GWJ FBO: Flight Simulation Catch-all

Here's a replacement link for that simulator video:

Arise, thread!!!

Lately I've been completely and utterly obsessed with Wings over Flanders Fields, a WWI flight sim that is actually a mega mod for Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator 3. The amount of work they've put into making a full, realistic, believable world is just astounding, and I love just flying with the AI autopilot on so I can look around and see what's going on in the campaign theater. The thing truly is a marvel.

You can enlist as a British, German, French or American pilot, actually go through training (which I did for my first pilot) and take part in any part of the war (unless you're American of course). The atmosphere is just astounding. Flying a recon mission near the front lines while hearing the far-off thunder of artillery, or hearing and seeing the flak around you as an enemy flight jumps your just-about-to-land flight is just incredible to experience.

So yeah, I can't gush enough about this thing.

I looked long and hard for a decent thread to put this into. Re-arise thread!

Dovetail Games, makers of Train Simulator 2014 (amongst other cheesy games), just licensed Flight Simulator X for re-release.

http://www.dovetailgames.com/news/2014/jul/9/dovetail-games-licensing-deal-with-microsoft-takes-flight

I don't care for Train Simulator one bit, but hopefully the badness that is Train Simulator will not translate into their port of Flight Simulator X. One thing they know is DLC... maybe they can do plane DLC better than Microsoft Flight.

I gave up on FS when I found out that FSX was going to be another table-based sim. I have no real interest in it unless it's doing force modeling.... after playing some sims that use that, I'd never go back to the old method. They feel so much better.

Looks like time for annual thread necro.

Xplane 10 Dreamfoil helicopters. The R22. That's some challenge.

I was linked to this thread last year when I started exploring DCS Huey.

Have we collected any other rotor-heads in the flight sim thread?

I'm also interested in anyone's review of this plug-in which gives one something to do in a flight sim, other than A to B.

Well I'm going to Necro this thread a little earlier than a year.

I've (very) recently got involved in the IVAO (International Virtual Aviation Organisation) as an Air Traffic Controller.
The IVAO is similar to VATSIM in that there is a pilot client for people with FSX, X-plane 8/9/10 or prepare 3d to fly in the same world, and am ATC client for controllers to come in as Delivery, Ground, Tower, Approach or Centre.

I've only put a couple of hours in so far and I'm really enjoying it and plan to work on earning the higher ratings.

I'd love to have some GWJers on Frequency, so was wondering if anyone has been involved in IVAO (or VATSIM) and would love to organise A GWJ fly in.

If anyone who uses flight sims and would like to fly you can get the client here: https://www.ivao.aero/softdev/softwa...

Well I know there hasn't been any responses, but if anyone is interested, I'll be activating Brisbane tower (YBBN) tomorrow from 0400 UTC until about 0600-0700 UTC.

If anyone wants to fly in or out, or even fly circuits, that would be awesome.

Hope to hear/see some of you tomorrow.

That sounds awesome, I wish I had the time for such a thing! Enjoy!

So, I finally ticked over my third star last weekend (passed the exam a while ago, just needed the hours) so I'm now "qualified" to do tower at almost any aerodrome in Australia or New Zealand as well as Approach at some airfields and lower centre (FL180-300) across Australia and New Zealand.

Really enjoying approach and centre work, get alot more 'hands on' time with the aircraft and requires more forethought than tower and ground.

Anyway as always, I'd love to fly with/control a group of GWJ pilots (or controllers). You can play with X plane or Flight sim or another one that I don't remember now. So if you already play flight sims it's easy to get setup.

A few of us have been chatting about the upcoming MS Flight Simulator over in the "Newbie Pilot" thread (starting here), but figured that the discussion was more appropriate to this Flight Sim catch-all thread.

Here is the latest trailer from MS, showing off their snow:

As far as my response to the OP of this thread is concerned, I consider myself to be far more to the casual end of the casual/hardcore spectrum. I played a lot of MS FS Century of Flight along with Aces of the Pacific and then IL-2, to the point where I bought a TrackIR 3 along with a full set of CH gear (Yoke, FighterStick, Throttle, pedals). I'm still using all that same gear about 15 years later, although most of it has spent a lot of time boxed up when my took a long FS hiatus when we moved house (in 2007-2008!).

I tend to favor flying the smaller planes, and even bought a couple of aircraft (DreamFleet Piper Archer and Beech Bonanza).

I originally started with flight sims back in the mid-1980s with Flight Simulator II (C-64), which almost turned me off sims forever if only because performance on the C-64 was really not up to the task, which made flying much harder than it needed to be.

Regarding the new MS FS, I quickly went from "extremely skeptical" to "OMG I want it now" after some of the updates that came out after their initial trailer. If it even approaches the level of expectation I've built up for it, this will almost certainly be the game that makes me buy a new PC.

In the meantime, I've recently jumped into the new iteration of IL-2 (Great Battles), as I've written over on the WW2 Combat Sim thread. I'm not particularly good at it, but I enjoy it.

Arise indeed.

I won't post all of the thoughts I had in the other thread but in summary.. I've gone pretty hard into X Plane for about 15 months now. It started as grabbing it on sale because I wanted something other than Elite:Dangerous to use my HOTAS on.

700 hours later (according to Steam) I've blown way too much money and time on addons, utilities, scenery and hardware. I had an internal laundry list of "things I would never do" with flight sim thinking I would just keep it casual and I think I've crossed off every single one of them.

