fs4fun

Fair enough, there would be less of that if ATC actually did a better job of controlling traffic. I think it does a better job controlling on the ground than in the air. What's worse is being on final and literally being run over in the air by faster AI. Will be interesting to see how much of this is fixed in MSFS

Hopefully there are much better programming hooks to track and control both AI and user aircraft, then we'll see some really nice ATC addons. I also hope the AI flight planning is much more sophisticated and an ATC addon can ingest AI flightplans and do some sophisticated scheduling and control. I'll be impressed if I try to to clear my flight plan and find ATC gives me changes back in order to cope with other traffic, or if I have to adjust speed or even hold. This would add a whole new dimension of interest to flying in the sim. From the IFR video it looks like what we get is incremental improvements over FSX ATC, which should be good enough for default. Heck I doubt most users know how to fully take advantage of FSX ATC such as knowing how to circle-to-land or even to fly published approach/transition or do a published missed approach.

Agreed. IFR is mainly about ATC, and ATC deals with traffic. It's all different sides of the same coin, and hopefully it will all be addressed together.

I'm a frayed knot. Sorry, couldn't resist. 😃

Microsoft interconnects its data centers with its own private global backbone network. They use the public Internet as little as possible. Google, and I imagine most cloud giants such as Amazon, also operate internal backbones similar to this. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/networking/microsoft-global-network

Azure has a huge global CDN, they can push a lot of the data close to users so it's not all pulling from one central place.

There is a problem with using "active" cases in determining fatality rates, since the outcome is as yet unknown. That an MD would use active cases in his analysis makes me think he's a bit of a knucklehead. I also noticed he's been written up on quackwatch.org. We could try to throw out all confirmed but "active" cases and use only known-outcome cases: Fatality % = 100 * deaths/(recovered + deaths) Applying to Diamond Princess (Wikipedia data) we get 100 * 7/(7 + 456) = 1.51% South Korea (Johns-Hopkins data): 100 * 72/(72 + 510) = 12.37% These are wildly different results and likely bogus because the useable sample sizes are too small. We also have problems with other data sets because some countries are only testing higher-risk individuals, as compared to widespread testing like in South Korea. Bottom line is we just don't know yet, we don't have enough good data. Good article here discussing meaningful statistics on the virus and what we want to know versus what we do know: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus See also: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#correct

Gamepacks are not really a thing anymore. Asobo already announced that MSFS supports standard export formats such as glTF, which Blender supports, so it's good to go. For some things like driving animations using sim variables, there may be an in-game editor, not sure yet, but that's generally how game engines operate these days.

I'd rather have the jobs system assuming it lets me do the flight planning and basically act like a free flight system but one that added some objectives and tracking/scoring. 90% of my sim use has been free flight and such a system would enhance that usage. That said, well designed missions should be fun to play over and over by being sufficiently challenging and also be having some variation and randomness built-in. Part of the problem is that the mission system from FSX was somewhat limited and the tools were not that great. Maybe P3D did better but I never looked at it.

Besides supporting whichever API version there's also the question of what variables and events will be there, and are they just emulating the old variable/event set for backward compatibility and devs will want to migrate to whatever the native interface will look like. Also, simconnect looks like something designed in the 1990's. It's fine to have it available for backward compatibility but can we get something more modern, maybe gRPC?

May I suggest different categories: "Casual Simmer" versus "Enthusiast" ? Neither is derogatory, nothing wrong with enjoying FS without diving in too deeply, but if you have felt your heart rate rise and palms sweat before making that "continue landing" call when the runway finally becomes visible just as you near minimums, then you are probably in the Enthusiast category, because at that point how can you not be? lol

Me too, but this sort of discussion can quickly boil over.

I've never found that worked particularly well. I try my best but absent feedback it's just guesswork and trying to use visual cues but yes eventually the trimming gets done. It is a long-standing complaint that it's easier to trim a real airplane than it is to trim in the sim.

Love it. Let's also build in a simulated misery map for airline travel: https://flightaware.com/miserymap/

I'm sure seasons will come along later. When you are trying to ship a product you sometimes need to cut things out of the release. They may just need more time to do seasons properly and they don't want to hold back what is already a very complex and ambitious product for something that's not a showstopper for most people.