condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

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cvvs
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condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by cvvs » Sat Dec 24, 2022 3:42 pm

seen on facebook fs2020 glider
‘’Check out this interview with Jorg Neumann where he mentions the devs are listening very closely to our feedback and will make changes accordingly 👍
I translated the important bits below:
"We took a very close look at the feedback from the glider pilots. We will definitely go back to the thermals and make adjustments," says Neumann. For him there is no question that the flight simulator will one day also become the reference simulation for gliding. When it comes to weather and clouds, the Condor gliding simulator is currently state of the art. [...] It can do everything that Microsoft doesn't do. "We have looked at Condor very closely. We'll do better," says Neumann determined.’’



Für Segelflieger ein wichtiges Himmelszeichen. Kumuluswolken weisen ihnen den Weg zur nächsten Energietankstelle. Ohne sie wäre ein Flug ohne Motor schnell zu Ende. Im Flight Simulator funktionieren diese Wegweiser nicht. Die virtuellen Wolken sind dort lediglich grafische Gebilde, die weder etwas mit dem Boden noch mit aufsteigenden Luftmassen zu tun haben. Die Thermik wird nach dem Zufallsprinzip über die Landschaft verteilt.

"Wir haben uns die Rückmeldungen der Segelflieger sehr genau angeschaut. An die Thermik werden wir auf jeden Fall nochmal ran und nachjustieren“, sagt Neumann. Für ihn ist es keine Frage, dass der Flight Simulator eines Tages die Referenzsimulation auch für das Segelfliegen wird. In Sachen Wetter und Wolken ist derzeit der Segelflugsimulator Condor das Maß aller Dinge. Das einst aus einem Hobbyprojekt geborene Programm führt den Flight Simulator in Sachen Wetter in Bodennähe vor. Es kann all das, was bei Microsoft nicht funktioniert. "Wir haben uns Condor sehr genau angeschaut. Wir werden wir besser hinbekommen“, zeigt sich Neumann überzeugt.



the report and the full article can be found here
https://www.stern.de/digital/segelflug- ... 18486.html

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OXO
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by OXO » Sat Dec 24, 2022 5:37 pm

We are not concerned.

What you guys in the community do not yet know is what developments we have made since announcing work on V3.

And you won’t know that until we release.. but it’s epic 😎
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by UWE » Sun Dec 25, 2022 12:29 pm

OK, we wait for it :D
Happy XMas

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2P
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by 2P » Sun Dec 25, 2022 1:44 pm

hmm much talk and in the end?
Weather is one thing, flight characteristics are another. As great as the MSFS looks and I enjoy flying, the feeling for gliding that you get with the condor is not available in any other simulator. For me, Condor will always be the number 1 gliding simulator. I'm sure Condor 3 will surprise us positively with some new highlights. Of course we can't compare Condor with the MSFS from a visual point of view, but if you know how many people work on Condor, you shouldn't expect that either. In any case, I'm looking forward to what the future will bring and I'm eagerly awaiting Condor 3. :)
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Berblinger
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by Berblinger » Sun Dec 25, 2022 2:00 pm

OXO wrote:
Sat Dec 24, 2022 5:37 pm
We are not concerned.
YMMD :mrgreen: For the very smallest part of a second, I considered trying X-Plane but resisted :lol:
OXO wrote:
Sat Dec 24, 2022 5:37 pm
And you won’t know that until we release.. but it’s epic 😎
Desperately looking forward to it

Happy Xmas to all, Rainer

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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by Sprunga » Sun Dec 25, 2022 10:20 pm

They won’t do better. Gliders fly around at 50kts with the nose way up in the air like it’s a aeroplane. I seriously doubt the performance is as accurate as Condor. Perhaps while we are at it we could stop advertising MSFS on this forum. Let’s support The condor guys.
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by 6266 » Sun Dec 25, 2022 11:56 pm

Sprunga wrote:
Sun Dec 25, 2022 10:20 pm
They won’t do better. Gliders fly around at 50kts with the nose way up in the air like it’s a aeroplane. I seriously doubt the performance is as accurate as Condor. Perhaps while we are at it we could stop advertising MSFS on this forum. Let’s support The condor guys.
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by Paul_UK » Wed Dec 28, 2022 10:09 am

They shouldn't have to be listening to feedback, they should have a dev team that understands all this stuff in the first place in my opinion.

