You wait 30 years and then all the flightsims come at once.

  • I have subscribe to their newsletter out of curiosity.

    I have bought AF2 because of ORBX so called ""Project A" (you guys), but ORBX as been way to silent lately.

    I'm sure we won't hear anything before they get their working fine in P3D V4.

    My suggestion, you have enough planes, only an heli is missing.

    Work on some other area and think carefully of which one.

    Work on something else then the USA. It as been done. Austria with it's magical mountain is a good suggestion and close to Switzerland.

    Most area with great mountain is a must.

    Ben

    BennyBoy. I5 8600K @ 4,3ghz, 16 ram, GTX 1060 6G @ UW @2560 X 1080. Sim: AF2 & P3D V4

  • Agree with Ben. Personnally need just more area for my cessna and DR400 flight (and yes Austria will be so great with Switzerland DLC and Lowi, for another USA places ORBX seems will work on it, i hope :P). And like J van E, i think begin working on weather engine soon will be a priority (hope ATC don't take too much time to IPACS to finish it).

    Anyway, only three month i have this game so my patience still strong and continue to discover great places to fly. (today first landing at Kern Valley, great approach by isabella lake :*)

  • Please, not the age old FSX vs x-plane physics discussion. That's just a common myth. In the meantime we are at x-plane 11 and e.g. crosswind and tire friction simulation are still horrible.

    X-plane is different, but not better.

    Now you started it :P You say tire friction in X-Plane is bad, I raise you landing with parking brake in FSX.... stopping a 747 on a carrier deck :)

    It's easy maneuvers like 60° bank turns where FSX already falls apart and the aircraft slides along the wing plane down into the turn which is highly unrealistic. Plus these snap turns in the Extra aircraft where the flight direction reverses from 150kts forward to 150kts tailward within less than a second and you can maintain a tailwards accelerating spin,... and tailslides in general and lack of any fuselage lift or drag in knife edge or sideslip flight, the list goes on. X-Plane has other glitches, that is true, but in terms of normal flight behavior and aerobatics X-Plane clearly wins the physics race. There may be other problems like the wheel friction but I see those as isolated problems in X-Plane. Sure maybe the wheels are horrible but at least they simulate a proper stall and effects coming from Reynolds-Number, Mach-Number etc. Also the default helicopter in X-Plane flies a lot more realistic and not as arcade-like as in FSX, IMO. No wonder so many payware add-ons for FSX now simulate their physics outside of FSX.

    It's not a myth if I can reproduce glitches on the default and even on all payware add-ons for FSX that I tried (PMDG 737, 747, 777, A2A C172 and C182, MJC Q400,...). Even the turn coordination isn't correct in FSX at only 45 degrees of bank. Something is off in terms of the maths behind the simulation. The slip indicator shows zero but the aircraft falls off to the side in the turn, I have to add 25° of pitch to fly a level turn with the default B747 at about 60° of bank. Then it goes sideways by about 30° (nose pointing up and out of the turn, flight path level to the horizon and pointing into the turn sideways of the nose). I should maybe make some screenshots of this :D

    It's ok if you stick to +-20 degrees of bank, 0.8 to 1.2gs and above the stall speed, which almost anybody does when they say it is realistic.

    I've studied aerospace engineering and know quite a bit about the maths and physics laws behind the aerodynamics and FSX breaks these laws in numerous places. X-Plane holds up to most of them, that is why I say FSX has a worse aerodynamics simulation, based on scientific proof not just some myth.

    But that wasn't really the point of this thread, each sim has it's downsides and users should be aware of them to avoid false training. You can use most sims out there for the normal flight envelope just fine and it's the payware add ons that really add value to those sims and make then study platforms.

  • Guys, this thread is getting a bit out of hand and not very productive. We don't want to start a flight simulator comparison war here.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • Guys, this thread is getting a bit out of hand and not very productive. We don't want to start a flight simulator comparison war here.

    Sir, Yes sir! :) He has valid points and a lot of experience on both platforms so I was just going leave it at that anyway.

    But the purpose of this thread is to show that there are plenty of sims out there today and people tend to chose their favorite and only that one sim and stick with it. Knowing the pros and cons of the current sim platforms can help users to take a step back and look at the variety of sims that we have and try multiple platforms. I'm quite happy that there are multiple platforms out there and we aren't stuck with the issues of one particular software, we can just use another sim and enjoy it's benefits.

