[Music] hello so today we are going to do an absolute beginner's guide to setting up and configuring Microsoft flight simulator 2024 so this is a beginner's guide for somebody who has never used 2024 before or never used flight simulator before this is being done in response to an email I've received from somebody who's really struggling to get started and they can't figure out how to set their controls up or how to get flying in the Sim so this is going to be the very Basics to give you a good start in order to do this we're going to use some picture in picture in a moment where I'm going to show my controls as we use them and as we configure them but before that I'm just going to have a look around the simulator so when you first launch flight simulator 2024 you come up with this world map screen and you may even see the controls to configure who you are in the simulator so I've already done that obviously so we're not seeing that but it would be in here and we can customize our identity okay so I'm not going to go back and do that but once you have gone and customized your identity when you first launched the Sim the next thing you do is arrive at the world map screen we are going to do a free flight for our purposes but before we do that we're going to go and have a quick look at the settings in the simulator so if you click on the Cog at the top right it comes up with the general section and there are several sections across the top the first thing we want to do immediately is go to flight interface so regardless of you may have all sorts of options switched on to to help you out in the simulator and you can come in and switch these on and off the important one in here is the cockpit interaction system you want it to be set to Legacy if you're using a PC you want this to be set to Legacy there are options here to have look or leg Legacy so it says up here um if you look at it so it says on the description on the right Legacy is intended for using the maths to control the cockpit lock is really intended for Xbox controllers okay so we're going to leave on Legacy this this tutorial is aimed purely at PC and I apologize for that in advance if you're an Xbox user some of it will be transferable some of it won't okay that's the most important thing otherwise you'll be wondering why you can't interact with the cockpit properly or in a natural way that you would imagine it should work okay in assistances there's all sorts of things you can switch on and off so the only thing I've got switched on is to assist with the tail rotor in a helicopter but you can see there's lots of of things that the simulator can help you fly also you can turn some of the realism on or off depending on how realistic you want it to be if you look in accessibility you get various things in terms of it narrating and putting titles on things and doing various animations so again you can go and experiment with those but to begin with I wouldn't change anything I would just leave everything stuck the biggest section here that you're going to look at is going to be controls now there's going to be no need to look at this until you are in the airplane we can come back to this when we're in the airplane okay so if we come back out of here in order to get going we are going to go to a free flight okay so if I go and click on Free Flight it shows me the world and we get the option to choose an airplane now on purpose I'm going to go and choose a Sesser 152 because I know that's what the person that emailed me asked about and now I've not used it before so this would be a really good use case for me setting it up with my controls okay so I've selected the 152 you can configure if you wish and that will give you options within the 152 so you can see there are several versions of the airplane so I'm going to go with the arrow bat the default one and save back we could change Livery as well so you can have different colors if you want but I'm just going to go with the default one and save and come back save and back again so now we need to change the simulator or to tell the simulator where we're going going to take off from so we can either depart and choose our departure here and type it in or we can just move the map around so we can drag the map with the mouse so just hold the left Mouse button down and drag and it will move the map around it does have momentum so you can spin it and use the mouse wheel to zoom in as you zoom in it shows more and more detail so I'm going to go to actually I'm going to pick a really quiet airport in the US so I'm going to go for [Music] d83 which is Booneville so when I click on that with the mouse it will zoom in on that Airfield okay and I can zoom in further with the mouse to have a good look at the Airfield and you can see it streams the data down what you're seeing in the map screen is actually the simulator so if we zoom in you can actually see it's in three dimensions yeah so we can pick either to start on a Runway or on a parking area if we start on a parking area the plane will start what they call cold and dark it won't already be running so we'll then have to go and switch the airplane on we're going to start on the runway on purpose so if we start on the runway the airplane will be running and ready to go so I'm going to select and set that oh it's cuz I've already typed this in look it already knows it so if we clear that out that's why this doesn't make any sense if we go and click on this now it says set as departure so notice now I've said departure it will change its context so if we click on that again we can either delete the parture or set it as arrival so we could just set Booneville itself as the arrival so it's going from Boonville to Booneville you don't have to do this route notice by doing that it's put the pattern in that's rather crafty actually I'm impressed with that I didn't know it was going to do that but anyway you don't have to put an arrival in at all you can just say where