So that DR-400 flight from the custom high detail airport of WX53 over to WAOA was supremely awesome. I had to parallel a ridge for quite a while to gain enough altitude to make it over the pass…
I’m not sure if the entire area around this portion of Indonesia is rendered to a higher detail level…or had more attention…but it is gorgeous…with little grass strips all over the place in the most beautiful settings…
I mean…this is better detail and feel than ORBX PNG in some ways. Maybe not as many custom objects at the non detailed airports…but it really looks great…!
The death of X-Plane has been predicted a few times over the years, usually coinciding with a new FS release. I would just say that not only did it spawn from almost a grass roots level, but that much like Linux vs Windows, by its fans, it will always be considered superior in the way that matter, IE, flight model. Austin will be held as the high priest of accurate flight sims, no matter how good FS 2020 is. Sure, its sales will be a drop in the bucket compared to Flight Simulator. But there is a society of the faithful, that will always consider one a commercial venture, while the other a crusade.
Hey @BeachAV8R have you tried to install FSX planes yet? In some press statements from the FS2020 team I had the impression that you could - in some way - use the legacy flight model to fly FSX aircraft.
Did I get that wrong, and if not: is that capability already implemented?
There is an option to select the legacy flight model - which you can toggle on and off (I believe it applies globally to all of the aircraft) - but I was not aware and had not tried (but I will) installing FSX or P3D aircraft to the sim.
Maybe I just got that wrong (drank a lot of that Kool-aid, maybe I misinterpreted it because I thought it would be possible since they have all the code) but even if only some planes worked, that would be awesome for the sim IMO.
Just looking at the directory structure it does look like it uses the same type of aircraft file:
MFS > Official > OneStore >
Then there a bunch of asobo-aircraft-aircraft name folder names (as well as some obvious operating system file directories). I just tried putting the Learjet 45 in there and following the naming convention and we’ll see what happens. Each aircraft directory has a further couple directories though:
RTC
SimObjects - Airplanes - Asobo_KingAir350
Once in that Asobo_KingAir350 directory though - you get a directory structure that looks very much like FSX/P3D:
So yeah…I followed the naming convention, but the GUI on launch has a sort of carousel from which you choose an airplane. That carousel would need a graphic and aircraft data I think…so there are some additional GUI layers that would maybe need to be tackled to actually be able to see and choose the aircraft maybe.
So it is encouraging…again…bragging on the DR-400…that if you turn the alternator off after a few minutes the lights and radios will go dead in the airplane and there will show a negative draw on the ammeter. And you can hit the ELT button and hear the chirping of the beacon. Fun airplane.
Giving the Robin CAP 10 a whirl this morning on a scenic flight from Queenstown - NZ over to Milford Sound. The CAP 10 is nice…just like the DR-400. Snappy. I tried to take a video of doing some wheelie stands with the parking brake on, but they didn’t come out. Set the brake, power up, and you can move the elevator and watch the tailwheel compress and you can even float the tail up and down carefully. It is a nice demonstration of the prop wash velocity and effectiveness on the tail…it also boosts rudder effectiveness.
Some low hanging clouds around Queenstown and some high terrain to transit on the way to Milford. The milky texture flying through the clouds is very, very well done. It is no doubt the best weather rendering I’ve ever seen in a sim by far. Conditions aren’t static either…the cloud layers have a nice variability to them and by the time we got to Milford Sound the conditions were more like scattered than broken…
Route map (yes, you can undock it to a regular window and move that wherever you like and resize it - map functionality is OK-ish…not a lot you can do with it really). You can see the overcast/broken layer really clinging to the tops of the peaks west of Queenstown here…
Nice shots!
So… do I get this correctly: in your opinion the weather in FS2020 is better than with those fancy add-ons for X-Plane and so on?
(XEnviro, ActiveSky, SkyMaxx et al)
Utterly gorgeous! The trees do seem big. But also there seems to be a lot of them. It’s been a very long time since I was there, but I remember Milford as being a little more open.
Yes - MSFS (2020) beats all of them from what I’ve experienced thus far. I’m mostly looking at aircraft performance and systems though (on assignment) so I haven’t delved too deep into stuff like icing, turbulence modeling, updrafts, thermals…stuff like that. I will be looking at rain/wet runway, density altitude, temperature stuff as I go though. You guys will have it in your hands before I get through all that though…
