Flight Sims

[Rare White Ape]

For my first international trip, I wanted to go to Vanuatu, since I was lucky enough to go there years ago and was enamored by it… needless to say, the little island nation is not modeled at all in the game, poor guys.

It's in there. I'm not sure what you saw but I just checked and it's definitely there.

[Jason]

Oh its there, but if you fly low you’ll see that it’s all very generic renderings with buildings that are like half buried and roads that make no sense

Unless its just an Xbox thing

[Jason]

You might also see if you can do slew mode on the XBox, lets you just sorta teleport yourself around.

Surprisingly excited that you basically got the same initial thrill out of it that I did - see places you know but from the air. I spent days just cruising around my folks neighborhood, my neighborhood, places I've been, etc.

Still haven't found that weird tower in Tel Aviv that I worked near, but I think they may purposely hide it.

Yeah so far I’ve done places I’m familiar with, because its the only way my brain can not get overloaded by having *the whole entire world* to visit

Next up I think will be Scotland/Iceland, then go from there

I’ll search on what “slew” is, thanks for the tip

[Rare White Ape]

Scotland and Iceland are great. If your brain gets bent out of shape about the scope of this game, well simply flying out of Broadford Aerodrome in northern Scotland will bend your mind when you see how stunning that part of the world is.

I recommend finding that airstrip, and then Googling the location of the Bond family mansion from Skyfall, flying that way, then plotting a course towards Edinburgh and taking in a lot of the country all at once. It’s about an hour trip in the King Air 350, longer in a Cessna.

Now the Vanuatu situation is very odd. The game pulls data from Bing Maps if you have world data streaming turned on. If you have it turned off the game has generic rudimentary terrain generated from mapping data which is included with the base game.

The terrain I see in Vanuatu is this generic base terrain, even with world data streaming turned on. There are two international airports there in real life but they are both empty grass fields in MSFS.

But go to Bing Maps and they are both imaged there in high fidelity, which is more than enough for the game’s AI to pull out and turn into proper airports.

Even tiny little Pacific atolls have their runways represented, and these places only have names because the US Army needed them as bases to stop the Japanese taking over half the planet in the 1940s.

[Rare White Ape]

The Top Gun 2 movie has been delayed until mid-2022, so the Top Gun DLC marketing tie-in has been delayed too.

The producers of Top Gun 2 are citing fears that a surge in COVID cases will lead to lacklustre box office take for the opening weekend, which has lead them to delay all of their 2021/2 releases.

[Freude am Fahren]

So, I just tried to open the game. Got a message I had to update from the Store. Launched store, no updates.

So now I have a virtual paperweight.

[Tom Servo]

I was excited to try out the new update to see if they fixed the ATC not being able to figure out what altitude you're at. I booted it up and found that now I can't interact with anything in the cockpit with the mouse. I just get a standard mouse pointer, clicking on things does nothing. So...no idea if they fixed the other bug, 'cause now I can't even setup simple things for an airliner.

I've really been trying to be patient with Asobo, but it's been months since I've been able to fly an airliner, and I just do not understand what the problem is.

[Freude am Fahren]

I had that problem after a previous update. I think it's some new accessibility option. Probably has to do with XBox compatibility.

General Options-> Accessibilty -> Cockpit Interactions System and select Legacy

Unless it's an older issue I had a lot where the ATC window bugs out and prevents any other clicking. If you move it aorund the screen, it can go back to normal. Also had this happen when using G3000 touch screens. Again, usually intereacting with it would kinda reset the mouse.

BTW, got mine to update by downloading the XBOX app from teh windows store and finding MSFS there. It did prompt for an update. Of course all my video settings were defaulted again (though maybe this could have been from a Nvidia driver update?)

Also, it now hangs pretty badly when going into the controller options menu, which can be a pain when setting up a controller/plane combo.

[Tom Servo]

I've already got it on legacy, so it's not that. It might be the thing with the ATC window, but after opening and closing and resizing and moving it for ten or so minutes, I gave up.

[lostnight]

Love flying the hills and canyons of New Zealand. Invercargill is where I took off from.

Also watched a YouTube vid a someone doing some stunt flying in London flying an Extra 330, it was amazing, so I had a session there with the same aircraft, it is now in my top 5, love it, and London just blew me away, great place to fly!