Looking forward to seeing how MSFS does develop but I'm far more excited to see what Condor 3 will bring to the party. MSFS is a jack of all trades base software that usually only excels when companies produce add ons to enhance it, based on previous MS flight sims.

Roll on the release of Condor 3!!
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by witor » Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:55 pm

Let's not forget that Condor a has unique focus on competitive glider racing, so in my opinion there will be no alternative for a long time.

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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by h.kreso » Wed Dec 28, 2022 10:03 pm

All "sims" has news for 2023, only Condor is Swich OFF :( :(
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by roeoender » Thu Dec 29, 2022 1:08 am

Hi, been flying Condor 1 & 2 (probably more than 400hrs) along my RL gliding (425hrs) since around 2011,
but since first unofficial gliders around december 2020 I almost exclusively "simmed" gliders with MSFS (about 250hrs purely in MSFS gliders),
mainly as after so many years I was very used to all the specifics of Condor weather and was enjoying something new and different for gliding.

Definately as of now Condor is still better tool to learn and train gliding, but as I don't need to learn the basics and can simply ignore few corner cases of flight model shortcomings and also don't enjoy competing that much anymore, I immensly enjoy MSFS as a substitute of RL experience of recreational gliding.

Both sims have very different philosophies, goals, architectures, dev and communication styles, performance specs, features and limitations.
And that is good! As in some areas they complete each other so depending on given person's "weights of preferenes"
or even goals of given flight session he may choose either Condor or MSFS.
I am really happy to have them both. So I don't join often occuring sweeping binary better/worse attitude - for me they are just tools with different properties.

One great thing MSFS did for Condor is made it more famous in more mainstream simming - many people learned about this "fantastic glider sim called Condor" only because they tried official gliders in MSFS (and they sucked, but they liked the activity in general), many people including myself recommend to newbies or fresh RL glider pilots to use Condor for training.

One of the greatest things in Condor is that it is made by people knowing/understanding gliding and all related phenomena (like weather) and that are passionate exactly about gliding.
MSFS devs sadly after about 1 year long subproject of official gliders implementation don't seem to deeply understand nuances of gliders and thermal weather and definately have to cater to the huge, vocal community of armchair powered flight pilots that are infuriated because of "turbulences" as they prefer to show off their "greased" landings in still air, so it is even hard for MSFS devs to incorporate some realistic features uncommon in previous sims like they artificially had to limit updrafts speed to have community more accustomed to it, but luckly it is improving and MSFS is really ambitious, not afraid of changes and indeed listens to community feedback.

After spending many hours in MSFS I appreciate even more the genius of Condor developement and feature set - how, while pioneering and having limited resources, and even way less CPU power, you were able to do so many things correctly.

MSFS open/moddable architecture made it possible for few very passionate 3rd party community members to create some really good free gliders pushing the limits of MSFS flight model which is great, but on the other hand this moddable architecture may very well make it almost impossible to make MSFS suitable to e-sport level of competition gliding. So Condor will probably remain unbeatable in this area. Just FYI there are already very enjoyable online group flights and even some offline competitions, but they are more like just for a relaxed fun flight/social events with high level of trust needed as cheating in MSFS is and probably will remain to be ridiculously easy (at the level of editing some plain text file).

Another area where Condor has strong advantage is performance - many RL glider pilots are not gamers - they often do not have strong PC-s.
It may not be an important in few years, but being able to run it on any PC and any laptop that has at least non intel gfx card widens the adoption.
Also VR in Condor 2 in comparison to MSFS has geat performance - on Radeon 5800xt I had easily 90fps in Condor (Reverb G2), while in MSFS my RTX3080TI still requires many tricks and reductions to have decent framerate. Having said that I wouldn't hold Condor algorithmical or gfx progress because of this.

MSFS as of current update level (SU11), which was first that introduced official gliders is sadly failing hard at thermal model - they made something unthinkable - by introducing their fantazy about what "ground thermals" are, they made glider weather actualy worse then it was without them.
But it may drasticly improve as they have quite ambitious multithreaded optimized navier-stokes computational fluid dynamics (CFD) air model and already quite impressive cloud visualizations and important asset in live weather data all around the globe from Meteo Blue. Only time will show if they will hit some hard sim limitations preventing them combining CFD with clouds visualization or lack of knowledge/focus to do thermals properly.

