Microsoft Flight Simulator

[Graham S]

1 hour ago, 5R7 said:

... From shadows website " Why do I have to wait until February 2021 to have access to my Shadow?"...

 

https://shop.shadow.tech/gben/discover

 

Ah, ok, I see that if I browse in Chrome. In Safari it just shows up as ".."

[Benny]

Why in the name of fuck does the installer for this make my CPU and GPU work like mad?

[tronied]

Not sure about the GPU, but the CPU is being used for decompression.

[Mars]

The GPU is just panicking.

[Wallace]

Set the autopilot for a flight across the US while I worked today. 1hr of flight in 40 odd seconds... 

 

https://i.imgur.com/885fZNU.gifv

 

[MrCarrot]

I did Lower Loon Creek to Challis just now. Scenery's not bad!

 

 

[spanx]

After great success last night I’m back on the aaargh wtf vibe tonight. Set up a flight plan around Lake Tahoe and set off in the Cessna 172. Flipped the autopilot on and it went mental, setting the trim to max and it kept stalling, but couldn’t get control back. The autopilot just wouldn’t hand control back. Then the game crashed. Bah

[Triple A]

Yeah autopilot is pretty flaky I think - unless there are any tips to get it working better? (which I guess would make it not autopilot any more - maybe it’s a machine learning autopilot?)

[mlewis]

22 minutes ago, spanx said:

After great success last night I’m back on the aaargh wtf vibe tonight. Set up a flight plan around Lake Tahoe and set off in the Cessna 172. Flipped the autopilot on and it went mental, setting the trim to max and it kept stalling, but couldn’t get control back. The autopilot just wouldn’t hand control back. Then the game crashed. Bah

you’ve probably already thought about it, but do remember it’s an autopilot without an autothrottle; so you do need to manage the engines and throttle yourself in the planes that are included. Sorry if you’ve already worked that out and it’s not the problem but it’s a common mistake!

[spanx]

I don’t understand it. I got the plane in AP and it was gently increasing its altitude. Got the course in and hit nav mode and it got on course. Then I decided to take control and fly around a bit, and then re-engaged it. And it went fucking mental. Went max trim, and no matter how hard I tried to disengage it wouldn’t let me reset the trim, it was fighting against me. Very confusing. 

[bradigor]

My stick keeps making my plane turn to the left. I thought maybe wind, but tried it on calm and still does it. Which is a pain. 

[mlewis]

2 minutes ago, bradigor said:

My stick keeps making my plane turn to the left. I thought maybe wind, but tried it on calm and still does it. Which is a pain. 

Is it torque from the propellor?

[bradigor]

10 minutes ago, mlewis said:

Is it torque from the propellor?

 

No idea, just calibrated the stick and it still does it, so must be something with the plane itself. 

[thesnwmn]

10 minutes ago, bradigor said:

 

No idea, just calibrated the stick and it still does it, so must be something with the plane itself. 

On my pad I had drift. In the settings there’s a sensitivity setting screen and you can move the stick around and see where it ends up resting and from there set dead zones as necessary. Might be worth checking,

[bradigor]

21 minutes ago, thesnwmn said:

On my pad I had drift. In the settings there’s a sensitivity setting screen and you can move the stick around and see where it ends up resting and from there set dead zones as necessary. Might be worth checking,

 

Did that and set sensitivity way down. It could be something to do with auto rudder trim apparently, so will check that next time I am on.

[footle]

1 hour ago, Triple A said:

Yeah autopilot is pretty flaky I think - unless there are any tips to get it working better? (which I guess would make it not autopilot any more - maybe it’s a machine learning autopilot?)

AP is pretty bugged, I think. As is weather, at least in the Gulf: beautiful hurricane clouds - really amazing. no winds.

[Fleksnes]

6 hours ago, bradigor said:

 

Did that and set sensitivity way down. It could be something to do with auto rudder trim apparently, so will check that next time I am on.

It’s physics.
 

https://fly8ma.com/courses/pplgs/lessons/lesson-2-maneuvers-and-the-traffic-pattern/topic/left-turning-tendencies/

[Meers]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you counter that with adjusting the trim?

[footle]

2 minutes ago, Meerman said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you counter that with adjusting the trim?

Rudder trim, yes.

[Cool Ben]

I managed to land outside my house and although it doesn't look like my house at least they got it right with the bungalows opposite.  So incredible.  One thing I did notice as I was flying over South London is that they have added far too many trees.  They need to relook at that and just replace the trees in gardens with trampolines and decking.

[Herbalizer]

Cant get my head around auto pilot. Sometimes it works perfectly, others it sends me into a death spiral.

