Flight Sims

[Kchrpm]

I made this for you, Nate. It's not an exciting route, and I'm a shit pilot, but the AI assistant ended up being even worse...

[dodint]

The pedals are USB only which is nice. I've always paired them with a G27. When I was going through boxes trying to find the Fanatec pedals I found the G27 pedals first but unfortunately they use a 9-pin connector instead of USB. The load cell on the Fanatec is pretty stiff and I think I would've preferred the G27 pedals for this use, but, alas. Better than paying for a rudder system.

I bought the smaller Saitek throttle quadrant for realism (it's single engine, most are multi-engine) but I'm kind of wishing I had more sliding axis to work with. I might pick up a trim wheel, not sure.

[dodint]

Very cool, Keith. I haven't flown higher than 5k or faster than 110kt so far. Interesting seeing all the assists, I've only seen some of them in the flight tutorials. I use the checklist function which is much of the same information but not provided in real time.

When you were coming in for the landing I was thinking "man, that looks hard to fly that slowly" and it looks like I was correct. It kept saying 'too fast' but you were miles away and flirting with stall speed.

[dodint]

I shouldn't have looked, Amazon had the Honeycomb Bravo Quad on sale. So that's on the way, solves both my trim and flaps problem and picks up a bunch of extra buttons I can map. I'll probably send the Saitek back.

My L-shaped desk isn't really conducive for this sort of thing.

[Kchrpm]

Very cool, Keith. I haven't flown higher than 5k or faster than 110kt so far. Interesting seeing all the assists, I've only seen some of them in the flight tutorials. I use the checklist function which is much of the same information but not provided in real time.

When you were coming in for the landing I was thinking "man, that looks hard to fly that slowly" and it looks like I was correct. It kept saying 'too fast' but you were miles away and flirting with stall speed.

I was going to make it work, until the AI decided that I need to go EVEN SLOWER and crashed the damn thing. The AI also freaks out and crashes it almost immediately if I put it in auto-pilot, so I'm guess the third-party devs just never got it right.

[Rare White Ape]

At the end all I could hear is Samir's co-driver yelling "Throttle! Throttle!"

The intention with that pattern entry is for you to reach landing speed just before landing, so you could have kept it fast and gradually brought it down as you got closer. On the green airspeed bar (bottom-left of screen) you'll notice a white line... that's the speed below which your aircraft begins to take a ballistic trajectory. Keep the speed higher than that on approach and you're golden. Drop into that speed for short-final and landing.

There's a bit of a feel to it. You'll get it with practice.

One thing I notice with the F-18 is the handling changes drastically at low airspeeds. This is due to less airflow over the control surfaces and resulting inability to manoeuvre. They work best at about 400 kts, in the dogfight zone where sharp turns at 7G are possible without ripping the wings off. I'm not sure how the old analogue F-14 handles, but the F-18 is modern with built-in autopilot gizmos that actually limit the jet's manoeuvrability at higher speeds and - I am pretty sure - will assist at low speed to keep it from falling out of the sky... provided you aren't completely ham-fisted and land upside-down on a carrier deck.

If the F-14 has a similar handing trait at low speed you will want to keep that in mind. If your attitude (direction and nose angle) is fine, you will always want to add power before you try and lift the nose to gain altitude. I notice the HUD has a bug on it (the small circular icon with the three little lines poking out of it). In simplistic terms this represents the true direction your jet is travelling. There is another icon that represents the direction your nose is pointing - on some jets it's a small dot, on others it's a W-shaped thing, and is useful for aiming the gun, so ignore that.

Here's a good exercise:

Approach a runway from straight out, at least 10NM if you can, and begin to set your speed and altitude for approach - landing gear, flaps etc. At 5NM the goal is to be at 2000 ft and 200 kts. Now look through the HUD and place the bug over the start of the runway. On your short final approach try and make as few adjustments on the stick as possible, while using the throttle to adjust how long or short your landing is. Basically if you have everything set up correctly you can see the bug move back and forth on the runway in relation to your airspeed, which is controlled by the throttle, and you can choose where you want to land. If you're going to be short, gas it up. If you're going long, keep flying and loop back around for another attempt. With practice you'll regularly be able to bring it down and land like butter.

If you're like Nate and flying crappy slow planes you can approach a major airport at full speed and slam on the brakes once the rear wheels are on the ground.

[Rare White Ape]

Small advisory:

I attempted to access the SU10 beta test but there's an issue with the Windows Store at the moment which is preventing lots of players form being able to download games (including other than MSFS). I'm not sure how widespread it is, or how long it has been going for, but looks like there is little that can be done right now without extensive troubleshooting.

If you search "Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 UWP Desktop Runtime Package" on Google for the last 24 hours you will see. Yay Windows Store

Currently I am totally unable to play MSFS as the download won't even start. I hope that my 196 GB worth of world data, add-ons, and content has been preserved as I used a custom file path for those items. Tomorrow I will try rolling back to non-beta and seeing if it works.

[Rare White Ape]

Update on previous post:

I went back to current stable release and had a 1 GB download to get it up and running again. I then went back to public beta release and it successfully updated. There is a 1.2 GB store download, then an 8 GB in-game download.

First thing I tired out was DLSS, oh my. Normally I get 45-55 fps at 1080p. With DLSS on the frame rate does not change, but it looks progressively muddier as you go down the performance scale.

Knowing that DLSS is NOT for improving anything at 1080p I changed it all to 4K (same graphics settings) and set DLSS to performance and easily got 30fps put of it, with only the most minor ghosting in the image reconstruction, which can only be spotted on the edges of wings when passing over materials with effects, such as water and cloudy areas. Over solid terrain it looks perfectly normal. DLSS ultra performance is a ghosted mess.

I eventually settled on DLSS quality which still gives me 30fps, locked by the in-game frame limiter, so it is nice and smooth.

I turned DLSS off and was instantly back into hovering up and down around 20fps, which is basically unplayable.

And you know what, I might even like to use 2160p with DLSS quality, as that gives me over 40fps most of the time. It's choppy, as the frame rate isn't locked, but extra frames never go astray.

[dodint]

Excited to have the hardware dialed in:



I used some RAM camera mount items to move the button box to an overhead position. I use the box for tuning the radios so that's a somewhat realistic reach.
The new throttle quadrant is here, set up in a single-engine config and repurposing some of the axis for other items like carb heat and parking brake.
The most exciting bit is the cell phone on the left. It's running Garmin Pilot and is connected to the sim. So the portable GPS that I'll use in the real plane is available to me now while I'm training, it's pretty awesome. It will help me beat down that learning curve a good bit by having full confidence in that flying aid before I ever take off in the real plane.
I just need to buy a kneeboard to put the phone/tablet into. That's how I'll be flying in real life so no need to wait. They have some really nice designs that allow you to flip between a clipboard and the tablet as needed.

In the bit of flying I've done I notice the same issue I have with sim racing. Without the plane moving around under me there is a real lack of connection to the experience. But I'm using this to learn how to read gauges, buttonology, familiarization with the GPS equipment, the visual navigation process, and how to talk to ATC. So it should help a considerable amount with that. The sim will likely add value all the way through earning my instrument rating in a few years.

[Rare White Ape]

Spiffy setup