Flight Simulator 2024
Notes that will coalesce into somewhat coherent writing about Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2024, which you plan to use for most of your flights in a flight sim voyage around the world.
Videos of flights will be recorded live on your HyperTextHero Twitch channel.
Notes
2024-11-21
Here’s how to turn off HUD instruments in cockpit and external views in MSFS 2024. If someone knows how to turn off copilot Christopher Walken please let me know.
The animation of the right aileron and flaps of the P-51 don’t seem to work. Maybe a glitch.
Managed to log in without issue early in the morning of the 2nd day after launch, and all the airplanes from the Standard Edition I got seem to be there. Yay!
2024-11-19
I was surprised to see the game had downloaded in less than 1 hour after I left it on while “Loading languages 7%” showed in the status bar. Many were not so lucky.
Craziest user experience problem I ran into: I clicked on the yellow “Sign in to Xbox Account” button which launched the Windows Live login dialogue, but when I tried typing in my password nothing would appear in the password input box and the cursor would lose focus!
Frustrated, I MASHED the buttons on my keyboard quickly and saw letters appear in the box once in a while, so I clicked on “Use a different sign in method” and then on “Use code sent to email address”. The input box now showed numbers instead of ••••, so by MASHING each number of the 5-digit code repeatedly I managed to eventually get each number to appear, and log in.
I left graphics settings on the recommended one for my PC (High End), and framerates in rural areas and also in NYC were good, feeling above 60fps, though I did not spend much time in the city.
Lighting seems more nuanced now, especially environmental light.
I only had two planes available, the Flight Design CTSL and the Beechcraft Bonanza G36, no C-172 for the training or career missions, so could not proceed with those. Apparently due to server issues, as communicated by GotFriends’ GotFriendsMykrode in stream chat:
It’s bugged because of the servers. They show up in the marketplace section, but have not been sent out. Seems like everyone got a different selection of aircraft randomly.
VKB Gladiator stick, throttle and rudder controls did not have automatically assigned controls, so I had to map them. I’ll add my basic controls here eventually to help others.
Menu music and ambient soundscapes are good, much better than MSFS 2020.
The Flight Design CTSL would seemingly start with no fuel despite having half the tank filled, so my first and second landings were emergency ones after airborne starts! Maybe there’s a switch to change tanks from one wing to the other that I missed.
There seems to be an audio bug where you need to move the throttle for the engine sounds to start when going into cockpit view.
The Bonanza had no sounds at all during the introduction flight in the career mode. Maybe missing files due to server issues?
There’s a volume limiter setting under Audio Settings now.
I did not see any raindrops on the windshield of the Flight Design CTSL while flying through clouds.
No flyby view button (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
You can get out of your plane and do a preflight check and walk around the world (Shift+C), and my character naturally became Harry Potter during my first stream of MSFS 2024.
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Friday, 15 November 2024
- Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update ✶
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Never played Valve’s second classic? Get Half-Life 2 and its sequel episodes for free on Steam until November 18th. And try clicking on the grav-gun on the bottom of the page and then clicking on any page element :)
Wednesday, 13 November 2024
Celeste
Notes that will become writing about a beautiful cult-hit pixel platformer game called Celeste that you tried once a while back.
Gameplay videos will be recorded live on your HyperTextHero electric twitch consciousness stream.
Notes
Ongoing notes about the HyperTextHero Celeste experience:
- Elegant pixel graphics art direction.
- Smooth movement mechanics. Jump. Hold. Holding activates certain things. Double jump in any direction. Move character in mid-air. Nuanced force feedback control response.
- Curious story. Climbing. Overcoming adversity. Trying again. Learning from failure. Perseverance. Secret areas. Tapes. Strawberries. Love interest?
- Difficult, with the right amount of challenge and fast reload after death for quick iteration, making it pleasurable to overcome obstacles. Player wants to keep playing, keep climbing, keep going.
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- Enlightened Imagination For Citizens ✶
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Alan Kay:
In our world, we have enough power to topple our most important systems, but not the power to restore most of them.
Tuesday, 12 November 2024
- Learning in depth ✶
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One of the great paradoxes of education is that only when one knows something deeply can one recognize how little one actually knows.
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In her portfolio is a beautiful large sheet on which she had written, almost like a medieval manuscript, a copy of W. B. Yeats’s poem “The song of Wandering Aengus,” with an illustrations of the ‘glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair’ and of Wandering Aengus who had looked for her for so long, and thinking when he had found her that they would pluck ‘till time and times were done / the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’
- Don’t Be a Sucker ✶
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Scope & Content: Dramatizes the destructive effects of racial and religious prejudice. Reel 1 shows a fake wrestling match and “crooked” gambling games. An agitator addresses a street crowd; he almost convinces one man in the audience until the man begins to talk to a Hungarian refugee from Germany. A Nazi speaker harangues a crowd in Germany denouncing Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons. Reel 2, a German unemployed worker joins Hitler’s Storm Troops. SS men attack Jewish and Catholic headquarters in Germany, and beat up a Jewish storekeeper. A German teacher explains Nazi racial theories; the teacher is dragged away by German soldiers.
Via Armin Ronacher.
