hypercide

I got that message during a hairy IFR flight between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg on Monday afternoon (11th). I hit no, but when I landed in Winnipeg (whole other story) the ATC voice had changed and the simulated "noisiness" of the transmissions had changed from what they were when I took off from Thunder Bay. I assumed a background tweak had been performed in advance of the update--unless central Canada somehow has different ATC voices than the rest of the sim.

Love this. Already bought your wonderful Brampton and Buttonville. Going to pick this up for the weekend. Keep up the great work; it makes flying around Ontario fun.

Bought it tonight. Going up to Cottonwood, AZ, on Friday night to start Kermit's epic journey. Just like him, I'll start with a few touch and goes to get a feel for the bird. But I'll have a Guinness at my elbow.🍺 Maybe someone will make that N53WC livery.

I bought this bird on the strength of their AN2 from FSX. Today was the first day I was able to really check it out, and frankly I'm a bit surprised by the extremely sub-par quality of textures of the cockpit seat backs and the back wall of the cockpit space--I am seeing splotches where I should clearly see fasteners--they are very low res and they are very much below the standard set by this sim and by their competitors at Carenado and Indiafoxtecho. And no, this isn't a detail: if the game's hanger space is designed for us to simply look at these aircraft closely, this addon fails that moment. I do hope ATSim makes an effort to replace those textures with something that is worthy of the platform. I won't be jumping on the AN2 until I see this fix with their first offering. (kinda an ORBX city of London moment, isn't it?)

I picked up Nemeth's Aerolite 103 Ultralite a few weeks ago. Pricey, but it's perfect for what you're looking for. I guess Nemeth is keeping their hand in the MSFS20202 game until it is ready for their stable of helicopters.

I had begun Kermit's journey in the XP11 WACO to get to the ORBX's TE Florida, but gave up in XP's arid wasteland (my time allows me 1.5 hr legs at best) once MSFS2020 launched, and I've been hoping for this release to complete Kermit's epic--one of the highlights of his fantastic channel. Oh boy. oh boy! Now if they could just release that lovely little Tri-Pacer, I'd be all set.

Lovely. That site is a veritable candy store. With the dawn of a new flightsim era, and with new users who will never have heard of avsim.com or flightsim.com, that site's library is quickly becoming the place to go for MSFS2020 freeware. It is exploding with incredible content in an extremely user-friendly environment. I've been simming for two decades, and I've only had the new sim for a month, but that site is already my go-to freeware site.

I've been using ctrl-e as well, but I seem to recall there being a check box on the flight planning screen in FSX. Something like that would be a welcome convenience with this new sim.

I'm very pleased with the announced focus of this update as it is an admission that they really dropped the ball in not giving the installation bugs enough attention in the alpha and beta. They've been very, "Hey man, let's be cool and help each other out," in the forums, but I bet there have been some intense conversations in the last week both at MS and between MS and Valve that sorta went like, "What the heck!?" I was amused by the burn-through of the corporate-speak. They've been all very fuzzy and we luv ya in the community for the past year, but this week, the sim is now, "the title." I guess the robots are back in charge.

Microsoft is located in Redmond, Washington. I've been following the Thursday development updates on the main site for months, and most of the time, those haven't been posted till late afternoon, early evening, EST. And as is being pointed out, today we should expect only an update on the update, anyway, and that was pointed out in last week's development update.

My understanding is that it is stored virtually. I found this out when I was trying to solve the ctd issue and did a search. Try it in the game directory. Use the wildcard, so search *.exe The game executable will appear, but it will show 0Kb as content. I remember back in FSX early days when someone was able to mod the fsx.exe file so you didn't need the game disc. That mod was either in the libraries here or at flightsim.com. But those days are gone.

Put it away till Thursday and go and enjoy your life. At the end of last week, zendesk did some sort of quick survey of key install/load issues. It was closed by the end of Friday. Based on their other announcement about announcing a patch this Thursday, I think any current user who is trying to get this thing working before then is wasting their time. I was in the beta test. There is a reason I've not bought this thing yet.

I posted on this synchronicity back in July. My guess is that they're using our experiences to help the tweak various aspects of Bing. Building assets and infrastructure for the sim, based on the mountains of data freely provided by users (Steam alone is showing tens of thousands of online experiences daily, only six days in), is doing the same for Bing. Somewhere at MS, someone at a desk in the Bing department is probably being paid to push a button that says, "synchronize" at the end of each work day. I don't really think MS is committing their apparently ten-year development plan for this sim to make a better experience for people who like computer games; gaming is a fraction of their business, and this sim a fraction of that fraction). The money would be in doing something with Bing. Maybe in ten years, the flight simmer isn't buying the sim, they're buying a key to unlock the sim features buried in Bing.

The purchase 6-12 months needs a choice of reasons: hardware upgrade, waiting for installation bugs to be resolved, waiting for performance bugs to be resolved, waiting for quality addons, etc. I'm a waiting on installation bugs guy.

