2:16
Settings page. Just left at "default" renderer (??). Hawaii looks more like this
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Category:Scr ... _in_Hawaii with ALS. Even with overlays off ALS generates cm scale detail on surfaces when regional definitions are developed and settings are turned up.
Partly there is a ui/ux issue - one that could probably be improved for the English version of 2020.2.x by changing text as it will be used for a few years. Maybe translations can be added with bugfix releases later.
"Default" renderer implies the renderer that is most accurate for the greatest number of scenarios. The one that people should be using, unless they know of a specific reason why another is better.
I also see ALS wasn't selected, likely as his GPU didn't have a graphics profile. A partial solution to this is possibly using a few conservative "safe" profiles to turn ALS on by default for GPUs faster than a safe minimum using GPU strings from
https://opengl.gpuinfo.org/. Additional levels can also max shaders, and to turn up scenery settings near max too - may have to be conservative with trees as they take up a lot of memory.
"Fallback/compatibility (old hardware)", "Compatibility (old hardware)", or even "Legacy (old hardware)" might be more suitable. Not sure about the exact wording.
ALS is more physically and perceptually accurate for more situations than others, as well as being more recent/modern, and should maybe have "default" in brackets - or "standard" if default will lead to confusion with the current default. There should be a mention that ALS can be faster than Fallback/compatibility for certain older hardware provided it supports shaders.
It's probably also better to have a short description of the render's goals and list the pros and cons of renderers in bullet points.
A cue in the launcher UI advising people that there is more settings/detail in the in-sim menus (he seemed surprised by lack of options), and maybe even the property browser for power users, might help.
- 0:19: "I'm genuinely reviewing Flightgear..because Microsoft refused to give me permission to post about Microsoft Flight simulator"
- 0:56: He didn't find the browse button on the launcher. The search bar is located on the top left, and is small. Maybe it should be larger, and located at the center(?) - eventually the metadata search would make searching even more useful. He also didn't use the drop down menu to find variants. Maybe it would help to have a more obvious cue there are variants or start modes, and how many variants there are e.g. Cessna 172p Skyhawk (Variant: 1 of 6) - or something very explicit to that effect.
- 7:30: "This flight simulator, it takes a while to figure out - I've only had about half an hour to prepare" many years and 100s of videos after start of channel to try do a video that is not a practical joke
. FG seems to be curiously invisible for those on social media. Glancing at his youtube channel video list [
1] by using the infinite scroll to the end and the ctrl+f search - a huge percentage of his videos are casual free/cheap flight simulators (GeoFS, infinite flight) that are overall less featured/quality - and there even flightsims implemented in roblox and other games. This is a lot of time put in. There are plenty of FS-x and x-p videos - implying yet more time. You can't say FG was overlooked because it was free, and you can't say it was overlooked as it was a bigger flightsim and he found it hard to learn those. He even has a video about the X-P Space shuttle (with a /massively/ placeholder version of a space shuttle heh) from a week ago [
2]. And another from 3 months ago [
3]. He seems to focus on silly/amusing videos, but even then there would have been enough material for videos if he tried the different start up modes and/or amusingly crashed the space shuttle - it seems that FG is curiously invisible again, with no one on social media he interacts seemingly having mentioned that the extremely detailed space shuttle project exists built on a huge amount of available data as it's a NASA craft. Similarly, I see various aircraft-in-space space videos on various sims that look far worse than the FG's Earthview renderer with high res textures. I see some extreme weather videos too - when FG has the most detailed terrain driven weather sim.
The takeaway - silly/amusing videos might not be what FG-ers think of when talking about FG on media, but it's probably symptomatic of a general invisibility that extends to other cases. It can probably can be side-stepped a lot, by updating outdated/obsolete parts of flightgear.org so there's at least an awareness of what FG can do.
Kind regards