One User's Take After Seven Months of MSFS

I’ll probably get flamed for this, but after seven months, I am moved to record one person’s opinion of the good and the bad about MSFS. I do this not to whine, but to receive serious feedback and, I hope, stimulate some highly desirable changes.

My basis for comparison is P3D v. 4.5, with a full suite of Orbx scenery, plus Rex SkyForce and TextureDirect. Actually, I was pretty content back in August, before someone gave me MSFS for my birthday. I would have preferred to wait until the bugs were out. I think I was right. But I was stuck with it.

THE GOOD:

First and foremost, the scenery, the Bitch Goddess that draws me back every night. Cityscapes are particularly impressive, considering how much data must be involved in rendering all those buildings. New York (my hometown) with photogrammetry enabled is a knockout. (I could find the apartment building I grew up in!) Mountains and forests are also splendid. (My favorite: pine forests in snow.)

Loads pretty fast, compared to my P3D setup.

Not many performance issues. Some CTDs, but this has greatly improved over time. I guess they work on it.

Easy weather changes. A great improvement over FSX/P3D, where you had to reload the scenario to change the flight conditions. In MSFS, you can adjust the clouds, time of day, etc., in a heartbeat.

Aircraft textures. These were pretty good in P3D, but they are now astonishing. Looking out over the wings, you can see normal unevenness and dimpling in the skin, etc. How the heck do they do that?! Interiors are also improved.

VFR Map: Cool! Toggles on and off in a second. In FSX/P3D you had to pause the flight, go to World/Map, etc.

THE NOT SO GOOD (in no particular order):

The flight parameters display in external view is absurdly large, making screen shots useless. In FSX/P3D, you had SHIFT + Z to give you readouts (including FPS) in small letters at top of screen. Why not in MSFS?

Info on nearby airports (runways, ILS, elevation) is hard to come by. I believe it’s unavailable within the sim unless it’s your set destination, and you noted it before takeoff.

Cameras are needlessly complex, especially the drone (which is somehow a subset of “Showcase”). Yeah, I know – there was no drone in FSX. But you can’t control the plane when you’re in drone view. So I find I hardly ever use the drone. I guess this is a matter of individual taste.

Speaking of cameras: you can’t preset a view in External view, like you can in Cockpit mode. Why the heck not?

You can’t change your plane, or even your livery, after you load a scenario. You have to go back to Main Menu, which takes a couple minutes. (Yes, I know about Dev mode, but that hasn’t worked for me, and in any case it doesn’t address liveries.)

Pause, including a hard pause with ESC key, does not pause the time! Okay, we can deal with this by resetting the time when we return to the flight. But why is this necessary?

The seasons don’t change in MSFS-World. In FSX/P3D, the autumnal equinox brought us glorious fall foliage in New England, and after the solstice, snow on the ground. But no more, alas.

GPS: very cumbersome to enter waypoints. With the exception of some planes, there’s no keyboard input, and you have to monkey with the inner and outer knobs to move the cursor and then scroll through the whole damn alphabet, plus numbers, four times! In FSX/P3D, you could just key in the codes. Maybe this is the way you do it IRL, but IRL I have real fingers and real thumbs.

No Quiet key. OK, you can turn your speaker volume all the way down, but gee . . . . say you’ve got Joe Biden holding on Line 1 and the Pope on Line 2, and you want to cut the background noise fast, right?

Clouds are terrible in comparison with P3D plus Rex SkyForce. In P3D I could establish half a dozen different cloud types in different layers, and they looked really real. (Of course, there may be a performance trade-off.)

THE AWFUL

Water textures (a subject of separate threads). The consensus, I think, is that you have to turn the winds unreasonably high – at least 20 knots – in order to see any real wave action. This was particularly disappointing in view of the Trailer’s depiction of waves and whitecaps. With Rex textures, you had much more realistic water (OK, but no whitecaps), and even got bathymetry, like on the Great Barrier Reef! Someone on this forum has suggested that Asobo could easily tweak this. I hope they do.

