So what are flight sims like now?
Sep. 6th, 2020 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinWell, I sprung for XPlane. MSFS2020 won't run on my Mac, though it might be interesting to check out the XBox version when it appears. But XPlane 11 does. It's a lot of fun, though I think anyone getting into it needs to realize what it is and isn't.
This is pretty much the opposite of the Google Earth flight sim. Which is to say, it treats the world scenery with some indifference, but this is the one for people who are really, really, really into the planes.
The cockpits are all modeled lovingly in three dimensions, and you can move about the cockpit and examine all the switches and gauges in detail; many of the doodads in there will actually be operative. By default the sim starts you on the runway with a full tank and the engine already running, but if you want, you can run through all the checklists and bring up a jetliner from completely powered-down (there's a version of this sim, not the standard retail version, that is certified for pilot simulator training--the key thing is apparently that it has to make sure it's always running at maximum FPS). You've got a mix of general-aviation aircraft, jetliners and fighter planes, an incredibly fun ultralight, a helicopter (haven't tried that yet), some exotic things like an X-15 and a Space Shuttle orbiter. For the latter things, there's support for planes carrying other planes (you can be the carrier, or be carried and have an AI take you up).
One problem if you're just using a single laptop monitor is that some of these control panels are physically gigantic, particularly in the big airliners, and in something like a 747 it can be hard to even look at the standard gauges while also keeping an eye out the window. You spend a lot of time panning around inside the cockpit with the view controls. The more modern planes have glass cockpits and you end up trying to interpret a little screen on your big screen. There's a HUD mode available with all planes (whether it would make realistic sense or not) that alleviates these issues, but I think one of my favorite planes in the program is the Stinson L5 Sentinel, a World War II-era military light plane, just because it's got a compact basic instrument cluster that is really easy to look at. People who are really into this stuff have elaborate multi-monitor setups that wrap around them almost like a professional simulator cockpit, sometimes with subsidiary computers just to control additional displays; XPlane supports a boggling variety of options, including VR headsets and using tablets to display control panels. I might try connecting an external monitor and using the main one just to display instruments.
Pilots seem to really like the flight model here; according to them, at least, the planes handle realistically. I wouldn't know, but the handling differences between the aircraft are palpable. I tried plugging in an XBox controller, and XPlane calibrates and handles it flawlessly*; a more serious user will doubtless prefer a realistic flight stick or yoke, but of what I've got, this is clearly the best way to control the simulation. The twin sticks give you independent rudder and aileron controls so you can practice coordinated flight; some buttons map to the throttle by default. When you have to push on the stick like a pilot would, instead of effectively controlling a virtual yoke with a keyboard or mouse, it does give you an appreciation of what trim controls are for.
What it's not is a sim for sightseeing of famous landmarks in the virtual world. It doesn't stream scenery like Google or Microsoft do, so the whole world has to be stored on disk, and the main way to scale back detail for lower-powered machines is to reduce the number of generated buildings. The scenery generally looks OK, but in a generic way. Cities will have more or less the correct street layouts, but be populated somewhat haphazardly; if you've got the scenery complexity set to low (which I think is the default), many towns will have streets but almost no buildings, and the world ends up with a barren, post-apocalyptic quality, almost Fallout 4-like. It looks better if you dial up the graphics settings (at risk of getting nagged that your system is too feeble to hit 60fps--at least you can turn off the nagging). But you'll still get a weird alternate-universe feeling if you try to go somewhere familiar to you, because almost everything is a generic object.
On the other hand, it's got a gigantic number of airports, basically every airport of significance in the world. Those are quite detailed--but with an eye to functional aspects a pilot would care about, not striking terminal architecture. Toodle around a major airport (the ultralight is useful for being a fly on the wall) and you'll see planes with all sorts of airline liveries, moving airport vehicles, etc. You can communicate with the tower, request and receive clearance if you want to play that way, get refueled and even pushed back from the gate by a tractor. (small correction: you can summon the snack truck and the pushback tractor, but not the fuel truck--you "refuel" just by editing your vehicle settings: in real life that takes a long time anyway.) All the navigation and ILS equipment is of course operative (even 1980s Flight Simulator had a lot of that). The night lighting of runways and taxiways is spectacular. But you won't find IAD's swooshing Saarinen terminal or LAX's Theme Building rendered recognizably. If you mostly want that, you might as well stick to Google Earth. Where this game gives near-pornographic aesthetic attention is the aircraft.
My impression is that MSFS 2020 is an attempt to bridge these worlds--it's got the accurately rendered planes in a mind-blowing streamed world. But even there, you may need fairly grunty hardware to get all the benefits.
