Flight Simulator discussion thread

Hi! Just wanted to have a thread to talk a little bit about Flight Simulator, how are you enjoying it, what you wish would be better?

Specifically I’d like to have a place to share fun adventures you’d think other people would like to try. I did the whole tutorial and quite enjoyed it, but now I’m a little overwhelmed at what to do next. I’m playing with almost every assist on for now, I just wanna fly around and have fun for a while before maybe trying to progressively remove assists.

Also I am a taker for any beginner tips. Like how am I supposed to know what is my cruise altitude after take-off? Even with all assists on I have no idea when I am supposed to stop going up.

Still just for now I enjoyed it quite a bit just for virtual tourism. The fact that you can change the weather on the fly is amazing, spawning a storm and trying to fly through it is an incredible experience. I’ll probably try to do a flight while listening to the hotspot tomorrow, I was thinking of just going from my city to my parents’ house just to see how Bing interprets these places I know very well.

This is one of the coolest games I've ever played and it is also making my computer want to kill itself, though my GSync monitor is making the 20ish frame rate shockingly playable. Guess it's finally time to upgrade from a quad core processor.

I've so far mostly just been flying around all the places I've lived finding my old houses. I also did a flight over Lake Michigan during a massive live weather storm pattern and even on medium the thunderheads and lightning were stunning. Very excited to keep poking at it (and even more excited to build a new rig that can actually handle it properly).

EDIT: My system is an i5-4690k OC'd to 4.2 Ghz, a 2070 Super and 16 gigs of ram

I'm particularly curious to know people's specs/performance. Mine have been all over the place. Though hearing what Vinny said on the beastcast about new regions chugging the first time you load in could be the issue.

I'm running a 3700x, 32gb RAM, a gtx 1080, and 200 down and getting anywhere between 20 to 65fps on default high with DoF and clouds turned down a bit.

I know my GPU is likely the main culprit but I don't think I've had this wide a range of frame rates in anything before.

ALSO, in an instance I am getting 60-65fps, if I lock my frame rate to 30 it drops down to like 10-15. If I set it back to 60 I'm back in the 60s.....NO idea what is going on there. Which is a bummer because the dips are what make the game rough to play, 30fps looks fine, I just want to lock it there.

Overall, I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but I've had quite a few technical issues. It's crashed to desktop at least half a dozen times at random, I had repeated issues with my keyboard ceasing to work mid-game (though I think that had to do with a monitoring software overlay conflicting with the game for some reason), and, of course, it can be a pretty inconsistent performer. None of that, however, ruins the relaxation when flying through the mountains, the fascination my daughter exhibits when asking me to fly around places she's heard of but not had a chance to visit, or the thrill when finally sticking a challenging landing you've tried multiple times. It's a cool enough experience that I've been pricing out HOTAS and/or yoke setups--which I never expected to want--so that I can get a more immersive experience. (Also, don't buy either right now, because prices are out of control.)

@reap3r160: I'm running basically the same build you are, except i only have 16gb ram (3600 mHz). I reduced some lighting and shadows to medium, along with the volumetric clouds (and possibly the DoF, but I'm not able to confirm at the moment), and am getting roughly the same performance you are at 1440p. I am playing with the frame rate uncapped, but have a GSync monitor so I haven't felt the need to try to cap it artificially to keep the experience feeling smoother. You might try capping the frame rate in the Nvidia control panel rather than the game, and turn off vsync, if you're running it, and see if that improves your effort to force it to run at 30 fps.

Oh wow, I’ve got a comparatively puny build (i5-4590, 8 GB RAM, GTX970) and aside from the initial stutters, I’m running ok at medium settings at 60 FPS. Some hitches from data streaming, but otherwise it runs pretty good.

