3 hours ago, Bernard Ducret said:

Sim updates are certainly appreciated by all, but it remains that some very basic aeronautical essential feature are still way off and lack correction as of today, it is as if Asobo/Microsoft want to run when they hardly know how to walk: how about having a correct runway when we land with ATC, how about eliminating cars, trucks and trolleys from taxiways and runways, how about removing blue lighting cones from the parking spaces, how about depicting a thunderstorm that looks and acts like one and a few cirrus while they are at it, how about having a good ATC after more than 20 years of experience with a wonky one, how about a good AI management, etc, etc.

We all seem to be craving for something new when our core sim has yet to reach a reliable, satisfactory state after three years of commercialisation. Whether or not the above should be taken care of by a different team is totally irrelevant, they should be treated as an emergency and should be handled as a priority and proper human resources allocated immediately. I, for one, would not mind having no new updates until the basics are corrected. 

Darn it, nothing is ever perfect. What a cruel world we live in..😡

30 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

  But that's not how real world software development works, 
 
 

•  

 Resources allocation doesn't mean only shifting people with special skills which is obviously difficult, it means also using money to buy the necessary skills. Instead of buying outsourced 'legendary' aircraft of dubious interest, paying salaries to some new dev who could address what Bernard upthread calls the basics. And I don't see anything in the roadmap. Anyway, saying that is a bit of a catharsis though  because I am convinced that they don't listen to the users. They know better than us what we need 😄  !

Someone wake me up when there is finally a WU covering the Caribbean. 🥱

12 hours ago, fppilot said:

Moot point when issues are ID'd in the betas and not fixed in the ensuing SU.

Issues are fixed, they just can’t get to all of them.

Why do we have to wait so long just to fix the elevation issues at Kona airport ugh. I wonder if there’s a third party fix.

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by Tuskin38

43 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

 Resources allocation doesn't mean only shifting people with special skills which is obviously difficult, it means also using money to buy the necessary skills. Instead of buying outsourced 'legendary' aircraft of dubious interest, paying salaries to some new dev who could address what Bernard upthread calls the basics. 

Well, I guess that comes down to the one-time cost they are paying for the outsourced 3rd party aircraft vs the salary of a dev or multiple devs to address fixes/issues in the sim. Also keep in mind, throwing more devs at a certain area of code doesn't necessarily mean more in that area can get done and/or get done faster. In fact, throwing more devs on an issue or specific area of code can sometimes hamper progress too.  Given the years and years of experience of running a software business, and given the varied user audiences they are targeting, I'm gonna assume MS knows best re: how to allocate/prioritize their devs and resources for MSFS 🙂
 

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by lwt1971

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

if every single developer on the MS/Asobo team have such a diverse skillset for being able to work on flight dynamics, graphics/modelling, world representation, weather, avionics, UI, etc etc (newflash: such devs are unicorns), *then* they can do very agile/nimble resource allocation and shift those devs from varied task to task. But that's not how real world software development works, so they obviously have their devs working the way they are currently in their lanes, and also as you say a bunch of these non-core sim add-ons like aircrafts are outsourced to 3rd party devs anyways. The devs are also split between v2020 and v2024 work currently, but they also have doubled their team size to handle the two major versions.

Gentlemen, this is not the problem, we have been reading comments like this for the past three years and, during that time, all the essential points I mentioned (and I surely missed quite a few) remained unsolved and/or neglected!... I don't need to understand how an IT business is run, we are sold a product that pretends being a flight-sim, so make it behave like one, at the very least for the fundamentals. This sim is extraordinary in many aspects, and I am certain the 2024 will be again astonishing, but if we keep forgiving the very basics of flight simming that are for many an immersion breaker, then no wonder they will never be fixed! I have been laudative and positive about MSFS 2020, but it's time - when a new sim is announced - to say STOP and THINK what needs to be done before we jump on a new train to nowhere. Of course this is only one opinion.

1 minute ago, lwt1971 said:

Well, I guess that comes down to the one-time cost they are paying for the outsourced 3rd party aircraft vs the salary of a dev or multiple devs to address fixes/issues in the sim. Also keep in mind, throwing more devs at a certain area of code doesn't necessarily mean more in that area can get done and/or get done faster. In fact, throwing more devs on an issue or specific area of code can sometimes hamper progress too.  Given the years and years of experience of running a software business I'm gonna assume MS knows best re: how to allocate/prioritize their devs and resources for MSFS 🙂
 

I am aware of the one-time cost vs salary commitment but there are ways ...

