MSFS Complaints: Seek the donuts of the day.

[DennyA]

I originally wrote this as a response after seeing the irony of people complaining about Asobo planes in one topic and complaining that third-party planes don't look as good as Asobo's in another. Figured I'd make it its own topic.


--


God, I'd hate to be a company involved in creating products for flight sims.


Third party brings out airplane: "Flawed! You can tell it is made from polygons! Why can't the textures and modeling be as perfect as the Asobo planes?"


MS brings out an airplane: "Flawed! These are terrible. Why can't it have all the niche-appeal features of third party planes?"


Those lucky enough to have actually flown real planes know that none of these planes is anything approaching the experience of flying a real plane, no matter how detailed. Many are more temperamental than the real things because sim fliers demand "realism (sic)" without accommodation for the lack of physical and environmental feedback.


The best approach is to realize this is a simulation of flying and find the joy in that. Sure, send (kind!) feedback to devs about obvious issues, but also appreciate what we have. Asobo hasn't replicated everything in P3D and there are some missing things. There are bugs that frustratingly are taking a long time to address. But there's also so much that is so much better than before. There's so much realism. There's an entire world to explore, and more than 50% of it looks awesome! Find the joy, y'all. As a wise child once said, "Seek the donuts of the day." (IE: Look for the treats and things that make you happy.)

I'm not dismissing anyone's feedback on any product. But if I was a newbie thinking of getting into flight simulation and I came across any FS forum, I'd come away with the impression that our hobby is flawed and most of the products are junk. Which is so not the case.


Also, given that most of the denizens of this forum as as old as I am, I'd think y'all would realize how spoiled we are compared to not that long ago. :-)

[DennyA]

And to be clear, I'm not dismissing legitimate complaints. It's just that the hyperbole and vitriol can get old.

This forum's one of the best when it comes to folks appreciating the efforts that goes into these products. But there are some folks who are just "the glass is 10% empty!" in their discourse...

[Mach3DS]

Plus, and not to be forgotten, if you really had the realism of "real" flight, you'd hate it!

1. Show up to plane, it won't start. Despite doing everything including low mixture starts.
2. Get a new plane. It won't start.
3. Wait around for hours...
4. Strike up a conversations with other pilots while waiting for a plane to return...
5. New plane lined up, it returns, yay! it starts!
5a. 15 minutes into the flight discover high engine temps
6. Look out the window, discover coolant leaking from left engine.
7. Land immediately.
8. Go home.

[DC1973]

Love this The Internet is so full of "experts" on aviation and how airplanes developed for flight sim should or should not be, despite only a tiny fraction of the world's population owning a professional aviation qualification of any kind. I once had a YouTube reviewer complain about the realism on my F-14s as "the screwhead textures in the cockpit are not as high resolution as I would expect." He couldn't fly it properly to save his life though. The mind boggles.

[FlameOut]

@ DennyA, you have wisdom!

I'm 65+ and started with the ATP (Airline Transport Pilot) sim many years ago. The graphics were only marginally better than what is displayed above. IIRC I purchased FS 98 as my first Microsoft flight sim, it may have been the one before that. I was waiting for the graphics to improve to a level higher than "stick figures", and of course I needed a 'puter that was faster than an old 286 chip set and those 4 1/2inch floppy disk, not to mention a monitor that had more display power than RGB colors and was that an interlaced or a non-interlaced VGA monitor. I can't remember.

@ 000rick000 the last time I flew on commercial jet was a flight to Las Vegas and back 28 yrs. ago. The last time I flew in a GA aircraft was 2019.


I think that "visually" this is the flight sim that we have all been waiting for.

Thanks to everyone that has anything to with moving this flight sim and our community forward, I'm grateful!

Don

[K5083]

Context is everything!

The flight model fidelity of MSFS is not great, but okay in the context of other consumer flight simulators, but of course it looks bad in the context of real aviation.

The visuals look great in the context of the very poor graphics in the flight sims we long-timers are used to, but viewed in the broader context of video games, they are not good at all. My teenage sons, who are gamers, sometimes watch me play, and they have never been impressed with the graphics. They can point to any number of specific things, both in the air (e.g. bad photogrammetry resolution) and on the ground (e.g. low-res earth textures under the grass) that would be scandalously bad in any normal open-world video game, even several-year-old titles like Fallout 4 or Witcher 3. I have to admit they are absolutely right -- MSFS is NOT the flight sim I have been waiting for, visually. It's a big step in the right direction, but there is massive room for improvement. I'm going to predict that in 15 years, we will be playing with flight sims that make the visuals of MSFS look like FSX. Which is fine; progress is good, and there are valid reasons why flight sims lag other video games visually.

August

[UnknownGuest12]

DennyA
Congratulations for your post. Absolutely right. I myself is to blame for complaining once about missing nazi symbology. Was wrong...

[Stearman]

DennyA, thanks for your post, I completely agree.

Also, I love those vintage pics that, as you say, seemed fantastic not so long ago. What are they from? FS3 or FS4 I think? First 16 color PC or Amiga/Atari? Those were great times, indeed.

Even so, I started flying about 5 years before with PSION Flight Simulator, an amazing software loaded from a cassette tape in my old cherished, rubber membrane keys, Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Would like to share some pics from then, if I may:





Thanks once again, best regards.

