2 hours ago, MattNischan said:

I've lost count of the number of times another dev said to me "hey man, this thing is super busted, it breaks for me every time I press this button" and I have the same code and it's totally working for me and I spend a day smacking that button in every strange way I can think of.

Here's a specific case in point to illustrate what Matt's talking about in a very relevant way:

Shortly after the last sim update we started getting complaints that a few people using our G3X mod were finding they could not turn SVT on;  or, if it were on, they couldn't turn it off.   I tried to reproduce the problem myself, but everything was working just as I would expect it to for me.  At that point it was just an isolated issue for a person or two and it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking it was just a user issue of some sort, especially when it could not be reproduced.

When you're developing something complicated you often don't have time to chase down every issue that gets reported to you.   So you triage, and prioritize things based on how many people a problem affects and how serious the problem is.   Since it was just a few folks, and it was a fairly minor issue, troubleshooting the synthetic vision problem ended up "in the backlog" as they say.  We have been, after all, busy with a number of things recently.

However, over time we got an increasing number of people complaining of the same problem.  I tried to repro it every now and then but no matter how many different things I tried I never could.  It reached a point, though, where I felt like we just couldn't put it off any more so I made it my #1 issue.

Finally, in frustration, I asked the rest of the team to try to reproduce the problem, and it was then that I discovered that, while I couldn't repro, someone else on the team could.   He agreed to help out so that I could debug through him, and now we had two engineers burning hours trying to figure out what this problem was, and why you could take two people with the exact same configuration and it would only be broken for one of them.

It wasn't for another day or so, when I was pretty much doing a line-by-line walk through of the code trying to determine where things could be breaking that I finally made a breakthrough.  Without going into excessive detail, the way the display initialized was changed by the previous sim update, and it could end up with people getting an incorrect initial configuration, but due to a fluke in how the code ran, it broke only if they had never had the mod installed prior to the update.  I asked, and sure enough, my comrade in code hadn't ever installed this particular mod on his current MSFS install.

At that point it was a fairly simple matter to fix the problem.   A few lines of code and everything was working as it should.  But it took it becoming enough of a problem that it felt necessary for not one, but two, people to devote their time to solving it, and the further good fortune of actually having one of us finally being able to repro the problem, and us having confidence in each others' technical abilities, and the ability for us to communicate closely, in order for it to get fixed when it did.  It's much, much harder to fix a bug if you can't reproduce it.

Even better, due to the particular nature of this bug, it naturally only affected a few people at first, and it was least likely to affect those who were actually doing the coding.  It was a perfect bug storm.

The moral of this long-winded tale is:  Developing complicated systems is sometimes hard in ways that may not be obvious to folks who've never done it, and now matter how smart people are, or how good their intent is, you will eventually run into an issue that can be a showstopper for some folks but completely impossible to notice or even reproduce for many others.  Take this one bug I've just described, and multiply it by a codebase that is as massive and complicated as the entirety of MSFS is, and add in the real-world constraints on time and manpower, and make the userbase huge enough that, if a problem exists anywhere, someone somewhere is likely to do exactly what is needed to trigger it...

... and maybe, at that point, folks who've never been professional developers on a project of such scale can have some idea of why things that may seem like a huge issue to a number of people don't get the attention they may feel like they deserve.  🙂

Sure, there's always room for improvement.  If there weren't we wouldn't be human.  But I think sometimes a little more understanding and perspective is called for.  Hopefully this can provide a few people that perspective.

 

Edited May 16, 20215 yr by kaosfere

My post wasnt wasn't accepted because it had too many parts although to me... the issue is single points of light. 

Do any of you have the following issues?

AI Aircraft lights can be seen throught miles of cloud cover. Airports are light brightly during daytime hours and good weather. Lights can be seen from too great of distance.

-Taxiway lights can be seen from 40k feet and 20 miles away.
-Strobe lights can be seen from 30 miles away even when not viewed straight on.
-Runway lights are on during the day in fair/sunny weather.
-AI traffic lights can be seen from 20 miles away thru clouds.
-Airports have lack of dynamic lighting at night.

