Bob Scott

I use a utility I wrote back in the FSX days (QuantumLeap) for the jump. It uses FSUIPC, so the interface still works for MSFS.

I've pondered this before, and somewhat expected something like this to be coming. Imagine what would happen if the popularity of these things takes off (pun intended) and we have hundreds of them flying around, with no routes or "rules of the road", no safety inspections, no operator training/certification, etc. Who wants one of these things dropping onto their house, their car, or their head when they malfunction, or when they collide in uncontrolled random traffic criss-crossing overhead? How is law enforcement done when the airborne version of the reckless driver acts out in close proximity to you and yours? A lot of work needs to be put in to establish route structure, operating rules, safety regulation and enforcement lest we let the technology run away and endanger us.

The Mighty Dog and the PMDG 777F are my go-to cargo haulers in MSFS. It's very good now, and TFDi continues to refine it. My only complaint is the inability to change the fuel load inflight to accomodate repositions when I use a utility to skip ahead on long overwater flights. I've come up with a workaround, which is to reposition forward to about 300-350nm from destination, then start dumping fuel and put the sim in 4x. You can drop 100K of fuel in 3-4 minutes and 100-120nm, leaving you ~200nm from destination with an appropriate fuel load.

Navigraph has a monthly subscription plan.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that it's a valid clearance. From the AIM, para 5-4-6 (f): " Except when being vectored to the final approach course, pilots cleared for an IAP are expected to execute the entire procedure commencing at an IAF or an associated feeder fix as described on the IAP chart." And 5-4-6 (b) says: " b. If a feeder route to an IAF begins at a fix located along the route of flight prior to reaching the holding fix, and clearance for an approach is issued, a pilot should commence the approach via the published feeder route" The feeder route is considered part of the procedure. Since you're already on a route to that feeder fix, a clearance for the approach without further instructions means fly it from that fix. And as always, if in doubt, query the controller.

Yoke travel is not the same as back pressure. All we can see in the video is how far the yoke moves, not how much force is required to move it. And I do note that the pilot has grabbed the yoke with both hands... Acft with hydraulic flight controls employ an artificial feel system to provide the pilot tactile feedback. A short pull against a high artificial feel force still feels "heavy" on the controls. That said, I wouldn't draw a conclusion based on what we saw there.

The author says it gets into the rendering swapchain completely external to XPlane. For me it killed the swimming lines and shimmer that have plagued XP12 since it first released, as well as enabling nVidia frame gen. With 2x FG I saw 100-110 fps at the monitor with no jaggies, shimmering trees etc on my first test flight in the FF 757 (KJAC-KOAK). Only discernible downside was some minor ghosting on the displays, which was not evident at all on the pop-up displays. If nothing else, this proves it can be done...why LR hasn't already is a mystery to me.

Since there's already a post-release discussion thread, I'm gonna close this one.

I'm going to assume your target budget is in your national currency and not USD, which certainly complicates things. If you want to preserve the option to upgrade later without gutting the system to replace the AM4 mobo//CPU and DDR4 RAM, then an AM5 setup would be preferable--a 9800X3D CPU is marginally more expensive than the 5800X3D, but a 32GB DDR5 RAM kit is almost double that of DDR4--an obscene $700 there. Upgrading to a better GPU later would be a much less invasive and straightforward proposition, not requiring essentially a full system rebuild. If you can find a used GPU (with 16GB or more VRAM) to pair with an AM5 build I think that would be a good compromise. Unfortunately, I'm not very hopeful that waiting will improve things in the near/medium term. A lot of folks thought the spike in memory prices was transitory, but it hasn't proven that way yet. Because the memory manufacturers have largely re-tooled towards producing RAM for AI use, even if/when the AI bubble bursts, it would still take some time to shift back to producing consumer memory.

The cited article showed an average 12% loss in performance, with some more memory-sensitive games losing much more--one dropped a third of it's frame rates. MSFS was not among those tested. The very noticeable increase in performance we saw due to higher memory bandwidth that came with the X3D chips suggests to me that MSFS is memory sensitive. I don't think upgrading to a better CPU just to give most or all of that performance increase back by skimping on the RAM makes a lot of sense.

Nooooooo! A single stick in a dual-channel motherboard (and nearly all mobos are) drastically reduces your memory bandwidth. And if prices improve, adding a second unmatched DIMM later is likely to present problems. Always populate your mobo with a manufacturer-matched set of DIMMs unless you really know what you're doing and can tune the memory timings to (hopefully) get them to play nice together. You haven't specified what sim(s) you're using. In my experience, the AMD X3D CPUs really made a huge difference in FS2020, but not so much in FS2024 or X-Plane. 64GB of RAM rarely makes much of a difference, and even if your RAM is approaching full utilization, it often does not translate into any performance hit, as the OS will use whatever it has available. With the pre-caching of scenery, pages can be swapped-in long before they are needed, but won't be paged out if extra RAM is available. IOW, just because the extra RAM is used does not mean it is needed. Personally, with your current system and budget, I'd consider keeping the mobo/CPU/RAM you have and upgrading the GPU to a 5070Ti or a used 4000-series GPU with 16GB+ of VRAM, especially if FS2024 is your target environment.

Just one reason that I do most of my control profiles in FSUIPC.

Closed--discussion continued in post-release thread:

Those things also work wonders for stoking-up a campfire.

The RealityXP developer abandoned his support forum here going on four years ago, yet he still advertises it's existence.