MS Flight Simulator 2020 vs. Real life
imgur.com
imgur.com
Gave it up almost entirely with career/starting a family 7-8 years ago. We’re talking cold turkey, gave the systems away, deleted steam etc.
Ever since quarantine started, I’ve been gaming like a fiend every night. Big, open world games especially. Partner has been chill about it as I wait until the kiddo is asleep, but it’s been one of the most sanity-saving activities for me while we hunker down.
When you login you join a team of 30 (60 players in total). One team is USA one Japan.
You can choose Bomber, Sub, Aircraft Carrier, Battleship. Each craft is manned by multiple players (ie one player controls guided missiles, one flies and has a regular gun etc).
There are 3 islands on the board in the middle and anyone can control them.
When you control an island you can teleport to it and spawn a plane from there which is a shorter run to bomb the enemy. You win the game by blowing up the enemies main naval base at the other end of the board.
You can also change the balance of war by spending a few cents on spawning aircraft carriers and battleships.
Any time you pop in, the server is always full so it's always a great game, but also you can create a private server and bring your own group.
A lot of kids play the game so sometimes the strategy is not the best BUT if a group of adults played on a private server the strategy is very deep.
Graphics are totally basic but it's a great mix of real strategy, action/skill and randomness of playing with 60 real people.
Works beautifully on any mobile or any pc no heavy graphics card needed. SO much fun!
Perfect game for a group of hackers/colleagues looking for easy to learn fun over few beers. Also perfect for these remote times we live in.
https://www.roblox.com/games/2210085102/Naval-Warfare
[BTW I don't know the creators, just a fun game my son showed me!]
There was the year where I set up a server and played with my flatmates and, in another country, a sibling and his close friends. A big part of my daily routine was coming home and checking out what they'd been up to. Some built elaborate structures and 'cultivated' their home, others mostly went for massive railway projects, and yet others just wandered around exploring.
After a few years of no Minecraft, what with the quarantine, a friend of a sibling set up a server again, and I've started playing again.
The game got more expensive, and there are other versions now. And there's a ton of new stuff.
But the experience has been just as much fun. The server I'm on provides a handy map of the world, and apparently I decided to set up base quite near the edges of the 'explored' (generated) world. The owner created a massive base at the spawn point, and I spent a good few days finding a place of my own, getting the resources I need, and then making a railway to the spawn. My younger brother did the same, and has also been working on a railway to spawn. He got distracted though because his gf might want to play, so he spent a bunch of time making his home safer.
What strikes me most is that feeling of immersion and comfort that so far only the best of Metroid(vania) games give me. I've become intimately familiar with my home area, which now has cows and chickens and pigs. I've been landscaping it a bit with massive trees. And under my home there's a sprawling cave system, parts of which I've explored and 'tamed', and parts of which are still full of resources that I keep getting lost in.
I 'know' much of my home region and cave system by feel, and I can tell when I start getting lost. There's a weird 'bubble' feeling when I take my minecart to the spawn point, because I am unfamiliar with all but the area directly next to the tracks, and the 'town' at spawn.
It feels a lot like the real world, but blockier and entirely virtual. It's one of those 'gaming' feelings that I often wish I could convey to others. I've had similar feelings about WoW, the culture and familiarity of de_dust2, and Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley. It's difficult to argue with 'well why don't you just go walk in a real forest'
Yesterday I was planing to randomly dig a hole in the game to mine whatever there is before go to sleep. Two minute into the digging, I found something blinking, it's "Sliver"! So I mined the whole chunk, look at the time (23:20) and decided to call it a day. But just before I quit the game, I noticed another chunk is blinking, turns out it's "Gold"(!!!) ... The pattern repeated until my clock says 1:40(!!!) Man! I'm over 30 years old now and that little game tricked me out of my schedule (!!!), again!
I think game like this is definitely designed to do that. They always trying to create an attraction loop so the player don't have chance to break out and quit the game.
Half-Life is not designed like that. In Half-Life, you have break points, for example, every time the loading screen shows, player may start to think "Hey, maybe I'll just pause here?". Plus, Half-Life gives you a lots of "Solitude moments", allowing you to break out the game during that.