    Obviously Aerofly should eventually be the best platform out there with as few issues as possible :) I think knowing the competitors well and learning from their mistakes can help Aerofly succeed.

  • Thank you Jan for that personal opinion.

    I'm always quite amazed how people put emphasize on airport ground details.

    I agree AFS2 AD's look a little bit synthetic, especially runways. They don't look totally real, but it's not so bad actually. Anyway, AD's are just a starting point you try and leave as quickly as possible, and a destination where you exit a flight. Most of the time in a simulator is usually to be spent in the air and that's where the simulator must be convincing in the first place.

    What strikes in AFS2 featured sceneries is the lack of buildings autogen and the sprayed trees. The elevation mesh is nice, the photo carpet is really good where HD. Such a combination looks gorgeous in desert areas, but unfortunately tends to kill the flight experience in populated areas (except maybe in manually-featured zones like Manhattan).

    I've read somewhere that an autogen was more or less under development, it's still unclear to me who's actually working on that, is it an IPACS or an Orbx development? who will then have access to the autogen coverage generator tool, if actually developed and what data format is to be fed?

    Talking about airports, you mentioned LSGG (among others) could have more ground details, same standard as LOWI, I'd love that too. But looking more globally at LSGG most of the surrounding ground scenery is blurred, the lake of Geneva is divided with a manually blue-painted Swiss part and a very low res photo French part, the city of Geneva (like all other cities) isn't featured, but randomly covered with trees, most of the specific landmarks to fly the LSGG traffic patterns are not featured...

    So yes, having grass between taxiways would look nice, but much more fundamental work is necessary to make LSGG look less like a disaster area (have you tried flying there ?) In that sense, LSGG is probably a little bit extreme due to the neighbouring French border.

    Scenery is only one aspect among others, and airports are only a tiny part of a scenery.

    I wish there was a "live" atmosphere interacting the the ground.

    I wish the basic systems of GA aircraft were featured : mixture, magnetos, engine startup/shutdown, etc.

    I wish, I wish, well it will always be a never ending list, fortunately enough (;-)

    Once again, Rom wasn't built in one day. I fully understand AFS2 will need more time to grow and I'm very supportive in that sense. For those who cannot wait, we are fortunate enough to have P3Dv4 that provides a significant performance leap ahead from other FSX derived platforms in the meantime.

    But to illustrate my meaning by making a parallel, it's a bit like if a company developed a revolutionary power storage system and wanted to build a new type of electric car to sell on the market. The chassis with such an efficient engine and power storage totally outperforms any other car on the market, but a slightly rudimentary, unprotective body and poor lightning prevent people from using the car on the public road.

    Looking at the car, you write it's really great, but you wish the wheels were more shinny because it looks better when the car is parked and once the wheels look better, what the car really needs is a new antenna for the radio.

    Well don't take it the wrong way, I'm not trying to sound negative, believe me or not, I'm totally supportive: I just give my opinion that I hope constructive, it's worth what it's worth, nothing more...

    Keep up the good work

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • As far as I have seen on the flyinside website they don't say it's based on ESP.

    There will be some modules to use the fsx/p3d aircraft (if this really works).

    At this moment I have no need to import my fsx aircraft to Aerofly, because the stock aircraft is really great.

    Yes I agree with you on Orbx, let's hope no news is good news, they are the ones that can bring a Sim to life, I can only fly so much of USA and Europe, some of it is beautiful but I still long to be able to fly my own part of the world which apart from a couple of dedicated local developers is sadly lacking scenery in these latest sims, I downloaded FSW the other day just to check it out, went to Wellington airport here in the capital of New Zealand and yeah just as I thought, sad man, I wouldn't even bother putting that kind of scenery into a Sim, it's rediculous, saying they have global scenery? Yeah right 😎

    fsw has a global scenery because it covers the whole world, but the scenery is very basic without many details or realism.

    So far in fsw they very strongly focus on missions, achievements, tasks to do, flightschool and so.

    The scenery seems to be not the most important.

    And for Aerofly I agree with Jan. It will be better to improve the existing areas before adding new ones.