I imagine cruise altitude is the optimal height for an aircrafts fuel efficiency, specifically for very long trips, if you're interested in all that you might have to read an aircraft owners manual :P, it is odd the game tells you to climb to it but doesn't tell you what it is.
So far i've just been flying around my local area finding my and friends houses so i haven't really gone above 4000ft, i have a surprising number of grass runways nearby i had no idea about, one of my friends lives next to a long and straight runway-like bit of road which i managed to land on, parked up next to his house which unfortunately is not rendered and is flat as a pancake, my house has been combined with my neighbours to create a mansion.

@navster15: Are you running off an SSD?

@banefirelord: Yup!

@cikame: @fear_the_booboo: So there’s a screen somewhere in the map menu where you plan your flight that shows the stages of the trip, and it lists a cruise altitude there. I wish I could remember how I accessed it, but if you click around a bit you should find it there. The last couple times I’ve flown a Cessna 152 it gave me a cruise altitude of 7100 ft.

Been messing around this trying to get it to run good. It seemed to me to run great the first day and garbage since. Looking into the cache stuff I realized it was saving into my backup hard drive (500gb pulled from a ps4) It said in game that it was saving onto the C drive but that wasnt true. Also, when i preordered through the xbox app it saved that small file on the backup too. The game itself installed on the C drive. Im now reinstalling everything. However, I doubt anything will change since im still on a i5 3570K.

@nateandrews: "I wish I could remember how I accessed it" is something I've been saying to myself quite a bit with this game. If ever one screamed the need for a two-inch thick manual, this is it.

It's ridiculous this can't be done from within the Xbox app, but just for future reference you can easily move games between drives from Win 10 "Apps & Features" settings.

I did this manually by moving the folder it asks you to check for updates every time. Had to track down every byte of usable space by deleting things in user\appdata\locallow that were not associated with currently installed apps.

And what's with applications leaving behind multiple gigabytes of crap when you uninstall them. TBH I kinda blame Steam for not making their uninstall requirements more explicit for cert.

@frytup: I did that but then it wouldn't launch. Wouldn't do anything. So I decided to uninstall everything, pull the second drive out, and reinstall.

I'm in a similar boat as OP where the actual game part of this is a little overwhelming for me. I keep taking off form airports after setting a flight and then I realize that the flight will take me several real life hours and I start to get some fomo thinking that my flight from Phoenix to Denver is actually pretty boring and I should be trying to fly in less domestic (I live in the US) areas.

But I still end up playing it for hours while listening to podcasts.

Running on an i7 9700k and a 2080ti and struggling to hit 60 even on High. Admittedly I'm running at a high resolution (3440x1440).

I'd say normal framerate is somewhere between 40-55 but my CPU and GPU are usually only at 50-70% load. Occasionally the CPU spikes up to 100% but it's a bit odd. Might put it back to Ultra since the framerate barely gets any lower.

My main grievance with the game is even despite the feedback they got in Alpha they still haven't added an exclusive fullscreen mode. The only option is borderless and a lot of people with G-Sync monitors have issues getting it to work unless the application is full screen. I also occasionally get issues with borderless applications where when the window is focused it thinks it is in the background and runs at a lower fps (~20) and when it actually is in the background it does the opposite and runs fine! I have to close and restart it, which isn't fun when it takes so long to load up.

Actually flying in the game is a blast, I just wish there were more guided experiences than the 8 tutorials. The Activities section would be great if every one wasn't "hey here's this really incredibly difficult thing even if you're a real pilot, go". The game is so overwhelming with the number of planes and being able to go anywhere, I wish there was a list of shortish flights with increasingly complicated planes that guided you through the process of going from a prop plane like the tutorial Cessna to a jet and eventually an airliner.

I wonder if they'll expand the flight school over time or just let the community do that for them. As I saw with Drew's Cloth Map stream a few weeks back, there's a lot of theory you can do in a sim. It'd be nice if Microsoft tapped into that.

I’m having a great time with it. My one gripe is I wish there were some way to tell exactly where in the world you were while you were flying, e.g. what town that was you just flew over an hour south of Paris.

I’m running on a 1070 with a pretty fast SSD on high settings and the performance has been a lot better than I expected, getting noticeably framey/jerky only when I’m flying very close to the ground (which might actually be a data streaming issue).

