MSFS is a beautiful simulation and have some noticeable achievements that you probably already aware of them, either you played it or watched YouTubers showcasing it.
- The world looks quite detailed and resemble real images in locations where there is lots of data.
- The weather feels right (I'm not saying perfect), the overall cloud coverage and atmosphere it creates is quite good and impressive.
- The mechanics of:
- The new Flight planning interface
- Multiplayer flights
- Windshield effects
- Volumetric clouds
- Terrain image streaming
- 3D Trees (?)
Although the simulator has been 5 years in development prior to the release shows the amount of work and framework Asobo + Microsoft put into this simulator. But with all this work that was put into this simulator I can't fill as it was rushed out to the public ahead of its time, maybe in order to capture as many users as possible while continuing and refining this mammoth of a simulator.
I'm not a real world pilot and probably will never be, so flight simulation that is as close to real world experience as possible is something that I will highly appreciate. MSFS ticks many of these requirements but it is not ready yet, it is almost ready. By almost I mean that I think it needs another year of refinement, SDK maturity and flight tuning. These are not small tasks but I trust Asobo to do their best, and this leads to the other topic: Youtubers as PR.
I hope that many flight sim pilots are experience enough with product PR. MSFS is just the same, it is a product and Microsoft, in a brilliant move, used Youtubers to push their product and have them as their Alpha and Beta testers. Even more, once the product will be published they would be seen hypocritical if they won't use the sim they praised for so long (Checkmate and brilliant).
Respectable Youtubers like: catstrator, Xbox On, HG4452, Steff Mason, Squirrel, Gamer Muscle etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYXV5S8Mpx0 and others (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1ell9nsy5c).
What I find sad about all this is that those Youtubers were bribed by Microsoft (there is no other word for that) by paying them most of their travel expenses and one hour of flight instructor.
I'm not saying we can't trust these Youtubers, but they can't be objective, and I don't think they will ever be when they speak about this simulator. I believe that many of them have their own preferences in flight sim but their opinion should be taken with a grain of salt because of these facts, but we also need to remember that the things that they really liked in MSFS should reach other flight simulation and should be taken into consideration ASAP if they want to keep their business because these Youtubers will probably won't stream the "other" flight simulation in the near future.
I hope I made my point here and now I can move on and share my experience with MSFS.
In a nutshell, as a VFR sim flyer, this simulation is amazing. When you fly around KSEA or the route I did in a mission: YBTL to YPAM and back, you really feel as you are flying above the real terrain and flora of the area, it was absolutely gorgeous, in this respect I don't think that the Youtubers I mentioned above has done wrong.
Flying the YBTL to YPAM was real fun on the Cessna 208B and since it was a G1000 plane it was even easier. I liked the coast lines, water representation city and area look from above it was more than plausible it felt real. What I did not like was the G1000 implementation, it felt lacking, it did not pop out so it would be easier to read from it and felt a little, well, raw. I think that the current G1000 is OK but missing some functionality that we use in X-Plane for example, so I just flew the whole route (~30min) manually (no big deal).
Another thing that bothered me was the keybinding of the view mechanics, now I'm not saying that the view mechanics are bad, I'm saying that we need more binding options to our joystick buttons, in my case the POV button views can be mapped only to "quickview" options which makes it harder for simmers to look left/right up and down without the camera picking momentum and basically "swings" your head to each side (this is far from real life view). To pan your head you need to use the mouse, which make it harder in tight corners and landing procedures. I hope that Asobo will add the pan view options (it might be implemented already but I fail to find it anyway).
Here is an image that explains what I mean, there are no PAN options
Graphics / Scenery
Graphics in MSFS is superb, but we need to understand that the world that is built is generated from images and in most cases not hand placed, see Asobo Q&A in YouTube. This means that above ~1000-1500ft the world looks quite fantastic but as you zoom in you see that the houses were constructed from images, which is not a bad thing, since it gives each building its general characteristics as we expect from above, and in my opinion that is the more important part, this allows the scenery to almost replicate real world environments. Neighborhood areas, flora and road networks looks really good for VFR flying, it is not X-Planes plausible scenery, it is almost true to world replications in simulation scenery (Caveat: MSFS needs good data to replicate this) and that is commendable although not the most important part in my opinion ( a big chunk of it though :-) ) .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4uWdPeX51k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pob9OLItWNo
and there are plenty others.
By the way, to answer Mr.Drury question, I will say: buy both if you can, to support flight sim as a "brand" and hopefully to enjoy them both (I know I bought other flight sim just to support them too).
Now, graphics are really great, but if you decide to fly in a remote location where default terrain imagery is not good enough, you need to understand it will take time to download the "latest" updated imagery and thus the scenery might look a little bit on the cartoon side (or low res).
Here are two images that reflect this shortcoming of this technology, you can see that the water and terrain area looks right but the terrain imagery is not on par as other locations (like Seattle for example).
