Tips and Tricks for Flight Sims

Over the last two years, I have been using many different tweaks and tips found online or invented by myself.

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 at 05:10 PM ET

Verified

The default X-Plane 11 sky is too dang hazy for my liking on clear days. Yuck. This is on the runway at LOWI in Innsbruck, Austria. [Courtesy: Peter James]

Key Takeaways:

For X-Plane 11, fix hazy skies by selecting 'orbit' or 'hialt' in the Developer/Sky Color settings. For Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, eliminate landing stutters by renaming specific "SmokeLanding" and "Touchdown Effects" files.
Optimize Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 performance by running in "Developer Mode," reducing "Terrain/Objects Level of Detail" to 100, setting "Buildings, Trees and Grass and Bushes" to "Medium," and using "DLSS Super Resolution/Balanced, DX12 beta."
Enhance realism by enabling "Crash Damage" and "Aircraft Stress Damage" for more consequential flying.
Improve control and perspective by assigning autopilot commands to an Xbox controller and adjusting cockpit view height to a realistic "pilot's-eye view."

See a mistake? Contact us.

Over the last two years, I have been using many different tweaks and tips found online or invented by myself. Some of them everybody seems to know, so I won’t go into those now. But here at FLYING, I feel most of the real pilots dabbling in the sim world probably don’t know about some simple, effective things that can really help out their experience.

Hazy Skies

Let’s start with my favorite on X-Plane 11 (XP11) that concerns the never-ending “hazy sky” issue that has plagued the sim forever. Now, you can purchase some great weather add-ons that will enhance sky and cloud quality, but I wanted to share a two-second fix that can bring back bluer skies easily.