Be Excellent To Each Other

Got to admit I tried this last night, in a small twin engined thing. It was this crazy, angry looking cloudscape but flying in it wasn't really any different. The wind speeds were high but the air wasn't hugely turbulent so the plane didn't really care.

Were they wearing US Civil War outfits and eating slices of chorizo as they did so? Because if so, 4/4.

Might have to get into this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDYjz_pO9To

I downloaded this as it's on the xbox pass thingy, and I don't think my PC can run it. It was very laggy on low settings. It does look fantastically beautiful though

What are your specs? Mine's not an outright beast (1060GFX card, 2600X Ryzen) but I'm surprised I've managed to hit High settings with a consistent 28fps, which is kind of all you need for a tootling along flight simulator. There's some options that are more hungry than others, natch, but I hear a big load on the CPU is the interior cockpit and there's been a tweak on the config file touted in reddit that's bringing a 25% frame-rate jump or more to a bunch of computers. It does it by reducing the FPS refresh rate of the largely static instruments, and it's kind of unnoticable but really bumps up the frames.

MarkG, that really looks tempting. Especially as I enjoy such shenanigans in American Truck Simulator. I'd for sure choose the Pacific North West around Oregon. The sheer variety of scenery, and not too far from the Seattle coastline and the islands around Vancouver, or a trip down to San Francisco. I went out flying last night to central Oregon to fly over the three abandoned old 19th century wood frame settler houses I hunted out on a trip over there many years ago. I found them! They looked like new wooden frame houses, but the property grounds were the same, the trees outside were the same from my photographs and memories and I clocked them accurately from the air!

I decided to take some snapshots with Nvidia Game Overlay, but it didn't work properly and didn't save. Bah. MSFlight, get yourself a proper screenshot camera facility please, it's insane you can't in a game which is basically sight-seeing. Any, flew about in my old skool propellor Cesna which I'm falling in love with and had so much fun visiting the places I'd hiked (Smith State Rock! Prineville where I went on a bar-hop with that weird guy who was straight out of Always Sunny casting, Patrick Fucker McGee!) that I ran out of fuel and had to glide down into a field amidst a woodland. Just made it. Looked up the road and there was a farm I could call a taxi from. Phew. What a great game.

I set up an account in OnAir for a free trial. I thought that flying around Hawaii might be nice so I set it all up and then realised that there's not many airstrips and the whole place is a bit small and fucking miles from anywhere in the middle of the sea. Probably couldn't have picked a worse place for this. So after a quick rethink of the business model I have decided that for the time being at least Hawaiian Air Haulers will be operating out of Blackpool.

Actually scratch that. It would take two days to relocate apparently so I'll stick with plan A and do a bit of island hopping to get some cash behind me.

Is there a career mode then?

No, it's a third party thing. A website and a separate bit of software that runs on your PC and talks to the game.

This was all going pretty well until earlier today. I was having a ball hopping around the Hawaiian islands and getting paid for it. It was meant to be a nice short cargo run that would get me back to my home airport. It was also night time which might normally present an additional challenge but not today since I had watched a ten minute YouTube video and was now fully up to speed with instrument flying and autopilot. So I loaded up the cargo and departed into the night, climbed to a thousand feet or so, set a heading, turned on the autopilot and dialled in a steady climb to 3000ft at 500ft per minute with the intention of going to grab a coffee.

I watched for a bit feeling pretty proud of myself as the plane made its turn and dutifully settled into the climb. With the plane doing its thing I was able to hop outside to look around and what a view. Moonlight reflected off the still ocean and the night sky was a spectacular backdrop to the silhouetted Mauna Kea. But I realised my unfortunate mistake just a few minutes after the nick of time. The plane, heavy with fuel and cargo was still in its climb when I noted that the trees and buildings, barely visible in the pitch dark below were somehow looking a lot larger than they should given that I was now 2500ft up. What I had failed to appreciate was that Mauna Kea - the massive, dormant volcano at the center of the island is actually the whole island and so the slopes go all the way out to the edge.

Guessing I was still perhaps 1000ft in the air I increased the desired rate of climb and gave full throttle but it was no good, these were the actions of a fool, there never was any way to outclimb the steepening slope and the ground only got nearer. In a last ditch attempt I snatched control back from the AP and desperately attempted to do what I should have right away, make a turn and save the doomed flight. But the trees were in front now, the little Cessna, engine screaming was already approaching a stall and my heavy control inputs were the final straw, the left wing stopped flying first and it abruptly turned over and crashed into the forest killing the plane, the pilot and the cargo. Tragic.

If only the cargo was Uhu Por...

Gonna give this Flight Simulator thingy a go. First up, my upstairs PC. i3, 8GB RAM, GTX 970 4GB. Waaaaay below par. Should be interesting

What a rubbish GPU. Where did you get that?

It runs decently on my GTX 980, but then I've got 16GB and a Ryzen 3600 so in my case the GPU is probably the bottleneck.

I haven't played since the weekend before last though, as I had a horrific bout of what I think was motion sickness that fucked me up for nearly 2 days, and playing this is the only thing that I can think of as the cause.

Fleeced some fool on an internet forum

Been meaning to get a bit more RAM anyway. Maybe this is the excuse. If I get a 16GB kit for the "downstairs" PC, then the "upstairs" PC gets a boost to 16GB by default.

Well, it runs. Not well. Seems to be the CPU choking it up.

Don't think it's worth tweaking the settings to get it working well when I can just install it on my other, better PC. PC gaming is fun!

Not surprisingly, it runs much better on my other PC. I took off from Liverpool in a Cessna and buzzed my house . I can see myself losing a few hours to this, it's so pretty!

Amazing insight there, Davpaz!

Yeah, this is great fun. On the advice of my daughter, I just took off from teesside airport in a jumbo jet and landed in the river next to the Riverside Stadium. Fun!

a real human being

and a real heroooooo

Oops, turns out I was capped at 30fps for no reason. 60fps works fine on my PC. Doh!

Been absolutely smitten with this again since they added VR. I've found myself spending a completely relaxing hour or so each evening. Some tunes on Spotify and puttering my way around a short-hopping VFR tour of the UK. Taking the weather as I find it although changing the time so it's daylight, but sometimes not and admiring all the pretty lights as I try my best to follow the roads and navigate to my next destination without cheating.

I had been flying Cessnas or Piper Cub but I sprang for my first add-on just now. £12.99 on this beautifully modelled Waco YMF-5:



It has a decent turn of speed, great visiblity and the big seven cylinder radial chugs away nicely in the backgound.

Is that an in-game shot or a photo?

It's from the game. Not mine I just grabbed it from somewhere.