> I enjoy flight sims, but I'm not sure I want to actually get a license.
This was me in late 2021 / early 2022.
I urge you to get a discovery flight! I did, and now I'm almost finished with my instrument rating. One of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. I love flying so much - more than I ever could have imagined.
Your wallet won't like it though.
If you use reddit I'd recommend lurking r/flying. Great community of pilots ranging from students to hobby pilots to 747 captains.
Totally fair point. I think VATSIM shines in IFR yet MSFS arguably shines at lower altitudes / in a more VFR way where you can sort of do whatever you want (i.e. don't have to fly an assigned heading or route).
I think flying VFR in an unrealistic way (ignoring airspace, altitude restrictions etc.) is plenty fun.
But, if you want to fly "realistic" VFR you could consider PilotEdge. It's like vatsim but more heavy on GA and commonly used by real life student pilots that want to practice procedures and ATC comms as close as possible to real life.
Step 1: Have an interest for it. It sounds like you might!
Once you know you want to, I think YouTube is a really fantastic resource. Also an active community on reddit (r/flightsim, r/MicrosoftFLightSim etc).
I recommend Microsoft Flight Simulator for most people just because it visually looks the best. People will say other sims have better flight dynamics but I'd argue that doesn't matter for 99.9% of people.
You need a pretty good PC to run MSFS though. There's also an Xbox version but it is less extensible. For example, you can't do VATSIM on Xbox.
I think at first you can just spawn on runways with the plane on and treat it more as a game than a simulator.
Then you can start spawning at parking spots which will have your plane turned off. You can just youtube "<plane name/type> cold and dark start" and you'll get plenty of videos that show the procedure of getting the plane started (it is more complex than starting a car).
Above is true whether you start out flying a Cessna 172 or a Boeing. Neither way is technically wrong in the sim, lol.
Note MSFS itself has a "learn to fly" section which teaches you some fundamentals. You could consider that a lightweight curriculum.
Once you want to get more serious you could look up the FlightInsight youtube channel. Real pilots use it to learn. Also, there is a service similar to VATSIM called PilotEdge which is like a more realistic version of VATSIM. One of the things it offers is a training curriculum that goes into way more depth than MSFS's native one: https://www.pilotedge.net/pages/training-program-overview. But note this is if you really wanna take it seriously. It teaches you things like airspace considerations and more. It's frequently used by real student pilots.
I got my PPL irl last summer. IMO PilotEdge is fantastic for real pilots/student pilots that want to practice realistic VFR and/or IFR procedures.
But if you want to just "have fun" VATSIM is the way to go, at least for me.
Like PilotEdge I always use with a Cessna 172 and pair the sim up with ForeFlight. I'll expand my planes on it as I expand the planes I fly in real life. But the goal is to mimic real training as close as I can.
I've been intrigued by VATSIM for over a decade now, but never tried it for a few reasons, including:
* I don't think I would handle stressful situations very well.
* I have no experience on either side, and find it difficult to get interested in the actual flying part, so ATC would be the absolute most I could do.
* And perhaps most importantly, I have no intention of actually pursuing an ATC career, and I worry that I'd be wasting people's time if I tried to do anything.
But despite all that... I'm still interested. I might need a lot of mentoring if I tried, though, especially since I'm not as passionate as I imagine many others would have been.
Given all this, do you think it's something worth trying? Or is it the sort of thing where I need to be more self-directed than I am? (Is mentoring even a thing in VATSIM?)
If you're not interested in the actual flying part then I'm not sure if it is worth it?
I think the path for most people is first they get interested in flight simulation, frequently in the context of flying airline jets. They start learning how that airliner works. How to start it up. How to program a flight plan & performance figures into it. How to use the autopilot. The concept of SIDs and STARs (departure and arrival procedures) (and again how to program them into the plane) and finally learning about all the different types of approaches like an ILS approach which allows the plane to break out of extremely low level clouds (think 200 feet, sometimes less!). And finally, how to perfect landings.
They do all of that usually offline. On their own, or with some plugins that inject fake AI traffic to make it a bit more immersive.
Then finally, once they have a grip on most of the above, then they hop onto VATSIM to add the challenge (just at start) and fun of talking to ATC and listening to other pilots. It just is really a great immersion factor to know there is another human being operating the plane that you're taxiing behind.
