I am quite happy with the performance of both my 737 & 777 aircraft.  Given that fact, I don't see what benefit I personally would accrue from downloading the new installers.  Without wishing to appear naive, if I do use them, am I likely to see any improvement in frame rates or VAS usage? I don't get CTD's (touch wood), or any other "funnies".  Therefore I would much prefer to adopt the "if it ain't broke don't fix it", approach.

Any comments from anyone?

John Earl

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi John,

I believe the NGX & 777 have some streamlined improvements learned from the 747 QOTS development.

PMDG are trying to get everyone on the "same sheet" if you like so you have no problems with future updates etc.

Greg

On 7/23/2017 at 7:58 AM, rsrandazzo said:

Captains,

We anticipate this week will bring a last round of major changes, and then everything should calm back down once again- which I think all of us are looking forward to.

Here is what you can expect;

• 737, 747 and 777 product lines will all get another round of installer replacements in order to wrap up changes triggered by the wide array of updates we have pushed over the past two months.  We anticipate that this will be the last round of mandatory installer updates, as we finally have stability where we want it and feel that mixing base installation and micro update processes will not create confusion for customers and tech support.
• 747 and 777 product lines are getting an update to provide additional debugging diagnostic information to assist technical support in solving problem reports.
• 747 and 777 product lines are getting some additional functionality to allow affected customers to gracefully avoid the "captains pfd popup CTD" .
• All product lines are getting a bit of cleanup and tweaking based on our work of the past couple of weeks.

For those eagerly awaiting the 737-600/700 expansion pack, we have had a hard time getting that product stable enough to release to you- not because of the product itself but because we keep making changes to the base package that then have to be tested again in the pass-through to the 600/700.  It sounds simple enough, but when you consider how much testing we have going on with the 747, 77L, 77W, NGX8900, NGX6700 and DC-6...   Both the development team and the beta team has had to load-shed and set things in priority order- else we risk giving you more headaches than you really deserve.  I have set the ETA for the 737-600/700 to "before 31JUL" in order to get it on the far side of this weeks updates for our own sanity- and in hopes of avoiding having to move the date again.  (This-  right here- is why we don't give release dates... Sometimes you just can't see the things that will pop up and kill your timetable at the last minute.  It is frustrating on our end too...)

I've mentioned a few times just how much work has gone on here at PMDG as we have pushed all of these product lines out to you with new updates and compatibility for P3D v4- and we are nearly finished- but we are definitely seeing stress cracks in the workflow over the past month- with some needless errors being made for no other reason than task saturation and fatigue.

Thank you very much for your patience as we get these last few updates completed- and then we can all get back to simming and the development team can get back to wrapping up the 747-8 for beta testing!

 

 

57 minutes ago, Jsearl98 said:

I am quite happy with the performance of both my 737 & 777 aircraft.  Given that fact, I don't see what benefit I personally would accrue from downloading the new installers.  Without wishing to appear naive, if I do use them, am I likely to see any improvement in frame rates or VAS usage? I don't get CTD's (touch wood), or any other "funnies".  Therefore I would much prefer to adopt the "if it ain't broke don't fix it", approach.

Any comments from anyone?

John Earl

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also Roberts explains some reasons in the above post 

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply, Gregg,

I did read the post that you have copied into your reply, before I posted.

I have the greatest respect for the guys at PMDG and the last thing I want to do is give the impression that I dont.

However having read the post you quote, I didnt see what benefit would be gained by me going thru an uninstall/install procedure.  Like I say, everything appears to me to be "stable" and I am quite happy with the performance. 

Thanks

John Earl

It's really up to you. If you are happy and everything is stable, no need to touch anything.

The re-install is not that much of a hassle, but there are no new major features yet, so you could forego it for a while. In the end you will probably end up reinstalling anyway further down the road, though and for customer support having the most current version running is always helpful, if not mandatory at some point.

If I understand correctly the 777  received an updated ground friction model which allows it to taxi easier on idle power. What I don't know is if this has reached the 737 as yet. So that might be a reason to update if you're into that 

2 hours ago, Jsearl98 said:

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply, Gregg,

I did read the post that you have copied into your reply, before I posted.

I have the greatest respect for the guys at PMDG and the last thing I want to do is give the impression that I dont.

However having read the post you quote, I didnt see what benefit would be gained by me going thru an uninstall/install procedure.  Like I say, everything appears to me to be "stable" and I am quite happy with the performance. 

Thanks

John Earl

My understanding is that this last mandatory installer is required if you want to be able to receive future product updates and enhancements via the micro-update feature of the Operations Center. 

Also, the bug fix for the pop up PFD CTD problem is significant. Perhaps it has never affected you, (yet), but it might bite you eventually. It is particularly frustrating because it is a "delayed reaction" type of bug that can cause an unexpected CTD 5 or 6 hours into a long haul flight if at anytime previous to the crash you used the pop-up PFD or ND 2-D panels on the captain's side even briefly.