No Manual! Not even the old FSX Learning Center! The SoFly “Manual” is next to useless; a lot of pretty pictures of FS history, but it doesn’t even cover the MSFS pull-down menus in any detail. I understand there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube, but they are of highly uneven quality, and software of this complexity should have its own publisher’s guide. And it should cover the aircraft. Where are the operative knobs, and what do they do? To this day, I have not learned how to use the flight planning console in the CJ4 or Airbus. And I’ve spent time on it.

Last but not least, my bugaboo: the Palette (also a subject of separate threads). I find many situations so washed out it’s just not worth it. I attach a typical screenshot in full daylight with little cloud cover. I’d say the ground looks like it was shot at f/5.6 when it should be at f/8 or even f/11 (but the sky's fine). I’m not saying the world can never look like this; just that it doesn’t usually, and certainly not on a pretty day with clear air. (For that matter, look at some of the screenshots when your flight is loading: wan, pallid.) And the color options in Accessibility don’t help with this. Okay, so there’s a fix of sorts: change the time to very early or late in the day and throw in more clouds, and you’ll get more realistic color saturation. But I can’t believe Asobo couldn’t tweak this.

Check back with me in another seven months!

Thanks for your comments, which I agree with in part. While some of your criticisms are on target, others simply reflect a lack of familiarity with the features and capabilities of this sim. For example, you can make screenshots free of extraneous text, etc., by using the camera system; it just takes some time to learn. You can also exclude cockpit or external views of the plane even during flight, by using the drone in "follow plane" mode. Other things you mention such as color brightness in the palette, etc. are adjustable. The "washed-out" scenery you describe is mostly a function of sun angle, which is also true in real-life flying.

This sim takes far more time to learn, and far more attention to detail, than FSX and FS9 which I used for years, but it delivers incomparably more, in my opinion. Patience will reap many rewards.

I’ll probably get flamed for this,

Yeah, probably. Maybe the exhaustive detail will save you, because the flames will have to be equally exhaustive, but one never knows.

...say you’ve got Joe Biden holding on Line 1 and the Pope on Line 2, and you want to cut the background noise fast, right?

:D :D :D

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

For example, you can make screenshots free of extraneous text, etc., by using the camera system; it just takes some time to learn. You can also exclude cockpit or external views of the plane even during flight, by using the drone in "follow plane" mode. Other things you mention such as color brightness in the palette, etc. are adjustable. The "washed-out" scenery you describe is mostly a function of sun angle, which is also true in real-life flying.

Thanks for the constructive comment. As to this excerpt:

1. Not sure about the "camera system," but I already make screenshots free of clutter: I disable the onscreen flight parameters in Settings. The screenshot in my post, of course, has no clutter. I was just saying it would be nice if I could have the data in tiny letters at top of screen.

2. I don't understand the second sentence. At all.

3. Adjustable? As I indicated, I know about the in-sim tweaks in Accessibility (for the color-blind and perhaps for the cranky) but I didn't find any of the settings helped. Is there some adjustment of which I am unaware? Could be.

4. It's true in real-life driving, too. I just think there is general overexposure in MSFS, and therefore lack of color saturation. That's my position, and I'm stickin' to it.

I appreciate your post. I recently bought a new CPU and monitor that will run MSFS. For now, I installed my old FSX and favorite aircraft and scenery. It runs like a Ferrari. I've been following the 2020 forum for several months. Most posts include the words

" hope", "think", "should" and "ought to", among others.

Maybe in about a year, when the use of those words diminish on this forum, I'll buy the DVDs, only if the bazillion patches are included in the package...Sorry

I totally agree with most of what has been stated.

I agree that Asobo did not listen on many things! I was a beta tester and I feel they wasted our time by not listening to what we reported that needed to be fixed! I'm apauled they did this as well, and feel as though they ignored the beta testing staff and went ahead for a quick release!

Regarding Beta testing - I often have wondered if the beta testers actually tested extensively and noticed those 'problems' which have been raised over the past months but now I know that perhaps most if not all of them WERE reported by the beta testers but either ignored or shoved to the bottom of the list.