But if none of that initlal stuff sounds very interesting to ya then (1) no problem!! It's understandably not everyone's cup of tear but then also (2) probably not worth getting into VATSIM.
But if VATSIM on its own kind of intrigues you then maybe you can live vicariously through people on Twitch playing MSFS on it, or YouTube searching "msfs vatsim full flight"
Thank you for the reply, and sorry for my delayed response.
I actually meant being in VATSIM from the ATC side of things, not as a pilot! (Since the ATC side is all volunteers as well.) You seem to be describing how a pilot would be on VATSIM... though then again, maybe that's how a lot of ATC personnel get involved?
Sometimes when I look things up, I find forum discussions from over 15 years ago. It's interesting observing how at first you might not realize it, and then they make references that make you look at the date and you realize you're reading a back and forth discussion that took place over a decade ago and it's still available to look at. Do those people still have those same interests? So many little meaningless questions.
Anyways. Randomc omment but your comment reminded me of this lol.
A lot of this kind of work ends up being repetitive-- like multiplying two matrices together that have a few thousand entries each. These are the sorts of things that GPU's do very well with. GPU's have the ability to do such things on a massively parallel scale. GPU's also tend to have more memory bandwidth doing the kinds of things that a CPU would get bogged down on in the memory cache.
GPU's are really good at parallel tasks such as calculating the color of every pixel on the screen, or doing the same operation on a large dataset. According to Newegg, the GTX980 has 2048 CUDA cores (parallel processing cores) that run at ~1266 MHz as opposed to a nice CPU which might have 4 cores that run at 4 GHZ. In other words, if you want to manipulate a whole bunch of things in one way in parallel, you can program it to use the GPU effectively, if you want to manipulate one thing a whole bunch of ways in series, CPU is your best bet.
Coarse rule-of-thumb: running on Geforce class GPUs you can get up to 5x, maaaybe 10x the performance per dollar as compared to a top-line CPU. Assuming your problem scales well on GPUs, many problems don't. The GTX980 is actually a great performer. For Tesla class systems like the K40 it's a lot closer to equal with the CPU on performance/$ (they're not much faster than the GTX980 but a lot more expensive). But you can get an edge with the Teslas when you start comparing multi-GPU clusters to multi-CPU clusters, since with GPUs you need less of the super-expensive interconnect hardware. (You're not going to put GTX cards in a cluster, you'd have massive reliability problems.)
IMHO, the guys showing 100x speedups on GPUs are Doing It Wrong; they use a poor implementation on the CPU, use just one CPU core, consider a very synthetic benchmark, or a bunch of other tricks.
great so can I login with my youtube account now? I don't think I ever migrated it to a Google account (despite being asked to like a million times - would always say "later") and now I have no idea how to login to it.
Umm...I guess 'citation needed' on the VAC ban part? Valve has a very strict zero-tolerance policy w.r.t VAC bans. As far as I know, reversals are rare and only happen in mass when VAC bugs out and detects a legit program as a cheat which results in an incorrect ban wave which then gets reversed.
I'm pretty sure that if I got access to your account and got your account banned, you'd be SOL.
On the other hand, VAC bans now only affect the single game that the cheat was used in, so your entire Steam library won't be trashed. Exceptions to this include early Source games (e.g. cheating in CS:S will get you banned in TF2) and HL engine games (e.g. CS 1.6 ban also affects DoD)
Yes, if you get access to my account and get it banned I'm SoL except if it were through some fault of their own. Same with items. [1]
They've reversed several waves of bans, with a number listed here [2] that you can follow the links through on if you feel like doing so. It's very rare but it happens.
I dunno, I submitted a ticket a few weeks back for a refund and got a human. I guess his first reply was canned but when I called him out on it, he was helpful and provided me with a full refund. (I had added funds to my Steam wallet to buy an item on the marketplace and then got a 7 day market ban making me unable to use the money. A few mins later the item I wanted to buy had already been sold.)
This was me in late 2021 / early 2022.
I urge you to get a discovery flight! I did, and now I'm almost finished with my instrument rating. One of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. I love flying so much - more than I ever could have imagined.
Your wallet won't like it though.
If you use reddit I'd recommend lurking r/flying. Great community of pilots ranging from students to hobby pilots to 747 captains.