GWJ FBO: Flight Simulation Catch-all

Going to set my download at midnight tonight (3 hrs from now!) then hopefully get a short flight in before I start work tomorrow.

I got a press copy of Flight Simulator, so after it downloaded around 100GB of data, I was able to get in. First off, helllls yeah.

IMAGE(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/319678073807044610/745004759060054147/unknown.png)

Second, holy f*ck this is gorgeous. I just did a small test flight in a Cessna, which put you in Red Rock country in Arizona and holy f*ck. Amazing.

Gotta tweak my controls to do some more flying, but wow.

I also find it hilarious that it was like "WE DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS MICROSOFT STICK IS." I mean I could set it and stuff but it was like "WE HAVE NO PRESETS FOR THIS." Amazing.

Wait, how do you "set" a download? Is there scripting I've missed or something?

Robear wrote:

Wait, how do you "set" a download? Is there scripting I've missed or something?

Sorry to give you false hope, I meant to type 'start' not 'set'.

Carenado appears to have released the first payware aircraft for MSFS2020, a Cessna 182T for 25 GBP. Unfortunately that company has a reputation of making pretty but systems shallow aircraft in P3D and Xplane, and I already think I'm going to have a hangar full of those in about 9 hours

On other news, a number of scenery makers have released scenery at what appears to be very competitive pricing. Following up on my previous post Orbx has released a number of airports, including Innsbruck (LOWI). That is interesting because that airport is already included as one of the high-detailed airports out of the box. Imaginesim has also released Denver airport (KDEN), which is a massive airport.

I'm probably not going to dip my toes into payware airports until the good payware tubeliners come out but looks like all the devs are getting started early onto jumping into the new toy!

Dumb question - where does the third part content live? Is is searchable in-game?

I believe that there is an MSFS ingame store.

Since I'm going to be the last person to get this game (evidently Steam releases at 0400z for all time zones, but if you bought from MS directly like this idiot, its 0700z for West Coast US) I won't be able to confirm.

All other sims are mostly 3rd party websites and you just install it. Curious how this will work for MSFS 2020. The install folder (windowsapps) is blocked from access even by administrator, unless you go in and change access control. Not hard to do if you google it and have some familiarity with windows, but not the most convenient thing to do.

Well, I updated the firmware and software for my stick and throttle. Didn't have a USB port for the rudder, so I'll just set that to auto in the settings and forget it.

It was nice seeing the throttle box light up that lovely green color... Then I turned it off so it would not get annoying lol.

Maybe I should fire up Elite Dangerous and actually get into it...

Nvidia looks like its released new Game Ready Drivers today for msfs. I don't think I've ever actually gotten new drivers on day 1 so it will be a first for me. Wish me luck (and anyone else who is running an nvidia card).

In related Flightsim news, Xplane put out its first release candidate for 11.50 which does a major graphics engine upgrade that should result in a pretty significant increase in performance. I'm *sure* its a coincidence that they put this out today (it's been in beta for at least the last 6 months or so). I'm actually almost as excited for that. I for one won't be deleting xplane for a while if ever and I'm looking forward to doing flight there as well.

The streams I'm seeing are quite impressive. Very beautiful indeed.

I played the first tutorial, where you begin in flight and get the basics of yoke and throttle. One thing I struggled with was keeping the aircraft level once I'd messed about a bit. The tutorial didn't cover trim, which I'm vaguely aware of and assume it will be covered in a later tutorial. In the meantime I found out which two buttons on my hotas were mapped to trim up and down and tried using it, but it still seemed hard to get things level.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the game recommended the high graphics preset based on my system. Nevertheless, it still doesn't look as good as the eye candy videos that are out there, which I assume are mostly shot on Ultra. Still plenty good enough for me though.

Data Streaming settings allow you to set how much of your bandwidth you want the game to use for graphics data, but the options are a bit limited, being OFF, 5 MB/s, 20 MB/s, 40 MB/s or UNLIMITED. My house has an overall average download speed of 29 MB/s, so to be considerate to other family members I'd like to be able to select less than 20, but definitely more than 5. Hopefully they can add a sliding scale in the future.

Looks great - just watched a streamer fly over his house. He was in medium settings and still VERY pretty

Hung for about 20 minutes during the "Get Started" loading screen, then I killed it. And again. Got to the "Set up your experience" message, then the plane flying picture with the progress bar hung at about 20%, just like the first try.

Edit - After seeing the MS synchronization engine going crazy in Task Manager, I turned off Steam sync for this game, and was able to progress. But now it's downloading 93GiB to my C drive, because it would not let me change to the E drive. Gonna have to move that over and then figure out how to change the registry entry... Sigh.

Edit 2 - Uninstalled, then reinstalled. Had to set the Steam sync off again. Then I created the proper path on the E drive. The program hung again, but after I killed it and restarted, it finally found the path and is now downloading 93GiB of data to the proper drive.

You'd think Microsoft would have the whole "Create new directory for install data?" prompt down, but noooooo....Sigh.

Robear wrote:

Hung for about 20 minutes during the "Get Started" loading screen, then I killed it. And again. Got to the "Set up your experience" message, then the plane flying picture with the progress bar hung at about 20%, just like the first try.

Edit - After seeing the MS synchronization engine going crazy in Task Manager, I turned off Steam sync for this game, and was able to progress. But now it's downloading 93GiB to my C drive, because it would not let me change to the E drive. Gonna have to move that over and then figure out how to change the registry entry... Sigh.