Another thing I guess, is games like Minecraft and Terraria requires player to be able to immerse themselves into the game. Many people I know thinks Minecraft is a game that lets you "Cut trees and build houses. Boring!", not a single one of them would play the game for more than 5 minutes.
If you can pass that 5 minutes test, I guess then you probably have the ability to find some interesting things to do in the game all by yourself (Meaning you are a self-immersive kind person).
We were raided multiple times a day but it was so much fun. Never quite got that again.
100 million things are constantly happening on screen while gundam type space robots fire plasma at you, some Independence Day ship in the background blows up a city and a horde of ants charges your troop.
All at consistent 60fps with early PS2 graphics and gameplay (almost all weapons have infinite ammo).
It's a true video game at heart and realism doesn't stand in the way.
Nowadays I just figure if there weren't video games, I would be drinking or doing hard drugs with much worse effects on my health. I'm also able to moderate better, going through dry spells when I find something else to do for a while, and now and then playing nights (not too late) for a month or two at a time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19213696
>gjs278 on Feb 21, 2019 | parent | favorite | on: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and ...
>go into your profile and mark the ability to see [dead] comments. a lot of them are useful.
None of yours are. That's why you're dead.
Largely as an alternative to vodkonferencing.
I noticed that my approach is different this time. I always regarded Counter-Strike as a glorified shooter, but this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=237KtKF9MDU
changed my mind entirely. Apparently over the years the doodads in these maps started serving as waypoints for throwing grenades.
And at the same time none of this is obvious for anyone who's not "in the know".
I’m making an exception for video games during this time because honestly it’s pretty low on the unhealthy scale in my current usage, especially with the accountability of a spouse who knows I can be this way and will call me out if it gets bad.
Sure, there might be different grades of quality and value but I think it's all just culture and feeling guilty about filling a free evening or two with such activities seems quite alien to me. However to each their own.
Another interesting thing about gaming is that it taught me at a very early age that reward requires effort. Even if the process as a whole, and we as humans, are still insignificant. Well, it taught me that, and I was blessed with an extended vocabulary of middle age weapons. Gaming these days and especially playing old games can be quite relaxing.
I think the main reason is that it’s an opportunity to turn my brain off (or parts of it off). TV isn’t doing that for me any more, too much opportunity for idle thought!
I bet the devs of KSP 2 are pissed that they’re not yet ready to launch. This would’ve been the perfect time to release that game.
Side note: try Google Earth VR if you can, it is not possible to explain how great it is with words, it's the killer VR app for non-gamers IMO.
It was really something. Sure the quality's not that great, but what's there works well, and you get a sense of presence with the headset that is considerably more convincing than viewing the same scenes on a flat monitor.
I've never gotten motion sickness, ever. VR also has never given me sickness. A slight fatigue at most.
For me, any game where the camera moves independent of my headset can trigger nausea. Blade and Sorcery's jump implementation is really bad about it; anything that lets me "fall" when I'm not expecting it. That at least makes sense; if I suddenly fell in real life I'd freak out too. Of all things, the non-teleportation option in Minecraft's popular VR mod, Vivecraft, trigger motion sickness most consistently. But I can teleport around Skyrim VR for literally hours and be totally fine. I get the feeling that with a bit of practice, I could build up a tolerance to it, but it's definitely a persistent danger. It's got to be frustrating for developers, since it seems like there's such a wide range of individual variance in sensitivity. If I get around to making a VR experience, I'll stick to teleportation simply because that's what I personally find to be "safe" and comfortable.
This feeling can last days in extreme cases (more from an intense fairground ride than VR - never taken VR use to that extreme!)
The game started me roughly over Washington DC and told me I had to get to Dallas, and I barely made it past Nashville (which is almost a straight line) before running out of fuel.
Sadly it does not have animations.
They also released an SDK, so there are a few other interpretations floating around the Microsoft Store.
About Outings, I should not judge by its cover but it doesn't look very impressive and seems to be AR oriented (mixed reality headset or hololens required).
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20776247/google-maps-live-...
In a flight sim you have lots of dials in the cockpit you need to look at, and long viewing distances outside the window. None of the VR headsets I've tried have had good enough resolution to have a clear view on the cockpit instruments. The combination of cockpit very near and long viewing distances is also a bad recipe for motion sickness.
