Good 'Flying Games/Sims'?

D

DarkSideA8

Gawd
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Apr 13, 2005
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I'm not a flying game / sim player - but I have a friend who's just built a new comp to play MSFS. He asked me what other games are available that have realistic flight profiles - and for the life of me: I don't know.

What recent games are good at this? (Last I heard Il Sturmovik was good - but that's been a while)

Thanks for all suggestions
 
1. DCS world on steam amazing sim.
2. FS 2020 runs like garbage on even a 3090.
3. Lockheed Martin makes a real training sim called Prepar3D, .
4. Join a virtual airline, my son did it through Southwest airlines I believe and he had to do so many flights within a time period and they are graded by real ATC personnel and commercial pilots.
 
Not sure if this is a simulator, (more of military simulator) but I was totally lost trying to play Over G Fighters on Xbox 360.
I also have I'll 2 Sturmovik but haven't tried it yet. I think that's on PC too.
 
MSFS 2020 is absolute dogshit for any kind of flight simulation. It was dogshit during the Alpha phase, it was dogshit on release day (but at least good looking dogshit) and now we're 4 months in and they haven't shown any improvements, in fact the LOD decreased substantially and the SDK is still a mess.

Otherwise, it really depends what your friends wants to do and what is his budget.
Good sims are actually quite expensive when you factor the thrust levers/yoke or joystick and rudder pedals on top of the software (both the sim itself and the proper addons to run it)

I wrote this back in September:

Depends what you want to do, if you just want to have fun, go try the DCS F18 or the A10. If you want to learn, you want to match the plane (flight model) to the avionics stack to the sim platform.

For example, 10 years ago when I was doing my multi-IFR training, in real life I was training on a C-310 with a Garmin 430/530W. So I would practice at home on FSX using Milviz's C310 and RealityXPs Garmin 530/430. I saved thousands of dollar because I was able to do the IFR portion in 1 flight instead of 3-4 and at 600$ per flight hour you don't really want to "learn" how the GPS works while you're in the air.

In my career, from air ambulance to regionals to airliners and there was always a platform that matched my needs, made the initial type rating certificate and breeze and significantly reduced the time and experience needed for the Capt upgrade. A2A for small piston planes, Milviz for light twins turboprop like the Kingair 350, Majestic for the BBD Q400, Aerosoft for the BBD CRJ, PMDG for the Boeing airliners and FSLabs for the Airbus ones.

That being said, If you just want to learn to fly you're better off just going to your local flight school, any sims will just teach you bad habits at that point: bad scan, self induce oscillations, over-correcting. Fixed/home simulators tends to be overly pitchy especially if you use a cheap logitech joystick and will teach you bad flaring techniques because you don't have the right depth perception. Where the sim really shines is with complex model systems which allow you to simulate failures and proper IFR navigation which actually does not require super duper shiny sceneries (because you'll spend 99% of the time in clouds or taxiing around at the airport where having proper lighting, layout and taxi charts is much more important than the how nice the FBO hangar looks like).

Last winter I passed my 737-800 renewal check ride and I was practicing with a 10 year old build with a i5 760, a GTX 470, 4gb of RAM and I was running FSX Steam Edition with the excellent PMDG NGX addon. With very little tuning, the sim would handle 95% like the real plane.

Now with modern hardware and Lockheed P3D V4.5 & V5 it's much better since FSX Steam Ed was limited on ram due to being coded on 32bit, you can have even more sophisticated planes like the NGXu or FSLabs A320. I upgraded to the P3D and the NGXu and with the new flight model it behaves 99% like the real one. I'd say it handles almost as well as the Level-D simulator we have in Toronto and the very few failures they are not allowed to simulate is due to Boeing's license.

MSFS2020 is not only a paid beta experience, it's not at all a simulator of anything. It's toy, closer to an interactive BingMaps viewer than anything else, albeit a very good looking one (those thunderstorms do look really nice) and I suppose a good benchmark to test your new GPU and CPU performance but it doesn't even match FS 2004 in the flight models department and the lack of progress on the SDK signals that serious addon makers like PMDG won't be able to port their products for at least another year, if not more.
Click to expand...
 
st1650 said:
MSFS 2020 is absolute dogshit for any kind of flight simulation. It was dogshit during the Alpha phase, it was dogshit on release day (but at least good looking dogshit) and now we're 4 months in and they haven't shown any improvements, in fact the LOD decreased substantially and the SDK is still a mess.

Otherwise, it really depends what your friends wants to do and what is his budget.
Good sims are actually quite expensive when you factor the thrust levers/yoke or joystick and rudder pedals on top of the software (both the sim itself and the proper addons to run it)

I wrote this back in September:
Click to expand...
Thanks for that detail.

So - he's just bought the Logitech Saitek Pro X-56 Hotas RGB FC. I suspect he'll pick up rudder pedals, too at some point.

His dad was a pilot - but I don't think that actual flight school is in the books. I know he wants something with a good 'flight profile' (if that is the word for programming the sim to work as planes would in real life - rather than something arcadey. Something where altitude, etc. matter. He's an old fan of the original MSFS, and got excited enough about MSFS 2020 to build a good rig.

That said - I'm looking to offer him some other titles that he might enjoy, so any suggestions very appreciated.
 
DarkSideA8 said:
Thanks for that detail.

So - he's just bought the Logitech Saitek Pro X-56 Hotas RGB FC. I suspect he'll pick up rudder pedals, too at some point.

His dad was a pilot - but I don't think that actual flight school is in the books. I know he wants something with a good 'flight profile' (if that is the word for programming the sim to work as planes would in real life - rather than something arcadey. Something where altitude, etc. matter. He's an old fan of the original MSFS, and got excited enough about MSFS 2020 to build a good rig.

That said - I'm looking to offer him some other titles that he might enjoy, so any suggestions very appreciated.
Click to expand...
Sounds like DCS would be a good match. Especially the A10.
 
Frankly - Just looking at that HOTAS gear my friend bought makes me want to fly something... But I'm not a fixed wing guy; how's the rotary wing on these games?
 
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