Aerofly FS 4 - Changes compared to Aerofly FS 2

    • Official Post

    For existing Aerofly FS 2 customers we would like to summarize what has changed in the new Aerofly FS 4 Flight Simulator and what new features there are in the new sim.

    System Requirements

    Aerofly FS 4 uses relatively new graphics features which may not be available on older hardware.

    • Quad-Core CPU
    • 8GB or more RAM
    • Graphics card with 4GB+ RAM, Vulkan support and OpenGL 4.0 (or higher)

    If you previously used high or ultra graphics quality you now need to bump that down a notch or even two. We changed the graphics settings to make full use of new and modern graphics cards and the ultra setting is only recommended for these cards.

    Graphics

    New lighting engine

    Aerofly FS 4 features new real-time dynamic multi-color lights that illuminate the ground and objects in the scene - You'll see landing, taxi, nav, beacon, strobe lights, etc. and airport apron flood lights in some of our screenshots. These lights are quite optimized and there barely any performance impact from them.

    Performance optimizations

    We've changed the way how and when airports and scenery tiles get loaded. With a global airport database we know ahead of time when we get close to an airport that needs to be loaded for rendering. The loading then happens in the background and only for the closest airports that you can see. Images and elevation data as well as the new buildings and trees are also loaded in this manner.

    With this change the Aerofly FS 4 application loads even quicker than Aerofly FS 2, On our hardware we measure a time from desktop to flying in as little as 12 seconds on a freshly restarted PC with SSD.

    In the simulator you'll now see a lot more buildings and trees. Depending on your graphics card all these buildings increase the load on your graphics card and to keep the same high FPS you may need to decrease the graphics quality a bit.

    Aerofly FS 4 now uses our own cloud rendering techniques which allows us to increase the cloud draw distance significantly.

    Available Regions

    Aerofly FS 4 still has global coverage of lower resolution aerial images and elevation like Aerofly FS 2 as global navigation data. So you can still fly around the world like before. To limit download size Aerofly FS 4 has several free Addons (DLCs) that you can install to increase the high detail region size or ground image resolution.

    Airports

    • Over 1200 hand made high quality airports are available with all free DLCs installed
    • New apron flood lights
    • New taxiway edge and centerline lights
    • New hold short guard lights
    • Several U.S. airports were updated and some were added as well

    Scenery & Cultivation

    All US regions that were previously DLCs for FS 2 are now included in the base scenery of Aerofly FS 4.

    Oregon and Washington states have been added to the base scenery region, so now the base simulator scenery now covers the entire west coast and reaches far in land up to Colorado and Arizona. The Florida Keys and Miami region as well as the New York metropolitan area are also included.

    A very large section of Europe is available as a free DLC covering everything from West-Europe up to a line from Estonia to about Moldavia, Bulgaria, not included yet are Greece and Turkey at this time, but we're continuing our work in Europe as well as other regions.

    • 3d buildings everywhere and trees based on several different data sources
    • Full coverage with buildings and trees in the entire flying area
    • Custom modeled points of interest (POIs) like castles, famous buildings (in Europe more than 500+ POIs)
    • New library buildings and structures like towers, cranes, antennas, powerlines, churches, chimneys and cooling towers, fuel tanks and grain silos, etc.
    • New wind-turbines that rotate in the wind
    • New building types and textures
    • New building shapes like T and L shapes or custom footprint
    • New roof shapes

    Air Traffic

    • Simulated air traffic based on tens of thousands of real world global airline flights
    • Airline, Cross country and local flights
    • Optional flight labels and flight path traces
    • Animated aircraft models with rotating propellers, moving flaps and landing gear
    • Traffic is automatically removed when the player wants to takeoff or land and a collision is imminent

    Flight Missions

    • Select from recommended 10,000+ real world airline flights and immediately start flying
    • Adjust the flight conditions, routing and/or aircraft if desired
    • Lots of custom flight presets for sight seeing, practicing and flying challenges like the circling approach into Innsbruck

    Time-Skip

    • With the push of a button the aircraft can be teleported along the planned route to skip long and boring cruise segments
    • Combine the time-skip with the immediate selection of a new flight mission and you'll be able to visit many new places very quickly

    Career and Achievements

    • Pilot and aircraft log books to review recent flight paths and to track flight time
    • Statistics of takeoffs, landings and flight time per aircraft and in different aircraft categories
    • Achievements for different aircraft categories
    • Achievements are non-invasive, there is no pop-up or sound during flight
    • Flight school removed: Was only working with the C172 and wasn't flexible or expandable, now we have more assistances during the flight and more of a learning by doing approach

    Assistances

    • Many quality of life features like automatic tiller nose wheel steering with rudder input when not assigned otherwise have been added
    • Optional assistances have been added that can help the user during the flight
    • Copilot can fly the aircraft from A to B fully automatically, just press 'c' to give control to the copilot
    • Copilot can be used to maintain current path while the user goes AFK for a second, like having an autopilot with autothrottle in every aircraft
    • Assistances like automatic landing lights, automatic caution/warning mute after a few seconds, auto-tuning, auto-propeller speed, auto pressurization, etc.