And then there's the controls. With a VR headset you can't see your hands or your controllers. With a hands on throttle and stick controller (HOTAS) you can fly around just fine, but when you need to toggle flaps or landing gear or navigation instruments, it's difficult to find the right button for that with a headset on.
So VR is ok for casual flying around, maybe even some dogfighting or aerobatics with simplified aircraft models. But once you need to deal with aircraft systems or navigation instruments, you're better off with triple screens and/or head tracking.
Is that not the case for flight sim setups? I can’t imagine looking at a horribly stretched image on a side window to be a nice experience.
Edge of screen mappings can be a little tricky but the higher level rendering engines can make near seamless transitions.
Military and commercial simulators try for displays that absolutely minimize visual artifact distractions so the experience is as close to sitting in the seat as possible.
Have you tried the Index? It used to be bad on the Vive, but Xplane with the Valve Index finally made it possible for me to see the instruments without squinting.
There's more to immersion than stereoscopy. All the different elements of VR (3DOF tracking, positional tracking, 360 imaging, hand/controller tracking, stereoscopy) work together to flip a switch in your brain that tells it that you are in something rather than merely looking at something.
Even simply covering the entirely of your 360 range of view is enormous on it's own for flight sims. Think of the $$$ that sim enthusiasts spend on multi-monitor setups.
It tracks your actual head motion and exaggerates it (this can be tuned to your liking).
0: https://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/trackir5/
It's a great little peripheral, and much more affordable than VR or a multi-monitor setup.
Maybe they could do something like how in Elite Dangerous you hold middle mouse button(? can't remember exactly what the control is) to freelook, but that's not as good as being able to control your PoV directly by moving your head.
Yuck.
I'd rather use my imagination.
I especially love the 90's / early 2000's style with a mix of analog and digital instruments. Lot's of physical buttons, multiple small screens, a somewhat poor UI compared to modern standards, etc.
I'd love to play around more with these types of simulated systems. I almost literally would just like a button pushing simulator. Are there any other games / simulators which might scratch this itch for me?
They have everything from WW-II steam gauges up to modern glass cockpit jets like the JF17 and things in between like the Mirage or the F14 tomcat. They're all extremely accurate simulations and you'll be reading 1000+ page manuals to learn what all the buttons do. It's literally button click simulator
We livestream dogfighting competitions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqUdcYvbzf8
The depth of avionics and world are unmatched even today. The only lacking area is graphics, but is expected to be upgraded to direct x 11 in following patches
> X-Plane is the most advanced flight simulator in the world. The product of 20 years of obsessive labor by a hardcore aeronautics enthusiast who uses capslock a lot when talking about planes, it actually simulates the flow of air over every piece of an aircraft’s body as it flies. This makes it a valuable research tool, since it can accurately simulate entirely new aircraft designs—and new environments.
While it's a limited experience compared to a 3-axis stick and throttle on a mid-high end PC, it's still a lot of fun to pick out places like Gibraltar, Saint Maarten, and other unique situations and fly in and out on HUD / trail view.
(I had my toe in the door, did three hours of PPL instruction, never could follow up on it. And many hours of sims all the way from Sublogic days.)
Heh, I had almost my entire body through the door, but stubbed my toe on the threshold! ~50 hours logged, a handful of "cross country" solos, did my night landings etc. Got sick for about a month, holidays, wedding coming up, just never got back into it. I actually lost my logbook for a number of years but I'm looking at it now on my shelf.... one of these days.
If you're comfortable with and willing to spend the money on VR, I was able to buy a peripheral that allows interaction with 3D cockpits in simulators such as DCS. It's not as good as a real simulator, but it's an awesome experience at less than 10% the price.
If not, that seriously hampers this product as a training/refresher tool.
My City is not that big and its in germany. But still, i was able to fly over my flat \o/.
And we have sandbanks and a river, autobahn, bridges etc. and it looks still great! There have been cars driving as well :)
Even at $60 + hardware controllers, it’s a steal compared to actually flying a small single-prop.
