Figured I'd do a fairly modest long haul route in real time to stress test system/sim performance and stability over a long period of time. Everything was pretty much vanilla with no fluff -- no traffic, vatsim, ATC plugins, map enhancement tool, etc. Just the 777, addon airports, GSX, and Volanta. The route was RJAA-LSZH.

I went away from the sim for about an hour or so, and when I returned, the plane was in the water, almost exactly over the north pole. Up until that point, everything was actually going really well. No performance issues at all for the first 7 hours. This may be a known issue, but it's my first Polar route in the sim. The weirdest thing was (aside from the crash) was the HUGE degradation in performance, even in the water. FPS were probably at 15, and that's with frame generation enabled. From the depicted flight plan below, I'm WAY off of the map!

 

 

As you can see here, it's like the plane "hit a wall" and dropped out of the sky. ....either the earth really IS flat, or Santa had a TFR I didn't know about 😂

It's a known issue with MSFS that ASOBO needs to adress. 

Until they do it is recommended to not fly further North (or South) than 85°

Has anyone seen a topic on the Microsoft forums that we can upvote? Is Asobo even aware of the issue?

45 minutes ago, Farlis said:

It's a known issue with MSFS that ASOBO needs to adress. 

Until they do it is recommended to not fly further North (or South) than 85°

Every sim I’ve played had this issue one way or another. If they couldn’t figure it out, Asobo’s “investigating” definitely can’t. 

Each section of terrain in the sim is designed and processed as a square. 

Closer you are to the tippy top, or bottom, the smaller and more distorted those squares are. 

When I headed up there on launch day all them years ago I certainly enjoyed the trippy light show but was expecting somewhere to actually fly around. 

4 hours ago, UAL4life said:

Every sim I’ve played had this issue one way or another. If they couldn’t figure it out, Asobo’s “investigating” definitely can’t. 

Did you ever use P3D?  I flew over-the-pole there and it worked for me.  I haven't tried it in MSFS but I do plan a pole-to-pole in the 777 eventually (Ushuaia --> Boston --> Mudken --> Perth).

I'm really surprised with the technological advances made in MSFS we still have the old "cylindrical" earth model that was FSX and not the near spherical earth of P3D

I've found that if you plug in geographic waypoints that approximate a great circle route in the flight plan rather than relying on a great circle, the route seems to work.  I don't think I've overflown a pole this way but will try it soon.

Jim Driskell

Does this "crash" also happen when the aircraft are manually flown or just on instruments?

Funny I am doing RJAA-LSZH right now. At this moment @ 87 33.5 wish me luck. FPS is getting worse by the minute, so that might be it? We'll see.

88.2 I am giving up, FPS is @ 9  im am turning to a less polar route. Problem is neither HDG Sel nor TRK Sel work. Probably accurate to the real thing, willhave to look it up.

 

So manual flight it is

Edited July 5, 20241 yr by Qowy

Should revert to grid mode when above 78N... for the North Pole... 

15 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Should revert to grid mode when above 78N... for the North Pole... 

Apparently you need to manueally select TRUE HDG REF despite the airplaine doing it automatically anyway.

Anyway after raching 0.2 FPS is fave up and used slew mode 😄 Back @ 86N on the other side now. And everything works again.

Did you change HDG mode to TRUE north?

14 hours ago, Mace said:

Did you ever use P3D?  I flew over-the-pole there and it worked for me.  I haven't tried it in MSFS but I do plan a pole-to-pole in the 777 eventually (Ushuaia --> Boston --> Mudken --> Perth).

In P3D the clouds stretched crazily and everything got wonky, have they fixed it? I haven’t played since 4.1

2 minutes ago, UAL4life said:

In P3D the clouds stretched crazily and everything got wonky, have they fixed it? I haven’t played since 4.1

I have no idea, I haven't played it since about v5, hard to believe that was 4 years ago

The only thing I remember was that the navigation worked fine, I wanted to test using the CIVA INS in the Aerosoft (Michael Cependa) DC-8.

I remember the crazy clouds thing but in earlier flights over northern Canada.  I don't specifically remember any cloud issues when I went over-the-pole, but I was mainly focused on the INS and seeing if that would work.