How much memory are people allocating to the streaming cache? I have it at 35GB but in one forum people were saying they had it at 500GB using an external SSD. Is there a clear sense of what that improves?

@pearsonpark: There's no need to have such a large cache, i read somewhere that all of San Francisco's data is 10GB, i suppose if you have a spare SSD that isn't being used there's no harm in donating it to FS but the game defaults to 8GB of cache so i left it at that.
I've now flown across most of the south west of the UK and the middle of Louisiana where a friend lives and i've only filled 1.1GB of cache.

Areas with lots of buildings, trees and traffic will cause slow down, i have an Intel i9 and a 2080ti, even on medium settings small towns put me down to 30-40fps.

@cikame: good to know, thank you! I’ll postpone the external SSD purchase for now :)

Just booting the game up now and getting annoyed at the intro logos, thankfully there is a simple Steam launch option to skip them, for Windows Store users there appears to be another method.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/icrc4c/psa_to_skip_the_intro_videos_and_logos_set/

@pearsonpark: I was thinking when I was watching a stream how nice it would be to see, "You have discovered <blank>" Or even a way to flip bing's map data so you end up flying over a 2D map with place names on it.

@pearsonpark: I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure there is a map option in the toolbar at the top of the screen while flying. And that can be zoomed out enough to see where you are.

@noboners: It's just the GPS map you get in the cockpit, it has airport codes on it and nothing else.

@cikame: ah dang. Whoops.

Kind of a weird question but: are there any controls (windows store since gamepass) to control the initial download?

Doing math and projections I should be fine to grab this in august but going to wait until closer to september to not risk overages (yay comcast...). Probably gonna end up starting the download an hour or so before the data cap resets but would be really nice if I could have finer grain control as to which mandatory components to grab when. Even if it is not usable it would be nice to queue up 75 gigs one morning and the other 75 the next.

@gundato: The game downloads through its own launcher and i'm afraid there's no control over it at all besides a pause and resume, if you close the program you lose everything so you can't turn your PC off (i left mine on for 2 days), it's pretty terrible.
I'm not sure how you're going to manage with that data cap.

@gundato: Unfortunately not. The download in the Windows xbox app is ~1 gb, and the rest takes place once you open the game. For what it’s worth, though, the standard edition’s actual download is about 92 gb, instead of the ~150 that is indicated on the shop/GamePass listing.

I would very much like to try this out, and I have Game Pass Ultimate, but I cannot get this to install. I've downloaded the first installer from the Windows store with no problem. I run that as Admin on my PC, and it installs the next 92 GBs. From here, I get a screen titled "Content Manager" with some release notes, and it indicates it's trying to download another 3.68 GB file. It never makes any progress. I've tried literally everything in this Kotaku article.

Some of those things I've tried multiple times; I've tried a 100% fresh install 7 times and always get the same results. I don't think I'm meant to try this game.

Well, after what seemed like a week of downloading and installing I think even on the lowest settings my potato pc isn't happy with running it. In fairness, I didn't think it would, but as I have PC Game Pass I thought it couldn't hurt giving it a try. Ah well, it wasn't to be.

If anyone on here is looking for a little more structure to Flight sim there is a plugin called FS economy that basically turns flight sim into Euro truck simulator. You rent (and eventually buy) planes, pick up computer and user generated jobs and fly people and cargo around. You can even make an airline and work together.

FS Economy homepage

I have made an airline with a few folks on the Giant Bomb Discord called "GBD air". If anyone on here want's to join us you are more than welcome.

Here is a video explaining how it works

Youtube Guide to FS economy

Hope to see some of you soon

o7

@mister_v FS Economy looks neat! I'll have to give it a whirl when I get around to playing. Thanks!

@mister_v: I will definitely look into this, bit busy at the moment but later, i love Truck Sim and having objectives in FS2020, no matter how simple, will give me even more reasons to load it up.

