Microsoft flight sim 2020 pre-order open

[blueskydriver]

5 more days...tick, tock, tick, tock, whole world crying about how their clock is not moving fast enough...awaiting MSFS 2020!

6 more days...tick, tock, tick, tock, whole world crying about how their computer is not moving fast enough...awaiting a PC in 2020!

Some things never change in this hobby... LOL!

John

[Joe Lavery]

After flying the Final Beta for some weeks now, I can tell you it's a new day for flight simulation.
I would add you'll need some hefty computing power to run it, but I guess most of us have that already. If you can fly P3D v5 without any glitches, you're good to go.
The graphics you see on YouTube are simply everywhere, I haven't found a place that didn't look better than any sim whatever the add-ons. I guarantee you will be stunned, the ability to look in any direction and see, realistic, accurate landscape is awesome.

Incidentally I have no connection with Microsoft, this is just my opinion.
I have not yet seen the final release, but I see Orbx has already got 8 products ready to go on the day of release. At a highly discounted price as well.
I just wonder will Microsoft's servers be able to cope with the rush on the 18th...

[bernard S]

now   all you need is collimation

[FredK]

now   all you need is collimation

More important to me is multi-channel...or at least a multi-screen proposition that will work smoothly with reasonable slider settings and 4K resolution etc.  From what I have gleaned all that nice eye candy is not translating to an easier processing burden on the hardware.

Have not heard anything at all about multi-channel....and not at all clear how that will work with separate (but synced) streaming feeds to multiple computers.  Perhaps those multiple feeds could be routed indirectly through the server, but that would be different than the way ViewGroups works for multichannel now.  In the current ViewGroups case for multi-channel only positional and attitude data is broadcast to the clients.  I am sure that was not an Asobo priority.

If that's the case that will be a big step backwards for me.

Fred K

[Joe Lavery]

I think once the sim is released we will have more idea what their intention is. I can't see them ignoring the needs of one of the biggest captive audiences. It wouldn't make sense not to at least offer what we already have with P3D.
The fact that they've been working on this project for three years and not a peep was known about it, until they made the announcement. Would indicate they have more up their sleeves than they are revealing.
I spoke a length to John Venema the founder of Orbx who has been working with Microsoft for months, yet he didn't even hint at it when asked about the new sim.
So as John said, just a few more days to go... Tik Tok...

[bernard S]

I  have learnt with my sim  as we say in tx if it ain,t broke don,t fix it.. one can end like a puppy chasing that elusive tail

[jackpilot]

Stamped and approved ! 

[Joe Lavery]

As I said, I have no connection with Microsoft so it doesn't matter to me who buys it, or not!
But wait till you see it for yourself, and then say you're not interested. I was sceptical when I heard the first announcement, so let's all wait and see if it comes with the interface we need. Otherwise like you, I will keep my PIT running with P3D, although I have also been looking at X-Plane.... but that's another rabbit hole!   

[blueskydriver]

Hey Everyone,

That's the great thing about all of us builders, we can be serious and we can be funny, but we never get mad at each other because we know things in this hobby always get better with time. 

In fact, take a look at this builder's YT video here:

https://youtu.be/O9qeuqSemBI

What do you notice? IMHO, it looks more like a full size aircraft; however, it's just 3 screens. He doesn't even have a MIP, but he has controls and a center screen (guessing GPS unit).

My point is, look how far a simple desktop setup can be made better by just a few ideas. Plus, if we think of what MSFS2020 might become (a spark if you will), as well as basing past things on FSX, P3D and XP, we should see a whole new group of builders get into the hobby.

In other words, since they can do more with less these days; albeit, they may not have all the functionality that we prefer, it'll still get more people involved and they'll bring new ideas. In which case it'll benefit all of us in the future.

If you just think back to 2009/2010 when this website was started, we were still enjoying FSX and XP (no P3D), and it was pretty much PM or SimA. Hardware wise it was just as limited.

Now, look at how far everything has come up until this point; thus, I can only say what a great time to live in for flight simulation....

John

PS Hi Joe, thank you for everything you share with us, without you providing insight we'd still be searching YT for a glimmer of things in MSFS2020 that pertain to us builders. 

[Joe Lavery]

PS Hi Joe, thank you for everything you share with us, without you providing insight we'd still be searching YT for a glimmer of things in MSFS2020 that pertain to us builders. 

Thank you John, and you have expressed what I was trying to say, only much more elegantly... 
Incidentally that cockpit is brilliant, makes you wonder why we go to all these lengths doesn't it.

[kattz]

Once ProSim is on board with FS2020, I'll buy it.  I am excited about it, but that AIO issue that a lot of YouTube posts miss is bothersome enough to wait until the bugs are worked out.

Otherwise, it's DCS for now on three screens and no pit.

Right now, my new liquid-cooled build is occupying my time.

