It would be great to see a drone included in the list of aircraft. There are millions of people flying drones world-wide. There are very few drone simulators with good scenery. FS2020 would be a great place for existing and new drone pilots to practice flying.
Maybe the sim graphics support is incompatible with detailed ground level views that one would have of vegetation and buildings while flying a quadcopter drone near ground level. Theoretically, sim graphics already existing should support higher aerial views from a drone cam. DJI already has a decent but arcade game-like free flight simulator (DJI Flight Simulator) through which one can control a drone with your remote controller or smart controller actually plugged into your PC via a USB cable. Get companies like DJI involved and see what they can do. They might regard it as a “free” avenue for advertising their products and getting young simmers to be future drone customers. I own a DJI Mavic 2 Pro and would love to fly a simulation of it in FS 2020. The DJI Flight Simulator really helped me learn the controls before my first real liftoff.
That is an awesome idea. What a great way to explore and get some great photography at the same time.
My wish is for drone makers to implement the same control scheme that Asobo uses for the drone camera.
Yes, it’s a good idea, but I doubt the sim could support the kind of resolutions of both objects and textures required at ground level. At that point, we’d be talking about a photorealistic world - and just look at the torrent of problems people are having with MSFS 2020 at its current resolution. But I like the idea. Seems to me there’s perhaps a whole game in and of itself waiting to happen with the drone in MSFS 2020. Maybe we just need to wait another 5 years for consumer tech to catch up.
I agree that detailed views the world over at ground level might be impractical but just as there are featured cities and cultural points of interest around the world in MSFS, perhaps drone flying at the scale of small remote-controlled quadcopters could be introduced in select areas around the world. Maybe just as the Reno Air Races was added, there could be a gaming aspect or just a touring aspect at select world locations. I guess some of the places with the best photogrammetry are not the places in the real world that you’re going to be allowed to fly a drone, e.g., downtown Manhattan, but you might certainly fly a small RC quadcopter drone around Monument Valley, which already exists in the sim in great detail.
Another completely off-the-wall idea would be if there some way that I could reconstruct the exterior of my house and yard in ultra photogrammetric detail and introduce that imagery to my copy of MSFS. Then by hooking my DJI controller up to the computer, practice flying my DJI drone in virtual reality around my house (even better if one could introduce different amounts of wind and wind variability). It might be helpful just as a vague approximate refresher and reminder of the maneuvers involved before giving it a go in real life, particularly if it’s been quite a few months since I last actually flew the drone around my house. Perhaps, though, nothing in MSFS should be intended to be a stand-in for real-world practice.
Has any progress been made on this front? I would really like to have a quadcopter “aircraft” model to use in videos. Extensive internet searching has turned up nothing. Here is one that unfortunately is “full size” (not to scale), won’t take off vertically or hover, and doesn’t sound like a quadcopter. It looks great, but I guess the creator never found time to do the aerodynamics. Looks like it was based on an airplane, and not a helicopter. FPV Drone
FYI in case anybody wants to make a comment reinforcing the need. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, it will get done.
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