I feel like we're reliving the golden age of flight sims again. There are a lot of good options available now including X-Plane, Microsoft Flight Simulator, DCS World, VTOL-VR, Tiny Combat Arena, etc.
Now when we have some free overlapping time and the time zones are kind to us (He's in Europe), we hop into VTOL-VR together and it's just fantastic. Can actually wave at each other from our cockpits while we're on different continents and with the new helicopter DLC we can pilot/gunner in the same craft with each other.
For those who want to simply have fun flying (in something of a combat setting) there is also Far Cry 5 or 6 - two beautiful games I can’t recommend enough.
Yes, some extremely detailed aircraft have been released, but the underlying simulation is still lacking realism in some key areas. Many aircraft just "feel wrong" when flown. But it's a ton of fun, and the nice visuals really make it a joy to fly places. I find I spend a lot of time in MSFS these days, even though I still prefer X-Plane for the overall realism.
MSFS gets the most basic parts of the flight model and controls fundamentally wrong.
(source: I have made multiple payware aircraft for both X-Plane and MSFS)
Each "controller" be it your mouse, a joystick, flight yoke, game controller, etc, all have a different amount of available deflection on the physical device, and that has to be translated into deflection in-game.
Take a flight yoke for example - you might have say 120 degrees of rotation available physically on the device, but the actual aircraft has 180 degrees. This means the sim-pilot doesn't have a connection with what is happening in the real-world vs what is happening in-sim, making minute changes a lot more challenging.
It's even worse for things like joysticks that have a very low available deflection already. Moving the stick a few mm's could result in an uncontrolled roll in-sim.
To help mitigate this, most sims offer a scalable conversion factor for controller input, but it's never perfect.
> In real life, there'd be feedback on the flight stick or yoke due to all the air hitting the control surface
Also, not all aircraft are direct linkage anymore, and most (all) commercial airline aircraft (your Boeing 737, 787, 777, Airbus A320, etc) will either have simulated feedback or no feedback.
Not that one :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Structural_and_...
It's possible MSFS had to do it wrong to make it work on an Xbox controller; you have a lot less fine control than with a yoke or joystick.
100% agree, I enjoy the systems simulation in X-Plane, but I also want a DCS style native multiplayer so I can do formation
The dynamic campaign was so cool, one time I was taxiing, preparing to take off for some routine mission when a bunch of Patriot SAM missiles nearby start firing off into the horizon. The game was simulating an actual, unplanned, attack 30 miles away and nearby air defense was responding. It was none of my concern though, it wasn't part of my mission, at least not until I got into the air.
I really like the idea of a flight simulator that tries to enable realistic things to happen, like stalling or being able to loft missiles, etc. I don't care as much about having the airplanes handle like real airplanes. I have a keyboard, mouse, and cheap joystick, I'm not going to get a realistic flight experience out of these, period, and spending 80% of the development effort on getting the airplanes to feel like their real counterparts isn't important to me.