you're going to fly from or just go and click on somewhere with the mouse and say that's where we're departing from yeah so if I click on Runway 31 set as departure and it will change up here by default you will have live weather yeah so you may pick somewhere in the world depending on the time of day at the time when you load the simulator you can change that so you can change the time immediately in here by moving the slider through remember it's going to be using UTC so you can also go and change the weather so we can go into flight conditions and we can say what month of the year we want so say we wanted some autumn leaves on the trees and we can we can also say whether we want live time uh live weather and time or preset if we say preset which I've got here you can choose what you want in the sky from some preconfigured weather configurations so you could say I just want a few clouds please you could say do I want any air traffic around and I've said no do I want any multiplayer traffic around and I could say oh yes I'll have all players please just be aware that there is a link between if you say live here I think everything else becomes live okay so if I say preset off and all players that means anyone that's also playing the Sim will be visible and the weather's going to be few clouds and we're going to set the time of day for about then so save and back so we're ready to start so when I click Start flight the simulator will load and it will put my sess not on Runway 31 so we just press start and now it starts loading the airplane the scenery the weather and anything else around when it's ready depending on how fast your internet connection is it pulls you down to the airplane and it will say ready to fly when it's ready to go so we're going to say ready notice it's lined us up on the runway we're ready to go so we need to look at controls what I'm going to do is go to OBS and turn on full screen and webcam so now you can see my desk in the corner of the screen as well as the simulator okay so you will see if we go and have a look in the controls of the simulator I'm going to press escape on the keyboard and go to settings and controls so every every device that is plugged into your computer will have an item on the devices list if for example if I unplug my quadrant so I'm just going to remove power from it it disappears if I put the power back on for that USB port it reappears yeah so any devices you have plugged in that the simulator knows about or can use will appear in this list okay so the TA A320 p is my joystick okay and you can see there are profiles associated with it now I have tweaked them slightly to put some various buttons in place I'll show you the default ones every device has a default profile so there's the default profile for this is the A320 pilot 2024 transversal I don't know why they've called it that okay so you can see we've got the pilot 2024 transversal so that's kind of the default settings for the joystick which puts various views on the buttons around it and you may not want that so I've actually gone in and changed mine slightly but you don't really need to worry about this stick just for flying around you need to worry about the quadrant so we're going to go and select the quadrant and we're going to go and see what you get normally configured so this is where I said this is a good situation because I've never used this aerplane so it is defaulting to the default control profiles so what are control profiles all they are saying is that this is the throttle axis this is probably a throttle axis out of the box this is the flaps this is the spoilers and so on and so forth to test that to see what has been configured while you've got your controls selected here you can search by input and then you can try moving something so it's saying this is joystick button 28 there's nothing specifically there for it okay so on this Cessna which makes absolute sense there's nothing mapped to the spoiler okay what about the flaps so if I search by input and go move the flaps control I might have to move it a long way and it says that that's the flaps axis and it's already been configured so by default these are usually set up yeah so if you've got spoilers it will probably work if you got flaps it will probably work so you won't have to monkey with it at all this is the fun in games so we're going to search by input now notice it says I've moved that um engine number two throttle to its 50% point and it said joystick button 15 and it's given up because I didn't do anything with it but it said it was a button press not an axis in thrust Master's Infinite Wisdom they made the detents on the Airbus throttle button presses so in order to get it to realize it's an axis you need to get it to the the uh the climb detent the 50% detent and then gently move it away when you're looking for it in the Sim so if we say search by input and then gently move it away it will come up with its actual axis and it's saying this has got the throttle 2 axis on it so for our little Cessna we probably just want mixture and throttle so what I'm going to do is you can see here it says the throttle 2 axis is on joystick L AIS y so I'm going to click on the Cog and delete it and say okay and notice as soon as I said delete it it says please enter a name for your new profile okay so I'm going to call this just for argument sake um test profile or example profile notice when you do this you could make what you're doing to the controller the default for all airplanes I'm not going to but you could so that would probably be more applicable to the stick where you might not have different engine configurations so the stick is probably you're going to want the buttons to do the same thing in every aerplane so as you configure it you would give it a profile and if you apply it to all airplanes that means whenever you go into another airplane that profile that you save will already be chosen and also for new ones it will become