Quality Mindset of MFS-Team

Oh, I remember, it’s a message board where you can talk about the product ?

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I came across an article this morning which resonates so much with FS2020 to me:

This system is both flawed and woefully inefficient, as any expert in quality management will tell you. It’s like letting cars roll off the production line with no windows, and waiting for customers to bring them back to have them installed. By far the best choice is to build correctly the first time, or, as second best, to detect and rectify defects before shipping. So long as shipping updates remains relatively cheap, and your customers are happy to report all the defects which you didn’t fix, it appears to work, at least in the short term.

I’ve now reached the stage where I simply don’t have time to report all these bugs, nor should I have to. Indeed, I’ve realised that in doing so, I only help perpetuate Apple’s flawed engineering practices.

Developing software is both labour- and time-intensive. Code is usually relatively quick to write, but far slower to test and debug, and to document. Apple cuts corners, and saves money, by reducing testing and debugging, and (almost invariably) by not documenting. We let Apple get away with this by devoting our time to testing and documenting for Apple. There’s no point in complaining about poor quality of macOS and other Apple software if you then help Apple continue its bad practices.

You could replace “Apple” with “Microsoft/Asobo” and find strange similarities to the article comments and the comments in these forums.

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These days people are impatient. The market focuses more on who can deliver products first rather than who can deliver the products right. Let’s imagine a scenario here:

We have 2 software companies, releasing similar software. They have the same number of staff and resources, and they have the same amount of budget and expertise. But they have two distinct methodologies.

Company A uses the traditional waterfall method. Company B uses agile method. Let’s assume the software being developed and release would be in perfect conditions when worked within 2 years time.

Company A would take all that 2 years to properly scope and plan the software, develop them, and have proper phases in the project to test them thoroughly, in the end of that 2 years, testing is completed and they’re confident that the software is at an acceptable quality for general release.

Now Company B with it’s agile methodology promises the same quality software, but they managed to scope the features properly to have half of the feature ready within 1 year. So they built a half-baked software just enough for the most basic and barebone functions and sell them at full retail price. So shorter time, requires shorter testing phase, and after release, they plan to gather public feedback on what works, and what doesn’t work, and to be driven by the market on what to improve for the remaining 1 year all free from the customers.

Now as the general public, which software company would you choose when faced by these two choices? Will you wait for 2 years for a software that you don’t know even if it’s a perfected software by then. Or you have this other software that’s ready to use 1 year earlier. You can get it and you can use it, you know what it’s doing, and while you get bugs, there’s clear communication line to report those bugs and also the channel to request for improvements for free. At year 2, when Company A finally released their product, Company B would have either the similar product to be at the similar quality. And would you suddenly request a refund to Company B and buy Company A software instead?

The lesson here is, that the sad truth in the software and gaming industry is that. Customers are impatient. People would rather buy a product now, rather than wait for a perfect product later on. And companies and shareholders are aware of this. They don’t want to dwell too much on testing and development, because competitors are going to steal the market share by releasing their products earlier than them, no matter the state they’re in.

If it’s more profitable to release half-baked goods now, rather than fully-baked goods later. Then the industry will always keep doing that business model. All of these are simply driven by the customers needs to have things instant. Everything has to be done now, they have to get something now, they have to express their emotions, now. now now now. Gone are the days, where people just stay calm and patient and wait for good things to come.

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And oddly enough, just like Apple, MSFS is the most popular in it’s category over it’s competition. Guess they are doing something right.

Can’t believe I am standing for up Apple in this hypothetical.

And unlike Apple, the value for dollar and time is better on this sim than any of it’s competitors, by far.

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This is a far greater problem in my opinion than the OP is describing here and a real quality problem. If they would have taken any aircraft for a spin they must have noticed the hideous floating in ground effect:

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I love a bit of eye candy.

However I didn’t spend £100+ just so I could float round the earth looking at fields. I can do that in Google Earth for free.

I expected a wide variety of aircraft with reasonably accurate flight dynamics.

The only aircraft that I could find that actually make any effort to utilize the new flight dynamics are the
impressive freeware STOL Savage Carbon and the lovely payware MB-339. Many third party developers are busy “modding” the default aircraft to make them “fly right”. This should have been done by Asobo before releasing the software. I suspect they overspent their budget on building the weather engine…

And as for the weather. The weather looks great. If only it had some sort of effect on the aircraft when you fly through it!

The “turbulence” modelling seems to feature just one effect - the aircraft wobbling rapidly from side to side. Aeronautical twerking? Even this doesn’t happen much unless you happen to fly from land to sea or vice versa.

Cross-winds just blow the default aircraft off the runway like a paper plane.

And as for the icing effect…

I’ve spent 25 years using flight simulators. I’ve used them purely for pleasure and also for flight training
FS2020 looks great but as a “simulator of flight”? I don’t think so.

Am I being too harsh fellow flyers?

Cheers,

Captain Moore

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Not too harsh at all… that’s your opinion and so it is valid.

Congratulations. You have chosen the right flight simulator because most if not all of the default aircraft do have reasonably accurate flight dynamics indeed. Albeit there are issues here and there but it’s nothing that can’t or won’t be fixed in near future. There’s a reason why MSFS has a ten year long development cycle and promise.