I guess that Asobo had/have a list of bugs and 'nice to haves' as 'long as your arm' and it will take time to address them all BUT I just wished that more emphasis was given to known bugs than releasing more scenery - having said that I assume that there are separate 'teams' which works on bugs and scenery.

I wonder if Asobo read this forum?

The drone and camera functions are annoying difficult and bizarre. No idea why. Hope they're working on that.

I don't understand the OP's complaint "you can’t control the plane when you’re in drone view". I don't see why anyone would want to fly two 'planes' at once. If I want to use the drone I pause the plane I'm flying and use the drone; I use the real pause, not the active pause which I have no use for.

If you assign the drone commands to a joy stick (or preferably an Xbox controller) you have efficient control of the drone's position and direction of view; I don't see what more a person would want.

I agree that Asobo did not listen on many things! I was a beta tester and I feel they wasted our time by not listening to what we reported that needed to be fixed! I'm appalled they did this as well, and feel as though they ignored the beta testing staff and went ahead for a quick release!

I don't blame Asobo, I pin the blame on Microsoft. Asobo is a contractor, they were hired by Microsoft to create the sim, they did create the sim and it is the best so far. But software is always a series of compromises and these compromises are usually dictated by resources, aka money. Microsoft signed off on the version that was released to the public back in August and when they did that, they accepted what many are still calling a beta version of flight simulator 2020.

Microsoft has always been the greediest of the greedy, it is a deeply held part of their corporate culture. If you've been following their behavior since 1981 as I have, it would be obvious that Microsoft intends to harvest the maximum amount of money out of the least expenditure of capital possible.

I suspect that Microsoft is paying Asobo the equivalent of two junior programmers salary for the maintenance and upgrading of MSFS2020. Asobo cannot be expected to be a charity.

Point your finger in the right direction please.

Thanks for the constructive comment. As to this excerpt:

 

1. Not sure about the "camera system," but I already make screenshots free of clutter: I disable the onscreen flight parameters in Settings. The screenshot in my post, of course, has no clutter. I was just saying it would be nice if I could have the data in tiny letters at top of screen.

 

2. I don't understand the second sentence. At all.

 

3. Adjustable? As I indicated, I know about the in-sim tweaks in Accessibility (for the color-blind and perhaps for the cranky) but I didn't find any of the settings helped. Is there some adjustment of which I am unaware? Could be.

 

4. It's true in real-life driving, too. I just think there is general overexposure in MSFS, and therefore lack of color saturation. That's my position, and I'm stickin' to it.

OK, let me clarify my earlier post. In drone mode, you have the option to have the drone "attached" to the plane (what I called follow mode) which allows you to view scenery over the entire screen (no cockpit or external plane) as you fly along. You can toggle back and forth between the normal cockpit view and the full-scenery view by hitting the print-screen key. Another very useful trick is that when you are using the drone, after you have been exploring around in various locations, you can set the drone back to its default position (viewing from just above and behind the plane) by hitting the numpad "5" key. Once you get the hang of the camera system, it is an extraordinary tool.

You can adjust color, brightness, and contrast via the Nvidia settings to suit your taste, with the option "use Nvidia settings" selected, rather than "other applications control settings". But as I said before, the vibrancy, brightness, etc. of the scenery is very much a function of sun angle, and also on whether you are flying in cloud shadow, etc. Many times I have noticed that the ground looks a bit dull and washed-out, only to find that when I change the angle of view it brightens considerably. (Same with views inside the cockpit, incidentally). This mimics the real-life effects of sun glare.

MSFS is a very sophisticated sim program with many features not found in earlier sims, and it certainly takes a while and a good deal of patience to learn how to use it. As someone who enjoyed FS9 and FSX for a couple of decades, I can attest that MSFS takes a lot of getting used to. But well worth the effort, in my opinion. Great though those earlier sims were for their time, in retrospect they are toys compared to MSFS -- which may be precisely why some simmers prefer them. This I fully understand -- "different strokes for different folks". But over time, I think most people will gravitate to MSFS, especially after the bugs and annoyances get ironed out.

