Microsoft returning to Flight Simulator in 2020

DeathSmasher said:
Anyone have some input on what controls to look at? In the $500 range.
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Thrustmaster Warthog for stick and throttle. You'll need rudder pedals tho. It's one of the best HOTAS or the best and has been for a long time. The TCA Sidesick Airbus Edition joystick is just a slightly reworked T16000M joystick. The Warthog is also mostly made from metal as well. It'll also give alot of flexability if you ever get into DCS or Elite Dangerous, etc.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I have no idea what HOTAS is.
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Hands on throttle and stick. Typically for combat aircraft, but Airbus planes do use a stick as well. Most GA and Boeing aircraft use yokes, which cost about the same as a HOTAS for your PC.

Your best affordable HOTAS is the X52 Pro:

x52pro-gallery-1.png

Now owned by Logitech, I think they go for $150 or so (I paid $120 many years ago). Not the best and build quality isn't perfect, but good enough.

Thrustmaster as some cheap stuff around $70 or so:

joystickhotasone.png

But the build quality is on par with an N64 controller, or something else from the 1990s. In other words, pretty crappy, and the stick is sloppy.

odditory said:
It's one game but one you could easily spend 500-1000+ hours in, especially since it will be constantly evolving with free and paid DLC.
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...or use it for the other flight sims out there. Get tired of civil aviation or general aviation? You can get DCS or IL-2 if you feel the need to blow some things up.

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You can buy a racing wheel for a racing game, and then play other racing games with it. Or multiple fighting games with an Xbox controller.
 
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odditory said:
It's one game but one you could easily spend 500-1000+ hours in, especially since it will be constantly evolving with free and paid DLC.
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That's the part that I'm struggling with.

No missions, no story, just aimless flying around.

Beautiful as it is, I could easily see how that might get old in less than 10 hours.
 
Flogger23m said:
Hands on throttle and stick. Typically for combat aircraft, but Airbus planes do use a stick as well. Most GA and Boeing aircraft use yokes, which cost about the same as a HOTAS for your PC.

Your best affordable HOTAS is the X52 Pro:

View attachment 271952






...or use it for the other flight sims out there. Get tired of civil aviation or general aviation? You can get DCS or IL-2 if you feel the need to blow some things up.

View attachment 271950


You can buy a racing wheel for a racing game, and then play other racing games with it. Or multiple fighting games with an Xbox controller.
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I tend to lean towards the X56 for bang for buck HOTAS.

Nice Wagner mobile....
 
Flogger23m said:
Hands on throttle and stick. Typically for combat aircraft, but Airbus planes do use a stick as well. Most GA and Boeing aircraft use yokes, which cost about the same as a HOTAS for your PC.

Your best affordable HOTAS is the X52 Pro:

View attachment 271952
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Id be inclined to go for something with a modular and separate throttle and stick / yoke so you don't have to pay for the throttle twice. Is there a compatible yoke that can go with the stick so you can swap back and forth?

How about rudder pedals?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That's the part that I'm struggling with.

No missions, no story, just aimless flying around.

Beautiful as it is, I could easily see how that might get old in less than 10 hours.
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A cool add-on would be mode like the old Ports of Call game but with planes.

You start with minimal money, have to buy a plane, and then take contracts to transport cargo / people across the world and gradually earn more to buy better planes.

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Anyone else remember that game?
 
Flogger23m said:
Even a good console controller costs $50-60, and those are done in high volume but have imprecise thumb sticks and only a handful of buttons. A good HOTAS has a lot of mechanical internals and if you cheap out they will get sloppy and imprecise quickly. Likewise, you won't find a good racing wheel for $20 either, those cost a good $200 or so for a decent one as well for similar reasons.

Best cheap device I found was Xbox 360 wired controllers for $28, which is what I paid 6 or so years ago for mine. Superb build quality, but the buttons, lack of buttons, lack of functions and imprecisie thumb sticks don't compare at all to a HOTAS. Seems like you're hard pressed to find a wireless Xbox One controller for $45. Getting any decent HOTAS for $100 or or less would be pretty much impossible to turn a profit on due to manufacturing cost I'd assume. I paid $120 for my X52 Pro years ago, and it is the best low cost HOTAS but even then the button quality isn't superb and Saitek quality control was up and down.
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Yeah, I have a X45 setup that is at least 15 years old and still works just fine. I simply have no place to mount them.