Now I just wish I could fly the Cirrus Vision jet in real life, like some Youtubers do.
Haven't tried the new MS flightsim yet. I hope they've put as much effort into physics as they did in visuals. Can't wait to give it a try.
Motion sickness isn't something I experience a tonne of in VR unless it's falling from up high or those rollercoaster simulations.
There is a flying VR game I used to play for awhile. Controls were a little difficult but it was quite fun and motion sickness wasn't a problem (in my case at least).
I don't suffer from seasickness normally, but a few years back we had a knotted up anchor chain so I went in to service the winch and there was a bit of a swell outside. In about 30 minutes I was quite ill. Once I fixed the winch and went out it all dissipated quickly when I could see the sea & horizon moving again.
I can see it being comfortable once you're in the air, but takeoff and landing might feel very weird :P
Funnily enough I've been playing Satisfactory a lot lately and I keep losing my stomach whenever I jump off really high places. I guess even non-VR games can affect you too!
But still, until artificial gravity can be generated, this is the closest it will come for the vast majority of people.
But definitely, any pilot will tell you that feeling all the forces is actually big part of good piloting, as you can feel what the airplane is experiencing & act accordingly. I took a ride in some small planes (a 4 person two motor plane and a glider) as well as an advanced small plane simulator and really, the simulator was good but not really comparable.
Not to mention extreme cases like air racing or aerial acrobatics where the forces are so extreme that they might prevent the pilot from having enough strength to execute control input or possibly even make them black out.
Going to argue against that generally. Vestibular disorientation is a significant killer of pilots. In instrument flying, you specifically train to ignore those sensations. Fly the numbers, not the feelings.
I've ridden it several times, and while I intellectually understand how it must work, it's still super convincing.
The sim was built out of an actual fuselage (Sikorsky S-76) with full controls, visuals were 8x projectors on a curved wall in front of and around the cockpit. Everything was bolted to the floor, no movement anywhere.
After 10-15 minutes I did a hard bank and my gosh, the whole world moved, and I could have sworn I was about to slide out of my seat. I panicked that I didn't have a harness on.
The instructor laughed and said that was quite normal and that many people get very motion sick.
So yeah, I can see that motion sickness, with the "right" setup, could easily be a thing.
This is why most 3d movies have very little happen in the virtual space between you and the screen. Since more than about 7 meters away is basically all the same final distance, it's fine.
That being said, it's the stuff flying at you that makes 3d seem worth the extra money, so they try to balance it. Some people will still get very ill even with the small amount that movies do.
I also think discriminating between motion sickness, flight simulator sickness and virtual reality sickness is splitting hairs, or at least a gradual difference. One could claim motion sickness requires real motion, but you have that in a good flight simulator, too, and most VR setups allow one to, at the least, move one’s head freely.
At Oshkosh he jumped into a $250,000 Frasca simulator and did a complete flight with no assistance /and/ the sales guy turning off various parts of the avionics. He’s 15.
TLDR don’t wait around for Microsoft.
There are other feelings, such as buffeting before a stall, that you'll miss on a sim. But flight training is very explicit about those situations, so you'll learn them when transitioning to a real plane. Avoiding uncoordinated flight is something that pervades your whole flight experience; it might be hard to retrofit it onto a sim-trained student.
There are other habits, but that's the most notable one when I'm comparing the two environments.
https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media...
https://www.aviation-accidents.net/tag/spatial-disorientatio...
For example, I explicitly stopped using a supposedly more realistic yoke controller in favor of a HOTAS joystick because I repeatedly found that I just _can't_ translate the physical inputs to a real plane. Yoke controllers in particular seem hard to get right (or maybe mine is just bad), but more generally, PC controller axes have a surprisingly low resolution (just 256 steps on an axis) making them wildly less precise than real thing, plus there's no force feedback. Using a completely different (and more precise) type of controller seems to help keep my brain from drawing conclusions it shouldn't.
