kerosene31

I started to focus on helicopters more and more, and it is a rewarding, but long journey. I do just fine with the Thrustmaster Airbus stick, old CH Pedals and a logtech throttle. Now, MSFS has a tendency to be extra twitchy, and that hits helicopters even harder. Gentle inputs and finding the right sensitivity settings is key. This is where the higher end setups really do shine I'm sure. My advice: -You have to learn the real world characteristics of helicopters first. There's lots of good real world insruction, and check out some good msfs heli youtube channels. You've got to understand the basics of what is happening and why, otherwise you'll just be chasing the controls and not learning. Belatu42 is a real world pilot who has great videos. P Gatcomb isn't all heli, but he has a lot of good intro videos. Matthew Crawford is good, just don't get discouraged by how easy they make it look. They mostly use higher end controls, plus most of them have real experience. -Get your controls set up for helicopters specifically. There's many videos on how to do it. It is collective, cyclic and torque pedals, not the usual airplane controls. -Find one heli and stick with it. For default, the Cabri is pretty good, as is the R66, otherwise there's tons of payware options. One of the best helicopters is the Taog hanger MD500, but that is a hotrod in real life, and not exactly an easy one to learn on. Find something and just keep picking it up and putting it down over and over until you get the feel of it, then start trying to do more and more. When it comes to airplanes, I can pick up and fly just about anything, but helicopters all have their own different feel. Repetition is key. I would just start at a big empty runway and spend 30+ minutes just trying to lift and hover. Just be ready that this will take time. I don't like recommending addons, especially with helicopters. I know I started buying every heli out there and wasting a lot of time and money. -Learn trim and especially force trim. -Patience, patience, patience. I could buy any airplane addon this weekend and figure out how to fly it pretty easily, from fighters, to tube liners to GA (not including the systems, but just the stick and rudder flying). Helis will take a lot more time, but are a lot more rewarding. It was hours before I could keep the Taog's MD500 even stable, but now I can handle it fairly well. It was humbling for sure.

When the idea of the walkaround feature in 2024 first was announced, I thought it was kind of a waste. However over time I find myself using it more and more. Granted, not a ton. Parallel 42 released a small addon that let's you fish in the MSFS 2024 world. Again not something I use all the time, but I'll grab a bush plane with tundra tires and look for interesting spots. One time I jumped out of the plane and walked over to a nearby lake and fished as the AI traffic landed overhead. There's a few GA sceneries that let you walk into a bar or some other modeled area. Orbx has some really cool ones. It is kind of neat. Now, would I walk around the inside of a large airport? Probably not, but I'm sure some people would. The inside of the tower is modeled at St Barths and is neat to get that view. Now, do I need this feature? No, of course not, but it can be neat to walk around and explore. I do wonder about the performance hit on larger airports. For the smaller ones I'm sure it is negligible, but I could see a big mega hub hurting because of it. Honestly I'm not the kind of flyer who flies the commercial stuff at all, so it makes a lot more sense on the GA side. I can see how modeling every single terminal of a large airport might be a bit much. Some people might like to explore, but how many people will actually visit every single inch of an airport, but I bet someone does. Again I'm a GA flyer so it makes a lot more sense for the smaller sceneries I hit.

You're right, it has really degraded, not sure when exactly. I know I had it working fine in 2024 at one point. Now one of the falls doesn't have water (which is kind of what makes it a falls and not a cliff).

Looks like it is only the falls itself, none of the surrounding area. Not that I'd expect that for the low price, no issues with that. Sad to see the Jeppesen2001 stuff no longer looks right in 2024. I would love to see this (or any other) developer really enhance the area. There's really a lot more than just some water going over the rocks. 🙂

Got everything installed, seems fairly simple once I got the option to select Navigraph. One thing I'm noticing is that there's a plane flying low over the airport, every one I've checked so far in the US. Looks like American Airlines, but hard to tell. It just seems to be on a loop and repeats. I know default ATC has some quirks, but I don't remember this happening so consistently. There's always an odd plane here or there, but this is repeatable (At least at JFK, PVD and PHL).

This is great news, not "free" of course, but something I think many of us are already paying for.