Edit: I even have a usb yoke and pedals in my closet, that I am sure still works.
 
erek said:
Flight Simulator Pilots Make 16-Hour Flight From LA To Dubai In Real Time

https://kotaku.com/author/lukeplunkett
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I think it would be fun to do the small plane northern Atlantic ferry route from the U.S. to Europe.

Somewhere in the U.S. --> KGBR --> CYYR --> BGBW --> BIKF --> EGPC --> somewhere in Europe

Can you land at any airport, not just the hand drawn ones?

And how does the game handle controlled airspace? Do you have to set radio frequencies and communicate with the ATC?
 
This game ate up our 16GB of system RAM. It peaked at 98% system RAM utilization. In fact, this could be partly what is causing the stuttering or down spikes at times. If you have 16GB of RAM, upgrading to 32GB of RAM may be an important upgrade to make for this game to play more smoothly. We were definitely hitting our limit on system RAM here for the first time.

We were also utilizing all of the video cards 11GB of VRAM. Indicating again that this game eats RAM in all forms. The more RAM you can throw at it in your video card and system RAM it will probably benefit.

https://www.thefpsreview.com/2020/08/21/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-performance-at-4k/7/
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Id be inclined to go for something with a modular and separate throttle and stick / yoke so you don't have to pay for the throttle twice. Is there a compatible yoke that can go with the stick so you can swap back and forth?

How about rudder pedals?
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Yeah you can get most separately. Thrustmaster and Logitech (they bought Saitek) are the most popular brands. They have lines of fighter and civil aviation set ups. Thrusmaster just came out with an Airbus stick and quadrant, $100 for each one. Not a huge amount of options and the yokes tend to be more expensive, probably because they're even more niche than fighter style sticks. But there are options. Pedals are around $100-200.

I'm sure if you're not too picky, you can get a decent set up of all three for $300-350. Of course the higher end stuff will be better, just depends on whether you value it. Something to consider, if you're not getting pedals some joysticks like the X52 Pro I have offer a twist stick. So while I don't have pedals, I can twist the stick to yaw in flight sims. Not all sticks have this axis so keep that in mind, but something to consider if you want to save money up front if you're unsure if you want to invest in all three peripherals.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That's the part that I'm struggling with.

No missions, no story, just aimless flying around.

Beautiful as it is, I could easily see how that might get old in less than 10 hours.
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It's only aimless if you can't think of places to fly and challenges to give yourself! And like a lot of sims, part of the satisfaction comes from learning a complex task that could translate to the real world. I wouldn't want to set a Flight Simulator pilot loose on a real aircraft without an instructor by their side, but they'd actually know their way around the cockpit.
 
ChadD said:
Well I was always under the impression that Flight Simulator wasn't really a game. Its a realistic flight simulator.
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World simulator as well, was flying around Antarctica, then Niagra Falls area, beautiful but also rather accurate except the falls were fixed :(. This is utterly night and day difference between previous Flight Simulators, now the World is accurately represented to a largely fine degree. Now my house did not look like my house so it is not 100% accurate but it was in the right spot.
 
Aurelius said:
It's only aimless if you can't think of places to fly and challenges to give yourself! And like a lot of sims, part of the satisfaction comes from learning a complex task that could translate to the real world. I wouldn't want to set a Flight Simulator pilot loose on a real aircraft without an instructor by their side, but they'd actually know their way around the cockpit.
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here's an absolutely fascinating thread where a guy bets on that

Prop Bet: Can I Land a Plane First Try
 
As someone who hasn't ever actually played a Microsoft Flight Simulator game before but is really interested in the world streaming technology of this one - is there an easy mode where I can just cruise around and check out the sights, or is it all hardcore sim, all the time?
 
Aurelius said:
It's only aimless if you can't think of places to fly and challenges to give yourself! And like a lot of sims, part of the satisfaction comes from learning a complex task that could translate to the real world. I wouldn't want to set a Flight Simulator pilot loose on a real aircraft without an instructor by their side, but they'd actually know their way around the cockpit.
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I winced a little.... remembering that Microsoft pulled the sale of flight sim back in 2001.
 
