Join the beta for Microsoft Flight Simulator X
Want to help develop the next and fantastic Microsoft Flight Simulator? Then join the beta now available publicly on Steam, and share with Microsoft your experience flying the sim.
Everybody is so busy with what’s to come, that many don’t even think about what is available. But there are things happening to FSX, at least the Steam Edition, and by using it everybody can help Microsoft shape the next simulation coming. In fact, the same day that new videos for the next big simulation became public, silently, Microsoft Studios added a new page to their site, with a note on the release, stating:
New beta branch available on Steam!
Yes, there is a beta of FSX going on at Steam, so if you’ve the Steam edition of FSX, which now is back under Microsoft Studios as I wrote here previously, you can accept the invitation and help shape the new simulation Microsoft is creating, with the French company Asobo. It’s an opportunity to help define what the next simulation will be.
fsx-beta - External Beta
The information about the launch of the beta branch is also published on Steam news, and if you have FSX in your account you will probably see the announcement. According to the information available on Steam and replicated in the Microsoft Studios page, the fsx-beta - External Beta can be accessed by everyone.
This is the information published by Microsoft:
We’ve released a new beta branch for FSX that will help us gain valuable new telemetry data that will help us in the development of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. If you are interested in assisting us with this process please follow the link below and select the branch labeled fsx-beta — External Beta. Remember that you are always able to opt out and return to the normal branch at anytime.
Then there is information about how to set up the Steam Client for FSX Beta. So, the new beta will help Microsoft to better understand the preferences of the users still flying FSX-SE. It does not stop there, though, and this beta introduces a series of bug corrections, a clear suggestion that Microsoft has not forgotten its old simulation.
Live Weather is back
The complete list of updates is below — you can also see it on Steam and on the Microsoft Studios page — but one of the updates is important to many: Live Weather is now reintegrated, meaning you can get to fly with the real weather available for the area you chose. That’s great news for those who want it “as real as it gets”. I tried it yesterday, and it surely is working, although I had to choose something else for my inaugural flight in the beta, as it was raining cats and dogs.
Here is the list of fixes:
Turbine
Resolved issue in N1 values where some settings were set to zero
Fixed issue where fuel flow not saved and set to 0 when started in the air
Agent radar
Resolved in flight issue which resulted in intermittent crashes when using navigation way-points
Conversion
Impression fixes when converting knots to meters per second
Piston
Small fixes to oil pressure table
C172 oil pressure changed to start with a valid value
Live Weather
Reintegrated Live Weather
When a weather station METAR line reading is failing the data will now be extrapolated from the weighted mean of the closest available METAR sources, instead of resetting to default weather.
Remember, this is a beta
I’ve not used FSX-SE for a while, as my last installation was crashed by a Windows 10 update, and I decided it was time to move elsewhere. I invested in X-Plane 11, for which I’ve acquired a lot of stuff, and it was only recently I reinstalled FSX-SE, to try a mod that has nothing to do with airplanes. FSX-SE was dormant in my Steam hard-drive and I believe it would continue to do so, if it wasn’t for the news of the beta. So I got the Cessna 172 ready, fired up and flew around.
It’s nice to go back to a simulation that was originally launched in North America in October 17, 2006, and try it all over again. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but this beta version appears on November 15, 2019, that’s 13 years and a little over one month after the original. Is someone at Microsoft looking at calendars, and making things happen at about the same period of the year?
I tried the beta with Ultimate Traffic Live and the DA-40 from Alabeo without any problems, but there may be some compatibility issues: Orbx’s ObjectFlow, for example, does not work and crashes the sim. After all, it’s a beta!
I quickly reinstalled Orbx’s Pacific NorthWest, along with Global, North America openLC and other stuff, including Bowerman airfield, which was my key stop in the region for a long time. Having all that running with the graphics almost all maxed up continues to show that computers have a hard time running simulations. My i7–9700K, RTX 2070 and 32GB RAM continue to give me somewhere between 50 and 70fps in FSX-SE, values that make me wonder how much of a computer will be needed to run the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. I believe that’s a question everybody is asking, especially after the recent release of two new videos showing the simulation.
Another aspect that worries me is Virtual Reality. With X-Plane 11 and DCS — and Elite:Dangerous in outer space — VR became a must for me, so going back to FSX-SE is a painful experience. I had to pick my DelanClip from the box and get the head-tracking system working again, something I thought I would not have to do again. Flying in FSX-SE without VR is difficult now, — it does not feel natural — and I wonder if the same will happen with Microsoft Flight Simulator, when it becomes available.
I sincerely hope the team behind the new project can find ways to add VR, because, the more I see the videos they share with the community, the more I believe VR and the new sim are like hand and glove. I’ve the new Microsoft Flight Simulator in my list of “first day buy”, but I am afraid that it will not offer VR at launch. And, I am also wondering if my PC will be able to run it and how. But, as everybody else, I am excited, because what I’ve seen represents a huge step forward in an area we all love.
