The base game is very very sparse compared to newer offerings like XPlane or MSFS.
Due to its long history of development it has some of the most well received third party aircraft add-ons, but be warned, these will cost more than the sim itself.
If you want a video game, you should get the new MSFS. If you want something more realistic you should get P3D + third party aircraft for airliners or XPlane for GA aircraft (+ setup ortho scenery for XPlane), but much of the ecosystem is slowly releasing MSFS ports too.
I am a little worried for what will happen to hobbyist flight sims after MSFS though. A large part of its appeal is the bing maps powered streaming of good terrain and other map features, and I suspect Microsoft won't maintain that forever. If they lose interest for a similar length as between FSX and Microsoft Flight or between Microsoft Flight and MSFS, that could be a bad time for the flight sim world if they've gotten too used to MSFS.
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If you do get into the P3D third party ecosystem, be warned that many of the developers are older hobbyists turned devs which have been in their own universe and so can have weird ideas from time to time. Like a support system that is a public forum where you must manually sign your real name at the end of each post or get banned (PMDG), or uploading the chrome username/password DB of suspected hackers based on a check for username (FlightSimLabs).
X-plane 12 is currently in Alpha and Looks pretty interesting. I think there's no need to worry about that going away. MSFS is of course looking pretty good; but in terms of rendering capabilities, X-plane 12 looks like a big update as well.
I think when it comes to simulation fidelity, it still has a nice edge over the Microsoft ecosystem. Though that did improve with their latest version. In terms of third party aircraft, there are interesting products for both simulators. Probably more for MS; but there are a few nice ones for X-plane as well.
P3D seems like it has served its purpose. It was a nice upgrade before MSFS 2020 became a thing for users stuck in the MS ecosystem without meaningful updates to their simulator for a decade or so. Now that they have released (and given how great it is), there probably still is a niche market for people with older setups that are happy to keep on using that; especially those that invested in third party aircraft. Of course, most relevant aircraft are probably also available for MSFS 2020 at this point and possibly in an improved or nicer version.
Other than that, I don't see any good reasons for new users to want or need this. Correct me if I'm wrong.
AFAIK the flight model of MSFS has always been trash, it's a bunch of lookup tables that kind of approximate a real plane in the most standard situations - there are no real aerodynamic calculations. MSFS can be used for serious training in navigation, procedures, cockpit instruments and such.
Pilot here. The MSFS flight model is so bad that I found it actually counterproductive. Also, the avionics are awful, they basically have a dozen of the most basic functions and that's about it. It's more like a game, not a sim. And yet, I do find myself using it still. Why? The graphics are insane. If I'm doing a flight to somewhere new, I like doing a simulated flight first in order to get a better understanding of the terrain and more importantly, layout of the arrival airport and visual cues. I still find it very useful for flight planning in that regard.
The MSFS flight model is so terribly bad that people have 'successfully' landed absurdly too-large craft from 757 all the way up to Antonov-225 size at Saba and also taken off from the same airfield.
Your mistake is using default aircraft - most consumer simulators will have poor renditions of aircraft that ship with the base game, mainly because the majority of development time is spent on core mechanics and the game engine. Download some high quality 3rd party aircraft and it’ll change your mind.
Most modules for DCS use lookup tables computed in a similar way to X-Plane. (The lookup tables are essentially a computational cache of the element modeling.)
I recall Flight Unlimited[1] made a big deal of their flight model which incorporated "real-time computational fluid dynamics". I'm not a pilot but I found it very compelling. It was groundbreaking for its time.
None of the rest of Looking Glass' flight sims used the first game's fluid dynamics model.
I’m sure you could make a deep learning model approximation of the computational fluid dynamics that would be much computationally efficient. Allowing form more detail and or faster execution.
If you care about computational efficiency, build a lookup table and cache it. Flight models generally deal with a known, bounded problem space rather than novel inputs.
In FSX and previous editions of Flight Simulator this was true. However, MSFS uses blade element theory, the same technique X-Plane uses, and recently introduced CFD. Load into the sim, turn on developer mode and enable the aerodynamics debug options to see it in action.
Can't edit anymore - I was actually thinking of the old MSFS, pre product cancellation and resurrection. I didn't know much about the new one except that the graphics are great.
> A large part of its appeal is the bing maps powered streaming of good terrain and other map features, and I suspect Microsoft won't maintain that forever.
There's a mod that makes it use Google Maps instead. In many places, it is better by leaps and bounds.
If you've ever flown really low in MSFS outside the specially crafted cities like SF you'll see that it's not really up for a ground level sim level of detail yet. I guess you could do with street view images what MS has down with satellite photos, but it's also exponentially more data.
>I guess you could do with street view images what MS has down with satellite photos, but it's also exponentially more data.
Unless every street in the world is scanned quarterly, or more frequently, the data would be laughably stale. That said, people would still flock to GTA World, or even GTA USA if it got made.
These addons are effectively desktop software running as your user, just like Chrome. If Chrome can extract your saved usernames/passwords, then another program can replicate that functionality. They could require a master password and encrypt, but then people would use it less. They could also push it to a cloud service and only pull down relevant passwords at usage time, but is that good for user control of data?
Due to its long history of development it has some of the most well received third party aircraft add-ons, but be warned, these will cost more than the sim itself.
If you want a video game, you should get the new MSFS. If you want something more realistic you should get P3D + third party aircraft for airliners or XPlane for GA aircraft (+ setup ortho scenery for XPlane), but much of the ecosystem is slowly releasing MSFS ports too.
I am a little worried for what will happen to hobbyist flight sims after MSFS though. A large part of its appeal is the bing maps powered streaming of good terrain and other map features, and I suspect Microsoft won't maintain that forever. If they lose interest for a similar length as between FSX and Microsoft Flight or between Microsoft Flight and MSFS, that could be a bad time for the flight sim world if they've gotten too used to MSFS.
---
If you do get into the P3D third party ecosystem, be warned that many of the developers are older hobbyists turned devs which have been in their own universe and so can have weird ideas from time to time. Like a support system that is a public forum where you must manually sign your real name at the end of each post or get banned (PMDG), or uploading the chrome username/password DB of suspected hackers based on a check for username (FlightSimLabs).