    I have complete photoscenery in fsx for the whole us westcoast, with watermasks but without autogen.

    Getting my first information about Aerofly I thought "this is great, they have California with all the buildings and vegetation".

    But now I've seen that this is not really finished, it's only done for some places.

    And I agree that at this moment only Orbx could do it. Innsbruck is the perfection of photoscenery, all sceneries

    by Jarrad Marshall and others are based on areal images and are exactly projected. But it's too much work for very large areas.

    If we all get the tools to place a lot more objects in the stock scenery, as it is announced, this will be a big step forward.

    Cheers

    Andreas

    PC: Ritzen 7 3700X, MSI AM4 board, GTX 1060 6GB, 16 GB RAM, SSD 1,7 TB, HD 8,0 TB, Win10-64

    SIMs: Aerofly FS2+FS4, FSXSE, P3D4.5, Xplane 10/11/12, MSFS

  • HI Antoine, thank you for your feedback.

    I agree auto-gen is another area that we need in Aerofly. Geneva is one example, another is Bern. You can't actually see Bern below all the trees and it is such a beautiful city in Google Earth for example. I wish those areas got a bit more attention. In my opinion though they should maybe finish one area at a time. Add grass and then the city as well, so that we have some airports and surrounding areas that look finished, like Innsbruck for example...

    Atmosphere interaction with the ground:

    What in particular do you have in mind? Thermals, slope soaring, mountain waves? Or more: locally increased turbulence due to high roughness of terrain, e.g. over cities, foggy valleys, cloud build up in front of mountain chains? Cloud shadows?

    Yes, one step at a time. We now have the first officially cold aircraft in the sim, as far as I know that is not going to be the end of it. Engine start, mixture, etc. are high on my wish list as well and it is something so basic that it has high priority I think.

  • Sir, Yes sir! :) He has valid points and a lot of experience on both platforms so I was just going leave it at that anyway.

    But the purpose of this thread is to show that there are plenty of sims out there today and people tend to chose their favorite and only that one sim and stick with it. Knowing the pros and cons of the current sim platforms can help users to take a step back and look at the variety of sims that we have and try multiple platforms. I'm quite happy that there are multiple platforms out there and we aren't stuck with the issues of one particular software, we can just use another sim and enjoy it's benefits.

    I can only fully agree with that, despite most third party editors won't invest and pluck up with several platforms in parallel.

    Currently major editors have a big amount of urgent work to adapt to P3Dv4, that's clearly the priority to most of them right now, no wonder they're silent.

    Adding to bbrz's excellent comments, flight model design in X-Plane also needs engineering knowledge, while in MSFS we can add an existing flight model to any aircraft visual model and tweak it slightly to fly reasonably well.

    As a result, many free aircraft I tested in X-Plane had totally inaccurate flight models because the author obviously lacked some information and probably guessed. For instance I remember trying a Robin with rotation speed of 100kt, far worse than anything I've flown in any other sim.

    There are a few really good third party models in MSFS, but the system allows anybody to easily setup a reasonably good flight model, quite convincing as long as you stay in the normal flight model... X-Plane doesn't allow for guess work, and I'm afraid AFS2 won't either...

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • X-Plane doesn't allow for guess work, and I'm afraid AFS2 won't either...

    Hm, not quite. The airfoils are the most tricky part, but if you set up the masses and the distribution of the masses correctly the entire physics model will already be quite good. Luckily there isn't that much to play with to ruin the physics model, there are parameters to increase lift, drag, moment, flap deflections etc. but the overall physics engine does all the rest, simulates correct momentum, gyroscopic effects, inertia, all the good things. Sure you'll need a good understanding of the parameters that you have, especially for the airfoils but you can also use the F18 physics for a Cessna in Aerofly if you ever need that. I think in general you can get reasonably good flight models with not too much effort in Aerofly as well. We may just need to tell you how to set the parameters right.

    Here is a wiki link for some explanation to set up the flight model, if you wonder how the aerodynamics work in Aerofly: https://www.aerofly.com/aerofly_fs_2/d…md:aerodynamics. Pay a visit to the airfoils: https://www.aerofly.com/aerofly_fs_2/d…aft:tmd:airfoil, there I tried to explain the parameters

  • Sir, Yes sir! :) He has valid points and a lot of experience on both platforms so I was just going leave it at that anyway.

