back to Sublogic will always be the norm.

It’s a matter of getting a balance and enjoying the development along the way.

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Agreed, the sim really is amazing. Every week or two I discover something new.

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Then we‘ve travelled down the same road! When flying now with my G2 on and having the feeling of being there in the great FBW Airbus approaching a wonderful airport I‘m very happy! I had to become 50 to see this!

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Lol sounds about right,

My god i’m Happy I don’t have to run scripts to run a certain fsx.exe file just to get something going.

I’m bobbing along the tree tops enjoying the best view I Have Ever !!! had in a flight simulator, and we have only just started

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This whole ten year commitment thing is hard for me to believe. I am sure if you read the fine print MS/ASOBO has the right to pull the plug on this thing any time they want and includes the servers to run this also. I understand they are in this to make money so I cant blame them but a more accurate statement would be that they will support it for ten years if financially feasible. I guess only time will tell.

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I agree with this wholeheartedly.

I played FSX a few months before 2020 released to get me in the mood and my immediate reaction was; “wow, did it really look like this? I remember this looking incredible near release. “

I do feel bad for people who are facing genuinely breaking issues that stop them from playing.

I do have less sympathy for people complaining that 30fps is a stuttery mess (I actually feel bad for anyone that perceives 30fps as stuttery and unplayable) or they complain about some obscure issue. They fail to appreciate the entire planet has been generated using a machine learning engine that will make mistakes, oddities etc. You’re going to find weird artefacts and glitches in this world if you look for them.

For the vast majority of the time I’m in awe as I fly over a country and look down at the scenery and come to terms with the fact that what I see is an actual road, an actual town, actual rivers, that really do exist. I find it absolutely incredible that I can do this for anywhere on the planet.

It’s been very refreshing to see the senior management team doing live Q&As and the like. I’m not sure how many development studios do that kind of thing post release.

If I’ve learned anything over the last few years it’s that we live in a world where people are ever more demanding, less respectful, and less grateful for what they have.

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Sad, but true. Some people find it hard to accept simple facts. That makes serious discussions nearly impossible. Criticism is absolutely fine, but being fair is also very important.

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The above is precisely why I bought MSFS 2020. I’m not interested in being a virtual pilot; but I love being a virtual tourist, flying from and to anywhere I want, any time, in this facsimile of the real world, taking in the sights (and some of them are genuinely awesome in the most literal sense of that word - try Gran Canaria - I was terrified by it). As you say - the very notion that each of us now holds the whole world, so to speak, in our PCs for us to freely explore at our leisure… mind blown

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