Simulators _do_ seem helpful for more abstract stuff, like going through checklists, practicing maneuvers, experimenting... so long as you're very intentional about what you're trying to learn. I think I benefited some from practicing ground reference maneuvers [0] in X-Plane with a VR headset, for example, since they're largely visual and aren't tightly tied to physical inputs. On the other hand, practicing stalls in the simulator has probably lost me a decent amount of time in the air with my CFI trying to un-learn the wrong ideas I picked up, due to both control differences and (I think) simulation differences.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
- learning flying yourself means you will probably learn the wrong procedures, that a CFI would correct. For example, if you're not flying a landing pattern, your landing procedure is wrong. So use a real 172 checklist, POH and flight maneuver procedures. Also how to handle ballooned landings.
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot that used MSFS for 20 years.
DCS basically simulates as much as isn't classified and is played by an increasing number of RL fighter pilots.
Must note that the graphics are a bit dated to me. (Cloud rendering is completely broken; lighting is very over-saturated and not accuratre). but still a very beautiful game and an extremely accurate simulation of awesome warbirds
If I want to fly something heavier than 250g, with goggles, what kind of FCC license do I need?
The problem for me has been city ordinance. My city is urban sprawl and it's illegal in my city to fly in parks, or over people. So that rules out pretty much everything interesting.
If you are into the whole racing quadcopters thing, there are options, but FPV exploration was what I liked.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/media/Part_107_Summary.pdf
https://www.faa.gov/uas/recreational_fliers/
https://jrupprechtlaw.com/section-107-31-visual-line-sight-a...
From what I understand, you should have a visual observer or obtain a Remote Pilot Certificate. IANAL.
My dream is a setup like that which can truly transport me to the drone as if I was flying fpv but with the ability to move my head and camera independently of the drone.
You'll pay about as much for the goggles as for the entry level drone. Budget some for an extra battery.
In a very large part, the "level designer" for FS 2020 is an AI, or more exactly, a team of humans who use AI as a tool to increase their productivity and reach by orders of magnitude. This is particularly visible in open-world games, where it is not feasible to hand craft everything. The results do seem quite spectacular, and put similar games to shame.
It's early days yet, but I'm quite excited about the prospect of using code to fill in the blanks and generate content like this; it could be a great way to limit game development costs in the future.
There are some neat papers where they do very high resolution CT scans (microCT) to examine the microscopic structure of different materials, like the size and orientation of fabrics. If you model that, the material takes on the appearance of the fabrics, which is amazing:
See Figure 8 here: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kb/publications/SIG11CT.pdf
Many techniques like this highlighted on Two-Minute Papers
See https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Dalamar42/rayt/master/samp... for one example; notice that the white light reflecting off the green wall makes the side of a nearby object look green, for instance.
For example for the Cornell box scene, imagine that the wall was pure green material and the box pure yellow material. Then there shouldn't be that visible secondary bounce, but with naive RGB path tracing there would be, because it wouldn't be able to distinguish between pure yellow and mixed yellow.
In practice I would expect the effect to be pretty subtle in most scenes, but e.g. scenes lit by sodium streetlights could have stark difference. For example something like https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_and_black_cars...
I have been out of the gaming scene with PC so your thoughts are welcome!
Also, what kind of controller for PC is the recommended?
I have a Honeycomb Alpha Flight Yoke and a plethora of Logitech gear for everything else (throttle quad until Honeycomb drops their own, rudder pedals, and some super basic avionics). I bought all this just for 2020 and it has worked great so far.
The yoke is pricey @ $250 USD but it is completely worth it. The build quality is phenomenal. Better than any real yoke I've ever used, plus it has a lot of basic switches already on it that replicate a small GA aircraft faithfully.
Select two GPUs from the list there (checkboxes). It will take you to the comparison page where there are two search boxes to type in the GPU you want to compare. It'll show price (usually decently accurate) as well as performance comparison.
On the AMD side you have the 5700xt as the top one at ~$430 (once you select it the website lets you quickly move between the products in the line - 5600, 700, 700xt). I think they have a newly released 5500/xt which along with the 5600 are probably good value.
On the Nvidia side you have the 2060[ti, super] and 2070[ti, maybe a super variant too?].
Never forget, nvidia is very evil :) I didn't even consider buying nvidia for that reason so I bought a Sapphire Nitro+ 5700xt* in November. Had to RMA the first card due to hardware issues but the replacement works great in Windows and Linux. It had driver issues but those have been resolved for a while. I think OpenCL support is still not great in Linux (and maybe Windows) but I don't use that so I can't tell you more about it.