In the video below, you can witness my attempts at recreating 10 famous flight scenes from some of my favourite films. These include well known scenes like the Grand Canyon chase scene from Independence Day, the crop-duster attack from North by Northwest and the opening shot to Goldeneye where the plane flies over the Contra Dam in Switzerland. There's also a couple of more obscure flights in there too, like that bit in Flight of the Navigator where David and Max fly along the South Lake of Hollywood Beach, Miami, and park up outside the Cramer house after being led there by a fireworks display.

So, will I be able to land a jumbo jet on the Las Vegas strip like they do in Con Air? Can I skim a plane over the sea next to Skellig Micheal, Millennium Falcon style? Or how about buzzing the Top Gun tower at Miramar air base in San Diego?
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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...s-in-microsoft-flight-simulator-2020#comments
 
TheSlySyl said:
As someone who hasn't ever actually played a Microsoft Flight Simulator game before but is really interested in the world streaming technology of this one - is there an easy mode where I can just cruise around and check out the sights, or is it all hardcore sim, all the time?
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From Eurogamer's review:

Microsoft Flight Simulator can also, if you'd prefer, be a fair bit more approachable than that. You can spawn on the runway, or in the air, and hand off the ATC chatter to an AI co-pilot. That same AI copilot might also have completed your checklist for you, or guided you through the process. You can skip forward to any point of the flight you want to experience, be that take-off, ascent, approach or landing, and have as much or as little automated for you.
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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...sim-for-everyone-and-one-of-the-best-sims-yet
 
TheSlySyl said:
As someone who hasn't ever actually played a Microsoft Flight Simulator game before but is really interested in the world streaming technology of this one - is there an easy mode where I can just cruise around and check out the sights, or is it all hardcore sim, all the time?
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And from vg247's review:

for VG247's Alex Donaldson, the most impressive is its accessibility. This is a series used to train actual pilots to fly, and yet Asobo Studio has found a way to make it an experience for everybody.

"The training aids are what make this a palatable video game and not just a simulator,"

"The game is obsessed with authenticity, but also embraces accessibility. If you want to taxi from the runway and go through the full pre-flight rigmarole, you can. You can also spawn right on the runway or even in the air, mid-flight. It's incredibly smartly crafted to make sure you can always easily access the parts of flying... of the most interest.

"Over time you strip away the assistance. Seasoned pilots can remove it all right away, if they wish. In ways it reminds me of the deeply granular difficulty settings that have become common in simulation racing games like Microsoft's own Forza Motorsport: it's not just easy, medium or hard, but a whole range of assists and settings that combine to make things more realistic and therefore more difficult. Flick everything off and you have staggering, terrifying full authenticity and realism."
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https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-18-microsoft-flight-simulator-critical-consensus
 
Looking to upgrade from my x52 as its wearing out from Elite Dangerous use, whats some of the best quality HOTAS' these days?
 
32gb may not be enough for this sim.
I am looking at getting a flight controller for this soon. May have to wait for a restock.
Flight sim 40gb mem.png
 
Playing this with a Thrustmaster T.1600 FCS set, works right out of the box. Ryzen 2700x, 16GB ram, and 5700 XT handles it just fine on the high-end preset 1080p ultrawide. After playing just a few hours I can see myself playing this for years to come.
 
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erek said:
Microsoft Flight Simulator Expected to Stimulate Billions in PC Hardware Sales
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interesting how people can't believe sim users won't upgrade their systems for this. I realize it's been almost 30 years, but I can recall Flight Sim people upgrading specifically for new Sims (though not MS's) in the early to mid 90s. Hell I knew people who upgraded for Wing Commander games, then bitched, because nothing was enough when there were a ton of Kilrathi on the screen and bitched some more a few years later when the replayed it and found out it suddenly ran too fast (though that was fixed with SloMo as I recall).

My guess is this isn't for me, because I was never a hard core sim player, but it looks spectacular and I can see my nephew drooling over this (though he may not have the H/W for it, despite having a new system).
 
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