Paid Steam at 21:35 and started download.  A bit of confusion because Steam did not initially recognize my 1 TB NVMe drive.  Once that was done it took 10 minutes for the Steam download (1 GB connection).  

I then pressed Install which took 5-minutes.  

Then pressed Play in Steam and was presented with the spinning & no mouse situation for the XBOX connection.  Seemed odd because I was already signed into XBox app. 

Anyway, eventually remembered the Alt+Esc trick and found myself at the XBox signin (I was already signed in).   It was a bit confusing because I forgot that my XBox app signin was not what it wanted - had to give it my flightsim xbox signin (why are they different?)

Once in Xbox it took 15 minutes for the sim to download stuff and for me to customize what I initially wanted.

Then I needed another 5-minutes to get the basic C-172 controls (Bravo throttle quadrant, CH Pro pedals, T320 Flighstick) set up - it is very intuitive and easy for the rush job initial setup.

Then I was off flying from KSEE - scenery is horrible!  Melted building, weird trees, strange clouds.  But, I am sure that will all work itself out over the next months. 

The whole thing from payment to first flight was easy and stress free here in SW Florida.

NOW - can they get the much advertised graphics going?

1 minute ago, TacomaSailor said:

 

 

NOW - can they get the much advertised graphics going?

Yeah even today I was back to blurry textures and AI traffic missing wings and engines even as they taxied by me hehe....  then again it was during peak Europe evening time so that's probably why.  Let's hope they can get the servers running better soon.

Quit the sim and then restarted thru Steam.  From pressing Play to having the Free Flight world map was 2' 30" (about the same as MSFS 2024 with 50 or so items in Community) on a 1 GB connection.

Selected the C-172 (six other planes available) and was able to start flying in 1' 45" which, is about two minutes faster than a 2020 flight from KSEE with a lot of high resolution add ons in Community.

Tried to get rid of all the assistance stuff on the flying screen but POIs still appear.

Had to dodge a couple 300' tall trees on final to RWY 17 that were sprouting from a non-existent 5-story apartment building.  Other scenery looked much better than the first flight.

My rudder pedals quit working on the 2nd flight despite verifying they were set correctly.  They had worked OK in the first flight.

I think it will all work out fine before the end of the year.  But, not going to get rid of 2020 for a while.

I appreciate that it is early days, but you guys can clearly accept stuff that I really couldn't. There is absolutely no way that I would be happy seeing blurry textures and slow loading scenery at any time. This is one of the reasons why I am sticking with MSFS 2020 for the moment. I really hope that Microsoft/Asobo can resolve these issues quickly, because I would not want to be using a simulator where I am constantly worried about the possibility of bandwidth problems like these appearing when lots of people are online. I need to be confident that everything will load normally during every flight session. Granted we already have the occasional "low bandwidth" problems in MSFS 2020, but it is that total reliance on streaming everything that concerns me.