    Flight-Info

    • New aircraft configuration display showing gear, flaps, slats, airbrake, parking brake, pitch trim
    • New mini-map in the flight info showing extended centerline to best suitable runway
    • Improved attitude indicator with autopilot flight mode annunciator

    Control Assignments

    As before a lot of the common joysticks and yokes available on the market already have the correct assignment out of the box

    • We've added even more default assignments for more devices so users can start flying right away
    • Users with multiple devices or devices with several levers can now define specialized assignments for:
    • Twin prop, twin jet, quad jet (and default)

    Menu improvements

    • Improved navigation menu with easier route creation
    • Improved controls menu with more options
    • New menus for assistances, career & flight-log, missions

    New Aircraft

    • A320 with Sharklets
    • A380 (*)
    • B787-10 (*)
    • Bf109e (*)
    • CRJ-900 (*)
    • Ju 52 (*)
    • Fokker DR 1

    (*) Aircraft AddOn DLC

    Aircraft Features

    • All aircraft now with landing lights that illuminate the ground
    • Almost all aircraft now feature a 'cold and dark' preset option
    • New aerodynamics simulation (see details below)
    • New turbo-engine simulation (see details below)
    • New electrical systems added in a lot of aircraft
    • New master caution and warning systems for most aircraft that have this IRL
    • New realistic radar height callouts
    • New GPWS terrain warnings
    • New and more realistic engines sounds in A320 and many other new sounds like APU and avionics fans
    • New experimental first hydraulics simulation in A320
    • New experimental fuel system in C172 and A320
    • New simulated touch screen displays in modern airliners (simulating the cursor control device)
    • New electronic checklists in modern airliners
    • New EFB in the B777 and B787 (work in progress)
    • Added approach marker indications
    • Many improvements to autopilot, FMS and CDU
    • Improvements to the individual EFIS systems and screen rendering
    • Aircraft with EFIS door pages or door indicator lights now have clickspots on them to open that specific door from within the cockpit (applicable to aircraft where the doors are modeled)
    • Countless small new features added to the entire fleet of aircraft, several thousand changes in each airliner
    • Many small bugs have been fixed

    New Aerodynamics Simulation

    • Airfoil simulation now uses the current flaps, slats and spoiler deflections to compute lift, drag and moment coefficients
    • Multiple control surfaces (not just 2 like before) are now allowed, e.g. inboard and outboard aileron and inboard and outboard flaps on the same wing as well as individual spoilers
    • Added Mach drag rise

    New Turbo-Engine Simulation

    • Turbofan engines and turboprop engines now use our new thermodynamic component based engine physics simulation
    • All components of the engine are simulated based on physics laws and characteristic parameter such as intake area, design compression ratio, efficiency, etc.
    • Modular approach allows realistic simulation of engines with multiple spools like the three spools found in the RR Trent 972B engine in the A380
    • This engine simulation inherently has a more realistic behavior and dynamically responds to environmental conditions such as temperature and density changes
    Aerofly FS 4 Flight Simulator on Steam
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  • I feel I could use some more convincing!

    FS2 gave us years of major developments, a FS4 purchase deliberation today would be more compelling if we got some more insight of likely near future and targeted more challenging improvements.

    Year 2022’s matured FS2 would be an exceptionally compelling simulation purchase back in 2016. Relaxing a tendency towards guarded confidentiality might very well boost customer enthusiasm and bring a similar improvement in sales and market penetration?

    • Official Post

    Aerofly FS 4 has some changes under the hood that are maybe not obvious at first glance. But with we've actually made the sim future proof with an airport loading system that works globally for 20000+ airports without slowing down the sim, a cultivation algorithm that we can use globally, a global traffic system which may one day also be used for multiplayer etc., a global navigation system and so forth.

    We've also incorporated new tools to build our airports and streamlined the process and we'll probably keep improving these tools with time. We now can programmatically change airports and add some new features to them without manually changing everyone of them.

    Things like that which you don't get to see which make Aerofly FS 4 the better investment for users today.

    And let's not forget the deeper aircraft systems and many assistances that you won't even notice during flying. For example if you crash you're put on a runway ready for takeoff again.

  • LAX is completely remodeled and looks very nice. Is there a list of updated airports in USA?

    Yes, there must be a spreadsheet listing all the airports in FS 4. Maybe IPACS will make it available to the community.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • Good day! Jet-pack, One question please, I feel that in VR the Simulator is jumpy, it is not fluid, I have a Reverb G2, Ryzen 9 3900x, #32 gram, an RX 5700XT 8Gb, and I installed it first on the SSD, I had little space and I uninstalled it and installed it on a normal HDD disk with enough space of one and a half Gb and it still has many jumps, I would like to know why the stutter!

