On 11/3/2024 at 6:48 AM, micstatic said:

I'd personally far prefer to see inibuilds focus the time and effort on making the best A350 they can make.  The FBW will get better and better.  Assuming they can be successful optimizing it, I don't see a huge need to replace it.  

Yeah...but we keep forgetting one Major Player....when we speak about Airbus, FSL! Bound by NDA nonsense (like nobody had any NDA and they are only one with it), we have no clue what they might come up with, if anything (based on their rude answers "because nothing you can tell them they will be happy and answer). But it seems that they wait for 2024 release or else.....who knows...

But since they had premium product...will have to wait and see....Maybe 350. Or nice 330 neo. 

3 minutes ago, cyyzrwy24 said:

Yeah...but we keep forgetting one Major Player....when we speak about Airbus, FSL! Bound by NDA nonsense (like nobody had any NDA and they are only one with it), we have no clue what they might come up with, if anything (based on their rude answers "because nothing you can tell them they will be happy and answer). But it seems that they wait for 2024 release or else.....who knows...

But since they had premium product...will have to wait and see....Maybe 350. Or nice 330 neo. 

We will see. We only know what they tell us. Since they tell us nothing…

2 minutes ago, micstatic said:

We will see. We only know what they tell us. Since they tell us nothing…

LOL, that's the problem....nothing really. 

1 hour ago, holland786 said:

Load/save is far from a basic functionality.

First, glad to have someone that seem to be involved in the FBW development.

And I never thought this, from a development perspective, would be basic/simple, what I mean is it's a fundamental functionality supported by the MSFS framework through their Flt files. And it's supported by most addon developers though to different extends. Some addons don't bring all the settings back after a reload, but at least it's doable. PMDG brings almost every setting back while FBW completely blocks it.

1 hour ago, holland786 said:

But it is an alpha release problem

Well as you explain it, it do not seem like such functionality is planned for in coming releases, and so making it just an alpha release issue. I hope I'm wrong as there ar other pretty complex functionalities that is already in place already at this stage. And so it looks promising from many aspects

 

1 hour ago, holland786 said:

I'm curious to know on which information you base this claim.

As I have no direct information regarding your architecture I might of course be wrong. My rather suspicion is that, the more you postpone implementing such complex functionality (since A320 and forward) the harder it will get, after a while it will turn into a business matter as: we now can't implement it as it had gone to far and will cost too much.

And I'm referring to both issues, sim-rate as well as load a saved flight.

It would be fun going back into coding as I've been doing this for 40 years, but that part of my life is behind me.

 

Edited November 5, 20241 yr by mseder

3 hours ago, mseder said:

Have flown 6 legs with the A380 FBW, learned a lot by watching the very good tutorial videos by the Airbus pilot Emanuel. It seems stable, and none of the usual VNAV problems (that so many other struggles with) and it feels good flying as well.

But what makes me abandon this product is the max simrate. It varies between 1-4 X. 4X can be kept during short periods and then the sim returns it to 2X automatically (or from 2X to 1X) and you have to turn it back again manually, probably because of the current FPS (50-90 in my case). Using the 8K or the 4K version makes no difference.

This might be ok for those who wish to spend a whole day for one single flight from A to B. For me this is not ok, and far from the long haul standard 8X+ delivered by PMDG and others.

The problem is that you can’t override the simrate, as was the case with A320 when yourself could change the parameters. A320 makes 4X. Also saving a flight and load it again, a basic Flight sim functionality is left out by FBW.

Could this be an alpha release problem? No, most probably not. The attitude from FBW’s side regarding simrate and loading saved flights has been ice cold for years as I’ve confronted them with these 2 matters many times.

I’m running on a GTX 4090 and 12900 processor, 32 GB mem (50% occupied), managing 50-90 Fps and still the sim can’t manage 4X, sorry to say but this is a lack of functionality and design. And to improve this would probably mean a basic reconstructuring of their codebase, which they won’t care for.

I now put my hope in a potential iniBuild A380 version but agree with some here that an A350 might be more important to focus on.

PMDG's 777 is still the king among long haulers.

If the sim rate thing disturbs you so much, just can disable it by putting a ModelConfiguration.ini with the following content in the work folder:

[autopilot]
limit_simulation_rate_by_performance = false
simulation_rate_reduction_enabled = false

This will disable what you seem to hate so much, but no support on that one. I'm working in parallel to better support 4x as it hasn't been tuned much with it. With the incoming changes and the above changes I can fly without issues in 4x @ 30 fps.

1 hour ago, AGuther said:

f the sim rate thing disturbs you so much, just can disable it by putting a ModelConfiguration.ini

Already tried that, it doesn't seem to have an effect. I also asked FBW if there was a way to supress the sim-rate blockage and they told me: unfortunately not.