Give the following thread a read. Read it slowly. When it comes to the flight model of some if not all of the default aircraft in MSFS 2020, there are many more real world pilots way more qualified and experienced than you who would flat-out disagree with pretty much everything you said in your post:

Real World Pilots, please state your feedback about the flight model - Community / General Discussion - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

Nope I don’t think so. IIRC You have the right to express an opinion, no matter how absurd and inaccurate it is. :slight_smile:

In that case it’s great news, and it only means Microsoft’s strategy is working successfully: make a bunch of visually spectacular and realistic-looking aircraft as base default, build a few of them with reasonably realistic flight model (see thread with testimony from numerous real world pilots above), leave some of them with decent but not too realistic flight model and thus leave room for third parties to make money, which is how it should be and has always been in past flight sims such as FSX, prepar3d and XP 10/11. Nothing new here.

Microsoft and Asobo whole-heartedly disagree with your expertly business advice, and have never promised anything like that. They decided to go “broad”, focus on the base simulator, build a phenomenal and revolutionary base for others to build on, and have said so in public numerous times from the very beginning. They haven’t hid anything from anyone. If you don’t like their business model and technical roadmap, you are more than welcome to find and buy for yourself another flight simulator with 30 perfect aircraft with “reasonably accurate flight model” and two petabytes of world data included in the base default package for a mere one-time fee of £100+.

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Maybe Asobo will update the flight models long after MSFS 2020 release for Xbox. If you don’t want to wait this long, try these flight model mods from MSFS 2020 sailplane

Well, I think MSFS 2020 has great potential. As they sold MSFS 2020 in August 2020 it was full priced beta quality software, nothing more. Maybe Asobo/Microsoft will realize the potential, maybe the 3rd party developer will (again as in FSX, X-plane, …) realize the potential. But at least 6 months or 1 year from now to see something solid.

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It’s not, and I did try to enjoy it after using MSFS 2020 for a day. On 20th August, 2020 I did go back to my beloved A2A C172 + Prepar3d aka FSX just to compare how it feels like after buying and using MSFS 2020 the previous day.

Almost started to puke 20 minutes later, uninstalled the whole trash, removed some remnants from C drive and jumped straight back to MSFS 2020. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I used FSX and P3D for about 10+ years collectively, bought and flew three major PMDG and one major FSLabs addon for four years, and three aircraft from A2A for a year.

But on 20th August, 2020 it was time to bury the dead. And I’m glad I did.

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This is very generic claim that could be applied to any company.

No, you simply bounce off an invisible wall. Low fps sometimes lets you glitch through if you fly fast enough…

Indeed it could. The thing is, Microsoft has a 50 year history of doing it.

Agreed, as someone approaching a cost per hour flight time of £1/hour on the Premium Deluxe (excl free updates), I think the sim-game already represents incredible value for money, even with its current flaws…

Projected out over the intended ten year development timetable, on current usage that will drop to about 20p/hour at today’s values…

My other hobby costs about £4.20/pint and has left the building in a few hours…

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I totally agree with you. The updates they are putting out look great. The guys seem like nice guys… but, fix what we have! It’s so frustrating every time I fly down the Delaware River to see the bridges have a wall from the span to the water. To see the trees growing out of the Battleship New Jersey. To see the oil tanker in the same place every time I fly. The airports are dead, compared what they should be. There are so many other things that need fixing. This isn’t ok. It really isn’t.

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The things that you are mentioning are not bugs and will not be fixed because that would mean manual work, which is unrealistic. It will take more time for the A.I. algorithms to mature and produce better results. We are talking years, rather than months.

I suspect it’s not really AI. There’s no learning loop ; it takes the data it has and builds scenery from it, but to ‘learn’ it has to have some way of evaluating that activity for accuracy.

So I suspect they are manually tweaking the “AI” and that it’s just PR to make it sound clever.

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Yep. Buzzwords, buzzwords, buzzwords.

Everything has gotta be machine learning AI these days, or cloud computing, or big data, or block chain encrypted…so that it takes 3 minutes to calculate what 2x9 is (including logging the AI learnings [sic], uploading and then downloading again from the cloud, writing all keystrokes and pauses to the big data schema and then unencrypting the response so it can be displayed on screen).

I’ve been an MSFS fan since SubLogic days on my Commodore64, back in '83.
I was expecting FSX with better graphics.
I got better GFX than expected.
I have great fun especially enjoy flying through snow covered mountains all over the planet.
OTOH, my computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than my C64.
Also, MSFS2020 has no review function and no helicopters, as had FSX.
FSX had similar issues, i.e. scenery jumps, roads and cars and water in the wrong places, etc.
But…
Where in the advertising does MS say that MSFS2020 is a ‘work in progress’?
Is that the new ‘standard’?
Oh, well. Just a ‘game’.

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How about they stop the scenary updates untill the game is stable, has a G1000 that is supposed to work like a G1000 and airplanes purchased on premium get basic things removed from inop status?

Forget the bridges fix the default systems first.

That is appearantly too much to ask for and we want everything instantly if I am to read some of the posters in this thread.

It is funny how we got USA, UK and Japan before a somewhat functional 787 at premium price.