 

I also cant seem to get the other automatic features such as altitude climb and vertical speed adjustments to work with any consistency. 

 

[bradigor]

3 hours ago, Fleksnes said:

It’s physics.
 

https://fly8ma.com/courses/pplgs/lessons/lesson-2-maneuvers-and-the-traffic-pattern/topic/left-turning-tendencies/

 

Great so playing with the rudder trim will help that then. Thanks. Will have to look at bindings on the keyboard.

[spanx]

52 minutes ago, Herbalizer said:

Cant get my head around auto pilot. Sometimes it works perfectly, others it sends me into a death spiral.

 

I also cant seem to get the other automatic features such as altitude climb and vertical speed adjustments to work with any consistency. 

 

 

You and me both. I think @mlewis above is on the right track though, it's all about managing your throttle. I'm going to play again later and look at the climb modes a bit more - FLC seems to be a mode that tries to keep your speed constant so you basically manage the climb/descent with your throttle, and then there's a different mode where you set a climb rate.

 

It's a lot to learn, but the fact I even understand what localisers, ILS, trim etc even mean is mad seeing as a week ago I knew nothing about any of it. It's quite fascinating

[jonathanhoey]

The worst thing is when you've been happily pootling around with the autopilot keeping you straight and level, so you can play with the camera and get screenshots. Then you turn the autopilot off and you find that it has inexplicably applied -95% nose-down elevator trim. So you have to give it full back-stick just to counter the immediate dive, and hold that while you get the trim back to 0.

 

As released software goes, this is such a weird case. In so many ways it's like playing an alpha (or an early beta, if I'm being generous). It's slow and clunky and full of glitches and inexplicable design decisions. But it gets so much RIGHT that you sort of don't care.

[bradigor]

48 minutes ago, spanx said:

 

You and me both. I think @mlewis above is on the right track though, it's all about managing your throttle. I'm going to play again later and look at the climb modes a bit more - FLC seems to be a mode that tries to keep your speed constant so you basically manage the climb/descent with your throttle, and then there's a different mode where you set a climb rate.

 

It's a lot to learn, but the fact I even understand what localisers, ILS, trim etc even mean is mad seeing as a week ago I knew nothing about any of it. It's quite fascinating

 

Squirrel on Youtube recently did a tutorial on level flight and also on flaps. He goes into detail about how it all works together and helped me loads. Especially with the most controlled landing I have had yet.

[Meers]

I've not even been to the big cities yet. Just flying around in a Cessna above my own area (Winschoten in the pretty rural N-E of the NL) and being amazed how it's all in there. Despite the irregular framerate (10-25fps depending on how much is going on) and the graphics tuned all the way* down to low-end, it's still a mostly enjoyable experience on a GTX1050 mobile / 8Gb RAM / i5 7300HQ.

 

 

* And I mean all the way down. Everything's on low or off. Except the resolution, which is staying on 1080p because 720p just looks shit. It sill looks fairly nice like this though! 

[Wools]

I sunk another 8 hours in over the weekend and still loving it.

 

I'm still not over the shock with the look and feel of it all, but getting more into structred flight; Setting a departure location with a destination and seeing the flight through. Gutted on a 2 hour long flight to France though, where I was only 10 minutes away from landing when I started to descend and didn't cotton onto just how fast I was already flying, resulting in overstretching the aircraft... 2 hours lost! 

 

Also been mucking around with the settings and bumped them up a bit with not much of a noticable performance hit.

 

 

 

 

[Meers]

9 minutes ago, Wools said:

Also been mucking around with the settings and bumped them up a bit with not much of a noticable performance hit.

 

What are the hardware specs of your PC, if you don't mind me asking?

[MrCarrot]

47 minutes ago, beenabadbunny said:

As released software goes, this is such a weird case. In so many ways it's like playing an alpha (or an early beta, if I'm being generous). It's slow and clunky and full of glitches and inexplicable design decisions. But it gets so much RIGHT that you sort of don't care.

 

It is weirdly MVP-like for a released game. And it's not like some of the bugs are even subtle - I can reliably make it crash to desktop just by turning off my xbox controller, which is really fun when you're an hour into a flight and the batteries go flat. Or the fact that Active Pause, is a bit too "active" and doesn't pause the simulation of changes in your speed, so you can unpause and immediately stall, despite having been flying perfectly safely before you paused.

 

And yet, like you say, somehow it hardly matters, because once you're (eventually) back in the cockpit, it all feels so... real somehow.

[milko]

has anyone gone with the 'extra' additions? Just wondering how you're liking the additional aircraft. And the airports I guess, but don't really care about those.