What we say is that this sim  needs some finishing touches. 

And, yes, I am sure that MS knows how to allocate  and prioritize resources. That the whole point, Len 😉. They don't want to allocate resources to the "polishing", prioritizing instead the marketing hoopla. We, the users, some of us at least, have a different opinion about what needs to be done. Why ? Because we like this darn sim ! 

3 minutes ago, Bernard Ducret said:

Gentlemen, this is not the problem, we have been reading comments like this for the past three years and, during that time, all the essential points I mentioned (and I surely missed quite a few) remained unsolved and/or neglected!... I don't need to understand how an IT business is run, we are sold a product that pretends being a flight-sim, so make it behave like one, at the very least for the fundamentals. This sim is extraordinary in many aspects, and I am certain the 2024 will be again astonishing, but if we keep forgiving the very basics of flight simming that are for many an immersion breaker, then no wonder they will never be fixed! I have been laudative and positive about MSFS 2020, but it's time - when a new sim is announced - to say STOP and THINK what needs to be done before we jump on a new train to nowhere. Of course this is only one opinion.

XP11 never had good working ATC and at the time was considered one of the best flight sim. It's nice to have feature but definitely not fundamental. All sims that I used in my pilot  training never had traffic or ATC; however,  they do have instructor panel.

1 hour ago, Dominique_K said:

I am aware of the one-time cost vs salary commitment but there are ways ...

What we say is that this sim  needs some finishing touches. 

And, yes, I am sure that MS knows how to allocate  and prioritize resources. That the whole point, Len 😉. They don't want to allocate resources to the "polishing", prioritizing instead the marketing hoopla. We, the users, some of us at least, have a different opinion about what needs to be done. Why ? Because we like this darn sim ! 

Completely get your points and @Bernard Ducret's ... I guess all I'm saying is that the best we can do is to keep raising and voting for the issues we want focus on. And we really can't come to any conclusions about MS/Asobo's level of focus on those issues just because *other* features/new-content/bugs (that some of us don't care for as much) are being worked on. We really don't know if it's because they don't *want* to allocate resources for polishing do we (and again I'll maintain throwing more resources on a specific area of code that already has an allocated set of devs doesn't mean things get done better/faster). They are juggling a larger set of priorities and work items for the sim both v2020 and v2024, so naturally not all of our desired items including some of these lingering/polish items are going to get the highest focus.

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by lwt1971

1 hour ago, sd_flyer said:

however,  they do have instructor panel.

The rudimentary Link trainer I used when preparing my instrument rating then (!) did not have one, neither was there one at our local airline training facility (again "then", that will tell you when it was), and many here were not born... That's beside the point, if you have ATC make it work, not from time to time because AZURE voices disappear - and so does the second set of voices - until your copilot, or yourself, talks to no one, or don't give twenty seven different descent altitudes when approaching an airport, is that too much to ask after three years? When you are given a runway to land, is it too much to expect that runway not to be the opposite QFU, and that too after three years - in addition to the roughly one year of Alpha, Beta testing period?

If you find ATC unnecessary for an entertainment flight simulator, I can recommend an excellent real flight simulator approved by FAA among others: Elite. There is no ATC, 2D panels only and minimal sceneries, that's as close to a Link Trainer one can get nowadays.

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by Bernard Ducret

1 hour ago, Bernard Ducret said:

Gentlemen, this is not the problem, we have been reading comments like this for the past three years and, during that time, all the essential points I mentioned (and I surely missed quite a few) remained unsolved and/or neglected!... I don't need to understand how an IT business is run, we are sold a product that pretends being a flight-sim, so make it behave like one, at the very least for the fundamentals. This sim is extraordinary in many aspects, and I am certain the 2024 will be again astonishing, but if we keep forgiving the very basics of flight simming that are for many an immersion breaker, then no wonder they will never be fixed! I have been laudative and positive about MSFS 2020, but it's time - when a new sim is announced - to say STOP and THINK what needs to be done before we jump on a new train to nowhere. Of course this is only one opinion.

