Driver8

Hmmm. Kinda wish they'd fix some of the things that got "broke" in the experimental version, such as the ECS, Electrics, and Hydraulics system pages - not to mention the button mapping on the FMS CDU in VR - before spending another 4 weeks just working on holds.... As it stands, i'm going to give 0.10.31 one try, but i'm expecting i'll probably be rolling back to the stable version. The FMS on the stable version is simpler, yes, but the overall experience is just better, at least in my opinion.

The profiles themselves, no, they were not affected. Which profile was assigned to which aircraft, YES, that WAS affected... Since the service updates brought about some changes to control profiles and i also learned more about how the profiles work in MSFS 2024 over the last year, i took the opportunity to simplify my controller setups a lot, but it is going to be quite a long time before i have profiles re-assigned to all the aircraft they were assigned to before whatever server / sync glitch happened. Does saving a local copy of the controller profiles save that information as well?

Had this happen once before.... Not sure why, either... Taxied out of the gate one time only to notice that the brakes weren't working. I'd get the brake message, but no braking. Tried the parking brake, but no luck there either... Had to use reverse thrust to slow down (which is a no-no at taxi speed IRL, i know, but with the very limited amount of time i have these days, it was one of those situations where i had to sacrifice some reality in order to get a chance to fly that night :) ). Was thinking maybe when i landed, it would be OK - but nope, once again no braking, nearly ran out of runway before i slowed enough to turn off! So i then did an instant replay, as i tend to like to do sometimes - and when i resumed after the replay, the brakes were back! No clue WHY, but suddenly there they were, working all fine! Never found out what happened, and it never happened again.

Well, honestly, i'd been holding off on the NGX purchase because i did not know what the "lifespan" of that purchase would be with Flight on the horizon. Since it now seems Flight is going to be exactly what i feared it would, looks like i'll be purchasing the NGX at some point soon after all :)To be honest, after all the years accumulating add-ons for FSX, i was actually getting somewhat nervous about moving to a new sim anyway. Call me crazy, but generally i've been pleased with FSX since the service packs and since i got some hardware several years ago that was capable of finally running it halfway decent. And i still have room to go before i get every FSX graphical feature enabled. So my thinking is that supporting FSX will be a pretty safe bet for at least a couple more years. But, I wonder what the future of Microsoft is going to be with regard to flight simulation. My problem here with their decision is that indeed, we are not the target audience - but that brings up the question: who IS their target audience? IS there even a market for a "fast-paced CIVIL AVIATION game"??? Sounds to me like they're trying to make a combat-style flight game without the combat.... I really don't personally know anyone who this would interest - anyone i know either has no interest in flying a plane where you can't blow up everything around you, or they want to enjoy the freedom that FSX and its predecessors offer but just on a casual level rather than as a hobby. So, i would not be entirely surprised to see this as the end of Microsoft's involvement in flight simulation. And if this really is the end for true flight simulators from Microsoft, it may be the 3rd party developers themselves that help to determine what direction the community follows down the road as far as which sim will replace it....

Well, sure, but of course the first flight of the Airbus A320 was in 1988, whilst the 737's been in the air since 1967 :( When you consider the advancements that have been made in everything from things like weather alerting, radar, and TCAS, to aircraft manufacturing and even seat design, flying in the 1960s and 70s is a world of difference from flying in the 1990s and later in terms of safety :( But - wanna know what plane i'm sorta impressed with now?The CRJ-700 :( Hit by an A380, spun violently 90 degrees, yet stayed in one piece without any serious injuries!

