Soulflight

I expected what was promised to us in 2020 to convince us into buying MSFS, not for half of the features shown in the trailers to have to wait 4 more years and buy another sim.

MSFS2020 is slowly turning into abandonware.

So RealAir is officially out of the game for MSFS? Edit: nevermind, i just read they disbanded. shame.

They reached the limit of what can be done? Thats kind of pathetic for FS2020. Its not like it is not enjoyable, but they just gradually started away from it being a graphics demo towards a real flightsim that deserves the name. Aircraft complexity increased just now, and, at the risk of repeating myself, weather left much to be desired, no seasons out of the box...all things that got hopes up for future sim updates. ...and they already hit a wall. 🧐 I am pretty sure it is more an economical rather than a technological one. I think maybe its time to take a break from simming until FS2024 is out and running well.

That was my main concern about that whole FS2024 announcement.....

Happened to me before, make sure you use controls profiles other than "default", this way you can just switch back to them. With the other options, I just took photos of my existing settings so I can quickly set up everything the same again. No other solution i am aware of.

"The most successful flight simulator of all time" indicates a very well working PR machine at Asobos side. Not more, not less. it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the product from a simulation perspective itself. Imagine announcing "This is the new microsoft flight simulator" after the last serious installment in this series was 14 years ago. Of course its being sold well. I have 500 hours of flight time according to my user profile. From a gaming market perspective, this is an absolute win. Most full priced games end up with something between 50 to 100h of play time. However, the way I use MSFS and the way I played f.e. Skyrim are completely different. I dont consider myself a "hardcore simmer" in every aspect, but I know what I had before and with flight simming, I look for the right, realistic "feel" of things. MSFS delivered, to some degree, in visuals, but lacked in other aspects. "but also the most adopted by third party developers, by far." Again, quantity isnt quality. I cannot count how often some support agent told me "this is a known problem at asobos side", or I read news that a release "is delayed because of something asobo is not providing something", or, the classic, "we are not opening the weather engine to 3rd party devs". At the same time, I get new good looking, but strangely behaving aircraft with rudimentary systems and flight model on almost on a daily basis. Or MSFS gets new default planes where someone skilled is releasing a "realism mod" later. Again, I dont mind all that, but my subjective impression is that 3rd party devs hit walls in the moment they want to create more in-depth realism, making overall addon quality stall. You are free to call my POV subjective but dont confuse quantity with "reality" here. You are referring to numbers, both in sales and 3rd party devs. Neither has to do anything with the quality they deliver otherwise we could all just play Call of Duty and thats it. Because CoD is good, seriously, because it sold well. But then again, why am i even argueing with someone who has a manga avatar.....

Yet another "just adapt to changes" thread. I am not sure many people here understand why the MS2024 announcement and the changed made to FS2020 upset people. On a moderate level, I am one of them too. My previous flight sim setup was FSX, i dumped it completely from my hard drive about 2 years ago when i moved to MSFS. FSX was released the way it is, it worked, even though I remember we spent years of tweaking because it was demanding. After a while, MS released TWO service packs that technically improved things, and one addon that gave us some default aircraft. After SP2/Acceleration it was by no means a perfect sim by itself, but it wasnt missing any key features, it felt complete. Everything else could be added by third party products because the system was pretty open. The flight sim business provided us with new sims simply because FSX was outdated on the technical side. Fine by me. So lets dump the iphone 4 for a newer model to move on. MSFS however upset basically everyone at the time of its release. Visuals were stunning on screenshots and videos, but as soon as you took a closer look, people notice errors like baked in clouds and sumerged ships in the satellite image. ATC and AI traffic were actually a step back from what we had with the corresponding Addons in FSX, and after 2 years 3rd party AI program devs are still dealing with issues and workarounds because many things "require a fix on asobos side" (for example the weird takeoff and landing behaviour of AI aircraft). Same with clouds and weather, we were shown nice looking rain, thunderstorms and even cirrus clouds in the promo videos. The latter two I have seen absolutely 0 times in a convincing way in 2 years of MSFS usage. Clouds either look 2-dimensional or like ash dirt (IL-2 Sturmovik does a better job here after some updates). Realistic atmospheric behavior, which is essential to give a feeling of "moving through the air" is mostly absent. After 1,5 years they finally added some turbulence which feels static and on/off. No turbulent clouds, no microbursts...i had all that in my FSX days, with archaic visuals to be fair. Again, since release Asobo is reluctant to allow 3rd party weather apps to fix what they dont want to fix. I cought myself getting bored of flying and instead checking online everyday waiting for "Sim Update XY: atmosphere and weather". Instead, FS2024 got announced for "next year". Meaning IF all those things are getting adressed -i bought FS2020 for already- i will have to wait a year and buy a new sim. MSFS2020 was a public beta. Change my mind. So, imagine you dump your iphone 4 you customized with all your apps for an iphone 14, which has shiny flashy graphics and a nice camera. But it doesnt allow you to install whatsapp on it, forcing you to live with apples own provided messenger program. That one lacks crucial features that apple first promised to fix with updates, but later tells you you have to buy the iphone 15 to get them. Maybe. Can this announcement be trusted?

I also use it and overall its a way better depiction than default, even though both improved since 2 years ago. Whats still there however is the issue that wind doesnt get properly inserted on ground level, resulting in AI traffic using the wrong runways. A fix for that is out of REX hands and would need collaboration from asobos side. They, on the other hand, are too busy making sci-fi aircraft and fancy trailers to promote their new MSFS version which will probably still not fix those things. 😉

Thats interesting, but from a technical side I dont get why this should prevent them from providing a decent injection method for 3rd party addons. It doesnt add server traffic if default live weather isnt used. REX tried but was noticeably limited.