Look at the wording: "expect a release date for the patch in our August 27th update." That means they need to give themselves a whole week just to figure out when it's safe to say they can release a patch that won't land them in a second fiasco. In other words, the issue that was an issue before the release, was ignored until the release, and it's turned out to be complicated enough they simply don't know when a patch will be ready. Nice. And now, for at least the next seven days, unless you are already a simmer and browse sites like this regularly for advice and recommendations, you'll have no idea what you might be getting yourself into when you press the "buy now" button on either Xbox or Steam.

In the years since the end of FSX, and because of how much XP11 has depended on it, ORBX has become increasingly detached from the core understanding that they're an addon, they're not the show. At the same time, they've grown really adept at pivoting rapidly from one new platform to another to preserve their market share. Can't blame them for that, but with their success has come a distinct complacence about the quality of what they have on offer (the permanently unsolved washed-out color issue for XP11's TE Washington has never been corrected--I guess we know now that their attention had already turned to the next big thing), and with the very high standard set by this new sim, as an earlier post pointed out, a lazy port-over simply won't cut it. Frankly, when it became clear ORBX was involved in the sim, my first reaction was, "Oh no." Hopefully this new sim will bring some hungry new players to the scenery scene.

Yesterday both BBC news and the Guardian ran enthusiastic peices on their sites. Today, it's the New York Times. This is a level of marketing that is unbeatable. The Times article does mention the download times and the bugs, but also, "Microsoft says it’s aiming to fix these." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/microsoft-flight-simulator.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Funny, eh? Mid-2020, and one of the world's biggest tech firms can't get something as simple as content delivery of a computer game right. Wonder if this showed up as a bug in alpha/beta testing? 😉 It will be interesting to see whether this shows up in the Steam roll out tomorrow.

I know, I know—I'm as scientific as the guy; but even with the tinfoil back on the roll where it belongs, the same questions occurred to me.

Looking at the background of Orbx's new CEO (a PhD, a connection to information science, and an interest in "high growth and turnaround outcomes"), some questions that have been on my mind seem relevant: What, precisely, are the "quick growth and turnaround outcomes" available in a company that produces scenery for flight sim platforms? Why would one of the wealthiest companies in the world, Microsoft, decide to invest in a.......flight simulation game (that it's killed twice)? So....to what extent is MSFS2020 actually a proof-of-concept for something that would make Google maps look like an etch-a-sketch (because BING has been mentioned frequently in the promo material)? What if Microsoft embedded a light version of this sim in BING? Is ORBX (not to mention Meteoblue and NavBlue) planning to get baked into some future iteration of BING and get paid till the sun goes supernova? That would certainly realize their new CEO's interest in "high growth"--cos it sure can't mean even more TE regions for XP11. 🤣

Isn't Laminar responsible for permanent-beta culture in this hobby? Microsoft can count on hordes of "early-adopters" to pay Microsoft for the privilege of being beta-testers... so it goes. No matter the release date, I was going to wait 2 months before buying the sim, not least so that the biggest bugs get fixed and the true best system specs get clarified. Also, by then the developers who are producing DLC will be coming out of the woodwork; I'm going to be interested in seeing how quickly ORBX will release some of its tastier airfields for MSFS2020. Between this sim and the new computer to run it, I'll be a broke shut-in by Jan 1 2021.

It's pretty simple really: If you nearly stall the engine midflight because you forgot to reset the mixture axis after the last time you flew a week ago, if you are wearing your 10-year-old JBL headphones, and if you are using a pdf approach plate you found online while you paused the flight (and then go ahead and land on the wrong runway, anyway), you're a gamer. If you've memorized the POH, are wearing a Bose aviation headset, and have a Jeppesen subscription, then you're a simmer.

Love that they've incorporated the flight planning feature that appeared in DTG's FSW: the point and click flight planning on a fluidly zoomable world map. Sweet.

While there are a lot of comments here about what ORBX can bring, I'm not sure that's a good thing. Advances in graphics rendering technology created a niche for ORBX once FSX started to show its age, and as has been noticed, X-plane cries out for what ORBX provides; but my experience has always been that ORBX gradually crushes the original platform, whatever it is, under all the additional files required to paint the various regions. Today's video, with its explanation of how MS is approaching the problem of scenery generation, makes ORBX suddenly seem not so "next--gen" anymore when its latest promo images are set beside any screen grab from today's update. I would much prefer a scenery experience entirely guided by the platform developer and internally tailored to the sim itself (much like DCS and DTG's Train Sim World). In other words, MS's own DLC.

Working through the previews on Youtube this evening. Between them, Froogle, X-check, and Flightchops (brilliant move on MS's part to invite him) have amassed hundreds of thousands of views on each of the previews they've posted. Pretty impressive. My favorite part of all these is Microsoft's Robert Jerauld saying they are building something that will be around for at least a decade.