OK, let me clarify my earlier post. In drone mode, you have the option to have the drone "attached" to the plane (what I called follow mode) which allows you to view scenery over the entire screen (no cockpit or external plane) as you fly along. You can toggle back and forth between the normal cockpit view and the full-scenery view by hitting the print-screen key. Another very useful trick is that when you are using the drone, after you have been exploring around in various locations, you can set the drone back to its default position (viewing from just above and behind the plane) by hitting the numpad "5" key. Once you get the hang of the camera system, it is an extraordinary tool.

 

You can adjust color, brightness, and contrast via the Nvidia settings to suit your taste, with the option "use Nvidia settings" selected, rather than "other applications control settings".

Thanks. These tidbits are certainly news to me. As far as I knew (after watching a tutorial on cameras) the only drone mode was what you apparently call "follow mode." I'll experiment some more. But my print-screen key takes a screenshot, as it has since the dawn of time; I didn't know it had another function.

Where the heck are the "Nvidia settings," and the option to enable/disable them in-game? Not in my Invidia device on my Control Panel, and surely not in MSFS.

Is nobody disturbed by the cost of having to upgrade their machine to enable the use of MS 2020? New video card to enable frame speed. New CPU to allow for increase in performance. New motherboard to allow for upgraded cpu & gpu. Memory! A minimum of $1000 with a lot of spare parts waiting to be sold or dumped. X-Plane wins this battle hands down.

Actually it's no different than when FSX came out. You had to upgrade your computer to get it to run somewhat ok.

Is nobody disturbed by the cost of having to upgrade their machine to enable the use of MS 2020? New video card to enable frame speed. New CPU to allow for increase in performance. New motherboard to allow for upgraded cpu & gpu. Memory! A minimum of $1000 with a lot of spare parts waiting to be sold or dumped. X-Plane wins this battle hands down.

Flight simulator has always been very demanding, not just this edition. Fortunately it will run with lower settings on a lower spec machine, but if you want to have the best possible experience it means having the very latest spec computer.

Regards

Steve

I now see what Mac was talking about when he noted that he couldn't control the plane when in drone mode. I have used the drone a lot, but I've never used "follow" mode before. Yes, when in follow mode it could be useful to be able to control the plane, but that's a small thing to me.

I like to fly low over mountainous territory, in my home county and everywhere else. I frequently use the drone for navigation. When exploring Yosemite I was constantly getting lost when I strayed from the path of the Merced river, so when I questioned which river I was actually following, I would pause and break out the drone and sometimes climb to 100,000 ft or so to get oriented. Same with flying in the Rockies. When I checked out the terrain around the Glacier collapse at Joshimath India, I was completely dependent on the drone for navigation.

When I flew over the Darian Gap, I paused several times to break out the drone and inspect interesting places along the way.

I have a different way of getting the full screen effect, I bought an add on plane: the Kitfox; it has a open roof above the pilot; so I elevate the pilot view to the max and my "head" winds up above the wing and I get that full screen view. This would probably work with the Pitts which is open cockpit, but I haven't tried it.

Thanks. These tidbits are certainly news to me. As far as I knew (after watching a tutorial on cameras) the only drone mode was what you apparently call "follow mode." I'll experiment some more. But my print-screen key takes a screenshot, as it has since the dawn of time; I didn't know it had another function.

 

Where the heck are the "Nvidia settings," and the option to enable/disable them in-game? Not in my Invidia device on my Control Panel, and surely not in MSFS.

Nvidia control panel -> Display -> Adjust desktop color settings -> Use Nvidia settings. In my rig, the Nvidia control panel is accessed via "show hidden icons" at the bottom right of the screen. Note that your selections affect Windows 10 in general, not just MSFS.

The tutorial you watched evidently was limited in its coverage of the camera capabilities. If you go to the drop-down menu in MSFS and select "cameras" you will find a bunch of options. May I suggest the excellent SoFly manual on MSFS, which costs only 16 bucks and is worth every cent IMO. In there you will find a trove of info on MS covering cameras and just about everything else.

https://www.simshack.net/products/guide-to-flight-simulator-msfs-tutorials-1771

The drone works flawlessly for me, I can't think of a way to improve it.

