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Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK the flight model of MSFS has always been trash, it's a bunch of lookup tables that kind of approximate a real plane in the most standard situations - there are no real aerodynamic calculations. MSFS can be used for serious training in navigation, procedures, cockpit instruments and such.

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Pilot here. The MSFS flight model is so bad that I found it actually counterproductive. Also, the avionics are awful, they basically have a dozen of the most basic functions and that's about it. It's more like a game, not a sim. And yet, I do find myself using it still. Why? The graphics are insane. If I'm doing a flight to somewhere new, I like doing a simulated flight first in order to get a better understanding of the terrain and more importantly, layout of the arrival airport and visual cues. I still find it very useful for flight planning in that regard.

The MSFS flight model is so terribly bad that people have 'successfully' landed absurdly too-large craft from 757 all the way up to Antonov-225 size at Saba and also taken off from the same airfield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juancho_E._Yrausquin_Airport

Your mistake is using default aircraft - most consumer simulators will have poor renditions of aircraft that ship with the base game, mainly because the majority of development time is spent on core mechanics and the game engine. Download some high quality 3rd party aircraft and it’ll change your mind.

This is how basically every simulator before/other than X-Plane does it, though.

I recall Flight Unlimited[1] made a big deal of their flight model which incorporated "real-time computational fluid dynamics". I'm not a pilot but I found it very compelling. It was groundbreaking for its time.

None of the rest of Looking Glass' flight sims used the first game's fluid dynamics model.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Unlimited

I’m sure you could make a deep learning model approximation of the computational fluid dynamics that would be much computationally efficient. Allowing form more detail and or faster execution.

If you care about computational efficiency, build a lookup table and cache it. Flight models generally deal with a known, bounded problem space rather than novel inputs.

Sure, if a lookup table works for your problem then use that. Im specifically talking about an optimization of CFD.

MSFS is actually improving this though: https://stormbirds.blog/2022/02/17/msfs-aerodynamics-takes-a...

Most modules for DCS use lookup tables computed in a similar way to X-Plane. (The lookup tables are essentially a computational cache of the element modeling.)

In FSX and previous editions of Flight Simulator this was true. However, MSFS uses blade element theory, the same technique X-Plane uses, and recently introduced CFD. Load into the sim, turn on developer mode and enable the aerodynamics debug options to see it in action.

Can't edit anymore - I was actually thinking of the old MSFS, pre product cancellation and resurrection. I didn't know much about the new one except that the graphics are great.

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