the default immediately yeah so that's what those two tick boxes do apply to all Aircraft would make this profile the chosen one for all of the existing planes setting it as the default will make it the chosen one for any new planes as well okay so we're just going to call this this change we have made about this AIS the example profile okay so then we can go back out of here and we can come back and we can see there is now nothing mapped on the L axis y so if we go and search for throttle in the box and scroll down to see these are all the settings with the word throttle in them we've got throttle one axis has been configured on L axis X which is this one if we scroll down there is nothing else mapped anymore throttle 2 AIS has been completely cleaned out yeah so how could we let's go and get rid of throttle one axis as well just in case you do this so remember we are operating on our example profile so it's worth saying any of these settings like the throttle xes it tells you next to them which profile they get saved in yeah and what type of setting it is whether it's a button push a digital one or an AIS so we are still working on the example profile if we don't like what we've done we could go and delete that profile yeah get rid of every every change we've made to it and we could just go and choose the default one yeah you can see I've got a couple of different profiles I've made of my own design but we could go back to the default profile you can't delete or rename the default profiles they are protected but you can use them as the basis for starting out so you could choose that one notice that's come back look when I said throttle 2 axis is back on that because we've chosen the default profile if we go to our no profile nothing's been mapped our example one we've only got throttle one mapped so we'll go and delete this as well just to show you how we can set that up so delete go back so we got no throttles mapped anymore so we're going to go to throttle one axis which is the basic axis for throttles we're going to click in here and it's scanning it wants us to move something so we're going to gently move the throttle and notice it's done that thrust Master trick so to get around that put the throttle at the 50% Point first on the detent then look for your axis so throttle one axis we're going to click in there it's looking for it and we move it gently and it's got it l axis X so let's go and save and back and back and look in our airplane if we look down and move the throttle you can see it moves in time with our let's zoom in on this to see clearly we can see this now look it moves in time with our control if it is backwards depending on what controls you've got you can configure that so if we go to settings and we go to controls and we go we're looking in here and we search for throttle again so we can see we had configured the throttle one axis if it's backwards click in the Cog and you can invert the axis if you need to okay so it isn't always guaranteed depending on what the developer's done of which way around they may have configured the xes so you can reverse them also notice there is an action curve so click on this and you can see this is fine it's zeroed all the way through the only reason I'm looking at this is if we go back and we go and there we go we've got a default profile let's go and look at the axis curve that they've got figured look at that so you can zero out all these numbers to make a straight line on the control profile what this means is as you move the throttle through its axis it means at the various different positions of the throw of the throttle it's going to give out different outputs this was originally developed by thrust Master for the very basic A320 so that it would hit the detents on its throt and if you don't know anything about air buses you don't need to ever worry about that just know that the default profile has this wacky curve on it you can either remove it when you copy the profile or you can just delete the xes and then when you reconfigure it it will get a zeroed out one with a straight line on the curve okay so what should we use this other one for in the Cessna it would make sense to have the throttle on this first uh one which we've done and to put the the uh mixture on the other one so we'll go and search we'll put this on the 50% remember because of this wackiness of the thrust Master we'll go and search for mixture in the controls remember oh we need to remember what profile we're changing before we do it so we're using our example profile so all we've got in the example profile is the throttle setup so we're looking for the mixture axis and there it is from minus 100 to 100% okay and we'll have a look down and see if there's any other mixture axes that we can choose I don't think there are no but notice you have mixture axes you also have 1 2 3 4 so the way the developers the well- behaved developers if you had a multi-engine aircraft say you had a two engine airplane they'll allow you to set mixture one and two independently so say you've got a controller with lots of levers but also let you set mixture which will control all of them at once so I'm going to click in there and I'm going to move this gently backwards and it says joystick L axis y okay and then so we'll go back save and back and we're going to have a look in the airplane and see what that's done so it's lean and Rich so it's already correct okay no need to reverse it or do anything clever with it so I've now got my two axes that are the most important to use in assessa and I've of course I've just killed the engine because I leaned it out and it killed itself so to move around the the cockpit you can hold the right Mouse button down and drag the camera you can click on the stalk of the yolk to make it appear or disappear which lets you get to the other switches obviously everything was preconfigured all we need to do is turn the engine over again we need to have Rich mixture and we