@mister_v that looks awesome. I'll definitely check it out. I find that even small goals really help me stick with sandbox games.

As far as performance goes, running at 3440x1440 w/ Ryzen 3700x, 32GB 3200Mhz RAM, 2080 Super, it's extremely variable. Running on a mixture of medium and high settings, I've seen everything from 70+ FPS in rural areas and especially mountains and places above the tree line on a clear day to mid to high 20s (after heavy tweaking, why I'm not running straight "high-end" settings) sitting at JFK (a high detail, hand built Airport in one of the world's largest cities) in a 747, just before dawn in a rain storm.

My takeaway is that MSFS is very taxing on both CPU and GPU, but the main limiting factor for me in the heaviest scenario was CPU. Hitting 60 FPS with reasonable settings just doesn't seem possible at the moment.

Usefully, I did find that in the most extreme scenarios, disabling live and AI Traffic made a huge difference. I went from high teens / low 20s to high 20s / low 30s just by disabling air traffic in the New York scenario mentioned above, so consider temporarily turning air traffic off if you find your frame rate tanking in or around cities.

Lovin this game. Google Earth VR blew my mind, but having an actual proper game that has the whole planet.. that's still crazy to me

I have a pretty high-end machine, but sadly I have pretty poor performance. With a 2080, 32 GB RAM, i7-6800k, installed on and SSD, 1080p, I have to turn off data streaming, AI traffic, and turn settings to medium to hold a decent framerate. And even then I get 30-40 fps in NYC.

That didnt stop me from buying a VKB Gladiator NXT and a Thrustmaster TWCS though. I've been wanting a HOTAS setup for a long time now, for VR mainly, but now with Flightsim I have enough reasons to justify it.

I play with no plane damage, so i can do some ridiculous maneuvers if I get bored, but I really enjoy studying all the screens, figuring out what these numbers and diagrams mean, and learning what really goes into flying a plane.

Seeing New York City in such great detail is wild, even if you get really low to the street. Obviously it's got the weird artifacts everywhere from imperfect data translation, but honestly, as I'm flying around the streets in drone mode, I wish this game was also a driving simulator lol. Imagine... the whole world in a driving sim. :0

@mister_v: I've been trying to get it working but the client doesn't connect to their servers, the website is really slow and their forums won't load so i'm guessing they weren't expecting an influx of new users.
I'll try again tomorrow.

@cikame: Once you have created an account on the website you need to post in the forums requesting a game account. Once that has been approved you get a second login that you use with the client. However due to the influx of new players the approvals are taking upwards of 48 hours

You need to post in the below forum to request a game account:

Forum link

@mister_v: Ah ha thank you, this is quite the process :P.

Yeah, It's a long running addon that has been around for years in other flight sims. I'm not sure they where prepared for the huge influx of new players brought on by gamepass and a couple of popular flight sim streamers using FSE and I think it has shown how outdated their signup process is.

It's worth it though.

The manual cache option is a life-saver if you're concerned about data streaming. Helpful video right here -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTomIUZOGY0

I've been doing jobs in FSEconomy now that it's working again, but i'm encountering a problem with fuel amounts, the site will say the aircraft i'm renting has 43%, which i think would be enough, then i start the flight and i'm down to 34%. I'm currently 130 miles from my destination, i don't know the math involved to see if i've got enough fuel and i'm starting to worry :P.
Is this a common problem? Is it because FS2020 isn't really fully supported? Or more likely i'm just doing something wrong.

Enjoying it so far, but it's so easy to make huge mistakes in setting up flights.

Edit: I should probably ask before this flight ends one way or another, is it possible to land and refuel along the way? I tried it once and it just ignored it.

I really enjoy it, but i do hope they add more "game" to it. Dont get me wrong i can and will enjoy flying around for hours but it dose feel a bit aimless at times. FSX had missions and i think they are going to add something like that at some point but i also kinda wouldn't mind some kind of progression even if it was just small things to work towards like plane skins or stupid cockpit decorations.