Quite simply, the default toolbar sucks. Prior to SU5, if you added too many things, it would not scroll unless you downloaded a mod off fs to. SU5 finally fixed that. Also not sure if it still happens, but I know any changes I saved to my toolbar would not save. Some thing I never use would be front and center while the thing I wanted was way off screen. Just convinence really. I did start messing around with the scripting, but the functions you can do seemed kind of limited. You're limited to what MSFS functions can do. I was trying to create a script that would tune 122.0 into the radio automatically, but it didn't seem to work. It does come with some better tools too. The wind visualizer is neat. To me it isn't a "must have" but I like it. I press a key and my menu pops up, with everything exactly where I want it. So basically one of those things I'm using every day, but only kind of scratching the surface. Basically, I was happy to pay to stop my headaches with the default toolbar.

My super short guide to what I do with Chaseplane when using a new plane: -Edit the pilot view to be exactly where I want it, assign it to "up" on my hat -Create new views for pilot left and pilot right, assign that to hat buttons -Create another new view for back. I use 135 degrees back for pattern work, but adjust as necessary. Assign that to my hat (back) Once I got the hang of it, it is super quick. You can type numbers into the view to move them too. I do wish the left/right and back would be default views, but I can set them up in no time. The trick is being consistent for every plane. Then I get up in the air and set my autopilot for cruise. I then check out the external views and add any I might want. I like setting up stuff as if there's a gopro camera on the plane. A lot of the default external views work well. There's a way to edit how sensitive the view panning is too. Some are far too sensitive. As for overall key binds, I have a toggle internal external view (just like the default camera). You can assign buttons for next/previous if you like. I mostly just pop up the interface to go through the external views. My hat already controls the internal views as always. The big challenge is avoiding key bind conflicts. If any assignment acts strangely, check for a duplicate assignment. When you assign something in Chaseplane, go into the default controls and search for that input and make sure there's nothing that conflicts. The program does a pretty good job clearing these out, but a few might still be there. There's a lot more depth to it, but this is all I really need to do.

There's nothing like the default "look left/right". I just create a custom view for each and assign them to the hat you want. You can type in the numbers into the view too. So just take your main view, then go -90 and +90 (I always forget which one goes which way). Then adjust to get the perfect view. It is a few extra steps, but you can adjust it to exactly where you want it. There's a bit of a learning curve but it is well worth it.

This is the problem with issues that only impact certain people. Huddison's video isn't showing the problem I think some of us have had with clouds. It is way, way more noticeable than that. Plus the issue with clouds has nothing to do with the weather engine. I saw the same cloud issue with ActiveSky.

The problem seems to be only impacting certain people. I bet more people have it than realize though. The problem isn't whether they are realistic or not, they are real for certain conditions, that thin haze with no definition. That's real, for those conditions. My problem is that you never see clouds having any thickness. Fly in a tropical area in hot weather, you'd expect to see thick, "puffy" clouds. Again, obviously this is only impacting certain people (and not that many) since SU5. Stop trying to prove people wrong on what they are seeing. If you don't see the issue, great. Consider yourself lucky. After a reinstall, my clouds are back to looking great again.

I only did one short flight, but yes! TEB was my destination and BATC loaded just fine with 2.0 (it stuck for me with TEB 1.0 as well).

There's some discussion about this in the SU5 thread. Long story short, this seems to have hit a few of us, but obviously not most. After SU5, my clouds looked 2d, like in one of the really old versions of MSFS where a 2d cloud would rotate around you to appear 3d. I had to reinstall the sim to fix it. I tried a bunch of things, but my clouds were terrible, and I had blurry terrian really close. This youtuber talked about it too, seemed to have the same issue. Nothing else changed on my system, installing SU5 seemed to just cause something to go haywire. After a reinstall, clouds are back to having 3 dimensions.

Exactly the kind of person who NEEDS antivirus running all the time. This is why I want you to be more specific and clear on your point. When you say to dump things like McAfee and use the default Defender? That's good! I'm on board with that. I echo that. However turning off antivirus completely is a pet peeve of mine, and yes, vendors will tell you do to it too and I stand up to them too. As an aside, anyone not familiar with John McAfee, google his story. A sad, but interesting story.

Reinstalling is definitely a last resort. This is my 1st reinstall since first installing, so I think that's acceptable. You definitely want to try many other things before doing this. Of course too, if I get the exact same issue a month later, I'm going to do a lot more digging before reinstalling again. Considering the sim has been running great up until recently, I'm betting that I won't have the same issue for some time. Hopefully not until SU10 is released 🙂 However, your 2nd point hits it - there's simply a not a lot of debugging you can do. General slowness is pretty hard to track down. You can empty your community folder, clear the various caches, update drivers, etc. I know that addonlinker has a way to search for duplicate icao airport codes. I'm not aware of too much else. You can dig into Windows 11 itself, but I find 11 pretty stable as long as you take care of it.