NZFF

Every now and again, I fire up AFS2. I really wish that IPACS would do something with it, there is so much potential there and yet they don't seem to be doing anything with it. The EC135 is really great but they've completely neglected the R22. Seems it's up to the community to make the big advances.


Heading out from Deer Valley. A police air wing is based there IRL.






Scottsdale Airport




I shut an engine down just to see how it would go... heaps of power of course but the FLI changed and the other engine compensated perfectly.




Mesa Gateway airport



Massive potential in this sim but the reason that I don't use it a lot is that there's nothing for me to do. Without extra scenery, there's nothing to explore. Once I got north of Phoenix to the little town that we stayed for a month and a half, it was difficult to even recognise it because of the low quality old imagery. I don't really want to buy all of ORBXs addons for it either as it's really expensive and it still doesn't give me very big areas to play with. I hope the community starts creating more quality airports and areas to fly around. Didn't mean to start bit**ing but I've seen it time and time again where a sim is on the cusp of greatness and then it just stops.

You said it..
Every time though, when I decide to dump the sim, someone comes up with something absolutely amazing and hooks me again.
What would you improve on the R22?

Great post Nick, and like Charl I agree 100%....but as Charl also said (or similar), as soon as my finger is on the delete button something pops up ie Dash -8 and the Lynx.

Well, they're a small team and they all have day jobs and families. One member was out of play because in his day job he was overloaded by the Covid crisis..
Comparing what they have achieved in 3 years with what MS spent 30 years on is very much in IPACS' favour. They do good work, it just takes time.
There has always been a group of what I call 'professional complainers' in the IPACS Forum and I am thinking of creating a template for them, something like :
"I noticed the texture used on the inside of the nosewheel tyre on the B58 is not really dark enough. That was nearly three hours ago, and IPACS still haven't released an update to fix it. That's not what I paid $60 for... etc etc " which does not help at all.
That said, I think they could be a little less protective of their coding. Some of the forum community are very skilled, and willing to contribute, and I think that might help.
I am staying with it.

Charl wrote:You said it..
Every time though, when I decide to dump the sim, someone comes up with something absolutely amazing and hooks me again.
What would you improve on the R22?

The R22 itself isn't too bad, the flight model has become a little odd but it's still very usable. The trouble comes with the sim itself where you can't change the fuel load. In an R22 this is pretty critical. No carb heat is modelled, again, pretty important in R22 flying. There are some small systems quirks but it is overall pretty good.

emfrat wrote:Well, they're a small team and they all have day jobs and families. One member was out of play because in his day job he was overloaded by the Covid crisis..
Comparing what they have achieved in 3 years with what MS spent 30 years on is very much in IPACS' favour. They do good work, it just takes time.
There has always been a group of what I call 'professional complainers' in the IPACS Forum and I am thinking of creating a template for them, something like :
"I noticed the texture used on the inside of the nosewheel tyre on the B58 is not really dark enough. That was nearly three hours ago, and IPACS still haven't released an update to fix it. That's not what I paid $60 for... etc etc " which does not help at all.
That said, I think they could be a little less protective of their coding. Some of the forum community are very skilled, and willing to contribute, and I think that might help.
I am staying with it.

I'm pretty impressed with the EC135. It's easy and fun to fly but as far as I can tell, fairly realistic. The R22 is still pretty good but it hasn't been improved upon since release. My main issue is really that there isn't much in the way of decent scenery and things to look at or do. Having buildings and cars on the road is a big thing for me. Thankfully, as you demonstrated the other day, that is already working on a small scale. Utah and Colorado seem to be a lot better in that respect with the DLC from IPACS. The other thing is as you mentioned that they seem to make it difficult to developers to be innovative like they can be with XP.