Some of y'all sound like a broken record....C'mon, seriously, how the heck long have some of you been into playing stuff on a PC??"We've all been using a Beta, it should never have been released this way in the first place!" - SOMEONE says it for every FS release. Get off it... This is the oldest, most boring argument and someone says it for ANY piece of software that gets a patch. FS2000, MSTS, Auran Trainz, Age of Empires, the ENTIRE consumer Windows OS history, half of any add-on i've ever owned for FS, you name it, if it needs a patch at any point, SOMEONE says this... For cryin' out loud, LEARN your LESSON!! IF you want to play something new, be prepared for bugs! IF you don't want to play something with the risk of bugs, WAIT FOR THE PATCH. This applies to any piece of new software AND even new PC hardware! Otherwise, shuddup! You can't be BOTH impatient AND get perfection, if you think that then you're not living on Planet Earth."Taking forever to get it/I'm thinking Duke Nukem!" - i fail to see how this even REMOTELY compares! Duke's been YEAAARS! Something is delayed a couple freakin' months and this is what gets resorted to?? Read the last paragraph - ya want it NOW, or ya want it to WORK? Take your pick."When the patch is out, FINALLY we'll have the complete game!" - Yeah, and ya think there won't be any bugs? Right. Ain't gonna happen. I can still find glitches in FS2004, MSTS, Trainz, AoE, EVERYTHING. They're small, they're don't affect too much, but they're there, cause at some point, it financially don't make sense to keep going on with fixes, it's time for a new version (and if the companies WEREN'T tryin to make money, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE GAMES TO PLAY!!)...So... In short, LEARN THESE LESSONS, and either buy the stuff when it first comes out and DEAL WITH THE FACT that there's likely gonna be problems (like i did with FSX), or wait for a product to get patched and THEN buy it (like i'm doing with Vista)...Glad to hear that Beta4 was released, i am indeed looking forward to the SP1, so i'll return now to doing what i've been doing - PATIENTLY waiting for it, doin' some IFR airline flyin' with one of my add-ons in FS2004, and some VFR pond-hopping in FSX.

OK, tried this - at KSTL (my "testing grounds"), i noticed only a slight increase in FPS. HOWEVER, i noticed SIGNIFCANTLY fewer chops and stutters while panning around. So, thanks a lot for the file! While "the numbers" don't show much difference, overall the sim feels much, much "smoother"!

>-ABIT Fatality AN8-SSLI with nforce 4>-OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)>Unbuffered (will have more later on... maybe mid-next year)>-AMD athlon 64 4000+ 939 OR AMD athlon 64 X2 4200>-XFX GF 7800GTX SLI over clocked (will have SLI by next year>this time)>-ABIT audioMAX with 8 channels OR a creative audigy>-120gig 7200 Hitachi (for now, but thinking about getting a>faster one to add to this)Specs sound good!I did a little different on the HD - i went for 2 smaller drives (Best Buy was having a $50 rebate on 80GBs Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB cache drives at the time). Theory being, i'd have all may games and such on one drive, and the Windows OS/Swap File and stuff on the other. Not saying that's necessary, or even that i notice much of a difference, just something to consider if a sweet sale comes along or something :) Also consider though, you can put the Photoshop Scratch file on a different drive than the program, and thus add some additional performance to that as well.One thing i may have missed in this thread - what PSU are you going for? Watch out for "comes with case" PSUs, even if their wattage SEEMS high. It may not be bad there, but other components might be. Personally, i recommend spending the extra money on either an Enermax or an Antec (some will tell you Enermax sucks, go with Antec, some will tell you Antec sucks, go with Enermax - either way, they're the two brands i personally rate the best, and i doubt you can go wrong with either). It may add $40 or $50 to the price, but if you don't, you MAY regret it later on...>-What is an unbuffered ram and what is a registered ram?>-looking at the AMD 4200+ CPU, the specs seem to be a little>lower than the 4000+, for example: >the operating freq. of 2.2 vs 2.4>1GHz of FSB vs Integrated into the chip>and L2 cache or 1x 512kb vs 1 MBRegistered RAM is not something the Athlon 64 needs. Usually used in Servers, the Opterons, and used to be for the AthlonFX. Can't remember what, exactly, it does - may be better on errors or something - but it's a bit slower, and your A64 probably won't like it. Just go with regular, unbuffered, non-registered RAM and you'll be fine.If your Motherboard supports it, ECC RAM supposedly has error-control, but again, there may be a (probably un-noticeable) performance hit. Again though, really not needed...>now is 4200+ with its multitasking capability but with lower>specs worth paying so much more ($80) to get the X2 instead of>the 4000+? does it make that much difference in gaming or>photoshop work?Depends.Now - i'm gonna confess, i'm behind on my Benchmarks... First off though, just cause the specs are lower, if there was a core upgrade, it may very well be more efficient, thus perform the same.But, as far as the "X2" making a difference - probably depends more on what you're going to do. If you're like me and only use only one App at a time, you'll most likely not need the X2. If, however, you're doing something in Photoshop, with a modeling program running, and ripping a CD or something all at the same time, then you'll definitely want the X2, even if in a single-app situation it may be a tad slower (but at today's performance levels, i highly doubt you'd notice the difference in a single-app state without actual benchmarking software - where i HAVE heard that in Multitasking, the difference WILL be noticeable, so decide on that :) ). So really, it depends on how you generally use your maching.

