The weather is absolutely stunning. You finally get the feeling of depth and height of real clouds. Rain shafts look real. I’ve flown cloud seeding airplanes before, and many of the visual cues we’d use were there. The icing model visually is terrible, however. It usually forms on leading edges and milky in appearance and airliners rarely pick up any at all. Boeing doesn’t even bother to heat the tail in the 737.
The scenery is amazing, and even with its glitches it’s better than P3D autogen garbage. 1000’ trees in downtown Vancouver growing through buildings, probably only notice many of these glitches up close. And don’t go to the Arctic. It’s a weird mess of trees that shouldn’t be there, missing textures, missing airports, and wonky coastlines.
I tested out some remote bush strips that I know and they look amazing, that I actually want to do bush flying in a sim for the first time. Grass and gravel strips finally have their individual charm.
The airplanes are a bit mediocre for flight models. I was testing out the C-172. Trimming with buttons is way too fast. There were things it wasnt simulating like P-factor, torque slipstream. It was either not there, or not strong enough. I tried spinning it and sometimes it would spin the opposite way it should, left rudder it would spin to the right, which was really weird. When it would enter the spin properly, it was the most realistic spin in a sim yet. However, the outside wing doesn’t stall first in a climb like it should while trying out some more complex stalls I used to teach when I ran a Flight School. Other airplanes don’t even stall or spin at all.
Now for a list of the ugly. Controls are too sensitive for light aircraft and too sluggish for the Airliners, they may be heavier but they respond fast and we can whip around if we need to. Trimming the light airplanes is too fast. There’s something about ground effect that causes a loss of nearly complete control authority. Cold weather effects on the altimeter are not present. The wrong trees in area’s are immersion killers down low. I have a ton more issues but I’ll stick to this for now.
Overall I think the core is there for greater things to come, but needs tons of work.
Awesome to hear from a real pilot… and I can’t wait for 3rd party airplanes!!! Ready for all the buttons to work, the weight and balance and perf settings to work, etc!
even though i m not a pilot first thing i noticed was “Controls are too sensitive for light aircraft and too sluggish for the Airliners” asobo just let 3rd party do aircraft and spend those times developing scenery and sim overall. now they have both not completed scenery sim and planes. what a shame
Glad to read this. I am not a pilot but if the trim and controls really were this sensitive i think light GA would be falling out of the sky all the time! Trim is way too strong IMO.
I am a “real” pilot, though just a non-commercial one. I agree with everything said here- they did a great job focusing on scenery, but the flight model has a long way to go. I’m using one of the recommended flight sticks, and it is ridiculously sensitive with the light aircraft (can barely fly the Cessna out of auto-pilot in a straight line and still hold altitude). I beginning to think they released this a month or two too soon. Maybe the brass at Microsoft was giving them heat? Anyway, I’m guessing these programmers won’t see any sleep for a few weeks as they pump out the updates…
I tried IFR in the C172. Its unusable because I could only set the OBS in 10 degree increments and the needles don’t move smoothly like they do in the real thing. 1/60 rule. Every degree your off course you’ll be 1NM off course.
It’s somewhat to be expected. Every Microsoft Flight Simulator has released with incomplete default planes. It’s all about the core.
I did a flight from KTEX (Telluride) to KASE (Aspen) and it tracked the GPS course perfectly with the TBM airplane. Trouble is, I couldn’t get either the localizer or RNAV approach to work. It’s pretty steep in there, and I purposely created a little weather so the visual was out. Neither approach worked.
They’ll fix it, I’m just surprised they didn’t get IFR squared away before they released the program.
The controls are only too sensitive if you’re using a low end Saitek pro or CH yoke. If you’re actually using a decent yoke, such as a honeycomb alpha that has a full 90 degrees of aileron travel and further elevator travel, you will not have these overly sensitive issues.
I haven’t flown a large plane yet, but I can 100% agree. This certaintly has a “arcade” feel to the controls, although the flight model is at least 10% better than stock x-plane 11 is. I think my biggest problem is like you said, they respond too fast/slow based on when I press the button - or (IMO) they respond too agressive/passive based on my button press.
The sensitivity of the flight controls were always a problem. From the start. And mentioned a lot of time.
You can change it a bit in the options, but it doesn’t feel right.I’m glad you have easier controls in a real plane.
You beat me to it on the OBI behavior issue. I was thinking maybe I was doing something wrong to get 10 degree changes per click. This makes them almost worthless, and the way the needles behave is totally unrealistic. I am begging for Reality-XP to bring their awesome guages to this platform. The defaults kill the IFR immersion for me.
Xplane has their model adjusted to correct for these low end hardware systems. Maybe Microsoft will do the same soon. Using any high quality hardware doesn’t display this issue from my testing (Honeycomb alpha, crosswinds systems).
There definitely some major issues with their new flight model. I had my hopes up watching the developer video on the aerodynamics.
The backward spin physics is the big one.
I am hoping all the tools are there for 3rd party developers for accurate models and they just missed something with the default airplanes.
I was hoping, with there Weather dev having a Phd in meteorology, it would be the first sim to have proper cold weather effects on the altimeter in the base simulator. From a High to a Low, Look Out Below. But in my tests there was no effect with temperature.