I really want this fixed.  P3D, XP11 have never had any of these issues.  It should be so easy to fix.

I'm going to try again but now I probably won't get enough up votes this late in the game.

I had a user who was reporting a  bug, Documented it with screen shots and it seemed she was right, I followed every step she took with teamviewer.

She was doing everything right. But I couldnt reproduce the problem and she was the only one of 1500 users who ever had this problem.

Until I sat next to her for two hours and watched every step she took.

And at one point, when she entered a command I saw her press a key with her pinky, unintentional, a reflex.

Maybe she was right in calling it a bug. But I didnt have any testers with the same nervous twitch on my team so I missed it.

 

3 hours ago, aniiran said:

My post wasnt wasn't accepted because it had too many parts although to me... the issue is single points of light. 

Do any of you have the following issues?

AI Aircraft lights can be seen throught miles of cloud cover. Airports are light brightly during daytime hours and good weather. Lights can be seen from too great of distance.

-Taxiway lights can be seen from 40k feet and 20 miles away.
-Strobe lights can be seen from 30 miles away even when not viewed straight on.
-Runway lights are on during the day in fair/sunny weather.
-AI traffic lights can be seen from 20 miles away thru clouds.
-Airports have lack of dynamic lighting at night.

I really want this fixed.  P3D, XP11 have never had any of these issues.  It should be so easy to fix.

I'm going to try again but now I probably won't get enough up votes this late in the game.

Maybe you are right. But a game that is developed for a wide user base can and should have some trade offs.

What if your a casual user and are not able to ever see other planes and runways? How exiting would that be.

How realistic are labels? How realistic is it to have an outside view while in air. Why are people complaining about reverserd textures while a pilot can never see them. Dou you think an airline pilot watches the name on his aircraft to make shure he is boarding the right one?

13 hours ago, MattNischan said:

 

 

11 hours ago, kaosfere said:

 

 

Thank you both for the incredibly insightful responses. It gives me, and hopefully the rest of us, a much better experience of seriously how tricky reproducing and fixing bugs can be. 

I've requested a logger tool feature on the official forums, which basically takes a snapshot of all the system specs and sim configuration, as well as traces the UI and sim path the user may have taken leading to the bug/crash - like an activity logger of sorts. 

The purpose of this tool is to simply and unionize the bug finding and reporting for the average simmer who isn't technically savvy. Do you think a feature like this can be helpful to you developers gain more information about bugs/crashes more easily and accurately to assist with bug fixing?

Hi, I posted a question on the availability of VOR and ILS frequencies in the Nav Window while in flight. Grateful if you would upvote! Thanks! 

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/can-we-please-have-vor-and-ils-frequencies-displayed-in-the-nav-window-while-flying/402551

Edited May 17, 20215 yr by saifs

Nobody can deny the sometime maddening complexity of debugging and some understanding and courtesy are indeed in order.  But as users, we see :

-  obvious and well-documented bugs by numerous simmers for months, some from release, some brought along the way, and we can be a little worried when we see the bemused look of the two Asobo engineers as they seem not to be aware of them. Or that they dismiss them as non reproductible at their end. And I don’t even speak of half-baked features or the LOD downgrading. Come on... This sim is not nine month-old but by their own admission about four years now in the making.

- that MS has created a frenzied environment very much bug-inducing with about one major update a month in average and parallel rewriting of the code for the console(s). Priority is given to new contents over straighten up the existing flaws. Many users keep on repeating freeze the WU and SU  for a while and do the job which should have been done prior to August of 2020. And correct the bugs which came afterwards. 

From the standpoint of an outsider (aka a buyer) everything points out not to the technical difficulty of cleaning a complex and enormous code but to a management problem. Priorities, internal communication, testing etc. 

So yes, understanding is in order. Both ways. The next SU coming soon with its beta testing will be interesting to observe. Will the team listen or will they pull another alpha ? 🤞😉.
 

Edited May 18, 20215 yr by Dominique_K

I feel the tree thing is the most overrated items in this sim.

I'm not a high hour pilot but have plenty of time in gliders and cross country in Europe.

That means most of the time below 5000 ft.

