I have the original FPVFreerider and I am very slowly learning acro on it but it got me thinking that it is quite afew years old and is there something better now?
So what are your favourite or most realistic sims for fpv quadcopters?
Thanks for any suggestions.
I like velocidrone, although I can't claim to have tried them all it's near enough that once I have the same rates set up as my actual quad anything that I learn there transfers to real life just fine. I think any of them will do the job really for practice, like I say though just make sure you have the same rates set up so that you can learn how to time a full stick roll or flip.
Quote from: Loopdreams on March 10, 2018, 01:41:01 PM
I like velocidrone, although I can't claim to have tried them all it's near enough that once I have the same rates set up as my actual quad anything that I learn there transfers to real life just fine. I think any of them will do the job really for practice, like I say though just make sure you have the same rates set up so that you can learn how to time a full stick roll or flip.
Cheers. It looks like it is about £16 at the moment - I assume that is not per month or anything stupid like that is it?
My laptop is just about at the required minimum spec so it should work. I will give the demo a go and see how I get on.
Thanks
To be honest I think the best practice is to buy one of those little indoor drones (I use an X4 that I bought years ago) ... Velocidrone feels like you're just moving a camera through the air, it feels very "computery" lol. At least with a little quad you get ground effects etc.
Rotor Rush is good too, and they have online competitions with real prizes.
It is a monthly subscription (£4 i think) but there is a free trial if you want to give it a go.
Also DRL has been updated lots lately and people are loving it.
Ive not actually used it tho.
Quote from: Steve W on March 10, 2018, 03:55:13 PM
To be honest I think the best practice is to buy one of those little indoor drones (I use an X4 that I bought years ago) ... Velocidrone feels like you're just moving a camera through the air, it feels very "computery" lol.
Once you've got a quad set up half decently that's pretty much exactly how it should feel, though. These aren't the KK2/Naza powered wobble-quads of old. You want it to not go anywhere except where you tell it. The sim is like an idealised version so it does undoubtedly feel smoother than real life but the FCs and everything are getting so good now that the experience is really very close. OTOH hovering about in the house with something like an X4 is fun but not really relevant experience. It's nothing like flying a typical freestyle/race quad, for a start it's LOS so an entirely different skill set but apart from that there's no acro and no power whatsoever.
Quote from: Loopdreams on March 10, 2018, 04:31:25 PM
Once you've got a quad set up half decently that's pretty much exactly how it should feel, though. These aren't the KK2/Naza powered wobble-quads of old. You want it to not go anywhere except where you tell it. The sim is like an idealised version so it does undoubtedly feel smoother than real life but the FCs and everything are getting so good now that the experience is really very close. OTOH hovering about in the house with something like an X4 is fun but not really relevant experience. It's nothing like flying a typical freestyle/race quad, for a start it's LOS so an entirely different skill set but apart from that there's no acro and no power whatsoever.
I guess you're right - I was talking about getting the basics of control though, not really doing power loops and stuff but yea - point taken, and that's what the OP wanted.
Thanks for the helpful comments.
I do have a KingKong Tiny7 to fpv practice indoors but I haven't got that much space to fly indoors, plus power wise there is a massive difference between the tiny7 and my Martian3 :)
FPVFreerider is OK and it is helping my stick control but I am very slow at learning acro.
It does seem that Velocidrone does seem to get quite good reviews. Maybe I will give the trial a go to see if my laptop will run it.
Thanks again for the suggestions.
I don't have a particularly high spec PC but it runs fine, just turn down all the detail and use a low resolution, it's not like you'll be flying your actual quad in 4K anyway.
I've been having a bit of a look lately. Normally I'd say "use a real quad, a simulator is great, but without the jeopardy of crashing you don't fly the same" But then I met up with a noob in my local field to give him a hand, and I found he still had a real issue just transferring the idea that he has to move his thumb on a stick into actual movement.
If you've grown up playing xbox, or whatever using a dual stick pad then it's not an issue, you don't need to consciously think about it, your thumbs should just work ok. Despite me standing next to him and shouting "Push your right stick away from you, you are drifting backwards.... no, your other right" etc, he wasn't getting it. So he's the first person I've really recommended goes back and builds up his muscle memory on a sim.
Sim-wise, I've been messing around with Freerider (and Freerider recharged) LiftOff and Velocidrone. Of these, both FPV Freerider and Velocidrone have a trial version and is well worth checking out. My system is an iMac, and brilliant as it is for editing video and things, it's not a gaming machine by any means, so I've really noticed a difference in what runs well and what needs tweaking more to make it work.
So Freerider is the less demanding of the sims I tried. It has no problem running at full speed/resolution on my iMac, but some of this is probably because the areas that you can fly in are quite small (teeny in the original, and a bit larger in recharged) It flies ok, but doesn't feel much like a real-world experience IMO, but you can at least learn what the sticks do.
LiftOff is the most demanding in computer terms, and takes an age to load up levels and get going. It has a bunch of real-worls quads from ImmersionRC and you can customise each one. The levels are really quite pretty - individual leaves on trees and things. Not a huge number of courses, but has online multiplayer and allows you to freeroam, freestyle or race (as well as design your own courses) It feels better tha Freerider to fly, but still not like a real quad. That said, I have tended to not go in and try and mess with the setup as it takes so long on my system to do so.
Velocidrone I picked up a few days ago after a few people talked about it being good. I tried the demo, and noticed I could get the quad to feel pretty much exactly like one of mine... this was a good start. It's certainly not as pretty as LiftOff, but it has larger variety of locations (I really like the city for doing some building deives !) and courses in each of these locations. Many real-world quads, and a much easier ability to change setup in game. A press brings up a regular PID screen where you can change all your normal pids as well as super rates. I also assigned camera angle, and lens FOV to the s1/s2 potentiometers so getting the experience right is much easier.