[bernard S]

actully joking aside  msfs  is no brainer  i am lucky i only need visuals from it so 

[Joe Lavery]

actully joking aside  msfs  is no brainer  i am lucky i only need visuals from it so 

I think that's what most of us use with FSX, P3D, or X-plane anyway.
And like Kevin, I had to build a pretty hefty machine to run it on. Firstly it only runs on Windows 10, so I had to get that and to run it at the resolution and graphic setting I wanted, I built a new system.
This is what I now have.

Intel i7 9700K 3.60 GHz Processor with Corsair Liquid Cooler.
ASUS TUF Z390-Plus Gaming (Wi-Fi) LGA1151 Motherboard
32 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM
Gigabyte GTX 1080Ti, 11 GB GDDR5 Video card
1 x 1 TB Crucial NVMe M.2 SSD
1 x 6 Terrabyte Samsung Hard Drive.
32 inch 4K iiyama Monitor

This will migrate into my PIT (when and if) MSFS has the hooks to operate the PM system without any control issues.

[kattz]

I think that's what most of us use with FSX, P3D, or X-plane anyway.
And like Kevin, I had to build a pretty hefty machine to run it on. Firstly it only runs on Windows 10, so I had to get that and to run it at the resolution and graphic setting I wanted, I built a new system.
This is what I now have.

Intel i7 9700K 3.60 GHz Processor with Corsair Liquid Cooler.
ASUS TUF Z390-Plus Gaming (Wi-Fi) LGA1151 Motherboard
32 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM
Gigabyte GTX 1080Ti, 11 GB GDDR5 Video card
1 x 1 TB Crucial NVMe M.2 SSD
1 x 6 Terrabyte Samsung Hard Drive.
32 inch 4K iiyama Monitor

This will migrate into my PIT (when and if) MSFS has the hooks to operate the PM system without any control issues.

Intel i7-10700 octacore CPU
Asus ROG Maximus XII Formula LGA 1200 Intel Z390 mobo
16Gb X 4 (total 64Gb) Z.Skill NEO low latency DDR4 4400Mhz RAM
ASUS ROG RTX 2080 TI OC 11 Gb x 2 video cards
512Gb PCIe M.2 drive on mobo M.2 slot 1 for Win10 Pro
2TB PCIe M.2 drive on mobo M.2 slot 2 for user and program files
512Gb PCIe M.2 drive on mobo M.2 slot 3 for MSFS 2020
2Tb Samsung 890 Pro SSD for fast library
8Tb Seagate IronWolf hybrid HDD for misc library
Video cards cooled by 420mm radiator on front of case
CPU and VRMs cooled by 360mm radiator on top of case

Proverbial can o' whoop a$$ in a case.

[blueskydriver]

Hey Joe, thank you. Also, where did you buy all your PC items, one place or multiple?

Hey Kevin, like Joe, you provided a great shopping list, but where did you purchase everything?

I've been looking at investing into a setup like the two of you have, and in the past I purchased from NewEgg or TigerDirect. Likely, I'll go there again unless you guys have something better...

John

[Joe Lavery]

John,
The majority of the parts were bought from Amazon UK, who at the time were cheaper than the major PC sellers over here. But I think you guys in the US have a better range of sellers than we do.
I bought the RAM and SSD from a company called BOX and the Gigabyte  1080Ti from a guy on eBay. It's always a risk buying such items from eBay, but he had 100% feedback and as it happens it's been performing fine for over two months now.
With my rig  I get 50-60 frames a second with most of the sliders set to Ultra. These setting were set by the program when I installed it and I haven't changed them since.

Well today is the last day for those with Alpha and Beta versions of MSFS, they will not work after today. But I'm told I'll have the full version by this weekend.
But I expect to see thousands of screen shots and reports from all of you by then.       

The first flight should be to find your own house, isn't that what everyone does? I sincerely hope that those that buy it are as impressed as I was.
I'm not knocking our current sims, but IMHO this is a giant leap forward for our hobby.

Joe

[Neil Hewitt]

So technically the sim is already released - in Kiribati :-) People have found various ways to fool the Xbox app into thinking they are in the right timezone and are playing it already.

Testers are still (and will continue to be) under NDA, but anything that's public is fair game, so by now you'll doubtless know that there's no multi-screen, no out of the cockpit view without a VC, no pop-up gauges, and no multi-channel. I'm quite sure all of those will come in time (and there is at least a workaround for the non-VC cockpit view) except for multi-channel, which I don't expect the sim to ever natively support (ESP didn't, and anyway this is clearly an entertainment product), but I'm sure one of Wideview or Opus will get ported, or someone will come up with something new. As long as Position Freeze User is available via Simconnect then it's doable.

However, I don't expect these features to come soon. I expect Asobo to concentrate on fixing the huge long tail of bugs the testers have found for them, and the VR and world updates they've already announced. They say pop-up gauges are hard because of the way the rendering engine is designed. Multi-screen is something they want to do but they want to do it properly. If all of it happens in 2021 I'll be surprised.