    A cordial greeting

  • Good day! Jet-pack, One question please, I feel that in VR the Simulator is jumpy, it is not fluid, I have a Reverb G2, Ryzen 9 3900x, #32 gram, an RX 5700XT 8Gb, and I installed it first on the SSD, I had little space and I uninstalled it and installed it on a normal HDD disk with enough space of one and a half Gb and it still has many jumps, I would like to know why the stutter!

    A cordial greeting

    Like what was already mentioned by the developer, you need to lower your graphics settings down a notch or two compared to FS2. I found that this helped a lot with my Vive Pro. Even with my rtx3090 most Ultra settings resulted in a bit of stutter flying heli's low level in cities like Los Angeles.

    i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro w/Air Link, Vive Pro

  • Like what was already mentioned by the developer, you need to lower your graphics settings down a notch or two compared to FS2. I found that this helped a lot with my Vive Pro. Even with my rtx3090 most Ultra settings resulted in a bit of stutter flying heli's low level in cities like Los Angeles.

    Hello! TomC RLG Thank you very much for the tip!!

  • Hello there,

    how exactly does the AI traffic works? Does it taxi to the runway to takeoff / taxi to terminal or hangar after landing or just appears / disappears on / from the runway.

    Thanks.

    AI Traffic is based on west winds. No taxi. The planes appear at the runway threshold to take off and disappear at the end of the runway after landing. The traffic disappears when your are too close.

    MacBook Pro | M1 Pro | Thrustmaster Captain Airbus Edition | DualSense (for travel)
    X-Plane 12 | ToLiSS A320neo | BetterPushback
    iPad | Navigraph | WebFMC

  • Hi Folks, can I first say that I have been like a salesman for IPACS since I discovered Aerofly FS2.

    I fly helicopters primarily and the flight model on the heli in FS2 is best in class.

    I have all the other flight sims on the market loaded into my PC but I keep going back to FS2 because of the superb flight model and how it doesn't stress my PC.

    I have downloaded every DLC for FS2 and keep going back to ORBx Innsbrook, which is outstanding.

    I have purchased FS4 and downloaded all the free DLC's and I hate to say it but I have been a little disappointed for the following reasons.

    It is resource hungry (I have a gen 12 intel with 32 gig of ram, all ssd storage and a 3060 graphics card) and it struggles in VR on a Quest 2. Screen tearing and micro stutters etc, even turning down in game settings.

    I do have a question and that is, can I use all my FS2 downloaded DLC's which I paid quite a lot of money for, in FS4? If the answer is yes, this will make FS4 more useable and if the answer is no, I will be one very disappointed Aerofly fan.

    I would love some feedback on the various point above.

    Many thanks :)

  • It is resource hungry (I have a gen 12 intel with 32 gig of ram, all ssd storage and a 3060 graphics card) and it struggles in VR on a Quest 2. Screen tearing and micro stutters etc, even turning down in game settings.

    I would love some feedback on the various point above.

    Many thanks :)

    FS4 isn't more resource hungry than FS2 imho. It's graphics have been improved a bit so you need to drop the in-game graphics down a notch or two from your FS2 settings. Maybe you just need to play around with FS4 settings a bit more, or just get a Steam refund if you are not happy with it (2 hour/14 day refund window).

    Your 3060 (hopefully not a laptop and/or Win11) is not exactly a powerhouse gpu for PCVR so don't expect miracles with any sim using a Quest 2. Especially since the Q2 uses about 10% of your gpu resources to handle data compression with both Link and Air Link. A 3080, or better gpu would be a much better choice for PCVR with a Q2. I have a Q2/rtx3090 and this works fantastic with both Link and Air Link. With the recommended Q2 router/wifi setup it's a joy to use wireless. Sorry for the tough luv mate, cheers.

    i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro w/Air Link, Vive Pro

  • ...

    I do have a question and that is, can I use all my FS2 downloaded DLC's which I paid quite a lot of money for, in FS4? If the answer is yes, this will make FS4 more useable and if the answer is no, I will be one very disappointed Aerofly fan.

    I would love some feedback on the various point above.

    Many thanks :)

    At the moment you can't use all DLCs because airports and places/cultivations have to be adjusted.

    But you can use all images and at least for me and for Europe it looks very good. I have also copied the images of the ORBX DLCs into my user directory for FS4. :)

    Tschüss, Michael (🍎🚁)

    Configurations:

    - MacBook Pro (16", 2021); Chip: Apple M1 Max; actual macOS || Thrustmaster TCA AIRBUS EDITION: 1x Sidestick, 2x Quadrant, 2x Quadrant Add-On || Pro-Flight-Trainer PUMA X

    - iPad (12,9", 4th Generation, RAM: 6 GB); actual iOS || nimbus steelseries