I have to push the detail and resolution down a bit on both liftoff and velocidrone to get it to run smoothly, but velocidrone is noticably a bit more basic in graphical detail.
I still need to do a lot more sim flying to decide what I think is the best overall experience, but right now Velocidrone feels the best - which is the most important factor.
I do think it's important to remember that these are more games than sims. In not one of these can you really practice the basics of flying in a circuit and landing on the spot. You can do it, but it's not really what they were made for. They all want you to hurtle along at breakneck speed through gates and things. If you are using any of them to practice basic skills on, try to keep the quad setup as you would your real one - it's all to tempting to tilt the camera to 45 degrees, fly around at 100mph and never think about landing
Thanks very much.
I grew up with a Spectrum 16K (later upgraded to 48K) I was way more into 'programming' it than playing games. I played a bit with ic boats and even bought an ic Hirobo Shuttle (built but never had bottle to actually take off).
My eye hand co ordination has never been good.
I can fly my F450 camera ship round no problem and I can fly my Martian3 fpv but only in a stabilised flight mode.
So I am trying to get my fingers more prepared to fly the Martian3 in Acro ready for better weather. I can easily practice on the sim on my laptop while misses watches tv.
So trying to find the most realistic sim would be handy. FPVFreerider is helping my hands do what my brain wants without really thinking about what I am doing with the sticks just I want to go through that gate.
OK so flying circles isn't what the sims may be designed for but I have found my skill level getting better by trying to get through the gates. If I can't make one gate I try the next. Gradually I am getting through more gates on each lap.
As for landing, well as long as I can get close to me it's OK at the moment. Yes I will need to practice that but the sims are not very good for that.
I am hoping that while they are not perfect in terms of physics they are hopefully good enough to help my fingers get better at small movements.
Just tried Velocidrone on my laptop and even after lowering resolution and quality it takes about 6mins to load the demo level!
So might have to just use it on my Desktop machine. CurryKitten when you say you tweeked it could you share your quad settings to give me an idea of a more realistic quad? OK so it wont match mine but I currently have no real reference to correlate sim to quad.
Maybe that would be a vid you could do - correlation of veocidrone to a quad?
There's no big changes I've made to make them feel more like real-life in Velocidrone. At first I thought it was much too floaty, but after checking through the support docs, the dev's were quite adamant they had the gravity right, and suggested it probably the fact that you are flying much faster than in real-life. Which I think is a valid point - there's no lipo sag and you can keep your thumb on the throttle as long as you want.
Here's my screen settings which a very smooth for me (I might be able to go higher, but I haven't been bothered to experiment)
(https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4777/26864620848_df07895e5b_c.jpg)
I haven't touched the physics settings on the quad, but what I have done is set the camera angle to what I normally fly (30 degrees) and the FOV to make a 2.1mm lens
(https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4790/26864620178_6b18a7f275_c.jpg)[/url]
This is where things can deviate from real-life if you want to 'play' the racing part. I raced around with a camera angle of 45 degrees which really helped let eh power down in more of a forward motion, but it felt really different than normal in the turns and doing some freestyle, so I thought it would be more useful to have it set as I'd normally have it. Which I'd suggest for anyone else as well. As I mentioned, I had the FOV and camera angle setup on pots on my Taranis, so they are easy to change.
Lastly the PID settings (via Advanced drone setup from the flying screen)
(https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4796/39840794525_915df3cb7e_c.jpg)
The default rates are close, but slightly different to the Betaflight defaults (ignore the actual pids - obviously you'll find that the sim quads are super smooth) So I changed my rates to what I'd normally fly, with a super rate of 0.8, 1.0 rate and 0 expo. This is possibly a good place to experiment if you feel you need to calm your rates down a bit to make your sticks less sensitive. Try it out here before you do so in real life.
I believe if you turn on Battery Simulation then it does simulate sagging voltage.
Quote from: Steve W on March 11, 2018, 11:06:46 AM
I believe if you turn on Battery Simulation then it does simulate sagging voltage.
Yes I think you can do this (in liftoff as well). This is where it's game vs reality as well. If you want the fastest lap times, then don't go near anything that'll slow you down :)
Thanks very much. I will have a play on Recharge and see if my stick control is getting more accurate. I had a quick try on Velocidrone demo and it was 'flyable' on my laptop but not great. Might be my skills or maybe laptop not fast enough but kept crashing a lot.... :)
OK so it's quite a while since I posted the original question about sims.
I have been practicing on FPVFreerider Recharged lots, trying to do 30mins a day. I have also been flying my Martian3 for about 8 packs a week and I am slowly getting better :D I have never been a gamer so my finger control had a long way to go and a longer way still to go but I am getting better. I can now fly round my field and not crash.
In fact last week I bought some gates, well some goal post type things from smyths toys. They were £15 and make 2 gates about 5ft wide 2.5ft tall. I can get through the gates some of the times, others I have to throttle over them or have a crash :D
Anyway I bought Velocidrone today and had a play on the laptop. I think the physics are better than FPV but boy does it take a long time to load!!! I think FPVFreeRider is great to get used to what the sticks do and gives you a good grounding to a complete novice and for me it was well worth the money and the simplicity of the 'rates' system enabled me to start with very slow controls to work up to the snappy stuff.
I do think Velocidrone is sort of the next level in control. So far I have set my rates same as on my Martian3 and it was very sloppy on centre stick till I realised that the dead bands were quite large. I reduced them down and it's much better.
So now I can practice with Velocidrone ready for when I can get to the field.
Thanks for the advice and support.