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A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Discuss anything here...nothing political or controversial please.
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Firebird
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Firebird »

Thanks for that Ian. I think I was curious as to whether or not they had defined spots for Helos yet, amongst other. I was not convinced that they would have yet as they haven't touched helos but I was just grasping at straws as to whether vertical AI was likely when they get around to it.

The fact that they haven't doesn't mean that they won't add them later. If they had defined them then it meant that they would.

Desperately trying to glean info about the future.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

As you know, there are no helos in the game at the moment. There are suggestions that helicopters could even be a paid-for DLC eventually, but I've seen nothing from Microsoft or Asobo to suggest that the entire genre would need a payware DLC.

Parking spots seem to have been taken wholesale from FSX, like a lot of the sim under the surface. As you know, I'm not convinced that Asobo really has any understanding of aviation at all. They are great at presenting a lovely moving picture, but IMO they've created a worse flying experience than is available in FSX as standard, let alone with some of the amazing third-party content there is (which is even better in P3D from v4). I tear my hair out at how badly their aeroplanes handle, and how they've made control routines that were simple and intuitive in FSX complex and difficult - just try panning an external camera around your aircraft in flight!
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Firebird »

That is disappointing to hear. I have read about each update and keep reading about updates to the dynamics. I just hope that they happen to hit the right note, preferably before I buy it.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Tuskin38 »

I have to disagree, the flying in MSFS feels a lot better than FSX/P3D.

I found this program on FSDeveloper that can convert base MSFS2020 airports into SDK projects

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threa ... ft.450344/

I was using it to touch up the base CYZX a bit, adding missing PAPI lights and adding the correct approach lights.

It doesn't seem to carry over the elevation data, so you'll need to fix that yourself.

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It's real hard finding reference images of CYZX's lights online, not surprising since for most of its life it was military only. But they moved a local flying club here a few years ago after the county airport closed.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

Tuskin38 wrote: 15 Dec 2020, 22:47 I have to disagree, the flying in MSFS feels a lot better than FSX/P3D.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that. So far, there's little to base any impression on other than the default aircraft. I'm not particularly interested in light aircraft, but all of those that I have tried are too twitchy and have some very odd behaviours with coarse control inputs. FSX/P3D default light aircraft aren't better, but they are less weird!

MSFS heavies are dire. There is no other word for it. Their hand-flown responses are completely unrealistic, and their autopilot/flight director systems are so simplified as to be pretty much laughable. I have no doubt that when PMDG and others get their study-level products into MSFS things will be a lot better, but there will need to be some significant amendments to the aerodynamics algorithms to make hand flying in any way representative of the real thing. In contrast, and despite the much simpler aerodynamic modelling (and ignoring the default aircraft), the fidelity available in P3D in particular, but also FSX in a well-managed system, is remarkable.

There are no military aircraft to play with, other than a very small number of FSX conversions available in obscure places, and no helicopters whatsoever. And, essentially, editable AI does not exist. As was said in Manschy's Bruggen thread, MSFS is currently a scenery simulator, not a flight simulator.

None of this is to say it won't get there. All of the building blocks are there or thereabouts, and the third-party producers are beavering away to bring us worthwhile aircraft. As you've demonstrated, the scenery side of things is coming along nicely. But as a flight simulator, or a place for 'spotters' to sit and watch the world go by (which is the essence of MAIW), it's nowhere. Yet.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by rocket_26_ »

I will give my thoughts having developed and used the sim for nearly a year.

When it comes to default aircraft I will give you they don't feel great to fly but I could say the same for default FSX/P3D aircraft.

I do have the MB339 for FS2020 and it is fantastic and I imagine once the developers get to grips with the sim other aircraft will follow.

I agree if all you want to do is sit and watch AI then as it stands this is not the sim for you. In time hopefully the SDK will get developed to allow for this. It has been updated almost every week for last couple of months so there is hope.

Scenery wise this is another level. Large complex scenery which previously had a big impact on performance in P3D now have little to no impact. I do see most developers focusing solely on this sim as the sales so far have been high in comparison to P3D versions.

For my own development I have found once you get your head around the way to build scenery using the in sim tools I have found it much quicker to develop.

Once I have finished converting my Coningsby, Lakenheath and Honington scenery, my next project RAF Mildenhall will be built from scratch purpose built for FS2020.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

I'm trying to reply to this, but the forum won't let me! (Edit: if I write more than a few words, it tells me 'Forbidden - you do not have permission to access this resource').
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Firebird »

I get this quite often.
The causes for me are two fold firstly, I take to long to complete the message and it times out. Secondly, it happens when I type in anything in single quote marks. I think the software takes this as potentially executable code and doesn't allow it.

Does this second one sound like the reason?
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Greg »

Never use single quotation marks together with punctuation marks in a text input field on an website. It could be considered as an SQL injection attack.

In this specific case, it was a single quotation mark followed by an exclamation mark followed by the capital letter F.

