neilends

Makes sense, especially in our current era of better and better deepfake videos.

The legal issues are very significant, unfortunately. While you might think that every airline company loves the free advertising, the reality is that Microsoft still cannot use a livery unless that company has explicitly signed off, in writing, giving Microsoft permission. The airline owns the intellectual property value of their brand name, and another company (like Microsoft) cannot sell or even maintain software to customers that's generating profits for Microsoft (i.e., commercial use) without legal permission. To your point, I also don't understand why any airline would object to this. But even for-profit companies are large bureaucracies and sometimes they just have too many cooks in the kitchen, which erodes the power of common sense decision-making.

Brand new update from the Just Flight folks. Among the tweaks are even more VR improvements. Cool! https://support.justflight.com/support/solutions/articles/17000115071

I found your criticisms to be pretty balanced and constructive. I don't agree with all of them, and some might be a problem with your hardware or settings, but others I do relate to and agree with. Clouds, for example, are spectacular in MSFS so I don't know why your experience sounds so different than mine. Different hardware maybe? Either way, commentary like yours would hopefully be very useful to Microsoft as they continue to improve this software, which it has promised it will do. So I do appreciate it and I don't think you deserve any flaming. The drone and camera functions are annoying difficult and bizarre. No idea why. Hope they're working on that. I sim-fly a lot over oceans and the water thing doesn't bug me as much, but maybe that's because I actually live in the desert and don't know what the ocean normally looks like from 5,000 feet in the air. If it's inaccurate I again hope that's on their agenda list. The seasons thing also seems like an oversight that should be fixed. Disagreement, respectfully: Info on nearby airports etc. I'd rather they fix the other issues you've listed than spend time on creating artificial tools to provide us with comfortable, fake access to airport information. It is incredibly easy to do exactly what real pilots do and (lay version) just google this stuff. There is a massive amount of really cool airport data available for free on the Internet, from various government, nonprofit, or even commercial websites. Maybe in another sim you're very used to not having to look it up, so I understand the irritation at MSFS using a different approach. But it's not that hard to familiarize yourself with the resources available outside the sim. On the same note, it will also be literally impossible for Microsoft to compete with the data available from those outside resources. Some of the favorites I have bookmarked, by the way: (sectional charts and more) https://skyvector.com/ (weather) https://www.weatherbug.com/weather-forecast/now/ (weather) https://avcams.faa.gov/ (weather) https://www.windy.com/?33.656,-106.362,6 (time zones) https://24timezones.com/#/map

To echo what the others are saying... I am close to computer illiterate. But my brother is a hardware engineer (in aviation to boot, and he has game design experience too from EA). I asked him if my personal setup for MSFS was optimal or should I consider buying additional stuff to somehow boost performance. His answer paraphrased: "Technically it's true that there are things you could add to this that would in theory give you slight improvements. But I doubt you would notice those slight improvements, and you would be paying a huge amount of money for them."

It's fascinating but predictable that the actually-racist comments on this thread have all been permitted to stay, while the numerous comments criticizing them have been censored. Glad yours survived for whatever reason. I agree with you of course. This thread is ridiculous, and as I said before, revolting.

Ironically, my reaction to the whiners complaining that Flight Simulator is racist because the copilot avatars aren't white enough--who include people who pontificate about "political correctness"--was censored from this forum, along with similar reactions from several other users. Hilarious. Please do me a favor: send me a copy of your official complaint to Microsoft about this. I would looooove to read it. :D

Yeah, it's scary stuff. I have completed about 55% of my ground school coursework, and a lot of it focuses on weather analysis. Because this topic scares the crap out of me also, I intend to supplement my pilot education and become as much of a lay-expert on weather as I can. I just don't want to be in these situations, ever. I do spend a lot of time in northern Arizona which is cooler and has more mountains, so unless I intend to stick to the flat deserts of southern/central Arizona for the rest of my life, I'd better do this.

You have it almost right. 1. When setting up your flight plan, make sure "clear weather" is selected, and make sure live time is not selected. Conveniently, if you do this once, it sticks every time you play the game unless you change it back. I find it even more convenient than trying to use live weather the old way. 2. Finish your flight plan, load up your flight, and get all the way to the very last setup point. If you're like me (I do not start from cold and dark), that means hitting the ready to fly button so I am sitting on the runway. 3. Do not hit escape. At this point you go up to the top of your screen which bring down the options window that is always available in flight. One of them (unless you removed it) is a cloud symbol for the weather. Click on that, and you will get the opportunity to click on live weather and live time.

I don’t know the answer. Just for the sake of interesting info about real vs. sim situations though, I thought you’d find this video about icing to be interesting. Forward it to 2:00 for the meat, but every word that this retired military fighter pilot and airline pilot says tends to be super fascinating, to me anyway.