It seem you have it working though, true? I'll give another chance. And BTW it's not what I hate, it's a matter of if you want to spend a day on one single flight. If that seems reasonable to you, ok.

Edited November 5, 20241 yr by mseder

27 minutes ago, mseder said:

I also asked FBW

Ask above, you are closer to FBW than you think 😉

8 hours ago, mseder said:

Already tried that, it doesn't seem to have an effect. I also asked FBW if there was a way to supress the sim-rate blockage and they told me: unfortunately not.

It seem you have it working though, true? I'll give another chance. And BTW it's not what I hate, it's a matter of if you want to spend a day on one single flight. If that seems reasonable to you, ok.

I’m a developer of FBW and developed a lot around the fly-by-wire and Autopilot systems.

I understand your concern but we also have a ton of people that just want to use stuff and are not so experienced and then come up with issues that might bind support a lot.  Support people on our end are all doing support in their free time, so you might also understand we want to keep issues on a minimum.

19 hours ago, mseder said:

Already tried that, it doesn't seem to have an effect. I also asked FBW if there was a way to supress the sim-rate blockage and they told me: unfortunately not.

It seem you have it working though, true? I'll give another chance. And BTW it's not what I hate, it's a matter of if you want to spend a day on one single flight. If that seems reasonable to you, ok.

Just seeing that you wrote it has no effect. To ensure its correct, the file location in case of Microsoft Store version is here:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\packages\flybywire-aircraft-a380-842\work\ModelConfiguration.ini

with the following content:

[autopilot]
limit_simulation_rate_by_performance = false
simulation_rate_reduction_enabled = false

In the upcoming pull request, I will also relax the performance requirements:
https://github.com/flybywiresim/aircraft/pull/9374

Documentation of this file can be found here:
https://github.com/flybywiresim/aircraft/blob/master/fbw-a32nx/docs/Configuration/ModelConfiguration.ini

Edited November 6, 20241 yr by AGuther

Given the FBW A380 some time to bed in and do quite a few flights.

It is certainly exciting for a freeware aircraft in an alpha stage. It is not really good enough, and has too many issues for me to want to fly it at this stage, but I'm sure excited to check back in 6 months - a year to see how it has come on.

27 minutes ago, abennett said:

It is not really good enough, and has too many issues for me to want to fly it at this stage

Curious to hear more about your experience (and what matters most to you), always helpful to near what people are looking forward to the most.

9 hours ago, abennett said:

Given the FBW A380 some time to bed in and do quite a few flights.

It is certainly exciting for a freeware aircraft in an alpha stage. It is not really good enough, and has too many issues for me to want to fly it at this stage, but I'm sure excited to check back in 6 months - a year to see how it has come on.

Issues like? (Apart from the performance issue which is known) 

12 hours ago, holland786 said:

Curious to hear more about your experience (and what matters most to you), always helpful to near what people are looking forward to the most.

First of all, let me just say thank you for your and other members of the team's work, and let me just repeat and clarify what I said in my post that it is an exciting project and given it is only in alpha stage, I think it has huge potential and is a very exciting project.

Some issues that make me want to wait for future updates rather than fly the aircraft as it is now include (and I'm sure some, if not all of these will be known):

 

Performance

Very stuttery and low fps even with very high-end hardware and appropriate settings.

Lateral Navigation

The aircraft frequently cant draw the lateral path properly, and also often doesn't follow the path it has calculated, ending up quite a distance away from it during turns etc, which then result in it requiring manual intervention with Direct-to's to stop it then over compensating and getting in a mess.

An example of the path drawing issue - 

 

Vertical Navigation 

A lot of the ND symbology is bugged, either missing completely, or appearing and then disappearing, or there but very slow to react. These things are incredibly useful when managing descent and meeting constraints.

For example, here there is a lack of level off altitude pseudo waypoint, symbol, etc. The aircraft is at FL130 with a FCU selected altitude of 5000, 8000 to lose, doing a roughly 3 degree descent, as we are, -1600fpm at GS320, should reach 5000ft in about 24nm, you can see the ND display out to 80nm and there is no level off symbol.

 

Constraint Management

When there is a speed constraint the aircraft aims for that constraint at the waypoint with the constraint but then does not plan to stay at that speed after the waypoint, instead accelerating back to the calculated econ descent speed. 

For example, here, 250kt speed restriction at DM476 and DM457 instead of staying at this speed after these waypoints, the aircraft plans to accelerate back to 290kts, which, as can be seen from the right side FMS, as the planned managed descent speed. This is incorrect behaviour.