 

I don't understand the OP's complaint "you can’t control the plane when you’re in drone view". I don't see why anyone would want to fly two 'planes' at once. If I want to use the drone I pause the plane I'm flying and use the drone; I use the real pause, not the active pause which I have no use for.

 

If you assign the drone commands to a joy stick (or preferably an Xbox controller) you have efficient control of the drone's position and direction of view; I don't see what more a person would want.

What is "real pause" and how do you use it? I know either the ESC key, which takes you out of the flight while paused, or Active Pause, which we all know is silly.

Under "Controls" --> Miscellaneous, you will find "Set Pause on" and "Set Pause off" commands.

You need to assign these commands to something.

I have them assigned to switches on my Joystick, but you can assign them anywhere.

Under "Controls" --> Miscellaneous, you will find "Set Pause on" and "Set Pause off" commands.

You need to assign these commands to something.

I have them assigned to switches on my Joystick, but you can assign them anywhere.

Thanks for the reply. I implemented this with a couple of unused buttons, and it pauses, but it seems to still be the same as active pause. Time continues to elapse just like when using active pause.

The "washed out" scenery is actually more likely to be a frustrating feature of XPlane 11. I find on my system (with a 43" 4K TV as a monitor) that 2020 is on average much brighter, with more contrast and more like a Kodachrome slide (the absolute gold standard of color realism and rendition, then and now) than XP is.

The lack of documentation is also annoying, and I agree about the "manual" that is available. I bought it online, and although it does contain some good info, and at $13 US was not excessively expensive, there is much more that could be added. In all fairness, though, it about duplicates the overall content and depth of the popular aftermarket manual that was available back in the early days for FSX.

What I have found is that, even as it now stands, 2020 is a great "next step" replacement for (wait for it...) not XP11 or P3Dv5 but for Aerofly FS2. Until now, FS2 was the walk-off leader in the area of visual scenery based simulation -- their level of detail in satellite based scenery and intricate mesh was not to be beaten. But 2020 has taken that level of what might be called "video realistic" scenery and extended it throughout the entire world. So if you like visual based flying, 2020 is ready for you now, even in its' current "beta release" status.

The really frustrating problems that I encounter even now relate to the perhaps unfortunate simultaneous availability of 2020 and the Honeycomb line of otherwise outstanding controls. Of course the main thing that makes these units outstanding is their tremendous versatility, and the unfortunate thing is that getting them programmed to work to their full potential in several different sims at once is, at least for a computer illiterate like myself, stultifyingly difficult. That is no one's fault, really, but it has made my last month a long series of profanity laced diatribes against the entire computer industry!!

Oh well, there has never been a version of MSFS that did not have its share of problems and frustration early on, and come to think of it that is also more than true of Windows itself, so we should be used to this by now. But hope springs eternal - just ask a Cubs fan!

Thanks for the reply. I implemented this with a couple of unused buttons, and it pauses, but it seems to still be the same as active pause. Time continues to elapse just like when using active pause.

No, that's a real pause.

I don't know what you're experiencing.

No, that's a real pause.

I don't know what you're experiencing.

I can see the clock still ticking off seconds. That means if I used this function to pause a flight right at dusk and came back an hour later to resume it, the sun would have set and the clock would be an hour ahead. By definition, this is not "paused" This is exactly how "active Pause" works.

So it is the same thing.

I can see the clock still ticking off seconds. That means if I used this function to pause a flight right at dusk and came back an hour later to resume it, the sun would have set and the clock would be an hour ahead. By definition, this is not "paused" This is exactly how "active Pause" works.

 

So it is the same thing.

With "set pause" you can come back tomorrow and the plane will still be exactly where you left it. With active pause, it will have flown away and crashed somewhere. And you can adjust the time to be anytime you want with the onscreen menu, I can't see that as an issue.

It's your choice to parse your definition as tight as you want if it pleases you; however, they are two different actions.