Microsoft FSX Real-Life Weather

SockPuppet wrote in news:MPG.21872f2936054301989692
@news-server.hot.rr.com:

In article ,
says...
What bad habit was it?


Joystick inputs (for the one I have anyway) are impossible to adjust
correclty to mimic a real yoke. There are dead areas and voltage jumps
in the pots that don't exist in a cable control system, so you wind up
making sudden small corrections to keep a SIM landing smooth.

In a Cessna 152 on landing I tended to make very small, jerky, periodic
pull-backs on the yoke -- completely unnecessary and WRONG.

But once she pointed it out it wasn't hard to stop doing.

I imagine the fly by wire sticks in sophisticated newer aircraft don't
have dead spots and voltage jumps.



I fly some of the most sophisticated sims ever made and they still don't
fly like real airplanes.

they're good for procedures and illustrating how an ADF approach should
look and that is about it.



Bertie

Jay Honeck wrote in
oups.com:

And I thought he'd gone away for a few days... Since mxsmanic has
never flown anything other than his computer game, he will never be
able to make a comparison to actual flying, no matter how much he
tries to argue to the contrary.

So what? Aren't you (and the rest of you never-say-die MX-bashers)
getting just a BIT tired of this game?

Nope.



Bertie

george writes:

Yes. And?

And the same software drives the sim in both cases. It's the same "game."

Those who try the Kiwi appear to, in the main, be real live pilots.

Whether or not the sim is a game has nothing to do with the people using it
(or "playing the game"). If a six-year-old steps into a full-motion sim, that
doesn't turn the sim into a game.

Or do you think that a sim flight game player is a 'pilot' ?

Some are, some aren't. But that has nothing to do with the nature of the sim.

You're making a distinction that doesn't really exist. Better to be
controlled by reason than by emotion.

SockPuppet writes:

Though I haven't
done it you can also play with various GPS devices without having to buy
them (much of those devices' functionality is recreated).

The Garmin GPS units are recreated with complete accuracy if you use certain
add-ons, since the simulation software is actually written by Garmin. They do
everything the real ones do, and you can step away from the sim and into a
cockpit equipped with the same real-world unit and use it effectively without
missing a beat.

But for actually handling the plane: stalls, unusual attitudes, spins,
wind gust corrections on landing, real emergency procedures, etc, it
does not help you (IMHO).

The weaknesses of a PC sim are the lack of motion, limited visibility, and the
differences in controls. Anything that depends on either of these will be
hard to simulate, although more elaborate sim set-ups can mitigate some of
these problems. Since there's a lot more to flying than VFR, these
limitations are not as great as they seem, unless flying a tiny plane strictly
under VFR is your only ambition.

The weather stuff is okay but innacurate -- it often only gets the
weather kind of close to the airport selected.

If you use something like ActiveSky, the weather will be identical to that of
the real world (although obviously the individual clouds will not have the
same shape).

Mxsmanic wrote in
:

george writes:

Yes. And?

And the same software drives the sim in both cases. It's the same
"game."

Those who try the Kiwi appear to, in the main, be real live pilots.

Whether or not the sim is a game has nothing to do with the people
using it (or "playing the game"). If a six-year-old steps into a
full-motion sim, that doesn't turn the sim into a game.


Maybe not, but if you stepped into a photo booth it would turn it into a
horror show.


Or do you think that a sim flight game player is a 'pilot' ?

Some are, some aren't. But that has nothing to do with the nature of
the sim.

You're making a distinction that doesn't really exist. Better to be
controlled by reason than by emotion.




You don't fly, therefore you can't say.

You will never fly.


Ever.

Bertie

"Darkwing" theducksmail"AT"yahoo.com writes:

I already do! I've had every MSFS since the mid-80's when it was still wire
frames on my hard drive-less Tandy, but as an ACTUAL pilot it isn't
near the fun and experience that I get sitting behind the controls of an
actual airplane.

And yet you've had every MSFS since the mid-80s. Hmm. It's not that fun but
you keep buying it.

This past year I've put in over 720 hours of simulation. If I wanted to do
that in real life, even on a very tiny airplane, it would cost me $253,800 in
rental fees (not counting $56,000 to get the pilot's license and IR).
Overall, even if the sim doesn't provide quite the same experience, it
provides a lot more bang for the buck. And unless you're absolutely hellbent
on experiencing some aspect of flying that only the real aircraft provides,
simulation can be more than sufficient to deal with a love of aviation.

The situation is even more lopsided if you like to fly airliners.

I also fly RC planes but it isn't near as much fun as flying a
real plane as well.

I've never been able to get into RC aircraft. When they can fly at a speed
that matches their scale, maybe I'll be more interested. Flying at Mach 7 and
pulling 350 Gs isn't very realistic.

Tomorrow I'm going overseas for business and I have to
sit in the back of a Delta flight and I'm sure that won't be as much fun as
flying the plane either.

Nor will it be as much fun as the simulator.

Dan Luke writes:

And it will actually *help* you learn to fly a full scale airplane, as opposed
to MSFS, which will teach you bad habits you will have to unlearn.

There are important differences between RC flight and real flight, at least as
many as there are between sim flight and real flight.

Paul Tomblin writes:

When you start to look *down* on clouds, we'll respect your opinion about
weather.

I've done that, too. Your respect for my opinion (or lack thereof) is
irrelevant to me.

SockPuppet writes:

In some ways a sim is harder to fly, I think.

One time my flight instructor was over at my house. She wanted to try
out the MSFS because she thought it might have been helping me advance
faster (I don't know that it did, but maybe).

My instructor is rated for aerobatics instruction.

The sim is so limiting in terms of feedback and vision and control
inputs that she just couldn't do any of the tricks she normally can do.
She and I got a good laugh as she jerked around in her chair and then
get lost on final and stalled out 100 feet above the runway. KABOOSH! Of
course the price of "fokking up" is nil in a sim. So what if you spin in
from 100 feet in MSFS?

This illustrates the point several people made of a) sims not being
enough like real planes and b) not being as much fun, but also I think
c) you can put the plane in places you'd never put it in real life (not
necessarily stalls at 100 feet above the runway) and then go have a
whiskey after it explodes -- if it explodes.

It also makes it easy to identify pilots who can't fly on instruments (because
if you can fly on instruments, you can fly the sim).

Aerobatics is probably about the worst thing to attempt in MSFS.

I picked up one bad habit from MSFS from the way the joystick worked
while touching down and my instructor caught it early on during training
and I made the problem go away without further ado.

What bad habit was that?

SockPuppet writes:

I imagine the fly by wire sticks in sophisticated newer aircraft don't
have dead spots and voltage jumps.

I'm sure they do, but they are replaced when such problems develop, or perhaps
before they develop, if the right schedules or diagnostic tools are in place.