Edit 2 - Uninstalled, then reinstalled. Had to set the Steam sync off again. Then I created the proper path on the E drive. The program hung again, but after I killed it and restarted, it finally found the path and is now downloading 93GiB of data to the proper drive.

You'd think Microsoft would have the whole "Create new directory for install data?" prompt down, but noooooo....Sigh.

I struggled with this too last night. however this morning it just "worked" and its installing now. Maybe because I was trying to jump the gun (it was about 2 hours before official west coast launch). I also did the uninstall reinstall, repoint the initial install and the "create new directory". If only the company that published this had a better understanding of how windows works I'm sure it would be a lot easier.

Yeah, it was a shock. But in the end, it downloaded correctly and also set me up for Very High graphics and auto-configured my HOTAS setup. I'll get to try it after work. (Oh, and anyone reading the above stuff, I did not let it download to C: and try to move that stuff over. I ended up creating the proper E: folders manually and that worked fine.)

I did turn everything down to Easy for the first few messing-around flights.

kergguz wrote:

I played the first tutorial, where you begin in flight and get the basics of yoke and throttle. One thing I struggled with was keeping the aircraft level once I'd messed about a bit. The tutorial didn't cover trim, which I'm vaguely aware of and assume it will be covered in a later tutorial. In the meantime I found out which two buttons on my hotas were mapped to trim up and down and tried using it, but it still seemed hard to get things level.

It can sometimes take a while for an aircraft to trim correctly. You'll usually get undulations as the aircraft settles.

Also you may want to make sure you have deadzones in your throttle or stick. If those have minor fluctuations in the hardware, that will also make flying level pretty hard.

Happy flying! hope to join everyone in a few hours.

Yep, trim was a bit fiddly, but I did manage to get it right after a bit of practice. Next - landing. My first few attempts have been botched

Streamed it this morning, had fun, found my apartment, landed in Nepal. Good times.

Uninstalled from Steam, which didn't uninstall the 92 gigs of crap it downloaded. Had to delete that manually.

Will reinstall when someone adds a game to it, like Air Hauler 3.

Someone needs to do a tutorial on the camera... I just fired it up and I had no clue how to control it. Understood I'm coming from Xplane which has a very robust camera system out of the box, but since I didn't have time to fly I just wanted to spawn and freelook the camera up into the air and look at the scenery from 1000 feet. I didn't know how to do that. I managed to pop the camera out but couldn't just go straight up in the air. I had to point the camera down at the ground then "zoom" backwards" then start looking.

I'll also need to play with the graphics settings. I meet all of the recommended specs except I have a 1080ti instead of of a 20xx, but it still recommended "Medium" I set it to "Very High" and tweaked a bit. Still at least 30fps but I was kind of expecting more.

I did load into two non-pretty airports and uh... yeah... we need more airport developers. I do my IRL flying lessons out of KDVO.. there were NO BUILDINGS there. The runways and tiedowns were in the right place but no hangars, no FBO building.. nothing, just a big piece of asphalt in the middle of pretty scenery. I then spawned into KOAK and while there were buildings, there weren't very many of them. This is a major airport here in Northern California. Because gates aren't labeled correctly and there's no image of it, I had no idea where I was spawning. Its just "parking spot XX", which doesn't correspond to any real gates #s. It indicates whether its a GA spot or an airliner spot but that's it.

Not to mention its probably going to take me a good 3 hours just to get my controls right. It didnt' recognize my Throttle so having to manually map with no button mapping image (buttons are labeled 1-xx in the MSFS UI but I need to open up MS windows joystick manager on 2nd monitor to figure out how each switch on my throttle is actually numbered).

I'm sure all of this will be fleshed out in due time, and hopefully I can actually get up in the air at some point today, but first 10 minutes... challenging.

I'm beginning to wonder if that's not a strategy to bring in 3rd party scenery modders...

Robear wrote:

I'm beginning to wonder if that's not a strategy to bring in 3rd party scenery modders...

Maybe.. but there are 30,000+ airports. In Xplane, 13,403 airports have 3D scenery. Many, if not most, of those were done by volunteers using the basic tools xplane gives for free, who then upload them to a database that gets curated, and when xplane does major updates it updates those airports for everyone. On top of that there are a number of additional free airports available on x-plane.org that users have made using free libraries that other users have created for free.

Again, time will tell on MS's strategy but this sort of "open source" type of work doesn't seem like the typical MS approach to things.

ObsidianAnt's videos about London show some stark contrasts between what MS is presenting and what modders will charge for.

Here's default London:

Here's the modded version:

MS has gone much more into Agile and Open Source stuff in the last few years. I’m hopeful that has trickled into the gaming group. An incremental, frequent small update approach with a marketplace for add-ons seems like the way they should be going.

Just wrapping up work, I ran this overnight to download, I have the whole excited "butterflies in your stomach" feeling like a kid about to unwrap presents. It's flyin' time!

Edit: 3.8GB patch?

What's 4GB after you already downloaded 90?

Well it's clearly not done baking.

I'm at attempt #6 loading the game. Incrementally getting further through with each attempt. Currently stuck on the "Welcome, Set Your Experience" screen, which is blank.

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

Hahaha.

Attempt #7 - got some choices on that screen finally, but plugging in my HOTAS was a crash-to-desktop!

Attempt 8 - I'm IN!!!!

Buuuuut, I can't bind any controls to the HOTAS