Be Excellent To Each Other

Good god this looks amazing. If it had VR I'd be shopping for a new PC.

That's crying out for VR

August 18th! So can't wait for this one. They're digging holes outside my house for FTTP too. Wasn't too fussed but I'll be needing that bandwidth now.

Given that I splashed out for a HOTAS for Elite Dangerous, what's the current Flight Sim that's worth looking at?

In terms of civilian ones I think this might very well make them all a bit obsolete. I'd just wait a month. But you can play DCS to an extent for free and that's very detailed, X-Plane also has a good demo.

Nice, cheers

Downloading this now! Excited. However it's a 91GB download and BT failed, didn't finish the fibre install when they said. So I guess I'll get to play it on Wednesday or so.

152GB... Jesus.

Ah well, downloading anyway

I think that's the install size rather than the download.

Seems to be getting great reviews everywhere. Not been so hyped for a game for as long as I can remember

That's great. I can't remember which was the first one I played. I think it was probably early 90s, before that it was "Flight Simulation" on the Spectrum. I'm not generally into playing old games when there's so many new ones but if there was ever a genre that don't age well then it's flight sims.

Currently at 60GB downloaded!

No demo? Bah.

It's on Game Pass so not too much if you just wanted to check it out.

78GB!

Yeah, FS2020 is basically why I signed up to Game Pass. £1!

I changed my region to Australia last nght in order to start the download sooner. I hope they don't ban me or something.

I did wonder how you were doing so, as I'm not able to download it at the moment. I assumed you had a higher tier or something.

You should be able to by now, it was meant to be midnight last night for the UK.

Ah, sweet.

Fuckin hell. What a game. Wow!

Either my Internet's gone to dogshit, or (more likely) the Microsoft servers are being absolutely hammered. Taking bloody forever to download.

Had to restart my PC while it was downloading, so I hit Pause, left it for a minute and then closed the app.

Now when I open it up it just tells me to insert the game disc and hit OK to continue, or quit.

The game disc.

Somehow it'd lost my Game Pass, ffs.

There was something on reddit about this, have you tried launching from the Xbox Beta app?

I've just had a quick go on this. It's absolutely glorious looking. The level of detail is astounding!

I got a huge airplane to take off but quickly crashed. The same happened with a smaller plane.

Yeah, this was what fixed the "connection" - downloading again now. Only another 60GB to go.

Gosh. This looks nice. I'm tempted, I have to say. I looked at a video by Quill where he promised to fly over Cardiff from Cardiff Airport, but mistook Barry for our capital! Since I used to live in Barry got kind of kick a out of that too. It looks great! I'm wondering how my machine will run it. Ryzen 2600x, 1060 6GB and 32GB ram at 1440p. I'm quietly optimistic.

However if I do buy it to enjoy with my lovely old Thrustmaster Flight Stick (and it'll be the first pure flight sim I do buy, unless I count the highly accurate and true-to-life Crimson Skies) I'll probably wait until a couple of weeks now, when I'll have a week off to enjoy it.

Happy flying everyone out there, let me know where you're planning on flying and what you think of it!

Had a lovely VFR flight as the sun was setting earlier, jumped in a trusty old Cessna and set of from Penrith to go down through the Lake District. The hilltops were in cloud and so I stayed low and just flew along the valleys using familiar landmarks of lakes, towns and roads to mostly just follow the route I would drive. Down Bassenthwaite lake, over Keswick, Thirlmere, Grasmere, Rydal then along the length of Windermere.

After getting through the hills the low cloud gave way to some clearer skies. I made for the coast and headed out to sea over the offshore wind farms, climbed a couple of thousand feet to get my bearings and then pointed it straight across Morecambe Bay. Came down low over my house of course then along the coast and in to land at Blackpool. I did some actual flying lessons from there years ago and coming in to land felt so familiar. They've really nailed these light aircraft, the textures inside, the flight model and the sounds are all really, really good.

That sunset, though. I really should have paused to take some screenshots. It's beautiful what they've done with all this, the clouds and the way they've handled the changing light, so good. I thought the sky in Read Dead 2 was someting to behold at times but this is really something else.

Just wish I didn't have to work tomorrow.

I had a quick go on this before bed and I can totally see the appeal. Sitting alone in a dark room with the hum of a plane as you're flying over a dark UK... all on your own. Yeah, I like it.

Isn't it a bit like a paid-for version of Google Earth with a massive install?

Nothing like it.

It's free with Gamepass.

It's a flight simulator, there's a pretty heavy clue in the title (and I know there's a flight sim actually in Google Earth but no). But I get what you mean, I absolutely adore Google Earth VR and part of the appeal is a bit similar, but it all looks way better than Google Earth. Google Earth still feels like looking at a map or model of sorts but this feels like a recreation.

Just about to embark on the final 50 mile leg of a 1000 mile trip around the Sierra Nevada. Navigating with nothing but a static map, some written directions and a clock and a compass (and Google maps once when I got totally lost). Hopping between town and city runways and dirt and grass trips out in the back country in a puttering little Piper Cub type of a thing. Listening to some tunes and taking in the sights. What an absolute joy.

Morning sun glinting off Derwentwater on a quick scoot around the lakes this morning. Bit of a faster plane this time.

Mine's not working. I'll put some effort in to fix it tonight, perhaps.

Do it. It's the best game.

It says something that I hate "proper" flight sims with a passion but I've watched a few videos of this and I wish I had hardware that can run it, so I could give it a go.

Well it's absolutely still a flight sim, just an incredibly pretty one. So if you hate them as much as I hate, say, football management games then I don't think you'd have a great time with it anyway.