This is fair..  My personal opinions have moved from wanting everything fixed yesterday when this sim was initially released to realizing that i personally will not get everything i want fixed to accepting the sim as it is and happily "rolling with it" because for the most part i'm still very happy with the experience overall and as i have realized when they do occasionally break the sim i make sure i find something else to do (Its not the end of the world).

However your points are very much valid because at the end of the day the platform fundamentals should be continuously refined.  In some areas they are moving very quickly because they outsourced it (avionics) while in others it appears a little stagnant (Wx) (ATC).  Hopefully MS/Asobo takes a hard and honest evaluation of what they want to prioritize. I know they have to make money and diversify the platform. Got no issues with that .. everyone should be able to fully enjoy what they want to use the platform for. It would be nice for the sim on a platform level to be refined and granular enough to accommodate what almost everyone is looking for.

Its a tough ask but i'm sure good things don't come easy.

I'm also very happy to see the elevated level of discourse these last few posts with point and counterpoint without the thread going off the rails.

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by Maxis

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

Given the years and years of experience of running a software business, and given the varied user audiences they are targeting, I'm gonna assume MS knows best re: how to allocate/prioritize their devs and resources for MSFS 🙂

Maybe, but, honestly, maybe not. They do have a bit of a track record of releasing things that break other things that were working fine before and they did release some updates with some at least mildly mindboggling bugs like confusing cloud base altitude references (MSL instead of AGL) or 10SM in the US being capped to 10SM instead of unlimited visibility. Some of this took some to fix, too. It's tremendous what they've achieved and it does keep getting better, but there were times I wasn't always sure if they fully knew what they were doing.

As for fixing basic issues, I personally think they should have done something about the friction model with regards to the transition between air and ground a long time ago, considering this has been there ever since it released 3 years ago and it's one of the few major issues; personally speaking, perhaps the single one most important issue when it comes to the flying part of the sim.

9 minutes ago, Nixoq said:

Maybe, but, honestly, maybe not. They do have a bit of a track record of releasing things that break other things that were working fine before ...

As for fixing basic issues, I personally think they should have done something about the friction model with regards to the transition between air and ground a long time ago, considering this has been there ever since it released 3 years ago and it's one of the few major issues; personally speaking, perhaps the single one most important issue when it comes to the flying part of the sim.

Oh yes fair points, introducing regressions are certainly bad, but I do feel they have gotten better with regressions and quality control compared to the early months after initial release of 2020 (I know I know the white dot/border issue is a recent example). 

And I'll very easily agree that ground handling and the ground<->air transition model leaves a lot to be desired and is the one main area of the FDE I've never liked. The interim fixes they put in SU10 with some new scalars do go some ways to improve this but I'm now guessing their promised rework/revamp of ground handling in general and fuller + more fine-grained modelling of wheel physics (i.e. beyond the single points they are currently) will only come in v2024.
 

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by lwt1971

1 hour ago, Bernard Ducret said:

The rudimentary Link trainer I used when preparing my instrument rating then (!) did not have one, neither was there one at our local airline training facility (again "then", that will tell you when it was), and many here were not born... That's beside the point, if you have ATC make it work, not from time to time because AZURE voices disappear - and so does the second set of voices - until your copilot, or yourself, talks to no one, or don't give twenty seven different descent altitudes when approaching an airport, is that too much to ask after three years? When you are given a runway to land, is it too much to expect that runway not to be the opposite QFU, and that too after three years - in addition to the roughly one year of Alpha, Beta testing period?

If you find ATC unnecessary for an entertainment flight simulator, I can recommend an excellent real flight simulator approved by FAA among others: Elite. There is no ATC, 2D panels only and minimal sceneries, that's as close to a Link Trainer one can get nowadays.

Can you name any sim that had good stock ATC?  FSX, P3D, XP? Did it ever stop for enjoying them? Yes there are plenty of room for improvement in MSFS but then fundamentally ATC is not most important aspect of flight simulation.

I don't think ATC is not necessary, but I believe there are more important thing has to be fix or implemented first. And no thanks I don't need to bother link on Elite. I'm familiar with a lot of FAA approved simulations. 

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

The interim fixes they put in SU10 with some new scalars do go some ways to improve this but I'm now guessing their promised rework/revamp of ground handling in general and fuller + more fine-grained modelling of wheel physics (i.e. beyond the single points they are currently) will only come in v2024.

Probably, but that makes it somewhere around 4 years until it's actually realistic in the new sim.