 

Climb Performance 

The climb rate of the aircraft is very unrealistic, even when fully loaded the aircraft is able to climb at ridiculous rates all the way up to cruise level.

 

ECAM

Things missing from ECAM such as an indication when the landing lights are on etc.

 

Flight Model

This may be subjective but the aircraft feels very 'pitchy' to me on approach and I find myself constantly pitching up and down to try and stay on path. Whilst I have never flown an a380, my other half flies the a350 and has asked colleagues at work who fly the 380 about this, and how they described the feel of the aircraft seems to fit with my impression. However, as I mentioned, this is subjective and if a380 pilots have said it is realistic then of course I am happy to defer to this, maybe I need to play with the sensitivities of the sidestick.

 

Summary

These things I would consider basic features to be present for me to enjoy flying an aircraft, but as I have said this is not a criticism, I am fully aware the aircraft is both freeware and only in alpha stage, and this is why I said I am excited to check back in the future and give it another try when more work has been done. When there are other aircraft out there that do not have this problem (yes I know they are not 380s) for me I just can't choose to fly the 380 over them.

Best regards.

 

Edited November 7, 20241 yr by abennett

First, thank you for your feedback!

1 hour ago, abennett said:

Very stuttery and low fps even with very high-end hardware and appropriate settings.

We're working on an update to the 4K texture pack which should be available shortly. This may improve your experience. For the sake of our own data, what are your specs?

1 hour ago, abennett said:

The aircraft frequently cant draw the lateral path properly, and also often doesn't follow the path it has calculated, ending up quite a distance away from it during turns etc, which then result in it requiring manual intervention with Direct-to's to stop it then over compensating and getting in a mess.

An example of the path drawing issue -

The example you give is a known bug, but this is in an unguided path, meaning it would not be trying to follow the path on the ND anyway. This happens in a number of scenarios, inlucidng course-to-fix legs in procedures, overfly waypoints, some cases where you overshoot a turn, etc.  This is accurate to the real FMS behaviour and the result of intentional tweaking. The drawing bug is not intended, but because it does not affect guidance is not a priority at the moment.

If you have other examples of LNAV issues, feel free to let me know or open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/flybywiresim/aircraft/issues

1 hour ago, abennett said:

A lot of the ND symbology is bugged, either missing completely, or appearing and then disappearing, or there but very slow to react. These things are incredibly useful when managing descent and meeting constraints.

For example, here there is a lack of level off altitude pseudo waypoint, symbol, etc. The aircraft is at FL130 with a FCU selected altitude of 5000, 8000 to lose, doing a roughly 3 degree descent, as we are, -1600fpm at GS320, should reach 5000ft in about 24nm, you can see the ND display out to 80nm and there is no level off symbol.

1 hour ago, abennett said:

When there is a speed constraint the aircraft aims for that constraint at the waypoint with the constraint but then does not plan to stay at that speed after the waypoint, instead accelerating back to the calculated econ descent speed. 

For example, here, 250kt speed restriction at DM476 and DM457 instead of staying at this speed after these waypoints, the aircraft plans to accelerate back to 290kts, which, as can be seen from the right side FMS, as the planned managed descent speed. This is incorrect behaviour.

I've forwarded this feedback to the dev who worked on VNAV. The level off point missing is a known bug due to it not being able to placed on MANUAL legs at the moment.

1 hour ago, abennett said:

The climb rate of the aircraft is very unrealistic, even when fully loaded the aircraft is able to climb at ridiculous rates all the way up to cruise level.

This is a known issue that the engine model is currently overpowered. This will see continuous work going forward.

1 hour ago, abennett said:

Things missing from ECAM such as an indication when the landing lights are on etc.

Feel free to open an issue on GitHub if it doesn't already exist: https://github.com/flybywiresim/aircraft/issues

1 hour ago, abennett said:

This may be subjective but the aircraft feels very 'pitchy' to me on approach and I find myself constantly pitching up and down to try and stay on path. Whilst I have never flown an a380, my other half flies the a350 and has asked colleagues at work who fly the 380 about this, and how they described the feel of the aircraft seems to fit with my impression. However, as I mentioned, this is subjective and if a380 pilots have said it is realistic then of course I am happy to defer to this, maybe I need to play with the sensitivities of the sidestick.

There should be some improvements coming in the next release, look out for that.

Edited November 7, 20241 yr by holland786

On 11/5/2024 at 10:06 PM, cyyzrwy24 said:

Yeah...but we keep forgetting one Major Player....when we speak about Airbus, FSL!

All this hype over Flightsimlabs is getting ludicrous. They have not managed to release one single product during the entire lifecycle of MSFS. As far as I'm concerned they are out of the picture completely.