Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Home Simulator

LeSving wrote:

Why would I do that?

Because that is the market MSFS2020 is for. And that, believe it or not, is what 99% of the high street customers for civil flight simulators are looking for.

Now you may say this is not relevant for us, who fly in the real world. But we are a share of customers so tiny that we are totally insignificant.

I recall an estimate in the heydays of flight simulation that of MSFS2004 I believe about 3- 4 million copies were sold. The estimate of the addon industry was that there are 150’000 to 200’000 people worldwide who have ever bought an addon. Hardcore simmers who really spend money are maybe 20% of those. Now how many of those do you think were real world pilots? Maybe 10’000? That is optimistic btw.

So for a company like MS, we are insignificant to the max. Actually, During the development of FS2004 and FSX, IMHO Microsoft made the “mistake” of listening to the hard core simmers way too much. The result was a sim, which was unusable (FSX) when it appeared, due to hardware requirements and miserable performance. It flopped on the high street market big time and finally meant the temporary end of MSFS until some enterprising spirit brought it back in 2020 to everyone’s stunned surprise. That it became a very powerful operating system for all the home simmers e.t.c. did not change anything on the fact that for MS it waas a flop. The whole franchise was sold to Lockheed Martin, who use it for professional applications and graciously have allowed hobby simmers to obtain the software for private and commercial use. It is simply a penny in their coffee cash.

Military sims are totally different sims. They are usually limited in purpose, scenery and airplanes to fly. But of course, what some people do flying those is to simulate what they did not achieve in real life, so there is nothing wrong with them, just they are totally off the scope of civil flight sim users.

Last Edited by Mooney_Driver at 05 Dec 13:04
LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

But of course, what some people do flying those is to simulate what they did not achieve in real life, so there is nothing wrong with them, just they are totally off the scope of civil flight sim users.

My experience is the “hard core” crowd is simply very interested in military aviation history. Recreating battles, what if scenarios and so on. Lots of them are fighter pilots as well, or used to be, while many others are ordinary pilots, professional or hobbyist. The shared interest is definitely military aviation history.

On average they are much more nerd than the average MS simmer I would think The flight models are insanely detailed. Not only in the usual way, but also in modelling the damage, weapons and so on.

The only SIM I have been more “deeply” involved with is X-Plane. But that is more because of the engineering approach that X-Plane has from the ground up. It makes it easy for an engineer to relate to in an engineering way. This is in deep contrast to MS FS which is more of a hacked solution. Don’t know about FS2020 though, but being made by MS, I don’t thing there is much engineering philosophy there except obviously pretty good programming of the graphics. This makes it just a game, not really a sim IMO.

There is another military aviation SIM, War Thunder, which I suspect is the MS FS answer to military aviation. I have never played it, but millions of people are. Manymore than IL-2 and DCS.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

LeSving wrote:

The only SIM I have been more “deeply” involved with is X-Plane. But that is more because of the engineering approach that X-Plane has from the ground up. It makes it easy for an engineer to relate to in an engineering way.

I’ve met Austin Meyers in Dallas on the Microwings conference when he introduced the then fully MS and sublogic world to Xplane. The project behind Xplane was not at all aimed at the entertainment market but at experimental airplane builders just as yourself. The idea was that you get a tool to try out what you want to build. Consequently, the initial Xplane was a sim which was extremely technical but had little in the way of entertainment. Austin knew how to listen however and really turned that sim around, so that it became what it is today. If you think that most of this is the work of a single individual, albeit with a pretty large team by now, is quite amazing.

He is quite a character too. He built a Lancair turboprop and got quite vocal about it’s shortcomings. The avionic that plane carries is almost 100% developed by him. He also developed Xavion, the one reason I ever might buy an Ipad or an Iphone to have on board.

He also fought patent trolls who basically forced him and others out of Android. Austin is very much ok in my book. They don’t come much more dedicated and knowledgable. And Xplane is the perfect sim for people like yourself who are capable to take it’s tremendous potential to the max.