[Wed Dec 16 21:01:16.257720 2020] [error] ModSecurity: Access denied with code 403 (phase 2). Pattern match (...) [msg "Detects MSSQL code execution and information gathering attempts"] (...)
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

Gosh. I did nearly fifteen years as a Supermod on PPRuNe, and I currently moderate on a couple of industry forums, and I've never come across that before!
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

Let's try again:

Scenery-wise MSFS is stunning, there's no doubt. I'm not sure I agree about large, complex sceneries having no performance impact. Anything locally stored will have a performance cost, but it seems to be less than sceneries in P3D. It is possible to get P3D looking nearly as good as MSFS, but at a significant cost both in storage and finance terms. My P3Dv4.5 installation was well over 900Gb with a full set of Orbx, some other payware scenery, and pretty much everything from MAIW. The big difference in MSFS's favour is lighting (environmental, not artificial), which is extraordinarily natural - at least in daylight. Only GTA V looks as good to me in this respect. P3D suffers from some odd lighting effects, especially in HDR, and the fact that much of its scenery texturing dates back to FS2002 or possibly even earlier. Trees, in particular, look mostly dreadful in P3D - even the Orbx ones. But from an MAIW perspective, this is all secondary to the living world.

I'm reminded of the apocryphal reply to the question of how do you get to where you want to go: "Well, I wouldn't start from here". For years, X-Plane has offered a potentially better vehicle for flight simming than the MS franchise and its LM offspring. They've even gone some way to making AI work, though it's far from great. MSFS is all about potential, unless your criterion is scenery. From every other point of view the potential is - as yet - unrealised. But it will come.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

Greg wrote: 16 Dec 2020, 22:20 Never use single quotation marks together with punctuation marks in a text input field on an website. It could be considered as an SQL injection attack.

In this specific case, it was a single quotation mark followed by an exclamation mark followed by the capital letter F.

[Wed Dec 16 21:01:16.257720 2020] [error] ModSecurity: Access denied with code 403 (phase 2). Pattern match (...) [msg "Detects MSSQL code execution and information gathering attempts"] (...)
@Greg, as you can see I've now succeeded in making the post. However, changing the single quotation marks to double quotation marks did not solve the problem. I had to remove the exclamation mark. As I say, in many years of forum moderation (both phpBB and Xenforo) I've never come across this filter before, and it does seem a bit odd.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Firebird »

Tim,
As I alluded to, I have been caught out many times by this on this forum. I guessed the reason rather than Greg tell me the cause after one time I solved the posting issue by accident. I admit the fact that nobody else pointed this out I assumed that it was well known and I was a bit daft for not knowing it. This I also assumed was down to me not posting in an awful lot of forums.
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

I've just asked a good mate of mine who used to own PPRuNe (which used to be on phpBB), and currently runs a number of forums on various topics, whether he's seen this before. It'll be interesting to get his perspective. Anyway, I got there in the end!
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Greg »

It's not something in phpBB. It's an extra Web Application Filter layer on server level. Not every server has this enabled and I guess many admins will simply disable it to avoid the hassle.

However, we've been hacked successfully twice in our early existence (some of the older users may still remember this) but since I beefed up the security about ten years ago we haven't had any issues, despite about 150 hacking attempts on this site every day.

But back to MSFS. ;)
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

Thanks Greg. Danny confirmed that it can be construed as an SQL injection attack, but also that he'd never seen it produce this result. However, right at this minute he's having a fight with a new forum he's instigated that won't let you use the word 'grant' at the end of a sentence - it gives a similar result! So, as always with computer stuff, there's always a new trap right around the corner!

Anyway, back to MSFS - sort of. In the sense of "MSFS, eat your damn heart out...."

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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

Jon has put out the first public Alpha build of ADE. It's far from complete, and there may be many bugs, but it can be downloaded from a link in the discussion thread here: https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threa ... se.450668/
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Tuskin38 »

Oh great I was waiting for this.

It makes for a good complimentary editor to the in-sim one. The in sim one is better for MSFS because you have the satellite imagery right there to line up your scenery with, terrain edits on the fly without having to reopen the sim.

But ADE is great for doing the initial setup, plus you can use it to convert a scenery to MSFS Project file to load into the in-sim editor without having to start from scratch. Also for quick edits that you don't need to be in the sim to see (like parking numbers, taxi names etc)
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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by Tuskin38 »

A user over on the Alpha India Golf forums had over 474 AI craft loaded in at once without crashing (killed their FPS though obviously). They were AI optimized models from FSX.

https://www.alpha-india.net/forums/inde ... #msg348824

Also the MSFS SDK 0.9.0 update brought in some SimConnect functions for AI. Dunno if that's useful for anyone here.

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Re: A brand new MS Flight Simulator is coming...

Post by TimC340 »

It looks like the techniques for developing AI are coming on, but - as yet - are far from user-friendly. It's no surprise that the guys at AIG are at the forefront of this! It's inevitable that this will be a moving picture; come back in a year and the MSFS experience will be quite different from what it is now. Hopefully, however, it will stabilise to the extent that the more average user can inject mods to it with the ease that we can for the older generation sims. I suspect it won't interest the majority of MAIW users or developers until the mod process is simple, reliable and repeatable, and has predictable results. Essentially, that side of the MSFS experience is in 'early Alpha', and remains a long way from where we'd like it to be.

Equally, the flying experience, particularly for large aircraft, is still unsatisfactory. I note that Aerosoft and PMDG have slid their major product releases to the right. Undoubtedly Covid has complicated their development processes, but I'm hearing whispers from other real-world pilots involved in those developments that it's proving more difficult than they hoped to get an acceptable flight model worked out. My own involvement with a third-party product (not directly involved with poling aeroplanes) leads me to believe that there are still many problems with the SDK and API access that need to be resolved before complex addons can be reliably integrated.

Still, no-one said it would be easy! MSFS is an enormous project, and is being tackled on almost all fronts at once. And, of course, it will never be 'finished'. It's still a case of potential trumping reality, so expectations need to be tempered somewhat, but most weeks bring incremental improvements that suggest we'll eventually get there.
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