[keithb77]

My first sim was also on the Spectrum but typed in from a magazine in basic and Z-80 machine code
Haven't got any pictures but it was basically an airliner cockpit with a small 3D wireframe drawing of the runway showing in the window ahead.
Many many simulators later and at 65 I just solo'd in real life last sunday

[K5083]

Congrats Keith!

I also owned a Spectrum ZX81 but had to give up simming on it, the vertigo from the super-realistic visible display was too disorienting.

Here's to many happy landings, real and virtual.

August

[DennyA]

Glad my post was received in the spirit intended! I certainly have eyerolled at many things I've seen in add-ons and sims, but having been involved with the industry for so log (I used to be the flight sim columnist for CGW magazine in the 90s), I know the realities of the business and of development. There's so much I want to see (don't even get me started on today's soulless-yet-rivet-accurate combat flight sims) but I also very much appreciate the progress made.

@K5083 Totally get it on the visuals. I'm a general gamer as well with an XSX, PS5, and giant Steam game backlog, so I know how good games can get. However, when your kids get all elitist because MSFS doesn't look as good as Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (tell them to play that, it's fantastic, if they haven't already!) point out that none of those games are recreating an entire planet! That said, agreed even with today's tech some of what's in MSFS could be done better with current data, such as fixing the post-nuclear-war photogrammetry.

@Stearman, those shots are from the Amiga version of SubLogic Fight Simulator. First one that had a smooth-ish frame rate! (We were blown away by 10-15 fps in those days!)

This was the first flight sim I ever played, A2-FS1. Didn't have an Apple II, but I worked in a computer store that sold them...



First one I owned was FS2 for the Commodore 64:



I think my favorite on the C64 was Solo Flight, though. Sid Meier! Fun missions.

[K5083]

Yes the size of the map is definitely the key limitation that excuses the weaker graphics of MSFS. Here's one of several videos that really makes that point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TwjUk4ReZo

Any game map significantly bigger than the planet earth (e.g. Minecraft, No Man's Sky) is 100% procedurally generated as compared with a flight sim's mixture of hand-built, data-based, and procedural (autogen). In that sense, there's nothing as ambitious as a flight sim anywhere else in video games. The gamer kids can snort at our weak textures, but we can snort back at their tiny maps.

August

[ColoKent]

We certainly have come a long ways in Flight Sim in the last 37 years....here was my first..."Fokker Triplane Simulator" for the then-new Macintosh. I remember trying to pretend it was an F-104....!



One part of the world that has changed for the better in the past 37 years...

Kent

[Tom Clayton]

I started out in FS2002 Pro with the cardboard clouds. Then came FS9 with the volumetric clouds that still rotated as you passed by. This sim blows me away every time I load it up.

[sketchy]

Fantastic thread, loving all the old images...

I was clearly getting very cocky at "Aviator" on the BBC Micro and ahead of my time for putting my (film) camera on the tripod to snap a quick "selfie" (long before that term existed) whilst on final flying by the keyboard.... circa 1989..





I used to think the South east area of the "world" (map above the keyboard) was so cool to fly in as it had two, count them two! wire frame triangle mountains.... To steal a Monty Python Phrase "Luxury"!!

Hair cut clearly inspired by the Jesus Jones post on the wall behind...

[keithb77]

This is the Spectrum airliner simulator I referred to

That's a BAC 1-11 honest
From 1982...

[FlameOut]

The last time I flew in a GA aircraft was 2019.

... make that 2016, my twin brother took us up at Peachtree-Dekalb Airport (KPDK) with a CFI that he knew for our 60th. birthday. It was a short trip down and around Stone Mountain. My brother died 2 months to the day after having Aortic valve surgery at Emory hospital in 2019. (I guess that's why I put 2019)

He never got to see this beautiful Flight sim we have now.

Don

[rubblebeam]

There's a thread on these very forums having a cry about Aerosoft dumbing down. There's threads on these forums defending third parties dumbing down their products. Now there's this thread saying most people don't know how to fly a real plane, because they're not "experts" so they should shut up, buy the products and enjoy the world graphics.

[Mach3DS]

There's a thread on these very forums having a cry about Aerosoft dumbing down. There's threads on these forums defending third parties dumbing down their products. Now there's this thread saying most people don't know how to fly a real plane, because they're not "experts" so they should shut up, buy the products and enjoy the world graphics.

Weird. that's not what I got out of this thread at all! (And I agree with many points on both sides of the products argument).

My comments were tongue in cheek. Because all the real pilots here know exactly what I'm talking about. You fly enough and realize that there's never a perfect flight. Something always breaks, doesn't work etc. etc. It was meant to just say "yeah, there's alot of complaining about not enough realism - here's some 'realism' that you probably wouldn't appreciate". I think the point is to have expectations, strive for continuous improvement and realize that you will never be perfect. And apply that grace to all the developers out there in good faith, with them applying it in return.

[Tom Clayton]

There will always be people that mope and whine when something doesn't work. There will be those that complain when something does work, but not the way they expect. There will be those that b|tch about the whiners, mopers, and complainers. MSFS isn't perfect. There are aspects that still don't measure up to P3D or XP. But there are some parts that are leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else. If you love the sim like I do, fly it. If you don't, fly something else. If you find an actual bug, there is a report process in place via Zendesk. This forum isn't frequented by Asobo staff, so complaining here won't get you very far. Asobo does monitor the official forum, and they have bug report sections there.