* Nitro+ has factory overclock and upgraded cooler which is silent when not gaming and cool and relatively quiet when gaming. Sapphire generally considered the best AMD card maker; their Pulse and Nitro+ are competitively priced with other variants.
3Dmark is still fairly standard, and most reviews will include a suite of gaming / rendering tasks as well that can give much more useful real-world benchmarks. LinusTechTips is usually very good - e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoDPTJ-3qCM
Went with Nvidia since noise under load was very important, and for windows their drivers are generally are super stable and just work (don't have that great experience with Radeon from the past). Good to see Radeon side catched up, we all benefit from competition.
Don't they have recommended/minimum spec on the product? I haven't checked...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-mobile-rtx-2060-ver...
My price range is around 1K, but wow there is plenty of choices, look: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#sort=-price&pa...
My base workstation is a Dell T5800 series and it has a 2x Gen 3 PCIe x16, do you think it would need more upgrades? like power supply? It has a Dual Xeon E5 and all memory banks are full at 256GB of sweet RAM :)
Depends on budget and goals:
* If you want to fly something realistic like a Cessna etc, get a yoke. Saitek offers a good combo Yoke/Throttle Quadrant/Rudders, which are a great way to start a fun yet relatively realistic experience. You can then upgrade it with instrument panels etc, but that is if you get quite serious about things. The basic combo is MORE than enough for a long time.
https://www.saitek.com/uk/prod-bak/yoke.html https://www.saitek.com/uk/prod-bak/pedals.html
Alternatively, CH has an "All in one" yoke with hand-controlled rudder and attached throttle. Slightly less realistic (as the rudder is not via feet), more space-saving & compact :)
http://www.chproducts.com/Flight-Sim-Yoke-v13-d-705.html
* If you are not looking for realism of that kind, or want something good value, and/or might fly fighter flight games as well, the Thrustmaster 1600 combo (joystick + throttle) are a reasonable "solid entry" pack.
http://www.thrustmaster.com/products/t16000m-fcs-hotas
* Finally, if you are really on a budget, OR play in living/family room on a couch but don't want to fly with gamepad, Thrustmaster HOTAS/Ace allows you to physically connect throttle and joystick, so you can hold it on your lap or similar and play from anywhere :)
These come in PC+PS4 or PC+XBOX versions:
http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_UK/products/t-flight-hotas-on...
http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_UK/products/t-flight-hotas-4-...
* Note also, TrackIR adds a huge amount of reality and fun, if you don't go the full VR route. It LOOKS like it'd be gimmicky, but once you put it on, it's quite natural and huge amount of fun. I was honestly giggling first time I've put it on and looked to the side and below my plane just by moving my head around :)
It should have paddles similar to racing ones that you use for rudder. I may have inadvertently linked wrong one though (can not edit anymore)
Try this
Today, for a desktop tool, the scenery and platform would look much better with MS Flight Simulator (though that's not the point of review), and presumably it would also render weather (which could be useful).
When practical, I'd prefer to work from an open dataset and engine, so I'd lean towards using FlightGear, even if it isn't as slick in some ways.
How does MS Flight Simulator get away with reproducing the likeness of these structures so accurately? Do they have to get some kind of permission, or are they covered by some sort of artistic license?
It's well known that in many other video games, statues (like Chicago's cloudgate "Bean") are replaced with some similar stand-in that doesn't infringe on the original structure.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Illumination_copy...
"French doctrine and jurisprudence allows pictures incorporating a copyrighted work as long as their presence is incidental or accessory to the subject being represented,[96] a reasoning akin to the de minimis rule. Therefore, SETE may be unable to claim copyright on photographs of Paris which happen to include the lit tower."
Also this only covers the illumination in particular and not the landmark.
What landmarks are copyrighted? I've never heard of such a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium#Worldwide_copyright_cl...
One thing is for sure, I'll buy this game and learn more about flying thanks to this.
So a PPL is useless unless you're willing to spend $2k+ per year to maintain it. Do you need to go somewhere far away, often enough for that to be worth it?