This is an ingenious community so I'm sure people will start finding ways to integrate MSFS into simpits. It'll be fun to watch. But for now it's pointless for my setup. I may well buy it anyway and run it on my desktop setup with a HOTAS, but I'll need a GPU upgrade on that machine to do it!

What are others here going to do? Buy or wait?

[FredK]

So technically the sim is already released - in Kiribati :-) People have found various ways to fool the Xbox app into thinking they are in the right timezone and are playing it already.

Testers are still (and will continue to be) under NDA, but anything that's public is fair game, so by now you'll doubtless know that there's no multi-screen, no out of the cockpit view without a VC, no pop-up gauges, and no multi-channel. I'm quite sure all of those will come in time (and there is at least a workaround for the non-VC cockpit view) except for multi-channel, which I don't expect the sim to ever natively support (ESP didn't, and anyway this is clearly an entertainment product), but I'm sure one of Wideview or Opus will get ported, or someone will come up with something new. As long as Position Freeze User is available via Simconnect then it's doable.

However, I don't expect these features to come soon. I expect Asobo to concentrate on fixing the huge long tail of bugs the testers have found for them, and the VR and world updates they've already announced. They say pop-up gauges are hard because of the way the rendering engine is designed. Multi-screen is something they want to do but they want to do it properly. If all of it happens in 2021 I'll be surprised.

This is an ingenious community so I'm sure people will start finding ways to integrate MSFS into simpits. It'll be fun to watch. But for now it's pointless for my setup. I may well buy it anyway and run it on my desktop setup with a HOTAS, but I'll need a GPU upgrade on that machine to do it!

What are others here going to do? Buy or wait?

YES...and....NO.....

I am certainly going to buy it to see first hand what it is all about, but it is not going to replace P3DV4.5 in my cockpit sim.  For the time being MSFS2020 will reside on my personal desktop computer only.

I have a full-scale 737 cockpit and I use multi-channel projection display.  Given that I am flying a 737 the eye candy that is most important to me are the departing and arriving airports and weather display while in the air.  Since while in the air I am mostly flying at 35,000 ft detailed ground rendering really is not all that important....can't really view it that far up and through the clouds and haze etc.  In that regard I have 95 airport and city scenery add-ons for detail realism, and I most often fly in and out of only those.  (BTW...MSFS2020 to start has far fewer than that from what I understand).  I am also perfectly content with FSGRW as my weather engine.  And most of all I am content with both P3D and SimA performance right now.....no insane need to tweak things and absolutely no crashes....zero!

So yes,  I will hook up a joystick to my personal desktop computer so I can buzz my own house etc, but then again I can easily do that by just slewing around Googlemaps as well.  So I may quickly become bored with it.

That said, I am curious to see what it is all about, and hopefully MSFS2020 will eventually evolve into something useful for cockpitbuilders.  Hopefully!  And hopefully MS will not suck up all the flight sim energy only to have it all blow-up 3 years from now.

Fred K

[Trevor Hale]

I Have confirmed You can easily have an out of the cockpit view, the Aircraft config files are the same as before, just split into multiple files instead of one file. So aircraft config tinkering is as easy as before...

The Model (mdl) file goes away and is split into a few other files similar to Xplane.

The Cameras can be easily configured, and similar to P3D, that's why I figure multi display will be easily not far in the distance.

FSUIPC will be released tomorrow with limited functionality, (NO LVAR INTEGRATION) However still has full lua functionality.

Wach tomorrow night's twitch stream of mine, I will have my King Air running on 2020 Tomorrow night.  (With one outside view).  to some extent LOL

[blueskydriver]

Trevor, does that mean you'll have that instruction sheet/pdf ready for all us by then...lol!

Actually, you should do a YT live stream of setting everything up for a full size flight sim. Not so much for the regular folks here, but for all the new people getting into MSFS2020. They'll be looking for sure.

Already seeing a lot of videos hitting YT, but nothing regarding full size cockpits...

John

[jackpilot]

John...how old are U ?

I know , I know...still too young and enthusiastic to be wise !
 

[Joe Lavery]

See John, we knew Trevor would have it sorted....  

[blueskydriver]

Hey Guys, yep it's great hearing that Trevor is digging deep into this. And, by the way it sounds, we all should be rather familiar to this already.

For you Jack, I just hit 55 on August 7th, which is crazy for me since I don't feel that old. I guess there is truth to getting older, but staying young at heart!

John

[jackpilot]

55 ! just a KID !
I whish I would be back there 

[blueskydriver]

Hey Jack, you're still back here!

Look at your sim, it takes wisdom yes, but stamina of a younger man as well, and you're putting some of us young boys too shame!

It's all good buddy 😁

John