DISCLAIMER (written on May 2023):
The World Tour I was logging here has been obviously cancelled long time ago. I'll give an explanation of this. However, I'm planning to start a new one very soon. Before doing that, I want to post those pending entries I had from 3 years ago, as well as the last legs I did before cancelling. Therefore, there will be a few more entries these days, to complete the old Tour (8 more legs till Paro) and then I'll start the new World Tour again.
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It has been a great experience so far to discover the Middle East in this Tour. Crossing Arabia was something I wanted to do for a long time, and the last leg along the iranian south coast has been amazing. All this was done in 8 legs, covering about 1500 nm of stunning desert and coastal landscapes.
But now, some kind of news. It has been a great experience to visit these countries with X-Plane 11 and orthos made with ortho4xp. I had already flown some of these legs, in FSX, years ago, on my beloved Mooney Bravo. So many great memories came out during this stage and I could recognize many of the natural landmarks such as mountains, bays and so.
And now we have MSFS 2020. I have been inactive for a long time. After testing MSFS for a month after its release, I decided that it was still not ready to be used as a serious simulation engine. But it was so beautiful that, for a while, I decided to wait and see what happened with its development.
Currently (8 months after the release), MSFS is not a serious alternative for study level simulation yet. However, they have fixed many bugs and improved some features that, at least, leave some of the default propellers at the level of those default in X-Plane.
So, will I continue the World Tour on MSFS? To be honest, I don't know yet. The Baron has been more or less fixed in the last patch (what they call Sim update 3), so at least the mixture is finally modeled and the ceiling is a bit more realistic (FL230 instead of FL+300 as before). Cowl flaps do "something" in the sense that move the EGT indicators. But, of course, no damage is modelled. And having a glass cockpit is not something I like, but not a limiting factor in terms on continuing the Tour. IVAO and FSEconomy work perfectly fine.
As "pros" for MSFS, weather is simply amazing and landscapes in flat regions and cities are usually superb. However, the mesh is so poor that hills and mountains are hard to see. Asobo claims to fix this along 2021, but I'm not hopeful on getting a mesh of the quality I got until now. And the resolution of the orthos is not as great as those made by ortho4xp. A positive point though is that I have to visit Japan and USA, 2 of the theoretically best countries in MSFS.
Finally, the main "con", together with the poor mesh, is the lack of a failure system or something similar to the REP package I'm using with the Baron right now. If I go on with MSFS, there won't be failures, locked gears, emergency landings or maintenance to do.
So, in conclusion, either I wait till the mesh is fixed and a study level Baron shows up in the market, or I switch to a brand new glass cockpit Baron and continue with the awesome weather system and a landscape that, although not great in mountains, is far better in flats and cities.
The third option is to return to the X-plane installation and continue as until now. But, to be honest, all the work of preparing orthos for half of the world, while I have MSFS sitting there with similar landscapes ready to use, is something that bothers me.
I'll take a decision one of these days. Anyway, nobody read this, so... :D
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