Flight Dynamics
First, I would like to remind you that one of X-Planes strength was the flight modeling, well, propeller modeling in any case.
When I fly in MSFS I do not feel much difference, which is good, but in some cases the expected behavior of the plane is weird. For example:
I did a flight in MSFS from CYBD to PAKT in Alaska using the TBM 930. The main Avionics is a G1000 or a version of it (not 100% sure), Under the G1000 there is a screen that lets you provide all inputs, instead of the small buttons around the G1000 screen. It resembles the GTN750 UI but only to control the G1000 screen. This is quite handy, since the screen font size is bigger and make it easier to read.
This means that you have to manually insert chart locations into the FMS which is not practical.
There might be an option to do that, but I never found how to do it.
To make a long story short, I used "PAKT_ILS_Y_11.pdf" chart from skyvector, and tried to do the landing procedure manually since the Auto Pilot did not behave as I expected.
Unfortunately when I was in the last phases of the approach, the plane started to bob up and down without real explanation. I checked the speed, flaps and gear position and all looked fine. I can admit that the manual landing was really unforgiving, and at the last hundred meters before touchdown the plane seem to settle down and fly much steadier.
Now, I do not blame MSFS for that, it might be some kind of turbulence or sheer wind but it repeated over ~5nm and this behavior was really strange.
I wish MSFS had some analyzing playback so we could see the forces playing on our plane and have better understanding what went wrong.
When I wanted to do the same in X-Plane, I decided to fly from PAJN to PAKT using real weather, and I flew in VR (which is the way to fly sim in my opinion). Since I do not have the TBM, I used a similar characteristic plane: "Epic E1000 G1000 Edition". In contrast to MSFS, I was able to prepare the flight plan with the arrival procedure from inside the G1000 (same procedure chart I used) and I flew all the way using with great success the AP and when the AP had to fly the approach plate + localizer, it did the job quite well. I did manually change the CDI to LOC 1 since it did not done it automatically, but it picked the glide slope immediately and brought the plane down very nicely.
So, flight dynamics might be a little skewed in MSFS in some cases, but that is acceptable at this stage, it also might be that I did something wrong but I honestly do not know.
On the other hand, flight dynamics and AP was better in my opinion in X-Plane because they were predictable, I mean the behavior was predictable, but that is not because X-Plane is better, but because it is maturer and most of the issues were ironed out. I really like X-Planes G1000 implementation, so far, and I wish they would have added other instruments like Avidyne and the likes (I do not know many brands, only what I see in YouTube, sorry).
I wish flight simulation will prepare better frameworks for new and diverse instruments to their list so we could learn not just Garmin's instruments but on others too, isn't it iffy that the only instrument framework flight sim are embracing is Garmin's, I mean there are many other brands so why not have between 2-3 and good framework to build appon.
Is this a progressive Beta ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVOzE61wYR8 (you can skip to the 5ft minute were he start his rant)
In a nutshell you can pick from the video that he was concerned with some aspects of the simulator at that state, and I got the impression that he would preferred the sim to rollout few months later, but I guess Microsoft thought differently and preferred to ride the hype train and make sure the sim will continue evolving while in the hands of end users (which is acceptable since the sim is quite stable).
In my opinion, for basic VFR flying the state of MSFS is good and stable. It falls short when you want to use high end instruments like the G1000 and do some instrument approaches (IFR) and since I do not know the state of heavies, I will let others sound their voices.
Overall VFR flight is good, steam gauges seem to function as expected but G1000 usage is lacking in some aspects.
Final Verdict
A good flight simulator is one that its developer members are continue investing and adding features to it, were community is being heard and there is a healthy communication between developers and end users.
I believe that we haven't heard the last word from MSFS developers and more will come and make this sim much better, in the meantime I hope that "Laminar Research" and others are taking notes, checking the hype and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and hopefully will address them in the near future.
I think we already heard from Austin that they are:
- Working on better weather engine(https://www.x-plane.com/2020/07/new-xavion-weather-maps)
- Ultra terrain (not sure if this is scenery).
- Hopefully better water representation.
- Probably other staff.
Now I'm not saying that this is going to be realized during XP11 life cycle but I hope in the next year we will have some of these features implemented.
One of the things that we need to remember is that a feature is like a "small" engine/technology or plugin inside the big application, it receives data and provide data which help shape the simulator.
What I think LR are doing, or have to do, is to rewrite some of their technologies from scratch in order to achieve their end goals. Unfortunately, they might need to break some compatibility to make it faster and more robust, or take the longer route and keep backwards compatibility while pushing technology further away so end users and 3rd parties developers won't be frustrated of them.
In my opinion, breaking changes should be introduces in new application versions (like XP12, XP13 etc...) while major updates should keep backward compatibility as much as possible.
I think we are going to have an exciting year in the flight simulation community and we should support both simulators in order to keep competition and win from it.
Blue skies
Saar