I have a week off between the 11th and the 20th so I plan on streaming some of my flights online. I generally fly airliners and try to use VATSIM as often as I can. You can go to my channel and see a few of my flights I recorded a few months back... not sure if I made it public but one of my flights ends in total disaster. My youtube channel is here. If anyone picked up Xplane during a sale and wants some guidance feel free to post here. You can do a lot with Xplane for $0 to really improve the immersion.

Regarding MS FS2020, I've gone from Skeptical to "you have my attention but still skeptical". All footage available has been curated and approved by MS and the Developers and those in the beta program I believe are under very strict NDA. I want it to be good, but not sure how badly MS and Asobo want it to be good or do they just want a pretty tech demo of their cloud computing capability.

I recently myself returned to FSX after buying Air Hauler 2, which adds a Euro Truck Sim-like business layer to the thing. Only problem is before you can take missions, you have to pass a flight test, and I keep failing on my landing score. I'll get there though. Because this thing looks really great.

Veloxi, you should check out FS Economy.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Veloxi, you should check out FS Economy.

I've heard it's very similar.

Veloxi wrote:
Carlbear95 wrote:

Veloxi, you should check out FS Economy.

I've heard it's very similar.

Could be. The appeal of FS Economy IMO is that its kind of a persistent online world. You start by renting planes by the hour from other players to make some money. Eventually you can by your own plane so you don't have to pay rental fees and can actually rent out your aircraft to others... eventually you can make enough money to buy your own FBO at an airport and get fees as people come through your airport and buy fuel.

You can join up with groups that set up specific charter missions or have aircraft only available to them.

Air Hauler does similar but its really more of a single player experience isn't it?

Yeah, and single player is what I prefer.

If you're like me and have fallen into the trap of watching more games than actually playing, you may enjoy checking out this individuals twitch channel. DAL213 streams his elaborate 737 simulator from his Manhattan home. I'm pretty astounded at his setup, it's something else, but I can't vouch for the content as I haven't watched much of him.

BTW friends, if you're needing a new stick, let me recommend the classic Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2. I wrote a guide on buying one here.

https://www.spacegamejunkie.com/guid...

Still the best stick around, and sims like IL-2 still support honest to goodness force feedback. So it's worth having.

Did a flight on VATSIM from Pairs to Madrid if anyone is bored.

No ATC to start, I get Madrid Radar on at around 1:32 and get ATC all the way into Madrid Airport.

Online flight simming on VATSIM and IVAO are at all time highs for concurrent users. If you've ever wanted to give it a try, now may be the time.

Have had some really fun flights. VATSIM set a record with over 2000+ simultaneous and 8000 unique logons in a 24 hours period.

First one departing LaGuardia on my way to Toronto. Took the screenshot too late but if you look carefully enough you'll see Manhattan in the background.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/24X1WsA.png)

Then on a big event going from Copenhagen to Munich. All the other aircraft you see in this picture are other pilots flying online.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/oWNb8KX.jpg)

The latest from Asobo about MSFS 2020. This one is about multiplayer.

I don't have a lot of interest in MP here, but from what they're saying (and what I've read) about their filtering, I might be interested in using the "people who aren't messing about" setting.

Hopefully by the time this is released, the live air traffic will be useful.

Via the Stormbirds blog:
Recommended system specs for Flight Simulator are out

The "ideal" specs for an nvidia machine:
i7-9800x, 32 GB RAM, RTX 2080 with 8 GB VRAM, 150 GB SSD, 50 Mbps bandwidth.

The "recommended" specs only need an i5-8400 (16 GB) with a GTX 970 (4 GB).


IMAGE(https://msgpwebsites.azureedge.net/fsi/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Slide1.jpg)

I'm currently sporting an i7-4770 (16 GB) with a GTX 1650.

Ohh I've got the ideal specs. Excellent!

I end up somewhere between Recommended and Ideal. Still not sure when this thing will come out though... i'm skeptical on 2020, especially if its going to be tied to the Xboxobx

That being said, X-plane is currently in the Beta where they revamped the graphics engine migrating from Open GL to Metal/Vulcan. I haven't tried it but those that have have reported significant FPS increases. I have better than the recommended spec above and there are plenty of times where I dip below 25 FPS when entering areas with lots of custom objects. Based on previous major betas I would expect this to go final within the next month or two, as we wait for the various addon and plugin developers to update to be compatible before Laminar makes it final.

So, I downloaded the 11.50b4 update earlier. I had largely ignored XP11 because my Mac mini (i7) + eGPU setup (rx580) has atrocious performance... less than 20fps on all but the lowest settings. Now I’ve got it maxed out on a bunch and, while I didn’t have the counter running, I had great frame rates with everything maxed. It’s worth checking out.

Air Hauler 2 now released for Xplane. I'll probably check it out.

Air Hauler 2 definitely adds a great layer to Xplane and I've found myself more interested in flying GA and small aircraft than the heavy metal I almost always flew. Its still a bit clunky to get started, and IMO requires some good tuning of options at least for the way I like to play, but once you get going its a lot of fun.

Interesting, I'll have to check it out. I've always learned toward the GA side of aviation.

If you do let me know. I can probably save you a few headaches getting started. I've "started over" at least 6 times now.. no big deal because its just flying around which is always fun, but I think I finally have it set up the way I want to.