* I also got around to trying the XBox controller with the Google flight sim, and it tried to handle the thing but there were hopeless calibration/centering problems that there seemed to be no way to address. Will need to stick to the mouse with that one.
This is pretty much the opposite of the Google Earth flight sim. Which is to say, it treats the world scenery with some indifference, but this is the one for people who are really, really, really into the planes.
The cockpits are all modeled lovingly in three dimensions, and you can move about the cockpit and examine all the switches and gauges in detail; many of the doodads in there will actually be operative. By default the sim starts you on the runway with a full tank and the engine already running, but if you want, you can run through all the checklists and bring up a jetliner from completely powered-down (there's a version of this sim, not the standard retail version, that is certified for pilot simulator training--the key thing is apparently that it has to make sure it's always running at maximum FPS). You've got a mix of general-aviation aircraft, jetliners and fighter planes, an incredibly fun ultralight, a helicopter (haven't tried that yet), some exotic things like an X-15 and a Space Shuttle orbiter. For the latter things, there's support for planes carrying other planes (you can be the carrier, or be carried and have an AI take you up).
One problem if you're just using a single laptop monitor is that some of these control panels are physically gigantic, particularly in the big airliners, and in something like a 747 it can be hard to even look at the standard gauges while also keeping an eye out the window. You spend a lot of time panning around inside the cockpit with the view controls. The more modern planes have glass cockpits and you end up trying to interpret a little screen on your big screen. There's a HUD mode available with all planes (whether it would make realistic sense or not) that alleviates these issues, but I think one of my favorite planes in the program is the Stinson L5 Sentinel, a World War II-era military light plane, just because it's got a compact basic instrument cluster that is really easy to look at. People who are really into this stuff have elaborate multi-monitor setups that wrap around them almost like a professional simulator cockpit, sometimes with subsidiary computers just to control additional displays; XPlane supports a boggling variety of options, including VR headsets and using tablets to display control panels. I might try connecting an external monitor and using the main one just to display instruments.
Pilots seem to really like the flight model here; according to them, at least, the planes handle realistically. I wouldn't know, but the handling differences between the aircraft are palpable. I tried plugging in an XBox controller, and XPlane calibrates and handles it flawlessly*; a more serious user will doubtless prefer a realistic flight stick or yoke, but of what I've got, this is clearly the best way to control the simulation. The twin sticks give you independent rudder and aileron controls so you can practice coordinated flight; some buttons map to the throttle by default. When you have to push on the stick like a pilot would, instead of effectively controlling a virtual yoke with a keyboard or mouse, it does give you an appreciation of what trim controls are for.
What it's not is a sim for sightseeing of famous landmarks in the virtual world. It doesn't stream scenery like Google or Microsoft do, so the whole world has to be stored on disk, and the main way to scale back detail for lower-powered machines is to reduce the number of generated buildings. The scenery generally looks OK, but in a generic way. Cities will have more or less the correct street layouts, but be populated somewhat haphazardly; if you've got the scenery complexity set to low (which I think is the default), many towns will have streets but almost no buildings, and the world ends up with a barren, post-apocalyptic quality, almost Fallout 4-like. It looks better if you dial up the graphics settings (at risk of getting nagged that your system is too feeble to hit 60fps--at least you can turn off the nagging). But you'll still get a weird alternate-universe feeling if you try to go somewhere familiar to you, because almost everything is a generic object.
On the other hand, it's got a gigantic number of airports, basically every airport of significance in the world. Those are quite detailed--but with an eye to functional aspects a pilot would care about, not striking terminal architecture. Toodle around a major airport (the ultralight is useful for being a fly on the wall) and you'll see planes with all sorts of airline liveries, moving airport vehicles, etc. You can communicate with the tower, request and receive clearance if you want to play that way, get refueled and even pushed back from the gate by a tractor. (small correction: you can summon the snack truck and the pushback tractor, but not the fuel truck--you "refuel" just by editing your vehicle settings: in real life that takes a long time anyway.) All the navigation and ILS equipment is of course operative (even 1980s Flight Simulator had a lot of that). The night lighting of runways and taxiways is spectacular. But you won't find IAD's swooshing Saarinen terminal or LAX's Theme Building rendered recognizably. If you mostly want that, you might as well stick to Google Earth. Where this game gives near-pornographic aesthetic attention is the aircraft.
My impression is that MSFS 2020 is an attempt to bridge these worlds--it's got the accurately rendered planes in a mind-blowing streamed world. But even there, you may need fairly grunty hardware to get all the benefits.
* I also got around to trying the XBox controller with the Google flight sim, and it tried to handle the thing but there were hopeless calibration/centering problems that there seemed to be no way to address. Will need to stick to the mouse with that one.