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gaggle64

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020: The F-Word

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Maybe this just me turning into a Dad (minus any children) but the new Flight Simulator has me drooling. Maybe it's the Covid and wanting a sense of space. Maybe I recently got into train sims and I don't know who I am anymore. Needless to say the streaming real-world maps looks super impressive, and will supposedly have air traffic matched onto real-life traffic via transponder data. At the very least I'll soon know how to cold-start an Airbus 320, never know when thatwill come in handy.

 

Out on PC & PC gamepass next month (consoles to follow). Who wants to join the mile high club with me?

(The F is for "flight". Among other things)

Edited by gaggle64
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Yeah it looks amazing, and I've always wanted to try one of those (flight sims), but I don't have the PC for it. Also the in-game store has me worried, but I don't know if the base game has enough content to keep me satisfied.

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It looks ridiculous. I’ve been thinking for a while of getting a well specced PC for the living room and this is only adding to my desire to do that. Have a friend who’s really into the series and he’s having a launch party for it - quite looking forward to having a play.

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A look at the history of Flight Simulator:

Absolutely incredible. :o

Can’t wait to try this. :bouncy:

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PC VR support has been announced, and is launching first with the new HP Reverb G2 sometimes in september. Support for other VR headsets is coming at a later time. 

I can't wait to try this with the new headset and a GTX 30-something when I get it all. The graphics... I've spent hours just studying the clouds, haha. I'm not much for sim games, but this has me hyped! 

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I think I’ll get a months game pass so I can play this tomorrow then if I’m enjoying it probably just buy it outright after the month.

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Anyone know what the deal is with the file size for this? Before pre-installation it said approximately 152 GB (insane! :o) but it only seems to have used up 1 GB on my drive. And now in the details section (where it was initially reporting 152 GB) it says the approximate size is 127 GB. Make up your mind! :heh: 

Anyway, it’s pre-installed (I think :hehe:) and I’m ready to fly tomorrow! :bouncy:

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I'm actually surprised at just how well its reviewing. 9s and 10s across the board. That generational leap visually and tech wise is certainly impressive though. Being able to stream all that global location data to make up countries and smaller airstrips is insane and a perfect example of how cloud integration can push certain games forward.

I'm curious to see what it'll be like but there's no way my PC would run it at all. Its coming to the Series X so there's a chance I could give it a go there down the line.

Still, kudos to Asobo for creating the game as it really does look impressive.

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42 minutes ago, RedShell said:

Anyone know what the deal is with the file size for this? Before pre-installation it said approximately 152 GB (insane! :o) but it only seems to have used up 1 GB on my drive. And now in the details section (where it was initially reporting 152 GB) it says the approximate size is 127 GB. Make up your mind! :heh: 

Anyway, it’s pre-installed (I think :hehe:) and I’m ready to fly tomorrow! :bouncy:

Same thing for me. I’m hoping that doesn’t mean we’ll have another massive download tomorrow before we can play the game.

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10 minutes ago, Happenstance said:

Same thing for me. I’m hoping that doesn’t mean we’ll have another massive download tomorrow before we can play the game.

Yeah, that would indeed suck. Not to mention being completely against the point of having a pre-install. :hmm: Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

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The download after that is 91gigs. I’m starting now so it’s ready for tomorrow morning.

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Probably takes longer because you're having to download it from Kiribati.

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Well its all working. Just had a quick flight and managed to find my local town before turning too sharply, causing mechanical failure and immediately fading to black.

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3 minutes ago, ArtMediocre said:

The game is currently sitting at a score of 93 on Metacritic, which is pretty insane for a flight simulator. But I can understand it, as it is a technical marvel. Can't wait to get it eventually. Does it run good @Happenstance? Or are you getting a lot of frame drops?

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/microsoft-flight-simulator?ref=hp

I’ve dropped it down to medium for now and as long as I give it a minute to load everything in when I launch then it runs smoothly. When I go back on later I’m gonna turn off all the live data like that article suggest and then start testing with higher settings.

Edited by Happenstance

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Yep, this is awesome. :bouncy:

Have completed all of the tutorials, which did a pretty great job of teaching the basics. Redid a couple of them just to be sure I knew exactly what was what, but I’m now quite confident in my flying and navigation abilities. :hehe: 

Only gripe so far is how it seems there are some useful controls/features that are locked to keyboard or mouse. Now I suppose this really shouldn’t be a complaint given the type of “game” this is and of course the platform it’s on, but with it also heading to Xbox I assumed everything would already be doable with just a controller too. ::shrug: Also, some of the onscreen prompts for certain functions only give information on the keyboard input despite a controller equivalent being available, so I actually had to figure out a few of the controls by trial and error.

As for performance, it seems to be running very well for me at the recommended settings which were set to high, still the occasional dip here and there (quite possibly related to the online features, as I’ve also had those enabled the entire time) but I haven’t really messed about with the visual options yet.

Speaking of online, at first I thought it wasn’t working properly as I didn’t see any of the live flights or other players when in-game (despite the map claiming there were lots in the surrounding airspace) but after turning on the option to display names I suddenly realised that I was indeed surrounded! :D 

Anyway, whether there are other planes on the journey or not, I’m definitely going to enjoy flying around the world and checking out various landmarks. Already did a quick flight over the pyramids in Egypt which was super cool! :cool: Think I’ll head to Japan next! :grin: 

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Look what I found on my flight to Japan!: :geek:

KUO9rBv.jpg

Not quite what I was expecting. :heh: Perhaps Nintendo requested their HQ be squashed like that to avoid anyone peeking inside? :laughing:

*EDIT*

Holy crap, this sim/game/thing is stunning!: :o

LkNe2CU.jpg

Edited by RedShell
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I had a quick look around this morning, was interested to see how it handled towns that don't have super detailed imagery.

 

I was kind of hoping from their "2D to 3D" software, the Bing maps birds eye view photos (you can view the town in different angles), they could make something special.

 

While it mostly looks great from a distance (except for the high school, which seems to be a mass of houses), it seems the software guesses what locations are houses (which also counts all high street shops as houses), and puts a random building there. The building with my upstairs flat is there, but it's a single story building. 

Of course, I know I chose to look at a place I knew wouldn't look perfect, I'll be checking out more detailed areas tonight. I just had to see where I live.

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This game looks fantastic! Such a clever idea, no wonder it's getting such high marks.

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Looking at Bing maps, I can understand how my house turned out the way it did. The roof has a fairly big "lip" which from the angles it has on Bing maps, cover up the top windows. The bay windows it generated are actually the doors, but they stick out a bit from the house. The doors it generated are where ground floor windows are.

So even though it's a shame my flat has been erased, I'm kind of impressed as I can work out how it generated the building from the imagery available.

 

The high street buildings, however, are just a mess. It doesn't quite understand high street shops yet, and struggles with odd shaped buildings. Hopefully they continue to work on the algorithms. Perhaps they could create a generic a few "shop front"designs and try and guess based on the map linked with the location data of actual shops.

 

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It's apparently not only lesser known areas, but also bigger attractions that get "remodeled" by the AI:

arenes.png

azie.png

Still, it's an impressive feat and I can only see the quality improve if more data gets available. I'm really curious to try the game out. I'm having two weeks off from work in a month or so, so by then I'll see if I can get some sort of cheap Game Pass for PC.

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