hold the left Mouse button down and the engine starts again so we can click on the stalk of the yolk to put it back and we can go for a fly so we can drag the mouse around if you get confused with the mouse you can press shift and space and it will straighten you back up and from there we can turn our parking breake off so just to illustrate this if I take the yolk off so watch as I turn my my parking brake control it's preconfigured yeah so take the parking brake off shift and space put the yolk back on you can see I'm rolling already put the yolk back on so we can see it and Full Throttle notice I've got no Rudder so we're going to press Escape go to settings go to controls and we're going to go and look at the pilot controller so I've got basic stick profile let's go and search by input and twist it there is no Rudder axis set on this airplane okay so the basic stick profile that I've got here for some reason doesn't have a Rudder AIS so I'm going to go and search for rudder and we should find Rudder axis and then I can twist the stick oops twist the stick oh the reason for it I've made a a school boy error here it's good that you saw me do this I chose the general controls that's things like views not axes I've got no airplane controls for this airplane let's go and choose it I've got my basic stick profile now so it's got my Reddit axis you would have this by default so where I've been playing around I hadn't gone and configured it yeah so I've now got this profile here based on the default one there is a default one in here look and then we got basic stick profile which I've configured which does things like putting the trim on the hat or twisting to do the rudder so if I go back save and back we can now steer the airplane so this is really good that some of these mishaps are happening because you're seeing the obvious things that will happen and your'll fixes for them so then pull back and we're in the air so if you do reprogram the Hat switch for trim it's really useful cuz then I can just trim the airplane out as I go for Aeron and elevator trim and then we can go flying if we keep our left hand on this controller we'll just bring the propeller back a bit or the power back a bit sorry we can then use our right hand on the mouse and we can hold the right Mouse button down and we can look around while we're flying takes a little bit of learning notice while you've got the right Mouse button down you can't use the joystick though it won't do anything so you need to let go with the right Mouse button I don't know if they'll ever fix that but it's a bit of a bit of a problem okay if you want to go to the outside View Press backspace if you want to rotate your view around hold the right Mouse button down and drag the mouse you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out if you want to go back inside press backspace okay let's go and turn around go land so that's the basics it it sounds enormously complicated but you have to remember the controls come with the default profile so if you suspect anything is not working you can always go back to the default profile and then start from there again and start changing things okay so we'll put the flaps down notice I didn't configure the flaps it's already preconfigured it just works so if we go and look outside you will see the flaps are down so we just come back into Boonville gliding in on full flaps doing just above stall spe we may have to increase total here a little bit and just hang the airplane out above the runway and we're down so I have configured the trigger on this stick to be the brakes because I don't have Rudder pedals so it's worth pointing out if you've got Rudder pedals and you plug them in they are going to work for the rudder out of the box okay so you won't have to worry about that so a lot of things I've shown you you probably won't have to worry about but at least you'll then know how to change it so for example I'll just show you how to set the trim up if you click on settings go to controls you want the stick control or you know whatever controller is your joystick that's got a hat switch on it and then I'm going to search by input so search by input and then press the Hat switch so I pressed it up so that's elevator trim down it will have some view or other on here to get rid of it you just click on the Cog and then delete the assigned control okay and then to set this you click in the box next to it and push the control you want obviously you need to get the elevator trim controls up so what you would need to do is search for them so you can search and say elevator or just search for trim and that will give you Aeron trim left and right and elevator trim down and up so you can put them on the various directions of the Hat switch so that's something I commonly do so on my basic stick profile across all of the airplanes I've always got trim on the hat switch yeah I never Ed the joystick buttons for views I use them to control the airplane okay so hopefully that's been useful and gets you up and running if you can't see a way back out of a screen just press escape and then go back and back and resume to get back to the main menu you press escape and main menu and main menu and that brings you back and you can choose a different airplane choose somewhere else in the world and go fly somewhere else okay so that's just the very Basics to get your controller working as you wish with a given airplane so you just need to take note that when you first go into the Sim it will have default control profiles for everything yeah and then it's up to you if you want to change them away from how they are out of the box there there are a lot of people that used to use the old version of flight simulator that are trying to turn the new one into the old one and it kind of lets you try to do that so if you go into the Cog and look at controls you can see if I go and look in my keyboard for example I've got my own mapping for the keyboard called