I wanted to know where the train tracks, rivers and cities were.

Not if I could spot an oak tree at 20 miles.

 

1 hour ago, hansb57 said:

I feel the tree thing is the most overrated items in this sim.

Not if I could spot an oak tree at 20 miles.

 

While it's extremely annoying to see some users flood pretty much every thread with their complaints about the tree issue, I totally agree it needs to be fixed in some way.

When flying at an altitude of around 3000ft in a C172, default-high viewpoint (i.e. pressed space to get the higher of the two default positions), and the tree LOD line was just a finger above the cowling, even on max settings for objects/trees. That looks distracting indeed, and in no way matches the otherwise great rendition of the surroundings. 

Thankfully Bijan's tree/seasons mod addresses this, so I haven't had any complaints since purchasing it.

Edited May 18, 20215 yr by pstrub

The tree line is less an issue, for me, than the rupture of terrain tint we see where the LOD ends.  It can be  annoying in some landscapes, with the faraway (not so faraway actually)terrain becoming bluish or kind of orange  (deserts). I do not complain too much on the tree issue as my computer forces me to make sacrifices on the settings and at least, speaking of trees, we don't see these awful cypresses that doted the landscape the world over in FSX and P3D, from Guadalcanal to Alaska 😁.

5 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

The tree line is less an issue, for me, than the rupture of terrain tint we see where the LOD ends. 

Well that's just a different way of putting it, right? That's the annoying point about the tree line, especially when the spring trees have a brighter hue than the underlying terrain... I'm not complaining much about it either, but it's very visible one way or another without using a mod for it.

1 hour ago, pstrub said:

 

Thankfully Bijan's tree/seasons mod addresses this, so I haven't had any complaints since purchasing it.

I am tempted by Bijan's addon which brings, as I understand, more variety of trees including blooming trees. I procrastinate as I have a weak computer that works more or less well with MFS and do not want to upset my delicate balance of settings.

Do you see any impact at your end on fluidity ?

1 hour ago, Dominique_K said:

I am tempted by Bijan's addon which brings, as I understand, more variety of trees including blooming trees. I procrastinate as I have a weak computer that works more or less well with MFS and do not want to upset my delicate balance of settings.

Do you see any impact at your end on fluidity ?

If you just use the trees, the performance seems pretty much the same with and without the mod. I love the greater variety in trees that it provides, they look a lot more natural due to differences in size, and palm trees where you'd expect them. 

To activate the distance mod, you have to crank both your tree quality and the objects level of detail sliders all the way up to Ultra / LOD 200, so this does have some impact on the framerate. I turn the tree distance mod on when not in framerate-heavy areas, and it works fine on my Ryzen 3900X and Vega56 at 1920x1200, so you should give it a go! I built my system about a year ago, just decided to wait with the graphics card until the next generation becomes available... the rest is history... 😅

 

12 minutes ago, pstrub said:

 just decided to wait with the graphics card until the next generation becomes available... the rest is history... 

Pretty much my story... 

 

On 5/16/2021 at 10:54 PM, hansb57 said:

Maybe you are right. But a game that is developed for a wide user base can and should have some trade offs.

What if your a casual user and are not able to ever see other planes and runways? How exiting would that be.

How realistic are labels? How realistic is it to have an outside view while in air. Why are people complaining about reverserd textures while a pilot can never see them. Dou you think an airline pilot watches the name on his aircraft to make shure he is boarding the right one?

Disagree 100% ASOBO PROMISED... PROMISED! every single development forum that this would be a simulator that would appease the serious simmer community. They have not delievered on this promise, and they seem to be regressing to a pretty looking mobile game.

Asobo needs to keep including options to make sure that serious simmers are happy while the cash grab continues.  The runways in real life are hard to see that is part of being a r/w pilot and by extension a sim pilot, but if you are using your systems correctly you will find the runway.  Labels are not realistic and I have never used them.  Your last line is a bad argument, obviously it is a simulator on a computer.

My point is these things are NOT an issue in FSX/P3d or XP11.  So how have we regressed so badly?  To appease the XBOX crowd?  You seem fine with that but I have a feeling a lot of simmers are not.