MSFS was born out of an experiment by a certain individual called Bruce Artwick, who wanted to prove that the PC’s of the day could handle complex graphics. He was later joined by Stu Moment, who to this day is a GA pilot. Later on, Stu split off from Bruce and created the first real airliner simulator called Flight Assignment ATP. It was superior to MSFS in the sense that it had airliners, 737, 767 and 747 plus a Shed and it was intended to do a pilots career in the airlines. It was also the first sim which had first a full US scenery, computer generated by a guy called Mike Woodley, the first fully automated scenery generation. Mike was the man behind the scenery disks which came out for both ATP and FS4 at the time. The Artwick Organisation, with a Dutchman called Hugo Feugen as the “what do we do next” guy then developed the first airplane and scenery designer. That was the start of the addon industry.

I was in Hugo’s office (and got to fly with him in his Lancair) when FS5 was introduced, the first photorealistic sim, while Mike and I were working on European Sceneries for ATP. It became clear then, where MSFS was headed. A year or so later, we had a 24 hour online race (online being the insides of the Aviodome Museum at Amsterdam Airport) using a modified DC9 airplane for FS95 (the windows port of FS5) and flew that DC9 From Amsterdam to Tokyo Narita with a team of people some of whom are my friends up to today.

MSFS developed into what it is today. ATP was shut down when the license from MS came to an end (the core of ATP was FS4). It was briefly revived by Simon Hradecky (who now owns Aviation Herald) who developed a totally new flight model for it and called it Airline Simulator 1. I wrote the manual for that thing, one of the most satisfying jobs I ever did.

Myself, i went briefly into addons and later on worked as an editor for an austrian flight sim mag called FlightXpress, where I was present for the whole duration of it’s existence. Due to this, I was able to follow the whole history of flight simulation, see hundreds of addons and work on a few myself and found my love for writing stories, culminating in a book. From 1998 to 2013 this was my 2nd job and eventually financed my real world flying. I was also there for several conferences meeting people like the boys from PMDG and FSlabs, Aerosoft and many more. I still have a lot of friends in that scene, even though my own sim is now a timefrozen box basically unchanged since 2013.

Sorry, I digress. But flight simulation has been a huge part of my professional life for a long time.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

I think it depends what you want to do. X-Plane is great for IR training and also in a more limited way for emergency training. The response for e.g. OEI in multi-engines is pretty realistic, at least for the twins I fly (BE55 and Tecnam P2006T). It’s not make to wow you with stunning graphics as MSFS 2020 does.

That said, I’m sure the market for MSGS2020 is huge compared to the one for X-Plane.

As it is widely accepted that Xplane is a good platform for training IFR, I wonder why haven’t anyone developed any sort of IR training add-on or even a virtual training program. I saw something like that for MSFS2020.

EDMB, Germany

The Virtual ATC community (VATSIM, etc) have training programs for pilots, including IFR. There is also PilotEdge.

tmo
EPKP - Kraków, Poland

@tmo wrote:

Can you please add what motherboard you have? And possibly which RAM you have, so we don’t have to do our own DD on it.

Sure I can do that, but keep in mind that these are “old” specs, both Ryzen and RTX have newer generations now. DDR5 is also a thing apparently. Regardless, here are the details you requested:

AMD RYZEN 7 3700X 4.4GHZ 36MB AM4 WRAITH PRISM
CORSAIR 64GB DDR4 VENGENCE LPX 3200MHZ CL16 (4X16GB) BLACK
ASUS GEFORCE RTX 2070 SUPER ROG STRIX GAMING 8GB
ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F GAMING S-AM4 ATX

Last Edited by Dimme at 06 Dec 11:00
ESME, ESMS

@Mooney_Driver wrote:

Stupid question on the side, but does MSFS2020 actually allow to make videos internally? Or do you still need a separate video capture program?

No stupid questions. I use GeForce Experience (AltGr + F9) which comes with the Nvidia drivers. It does capture video, and also does live streams if you’re into that sort of thing.

Last Edited by Dimme at 06 Dec 10:57
ESME, ESMS

Is there a force feedback yoke that works well with X-Plane on Linux? The Brunner CLS-E NG requires either Windows, or a Windows VM for the CLS2sim software, whatever that is.

tmo
EPKP - Kraków, Poland

tmo wrote:

CLS2sim software, whatever that is.

That’s the “driver” for the yoke. It communicates with X-plane and determines the amount of force to feed back.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top