basic controls but if I go backwards there's a 2020 profile built in and a 2024 profile built in but then I've got my own so I started off with the 2024 profile and made some slight changes to it and I called it basic profile basic keyboard and then I made it roll out across all of the airplanes and made it the default but yeah I would advise everybody to use the 2024 keys that come out of the box and then just make slight changes to them as you want to don't try and turn this into the old simulator because there's a lot of new functions in the new simulator that weren't in the old one and if you go back to the old one those keys won't do anything you know the keys for the new functions won't be there anyway I'm going to leave it there hopefully that was helpful so let's just do a very quick summary you start a flight you choose your airplane yeah you can choose any airplane you like so say we go um Cessna 172 so there's the the default Cessna and we save and come back we'll do one thing differently this time so we'll go and type in our airport so we can type the name Boonville for example and you'll see d83 Booneville is there and the map will zoom in on it we can then zoom in further with the mouse using the mouse wheel and we can either choose to start on the runway or on a parking area if we start on a parking area we set that as a departure and we start and the Sim carries on loading so it's loading the airplane the weather the local scenery any airplanes that are nearby I didn't set the time remember and it's gone to live time so I'll say ready to fly so we're in the night and we've got a flashlight if that happens press the right Mouse button top of the screen click on the cloud and change the time of day by dragging it okay and then close the weather dialogue so if you start in a parking area it will start you outside of the airplane you have to press shift and C to get into the airplane or if it's an airplane that supports it just click on the door handle but notice there are things I have to do so you can use w D to walk around the airplane if you get an airplane that needs these things so d a w s I can hold the right Mouse button down to change my direction and drag with the mouse so if I walk up to one of these things I can wiggle the mouse and just click it is there anything else I need to do can anyone see any other I can't see anything else so I can get into the airplane so I can come back under the wing notice he crouches down it's quite funny isn't it then click on the handle and he will get in once you are in the airplane obviously you can control everything in the cockpit as you wish with the mouse as long as your cockpit interaction system remember from general settings is set to Legacy which uses the mouse but once you are in the airplane you can obviously use it all in depending on the airplane of how realistic it is you can press all the real buttons flick all the real switches and it will behave just like the real thing you can also cheat you can press controll and E so I'll do that and you'll see things moving around in the cockpit and the airplane starts itself it's cheating isn't it so we can then still go and press the button over there on the navigation display and you have to still have to wait things boot up it does a TS test and stuff like that so just sit and wait for it it's worth noting before you get into an airplane make sure your controls are in the correct places so go and put your parking brake on cuz not all airplanes will sit without rolling with the engine running okay want to put the flaps back up so I had them down so we can see that from outside if we I press back space there look so we can see the flaps moving for example make sure everything works we could come around to the front of the airplane while we're on the parking brake try the throttle out okay back space brings us back in and we can go flying if you want to shut the airplane down really quickly and easily press um control shift and E so control and E started the airplane control sh shift an e will shut it down so control shift e okay obviously it doesn't switch the avionics off that's up for up to us to do that but control and E will start the engine again notice it doesn't do everything so we got things like the nav lights the taxi lights The Landing lights the beacon lights the strobe lights the PTO heat yeah so it's not it doesn't do everything things there are still things for you to go and do if you want to calibrate your altimeter to the local barometric pressure press comma on the keyboard so you won't see that unless we have live weather because if you have a preset weather it sets your barometric pressure to 2992 which is standard barometric pressure so I'm not going to get into what all this really means but let's go to live weather okay so the simulator is just loaded in live weather weather so it's a bit foggy and Misty so let's go and press comma again so the barometric pressure is different yeah cuz it's the live weather so that will give us the same altitude eventually but obviously the pressure reading is different apparently there's no wind not a breath of wind it's just a a freezing cold well it would be the middle of the night still in Booneville cuz we Advanced the time didn't we so in the weather we could say we want real time and there we go look so it's lit up some of the houses nearby and we can see our strobe lights flashing away it's very clever isn't it anyway I'm going to leave it there hopefully that's been of some help to those of you that are just starting out with the simulator to get you through that first step I've got another video specifically about how the controls work that just goes through step by step how to make the controls work okay how to configure controls so I'm going to leave this here this is really tailored just for the Airbus controls specifically because programming the axes on the throttles is so fiddly and difficult but there we go see you again soon