Your rebuttal again is how expensive it is to fly. Some would almost say, prohibitively high?
Why don't/do they use the tech in other places?
It's true that it was Bill's pet project.
But it was one of the best-selling PC games for 20 years and sold millions of copies, so "money-losing" is unlikely - maybe in a weird enterprise accounting way. It's also a useful standard game for their games division.
Also, MS could probably get the DoD to fund all development. MSFS was used in a lot of military sims over the years, so it's a useful thing beyond gaming. (Lockheed resold MSFS for several years during the hibernation, calling it "Pr3par3d.")
If you look at AW&ST around 2000, you can spot MSFS being used for terrain generation in full-page ads for military sims.
MSFS is one of the most underrated software products of all time. Even with MSFS5, I was able to get my IFR rating in the minimum amount of instruction time. I would call it the first true virtual reality product.
I guess "loses money" might be stretching it, but it was never profitable at the level that normal Microsoft software is profitable. It stuck around because BillG made it so.
On that note, Prepar3D is fabulous. I am an "academic" user who has spent thousands on addons because I am a goof. I am so excited for MSFS2020.
Then again, maybe it's just an effect of the particular camera lens, or the slightly off angles in the comparison pictures.
Anyone got any idea how well (or not) this is likely to run on a MacBook 16" with 5300M? It looks amazing, but I'm not a gamer and really I'd probably just play it for a bit out of curiousity so wouldn't make sense to invest in a proper gaming computer!
Documented it here, if it helps anyway: https://gist.github.com/ArjanAssink/09e46937a8e355044c87ce59...
Using lower res is not the end of the world imho, I do it on iMac all the time.
The main problem with flight sim on a portable is the input method though. It's challenging to fly manually without a joystick or yoke, and proper immersion really requires a throttle too. You can get something enjoyable enough going with the mouse though.
I use spot instances which average at around $0.6/hour (I set the maximum bid to $1, if the price rises beyond that the instance is terminated). Bandwidth ends up being more or less the same cost as the actual instance per hour if you cap it to 100Mbps which is enough for 1920x1080. If you remove the bandwidth cap (in the Steam settings, for example if you want to play in 4K or higher) the bill can go up dramatically - last month I spent over $70 and more than half of that was actually bandwidth rather than compute. I'm now exploring Oracle's cloud as they seem more competitive on the bandwidth front.
The main concern would be your network connection and latency. Unlike latency between the game client and server (where the client can and does compensate for it), we're talking about input latency here. You can get used to a certain amount of latency and predict it as long as it remains consistent, though I'd say for multiplayer shooters a few milliseconds is the maximum before it becomes unplayable. For single-player games I'd say you can get away with 20ms or so.
Some source state that it is possible to fly over Moscow in certain corridors, but only on the altitude of at least 8100m.
Then Mayor Daley the asshole destroyed the airport.
Santa Monica is next. poundMAGA
If you're looking for a more accurate, 'real' simulator it has a lot to offer. MS Flight Sim will be more than real enough for the vast majority of us but if you're interested in contributing to a product you can improve and have fun modelling/texturing additional planes, cities etc this is a project to get involved with.
What do you mean by this? The MSFS 2020 flight simulation is on par if not better than X-Plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw-opH4f8Qg
> but if you're interested in contributing to a product you can improve and have fun modelling/texturing additional planes, cities etc this is a project to get involved with.
Again, MSFS 2020's SDK is already with all of the major third-party developers and will be publically available upon its release. A couple have even swapped to almost purely working on MSFS products instead of X-Plane or P3D.
If you're going for extreme realism IMO one of the best tools out there is Pilot's Edge (https://www.pilotedge.net/). Real air traffic controllers tower some airspace (currently california) and it lets you practice things like getting flight following, IFR clearances, taxi instructions, etc. without burning $150/hr (cessna 172) (+$60/hr instruction) to practice radio work in your private pilot or instrument training.
Works with X-Plane and MS Flight Simulator X (though I'm sure when 2020 comes out it'll be supported).
Matchmaking killed that.
I don’t think game publishers realized they were essentially firing a free workforce that was making their online play great. I think private servers is one of the reasons Minecraft has such staying power.