>One thing to keep in mind when it comes to MSFS, you are>generally bound by your CPU's speed, not your video card.> (assuming you have a half-way modern card already)Yes and no.MSFS IS CPU intensive, no doubt.But, the Video card plays a HUGE part in there as well. For example, the single-biggest performance killer on my machine is clouds. Likewise, i have tested this, and landing at a demo of one of the add-on airports brought my machine to a crawl - until i removed the static aircraft. That is almost entirely video related.Even with AI traffic @ 100% on my machine, it's the polygons the video card must chomp on, not the CPU processing, that likes to eat my framerates. Now, i have a halfway decent CPU, but it is the older generation Athlon 64, and it's handling the loads just fine. Add-on aircraft, with lots and lots of guages and calculations and such, don't play anywhere near the role in performance as a thunderstorm in the area does :)Of course, i have the display settings tweaked to where i get all the eye candy MSFS has to offer up close, yet everything remains just smooth on landing in the vast majority of weather. No frame goes to waste! And, the biggest things that made the difference were ground shadows and clouds, which are video intensive.> (one thing I'll note from the lessons learned catagory ... DVI>connected monitors do NOT display anything during your bios>post sequence as they are a driver based interface. Only once>the operating system gets the driver loaded do you see>anything. Be careful of DVI only monitors/panels ... I have to>use my poor TV to get into my bios now!)That has to be a hardware thing then. My old computer (that the wife "appropriated" for her business, thus forcing me to buy an even better machine for myself :) ) has an ATi 9700 Pro hooked to an LCD display via DVI only, and it shows all POST data and BIOS settings and stuff just fine.Well, the only exception to that was when the CPU died, but i can hardly fault the DVI for that! (I CAN fault my electric company's cruddy power feed to my house though... Which brings up another lesson though - BUY A GOOD POWER SUPPLY!!)

"Going Gold" means that the beta testing is complete, and the product is ready for release. All that remains is to package it for distribution.

Also - i have got this message when i have set a cruise altitude, but started my descent priot to reaching it...

Do you already have the original 737NG (600/700) package installed? You need that installed in order to use the 800/900 package if memeory serves...

What are your system specs, including soundcard?I'm leaning toward thinking you're having some odd behavior due to system resources - i'll be willing to bet that the reason it doesn't do it on default aircraft is that they are less taxing on a system than add-ons generally are, especially since a lot more sounds are usually employed in add-ons. When this occurs, what is your system performance like?FWIW - while i've never had this on Flight Sim, i did have the same thing happen in another simulation program on an older, less capable system. Tended to happen in areas where the system was "chugging" the hardest.

Personally....I think anyone who raises a stink over WIPERS needs to go back and find themselves a copy of FS 4.0 and mess with that for a while. Heck, i'll go even newer and say FS 5.1 - i still have the MS-DOS, 3.5" floppy version of that in my basement. Go play with those for a while, then come back here and complain about wipers being too small.How quickly some can forget just how good we have it these days....

1. Use the VC as close to 100% of the time as the VC functionality will allow me.2. Whole flight from startup to shutdown.3. Whatever is needed at that particular phase of flight in whatever conditions i'm flying in.4 & 5. Hmmm, looks like that is really one question :) I would say that there is definitely an interest in the VC. So as real as possible would be my vote - so far VCs run pretty decent on my machine. Can get a bit choppy with a heavy AI traffic load and some heavy cloud cover, but still perfectly flyable...I would think that as long as new prodcts continue to have the same VC / no VC options, i would think everyone would be happy!For the record - i am a VC "Convert". I had been using 2D panels since FS v4.0 (or what passed as a 2D panel at that time :) ). When the VCs debuted in MSFS with working guages (not clickable though), i was really not a very big fan of them. I found them difficult to use at first. However, i started using the VCs in Cruise on flights to just "look out the window". As time went on, and as my button mappings on my flight yoke "matured", i began using them more and more. And the VCs were getting better. So by the time FS2004 rolled around, a VC became a must, and now i won't even consider purchasing any add-on product that doesn't include one.