Having said all that for me personally the most important thing that I would like to have improved radically in Condor 3 to consider using it more than MSFS is weather model. It is perfectly ok for me not to have rich ground visuals, but you don't need photogrametry to generate interesting and varied cloud shapes and large scale weather phenomena (various elongated Cu clouds, stratus areas, nimbus, storm cells, rains and so on), MSFS although far from perfect is already better at cloud visualization - but I cannot see any hard limit why it couldn't be beaten by Condor. During RL flight I meet wastly richer kinds and shapes of clouds than we have now in Condor - I simply can't stand those puffy similiar shaped spherical Cu clouds anymore - sorry this really feels arcade level of weather representation at current level of computing power available.
As a RL flatlands pilot I need to study weather maps to learn what airmasses will generate the weather, how they will move and evolve during the day to plan the flight. It is for me way more important than glider flight model or any other "convenience" improvements listed in the Condor 3 whishlist thread. MSFS is not far from it - namely improving thermal model - they already visualize live weather good enough. Obviously I don't expect Condor to have live weather source data (although plugins to other sims show that it would also be possible), but using something similiar to RASP models to generate more realistic large scale weather evolution for at least most flown landscapes is possible - without more advanced large (landscape level) and small (cloud types and shapes) scale weather simulation I am afraid that MSFS live weather with thermals under clouds will be a killer feature for me.

Condor definately has, and will have it's place in simming landscape. I am really curious about planned changes and eagerly waiting for Condor 3.

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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by KipperUK » Mon Jan 02, 2023 5:28 pm

Competition breeds innovation. There’s certainly room for more than one simulator.

I gave gliders in MSFS a little try and was a little disappointed with the weather setup so good to know they’re working on it, this is the battleground. If an updated condor offered nothing except for an overhauled weather model it would be enough - and I would imagine that’s where most of the work is going. Not only does there need to be more variation in what the sky scape looks and behaves like, it needs to move. Sea breezes, blue holes, areas of top over with embedded Cu, rain, better wave are all desperately needed but neither sim has them yet.

As groundbreaking as MSFS has been with the ground visuals; if you actually break it down, it’s not *that* complicated with recent advances in machine learning, cloud computing and open source APIs. They’ve simply taken satellite imagery, used ML to recognise different terrain types and replaced the low res textures with generated ones. Buildings and roads come from open source mapping, the ability to have the whole world and manage all of this data comes from Azure. It wouldn’t take as much dev resource as people might think to be able to replicate that. I think Condor could either do it, or set landscapes up in such a way that 3rd parties can easily integrate a richer visual experience.

Whilst Condor concentrates purely on gliders and has so much input from glider pilots, it will probably always have the edge on flight dynamics. It doesn’t need to do anything, whereas MSFS does - and not only that but MSFS has only two official gliders, so condor has a jump on them here.

The other area that could be important here is instrumentation. Condor gliders have basic working instruments that are unrecognisable compared to modern ones, MSFS has an S80 but it’s not functional. MSFS is ahead here because modders can probably improve the S80 and bring in other recognisable instruments which would be great for training people on club simulators. The first sim to offer a fully customisable panel with a section of real world instruments will have a distinct advantage for that market.

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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by jcomm » Mon Jan 09, 2023 5:07 pm

MFS aerodynamics overall are a joke, sorry :-/

When it comes to soaring, then, it's and even more sad joke ... adding to it that "sketch" of soaring weather made of in-house interpretations of the various sources of lift :-/

The views, Ah! those are great, even for familiarization with areas I fly over IRL, for task debrief / preparation, provided you totally forget about "the flying"...

I keep polling this site waiting for the release announcement of Condorsoaring v3.
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Re: condor better than FS2020.......but not for long

Post by Petrucci14 » Wed Jan 11, 2023 6:27 am

Condor 3 announcement? You will not find any. It is more secret than Area 51. I wish they didn't make the initial announcement 1.5 years ago. Everyone would be much more relaxed about the future of the sim. !Alert! Criticism incoming: Let's face it, C2 is basically a better looking C1 where you can spend a good sum of money on additional gliders. The pro version is 200€ + Tax, which is frankly nuts compared to what you could spend on C1 with the plane packs. Weather is pretty much identical and it is of course the most important for gliding next to flight physics. I am really hoping that this time we really get a fundamental upgrade. Something worth both waiting and paying for. Lastly, before someone calls me a sore hater, well I'm not. I am grateful for Condor and its creator(s). There are just some frustrating aspects as I pointed out. Oh, and MSFS gliding is pure garbage at the moment...

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