Installed this late last night and got in a couple of quick flights. I'm having a lot of trouble with my ancient QZ Predator joystick, the twisty-roll direction seems to get employed to the right on turning the stick left, and though it serves fine in American Truck I'm having a hard time getting anything resembling stable flight no matter how I tinker with the sensitivity and deadzone. Tch. Still, I managed to take off and fly around a bit.

Oooh. It's kidna splendid, isn't it? I flew over my friends house in Butler, PA, which is modelled pretty well despite being an obscure town populated by AI generated thingummies. I followed the road down past the steel mill we drove on the road trip and south into Pittsburgh, where I flew over and clocked from the air the garish bizarre house 'Randyland', my Air BnB, an amazing Orthodox church and the famous incline. I was able to follow streets I've walked and know them instantly for what they are, retracing my street photography explorations from the air. Cracking stuff. Pittsburgh looks great, though the bridges are solid and need custom-building.

I was surprised that it runs at a decent 30fps on High Settings with my Ryzen 2600x, 1060 6GB and 32GB RAM. It's great for just generally exploring and going ooooh over.

I am hilariously bad at knowing how to turn myself to approach for landing.

And at landing.

I've got an old Force Feedback 2 joystick which is really decent but I actually prefer using the 360 pad. It's got enough buttons for just hand flying small planes and I find it comfier for long flights. It does need a tweak of the deadzones and sensitivity, though. It defaults to no deadzone at all and those sticks don't center perfectly, it's way too sensitive on the defaults as well. I also dug out my TrackIR which makes the whole sight seeing thing much more enjoyable. Not least because it means I get to wear my special straw trilby flying hat that has the reflectors blu-tacked on.

Yesterday in the hour I had I felt reasonably impressed but not shaken in awe. I took off and flew from Butler to Pittsburgh slewing from side to side alarmingly. (This was before I'd sorted the controls out. I've fiddled with options a lot and it's a lot more manageable now, though I've had to nearly annihilate the rudder sensitivity.) I was impressed how aside from individual buildings being wrong it still felt like the place, and that I could navigate from the 30 miles from the small town to the big city. It looked pretty good, but it was early afternoon with no cloud, I was flying low altitude and I wasn't blown away.

This evening I upped the graphics settings a mite, not worrying myself if I dipped into the mid-twenties. I took a little pusher-propellor dinky two man cockpit into the skies above Canada's Vancouver Island. Scattered cloud at all altitudes, pre-dawn. My God.

First of all the ascent. Pulling up over the streets of Courtenay having taken off from Comox Valley Airport, the street-lamps all lit up. I decided to see how high I could fly in a dinky little plane before something disastrous happened. I flew West towards Comox lake nestled snugly in a mountain valley. Snaking rural roads alternately lit up and plunged back into darkness revealing glimpses of small mountain towns, glowing as if with strung-out fairy-lights - quite magical. Outside was the night and I was in my own little world with the engine throbbing in my headphones, punctuated by the odd rattle as I hit a brief air pocket. It really felt like those night-time cross-continental flights suspended high up in the void, feeling alone but and suspended in time.

The altitude clock kept its steady crawl. Ten thousand feet. As I rose higher the sun began to rise over the Strait of Georgia. The undersides of the clouds lit up in beautiful soft palette of ochre and salmon pink tones. The sea below took on the faintest glow, and the islands of Denman, Hornby and Texada lay dark and formless like sleeping giants. Up and up I rose, to twelve thousand feet. The cabin began to take on a soft roseate glow as I tilted towards the sun. Looking around I saw the still-dark Western sky and back to the sun the filtering of the light through the alternating layers of cloud. I imagined the people down below. Mothers and fathers waking to softly descend barefoot down the stairs, into the kitchen, flicking on the lights and reaching for the milk, the cereal boxes, kids still fast asleep up in their beds.

Fourteen thousand feet now. A gentle - almost subliminal - brittle crackling noise. I looked to the side and saw the window very slowly begin to ice up. The golden light traced out the spider-web threads of ice expanding into rivulets. It was mesmerising but of a sudden I began to wonder if this was indeed the limit. I pulled back on the throttle and began to descend.

I'd like to poetically wax on about a gentle descent down over the lapping shore of Union Bay, gracefully curving into Comox Airport in time for black coffee and a quick muffin in the airport cafe, but in reality my plane broke up mid-flight as, unused as I was to the tolerances of airframes, I committed to too steep a descent at around five-thousand feet whilst at the same time banking the aircraft. The sudden frightening and then fading sound of the piercing death-note accompanied by black screen was a jarring and mildly harrowing moment but it's not going to spoil my memory of a strangely magical experience staring into a PC monitor in a dimly lit bedroom.

I got it working! I had a quick play with KB+M and it's practically impossible

Still, I landed an Airbus in London. Central London, sadly, not at an airport.

Yeah I'm rocking a GTX 960 and it won't let me push the graphics settings above the very lowest. Everything feels a bit smudgy. Can imagine it being revelatory with more graphical umph.

Flying smaller planes away from cities tends to make it a lot easier on the computer and even the beautiful cities are ugly blights from a few feet in the air anyway. But yeah, it can give any system going a workout. People trying to run it all on ultra everything is like the new Crysis.

That game looks soooo pretty.

People buy this so we can make a Beex Squadron or something. It's ace!

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/27/2140 ... AA1vzBZkL8

Combining Pete's two current obsessions, people are using the real-time weather feature of MS Flight Sim to fly though Hurricane Laura