- Booklets ✶
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Print, cut, fold, staple. Drop off at a little library, big library, bus stop, coffee shop, laundromat, workplace, dentist’s office, the mailbox of your crush…
Friday, 8 November 2024
- 1933 and the Definition of Fascism ✶
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Ancient and military historian Bret C. Devereaux:
And if hearing about these things that happened is unpleasant, well, Polybius offers the solution: “men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past” (Plb. 1.1.1). We must correct our conduct.
Tuesday, 29 October 2024
- Imgtlk Garbatella 2024 ✶
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A somewhat random project powered by food, wine, and @erikvaningen.
Monday, 28 October 2024
- Paradise: Tove Jansson’s public paintings ✶
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Exhibition of public artworks by Tove Jansson at the Helsinki Art Museum. I’m not familiar with her art, but loved The Summer Book.
Tove Jansson: Bird Blue, 1953 (detail). © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
Tuesday, 15 October 2024
- The quiet art of observation ✶
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Succinct description of one of the key insights in The First and Last Freedom.
Saturday, 12 October 2024
- There’s something wrong with suburbia ✶
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Intro video from a channel called Not Just Bikes with “stories of great urban planning and urban experiences from the Netherlands and beyond.” Found StrongTowns.org via the channel, too.
Thursday, 10 October 2024
Single Best Tweak
A place to list single best tweaks that’d make something much better, greatly improve it.
This will often be about a video games, a primary topic formed by HyperTextHero’s brain and fingers clacking at keys on the keyboard, but other things can and will appear, from music to visual design. Here we go:
Have more PvE content, and non-repeating sounds of airplane wheels rolling on the ground in War Thunder.
A redesign of the unsightly cover of Jesse Schell’s excellent book The Art of Game Design: A Deck of Lenses to make it more likely to be displayed prominently.
The same tweak type for two space games, Delta V: Rings of Saturn and No Man’s Sky: Better sounds when firing mass drivers and microwave beams in the former, and the scanner in the latter, with less treble and more bass. A sound heard often needs to be particularly pleasant so we don’t tire of it.
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Wednesday, 9 October 2024
- Rest of World ✶
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Haven’t dug deep into it, but this seems an interesting find. A nonprofit publication about parts of the digital world outside the usual technology media coverage, showing underserved communities’ unique perspectives.
I like the dynamic logo with diacritics that change when you refresh the page.
Wednesday, 2 October 2024
- Hope produces space and time? ✶
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That question is the last thing the physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote in his journal, at 95 years old. Quite a question.
The longer I live, the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe.
- Defeating Heisenberg ✶
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Jesse Schell, writing in chapter 2 of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, that I borrowed from the local library and am thoroughly enjoying:
But there is still a greater challenge of introspection. How can we observe out own experiences without tainting them, since the act of observation itself is an experience? We face this problem quite often. Try to observe what your fingers are doing as you type at a computer keyboard and you will quickly find yourself typing slowly and making many errors, if you can still type at all. Try to observe yourself enjoying a movie or a game, and the enjoyment can quickly fade away. Some call this ‘paralysys by analysis,’ and others refer to it as the Heisenberg principle. This principle, in reference to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics, implies that the attributes of a particle cannot be observed without affecting those attributes. Similarly, the nature of an experience cannot be observed without affecting the nature of that experience. This makes introspection sound hopeless. While it is a challenging problem there are ways around it that are quite effective, though some take practice. Most of us are not in the habit of openly discussing the nature of our thought processes, so some of the following is going to sound a little strange.
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All this talk of experience brings out an idea that is very strange indeed. The only reality that we can know is the reality of the experience. And we know that what we experience is ‘not really reality.’ We filter reality through our senses and through our minds, and the consciousness we actually experience is a kind of illusion — not really reality at all. But this illusion is all that can ever be real for us, because it is us. This is a headache for philosophers, but a wonderful thing for game designers, because it means that the designed experiences that are created through our games have a chance of feeling as real and as meaningful (and sometimes more so) than our everyday experiences.
Tuesday, 1 October 2024
- The Axis Unseen demo ✶
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Bow with elemental arrows? “Heavy metal horror” game by someone who worked on Skyrim, Starfield and Fallout? Yes, I’ll try it out.
Saturday, 28 September 2024
- Screenshot from last Thursday’s Helldivers 2 session ✶
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Part B, that is, due to a WISPy internet connection. Part A is here, though I left the echo voice effect on for half the stream, again 😅 Streaming can be hell!
Dead Cells
The plan is to finish this roguelike platformer melee parrier of a side-scrolling shooter game called Dead Cells which has stats, loads of weapons, obscure lore, and high-speed movement action in randomly generated biomes with sound soundscapes.
I’m starting with a fresh save where nothing is unlocked and will reach the end of the base game this time, with some help from experienced players, while noting down thoughts here.
Notes
Dead Cells’ rogue lite design philosophy keeps you moving forward despite setbacks by letting you unlock permanent progression elements like new gear and skills that persist the next time you play. Like in life, a little bit at a time goes a long way.
One of the typefaces you can select in the user interface, Adys, is designed for people with dyslexia.
The game runs on a Mac laptop so I can take it with me where I go.
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How to turn off Fujifilm X100VI LCD screen with a button press
The Fujifilm X100VI’s DISP BACK button cycles the LCD display, but doesn’t turn it off, even with other display mode shooting settings selected.
As a workaround I set the Q function button to cycle the LCD display view mode setting so that I can turn it on and off when photographing, like this (click for larger image):
Reddit discussion with further tips about the LCD.
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