Let’s try to create a more positive feedback topic as lots of topics are overrun by the same people going on and on about how bad the sim is. If you are one of those people, please refrain from posting in this topic or stay on topic.
Please do no post the most obvious things like fixing all/certain bugs, fixing a specific location/airport or already promised or obviously wanted functionality like improved flight models, autopilots, helicopters and VR. Let’s try to just specify improvements and feature requests for both the short term and the long term.
I would like the following things in the short term (say the upcoming half year):
More vibrant night environment where the ground is darker and where lights are more visible in the distance. No more lit up farmlands. Don’t get me wrong, the current night environment is close to reality in my opinion, it just needs a little more contrast. Also car headlights should be visible as bright white dots aside from their light bundles, so we can better see them at night. We’re nearly there, it just needs some nudging and tweaking now.
Improved AI traffic with way more different plane models and preferably real world liveries. Vehicles shouldn’t clutter the taxi ways and should give way to airplanes instead of the other way around.
More voices for ATC
Effects like contrails, splashing water on the A5 windscreen when moving through the water, wake effect behind the water planes, dust while taxiing through dirt, water spray from the wheels when the runway is wet, etc.
Windscreen wipers actually being necessary and having effect. Windows fogging up when using incorrect airconditioner/blower settings.
Improvements of the clouds, more types, better texture effects, more prominent whites instead of the ugly grey shades we often see now.
Better lightning effects, the current ones seem a bit weird and too slow.
In the longer term the following things would be great to have:
Wake turbulence from other aircraft.
More activity in the world, birds should be more common, addition of more ships (also river boats and leisure vessels), trains, gliders an parachutists at recreational airports, hot air balloons when the weather is right. Also things like traffic jams on the highways would be nice.
More realistic ground crew communication (not through ATC) and automatic start/stop/turning.
Better lighting effects in the clouds (landing lights should light up clouds more realistically), strobes being visible while in the clouds
A career mode would be great, but at least give us a reason to fly and a way to discover new places. The hamburger runs from MS Flight where nice, but a flight of the week might also be sufficient.
The ability to walk around the aircraft and open at least the doors and preferably do a pre-flight inspection
I think if they could concentrate a bit more on decent Bing textures for the lesser-known regions (Africa, SE Asia, India, etc) it would make a significant difference for the many MSFS users who don’t live in N. America or Europe. What we have atm is extremely slapdash in places.
Hell even London and several European places look bad, what to talk about Asia and Africa.
The Colosseum is a bunch of office buildings. Mount Rushmore is office buildings. Bridges are underwater in London and the Buckingham palace is an office block lol.
They really should have fixed these important areas.
Hoping they’ll release a monuments update or something .
You made my day, brother! I am an amphibian runner…and the Icon A5 landing or taking off in the water, no water disturbance effects kills the immersion, right then and there. Same for the boats and ships, showing no visible converse through the water as you fly over them. Also..the Icon..needs to react with the water, in the depth of the hull, immersed in it…such as can be enjoyed in P3D…for right now..it looks like it’s on a false platform (rails ) ABOVE the water…and never truly engaging the surface. I hope they fix that as well!
Realistically though, I would foresee handling the large backlog of bugs, terrain and airport quirks, performance issues, etc. to take up at least the next few months. That’s just my gut feeling. So within a ~6 month time frame I could only see a small fraction of that being dedicated to new features or functionality.
That being the case what could we expect that’d be long hanging fruit? Real world liveries seem like an easy one, just pending licensing approval. That’s straightforward art team work.
Flight replays would be probably #1 on my list for functional additions.
Having gone through the requisite “jump in Cessna, do a couple of runs around my city, find house/office/etc.”, I’m starting to notice all the stuff that’s missing.
For the beginning/intermediate user
A proper flight school program that goes from “never flown at all” to ATPL, like we had in FSX, for example. I cannot imagine how a first-time flight simulator owner is expected to make use of even a fraction of the base software functionality if all they get is training up to their first solo flight. Even a Cessna 152 is a very complex machine that requires a fair amount of training to operate proficiently and it only gets worse from there.
An in-game manual/knowledgebase that allows the user to learn the software and the planes/systems. Again, this was something that came out-of-the-box with FSX. Right now, there is very little information provided officially and while user-generated content will make up for some of that, we really shouldn’t be expected to trawl YouTube or wherever to find out what MSFS does and does not, and how to get the results we want.
More and more varied activities. The hardcore simmer will always find something to do, but for the beginner/casual player (and given the profile of MSFS, there are gonna be many of those), a large number of varied missions (again, something FSX had) keeps up the interest until they develop sufficient skills and knowledge to appreciate the sandbox aspect more
For the intermediate/advanced user
Detailed specs/checklists for all planes being made available. The currently existing checklist for the 152 (only one I checked) goes as far as take off and no further. It will get you up in the air (the easy bit), but won’t bring you back down again (the real trick). I can get by without one, because I’m familiar enough with simulated light Cessnas, but I’d really like to maintain at least a semblance of correct procedures without having to consult external sources.
A better flight planning experience. Much to my surprise, the nav log as it now stands doesn’t even include expected fuel consumption. Having already gone through a rather amusing field (literally) ditch during my first cross-country attempt, I would very much prefer to have some idea of whether I’m taking enough fuel for the trip. Another thing that struck me was that planning cruise altitude was rather wonky. It would be nice to be able to set altitude for each waypoint. As things are now, we get weird pseudo-waypoints like “cruise” and “descent” that seem to serve no purpose (my “descents” invariably result in maintaining altitude). It would also be nice to be able to plot radials/measure distance from VORs to waypoints during the planning stage - I’d love to use my NAV instruments, but determining the settings requires external resources and more work than it should.
I’ve read on these forums that the IFR experience is lacking. While I can’t comment myself, since I don’t fly IFR, if this is the case, then addressing these issues should be a priority.
I don’t want to judge MS/Asobo too harshly, because overall my experience has been good, but MSFS feels rather unfinished at present. The beginner doesn’t get enough information and the advanced user, who can get by on what they already know about flying and simulators, will find that they are missing important features. Hopefully, upcoming updates will fill in the blanks, as it were.
I think a great improvement would be a realistic background to the so-called “VFR map”. Even a standard Bing Map background would be better than this green fill-in. I mean, VFR flight uses the landmarks on the ground, like cities, villages, railroads, roads, forests, and VFR maps show them…
Plus, a lot of people use FS as a way to discover places. I’d personnaly like to know the name of the cities, rivers and mountains that I see.
And on this map, there should a way to find the radionav (and maybe ATC) frequencies. Not anyone uses G1000.
Excellent list - start with showing users what is even possible, instead of assuming or relying on our our finding online, or even being aware of, some procedure, feature, technique, equipment, option, etc.
Flying is relatively easy - its using & getting the most out of the Sim that makes the experience really enjoyable.
I hope this is the right place/way A feature I would really like to see would be to gave a shared cockpit, I dont know if this has been said already or is already an update planned. It would just add a ton of depth to the sim.
The first thing I want them to do is to take a long hard look at real world images and see how trees grow in groups, largely based on variety. Then do doing something about the dreadful system they use now that just mixes tree varieties and randomly places them over the Orthos instead of properly placing tree types in the correct places. Wherever I look in the UK the trees just look identical, not the slightest effort to replicate pine forests or deciduous forests, just a random placement of some sort of tree. Its the same in other parts of the world too.
Totally agree with the point about textures for the lesser-known regions. I fly a lot in North-eastern Russia, and although the scenery there is often spectacular, there are very few decent textures there. A shame for the sizeable Russian flightsim community.