    But the purpose of this thread is to show that there are plenty of sims out there today and people tend to chose their favorite and only that one sim and stick with it. Knowing the pros and cons of the current sim platforms can help users to take a step back and look at the variety of sims that we have and try multiple platforms. I'm quite happy that there are multiple platforms out there and we aren't stuck with the issues of one particular software, we can just use another sim and enjoy it's benefits.

    Obviously Aerofly should eventually be the best platform out there with as few issues as possible :) I think knowing the competitors well and learning from their mistakes can help Aerofly succeed.

    Actually, the original purpose of this thread was simply to inform for the value of IPACS and us users and in no way do I consider that polite "Discussion" thereafter is a sim war. Jeff, you have this wrong my friend.

  • Jeff has it absolutely right...

    There is value in seeing what the marketplace offers in comparison, but only in respect of this sim.

    This translates to what we want here.

    There are things from FS2004 I'd like to have in AFS2, notably more freedom in creating views.

    But no-one wants to hear me on the topic of how FS9 beats FSX in so many ways :)

  • Atmosphere interaction with the ground:

    What in particular do you have in mind? Thermals, slope soaring, mountain waves? Or more: locally increased turbulence due to high roughness of terrain, e.g. over cities, foggy valleys, cloud build up in front of mountain chains? Cloud shadows?

    Hi Jan,

    Well, a little bit of all that.

    AFS1 featured a wind interaction with the terrain, causing up- and downdrafts in mountains. It was far from perfect, but had the virtue of being featured. What was especially odd was the aircraft behaviour in up- or down drafts, felt like a sudden power loss or power increase...

    The flight in AFS2 is very smooth, wind is always laminar and seems horizontal whatever the terrain relief.

    Adding turbulences on the slider seems to mostly jolt the aircraft in yaw. Flying with a high turbulence setting causes a little bit of a dutch roll, but no bumpy atmosphere and no influence from the surrounding mountains.

    Last time I set high thermal activity (a long time ago, I didn't test it lately) I also experienced the odd power loss/increase effect of AFS1, nothing like my real experience of vertical drafts.

    To model a real atmosphere would be outstandingly complex, but the current AFS2 model lead me to set rather low wind, turbulences and thermal settings resulting in a rather "dead" atmosphere.

    Third party SW like EZDOK for instance add in FSX/P3D, I know you dislike it because it's an external SW and it moves the camera point of view instead of the aircraft, but the result adds a lot to immersion with bumps and jolts.

    What I would like is :

    - on the one hand a better, bumpier aircraft behaviour in turbulences,

    - on the other hand an atmosphere that reacts with the ground, causing updrafts, downdrafts, windshear and bumps depending on ground relief configuration (easy to write, eh?)

    - additionally, I don't know if this was ever done, but as long as there's no weather engine, one could think of adding to the cumulus cloud models vertical drafts and turbulences just below and inside...

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • What I would like is :

    - on the one hand a better, bumpier aircraft behaviour in turbulences,

    - on the other hand an atmosphere that reacts with the ground, causing updrafts, downdrafts, windshear and bumps depending on ground relief configuration (easy to write, eh?)

    - additionally, I don't know if this was ever done, but as long as there's no weather engine, one could think of adding to the cumulus cloud models vertical drafts and turbulences just below and inside...

    Hi Antoine,

    1) totally agreed, the current left right yawing is boring, it needs up and down as well. The distribution / probability for the strength isn't correct, currently it is just random, normal distributed I think. It should be a lot more turbulent with a lot of small gusts and vibrations and the occasional large gust that continues for 30s or so, that steals 15kts from your airspeed.

    2) Last time I checked there were updrafts, I was able to glide and climb in the updraft with moderate wind conditions. It wasn't perfect as well but it felt better than the 100kt winds over the mountain ridges in Aerofly FS 1. This is certainly something that will be improved later I think.

    3) The current clouds are not made by IPACS as far as I know. They don't allow interaction with our physics, so with these clouds, no thermals underneath them. Not possible. If we do our own clouds this will probably be one of the first things I would add. ... And a bit of ice build up when I enter the cloud in the right conditions.