Well, Asobo to this day refuses to give 3rd party devs full access to the inner workings of MSFS' weather mechanics.

This! FSX had its "world updates" made in the form of ORBX and UTX, it was payware and i was fine with it. Asobo seemed to take an effort to place a few landmarks and "custom airports" more and thats it. I can add all that by myself, thats what addon devs and the community is for. I deliberatly bought the standard version because I didnt need premium deluxe airports and default planes I will never fly after the first PDMG plane gets released. Plus, some regions outside the G7-countries just feel dull and not accounted for. Asobo seemed to take a lot if efforts to please the "hey I can see my house in there" people instead of fixing the mechanics that really matter for flying in a way that I dont need to run 20 additional background programs to call it a simulator. Give me world updates for the global south, I pay for it. Give me a Hifi-style weather engine, ill pay for it. Give me a good ATC addon, ill pay for it and the casual folks can skip this one if they want. Dont spend time on world updates or "flight adventures" no one asked for. Tbh I am not even complaining about the fact that next year I need to buy a new sim. I dont even want Asobo to be busy developing it.

EDIT: please delete, my browser messed up.

Yes and no, i am also concerned that what should have been there in the beginning and was missing (examples: decently behaving AI traffic and a realistic weather engine where the conditions you are flying in actually matter.) will never be fixed, or the bugfixes will be sold to me as MSFS2024. I deliberately waited with the purchase of the new sim for a year because i wanted to wait for developments. I got MSFS in mid 2021, now i am comfortable with the "new sim" and I notice more and more addons being offered. I feel myself like i am just getting started and MSFS is just now unfolding its potential. So what next? Abandonware until 2024?

Wait, so i will never get decent weather, seasons and all the other stuff that MSFS was missing in comparison to what we had with FSX (!), and instead, they are seeling me a new sim, with new bugs, requiring new addons and new hardware? really?

Some may recall my earlier thread about MSFS having lost all settings. Back then at some point I just set it up again, which took me about an hour because fortunately the control profiles are stored seperately. Well, it happened again yesterday, it set everything up again, and today my settings are gone once more. I tried to launch the sim, it loaded eternally until i was killing it with the task manager. Upon second launch i am greeted with acessability settings and everything set to default. Anyone else with this problem? Are system settings stored somewhere where i can backup them? I am kind of reluctant to contact support because the last two times they were too busy to prove that the problem is on my side when it clearly wasnt. MS Store version. EDIT: settings just were gone again, right after adjusting and restarting to apply my modifications.

I dont have a solution but this is hilarious lol. How much old leftover code from FSX and before are there in MSFS?

A decent weather depiction update with multiple cloud layers, cirrus and CBs (they are missing both with MSFS live weather and REX WF) that you have to actually get around of because of turbulence and microbursts. Basically the way we had it implemented in Active Sky products for FSX /P3D.

I already did but that doesnt help because all those keys do not have an effect when this particular condition occurs. its interesting to know that MSFS actually has 4 pause states: active, esc menu, the legacy "normal" one and dev mode pause. The way I see it, the connection error message causes the sim to go into dev mode pause and can only be brought back to normal from dev mode as well. I will see if this is reproducable.

OK i think i fould a workaround to at least recover the flight when that freeze happens. Last time I tried to resume flying after the message stuck my plane, I entered developer mode from the esc menu. There under "options" is another pause mode. After pausing and unpausing there, things are moving again. I dont know how reliable that is though....

because I use the mouse for camera control and i need to switch back to cursor mode to click anything, which I cant beause controls are not reacting.

I just tried again, this time i got the "You have been switched to offline mode" message and this time it behaves like a real freeze. The message is there, i cannot click it away because of the absence of a mouse cursor, and the entire MSFS doesnt respond anymore to key presses. I still hear engine sounds though...

A shame, the 787 was one of the birds i was waiting for.

Thats all very interesting, do you know any VPN where I can give it a free try first? Even though I dont think that my ISP is specifically throttling MSFS, since during the night it is working normally. I live in europe and streaming lags are quite common on rainy sundays for example, when everyone is netflixing. In Theory, the performance tab in the task manager should show wether MSFS is using the full available bandwith or not. Let me give it a try. That still, however, doesnt really help with the issue on the UI side. 😉 Yes and no. It is definitely not active pause as pressing the active pause key does nothing to get out of it. It looks a bit like active pause though. Props are spinning and sound is there. It usually happens some seconds after taking off, to make it especially annoying on nicely set up airliner flights.

A while ago i contacted asobo support because of a very annoying MSFS UI issue regarding the "connection problem" popup message. I also up-voted this in the MSFS forums but this was like 6 weeks ago and nothing has happened since then. To explain it in a short way, when the "connection problem" popup message appears, my MSFS plane is flying on without any controls. Since I do not have a mouse cursor, and I am in pan mode, I press ESC to bring it up and to be able to click "OK". Usually, at this stage, the green message appears "connection successful". So all could be good at this stage. However, it isnt. Because when i exit the pause menu pressing ESC again, my plane is frozen in the air and remains that way until i close MSFS. I have view controls, i can bring up the ESC menu, engine sounds are working. It is like a pause state, but trying to use the "exit pause" keybindings has no effect. The only way out is to cancel the flight and to go back to the main menu. So, its clearly a UI bug. Now i was explaining this like 3 times opening a support ticket, but all Asobo is doing so far is to insist that my connection is the problem. In theory, this could be correct...because if you have some industrial fiber optic 100GB/s connection, the message in question might indeed never appear. However, this is never 100% possible in reality. This issue has been haunting my sim for some 2 months now and I stopped flying during daytime in dense scenery, because as soon as there is even a minor connection problem, I am just wasting my time. If anyone is familiar with the issue and found a way to at least recover from the "frozen state" described above, please let me know.