If you're choosing to hit "fly" while loaded up and ready to go at the runway, which is obviously not very realistic, you're also choosing to set the frequency to ATC. The two super easy ways to not have ATC at all are (a) start cold and dark, in which case your COM won't be tuned to ATC unless you do it on purpose, or (b) if you are loaded up on the runway, just turn the COM frequency by as little as a single notch. ATC gone. I agree that the ATC AI sucks. Lots of good alternatives for those who want better ATC experiences though.

Here's yet another link that might work: https://discord.gg/7TnBD8mF (Or: link)

Try this: Link

There are no sim consequences to ignoring or even defiantly disobeying ATC commands. In real life the FAA might be knocking on your door one day with an angry-looking agent (or whatever your country's flight regulation agency is). In the sim, the absolute worst thing that happens is an ATC communication saying, "You were not authorized to land. Please contact ground at ...." Or if you are in the air, "ATC services terminated." Another suggestion btw: if you turn the COM dial so that it's not actually tuned in, then ATC actually cannot speak to you in the first place. When you hit "fly" and are loaded up at the runway, you are telling the sim to tune your COM in automatically. Just tune it out and voila.

As of 2020 when I first got it for work, the Samsung C49RG9x was the largest screen on the market that didn't cost $10 billion (though it's not cheap). I absolutely love using it for MSFS, when I am not doing VR.

You just click on the link that I had included. Here's the same link again: https://discord.com/channels/7800189...35050368106496 Btw I have also looked into Tom's website, and it also looks very cool. I don't group sim a lot so I just hadn't signed up for it yet.

I've had much better luck after Asobo advised players to only load live weather and live time after their flight was fully loaded. Are you doing that and still having weather realism problems?

Have you downloaded the most recently updated version of LMN? The update came out just a week or so ago. I don't know if it matters. I never had a CTD caused by LMN either pre- or post-update.

Suggestion: First, just register for an account at Discord.com. You'll get used to Discord after using it for a while, so don't worry about trying to master it through tutorials. It's just a giant chat network, really. After you are registered, navigate yourself to this particular MSFS pilot, who by the way happens to be a fellow Aussie of yours: https://discord.com/channels/780018927731474462/780235050368106496 His username is GunPilot and once a week he organizes a well-planned, just-for-fun bush flight around different places that he has mostly flown in real life (he's a retired pilot I think). Giving him a try at least once or twice will be a great way for you to learn the ropes of how multiplayer simming works. To answer a specific question of yours, to verbally talk to not only GunPilot but also the others on the tour who join him, you would navigate to his Discord Talk channel. You should get into his main server and channel first, and then you will find the talk channel there. Just make sure your microphone is functional. I am occasionally there but not always. Depends on schedule.

Not that I know of. Have you also turned the setting to automatically handle ATC?

I was referencing the add-on I used to explain why I confirmed that the flaps bug had been fixed. The point is that the flaps bug has been fixed.

More than CNET, i’m interested in Qualcomm which evidently makes the damn chip that’s in ALL headsets. Feb. 2020 article: “Qualcomm's reference design lays out specs and expectations for where other manufacturers could go by the end of this year or in 2021.” That’s exciting! Covid happened around that article so maybe some delays.

And sure enough, here's a piece outlining a few new VR headsets that are in the pipeline: https://www.cnet.com/news/qualcomms-new-5g-vrar-headset-tech-looks-like-a-superpowered-oculus-quest/

Larry, I think you're asking the right questions. And the point you're making is valid and actually sheds light on the problem. From our simmer-only perspective, these different systems are features of a video game. Just like any feature of any video game, you expect it to work in a certain way when you push the right buttons on your joystick, keyboard or mouse. We experienced simmers have gotten used to the sim feature known as "ILS," but only simmers who are real pilots know how ILS works in real life. The rest of us? It's just an abstract thing where you push a few buttons, and then auto-magically your plane locks in to the correct pitch and glide scope, and then voila, you land. RNAV is viewed similarly, I think. We simmers have the disadvantage of not getting any real training to explain to us what RNAV actually is, what it means, how it works, and what it looks like in real conditions. We just know that it's another thing where we should be able to push a few buttons, move the plane into a particular space, and then events occur that are very similar to ILS. I say all this as someone who is still pretty confused about RNAV (I have not gotten to it in real-life ground school yet), and is following this discussion closely. Sooner or later I'm going to have to figure this out.

I'm still considering a G2 purchase in the future some time, but will say that the Quest 2 seems considerably improved. Maybe their last update accomplished this. I'm kind of in an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mode for now, since I love flying in VR with the Quest. The incentive to drop US$600 on a G2 just isn't that high. The dials are still not perfect, that's true, but I know most of the dials without reading their letters. A single mouse click zooms them in. I don't keep up on the VR industry, but my other fear is dropping $600 on a G2 and then suddenly, the following week, another company will come out with a brand new frontrunner that blows both the G2 and the Quest 2 away. Either way, hope that day actually does come soon!