Funky D

I did some testing with the fully loaded Kodiak on sloped grass strips after reading about your issues with bouncing in the other thread. I didn't have any bouncing issues with the regular tires with multiple landings at different small strips, and not all of those landings were pretty. If you want to dumb-down the flight model no one can stop you, but I'm guessing your issues are related to improper technique. The numbers aren't in the manual, but check the pics of this flightsim.to addon for the Kodiak's landing speed chart. If you're bouncing, you are probably coming in too fast... my fully loaded landings were 70-75kts over the fence.

I suspect they're making changes on the backend with ATC processing... I'm not in the beta, but I'm noticing ATC has been better lately with descents in career missions. Sometimes ATC will ask me to descend twice, a bug that I never noticed in the past. There seems to be tweaking going on with both career missions and ATC that never makes it to the change logs.

Are you using the tundra tires? I've read about people finding the tundra version "bouncy" like you mentioned. I couldn't find any info about tundra tires for the real aircraft so not sure how common they are in the wild (all the pics I've found of the real aircraft seem to have the same tire size). I haven't had issues with the regular version, but I usually fly it into paved strips. I will say that most aircraft in the sim are too forgiving when it comes to bounces or porpoising. I don't think I've ever bounced the default 172 and I've had some doozy sim landings that you'd never get away with so "peacefully" in real life!

With the last update to the Kodiak's flight model, you can hold it off the runway fully loaded until stall speed if you try. I can't comment on torque numbers, but I believe all devs have had to do workarounds to make turbine engines work somewhat believably. Hopefully the new turbine SDK additions in SU6 help with this and SWS can implement them when SU6 goes live.

Since this is a marketplace plane, the updates are automatic. Microsoft/Asobo list the marketplace updates every week in their marketplace newsletter, or you can join the FSReborn Discord or keep an eye on the Phenom thread in the official MSFS forums.

I've only flown the update once, but there are some nice changes that are apparent right away. The G3000 has some further customizations to make it more like the real Phenom version. CAS advisories are now auto acknowledged after a short amount of time (nice during startup and taxi when the Bleed advisories appear), the transponder page has been completely overhauled to match the real aircraft, and I believe some text colors on the PFD have been updated. I also noticed the adjusted crosswind ground handling on my first flight (the takeoff roll seemed to need gradual rudder correction instead of needing a bunch of correction all at once at higher speed). One thing I'm testing is extremity deadzones on my yoke... most of the nice yokes out there have 180° of roll axis, but the real Phenom seems to be only 90°, so I set extremity deadzones so the yoke reaches full deflection at around 45°. This makes it more sensitive, but should also make handling in crosswinds easier. The one bummer is the new flight model shows up as a different variant, so I needed to sell and repurchase my version in career mode. About to take her up for a spin again and will hopefully find a destination with a bit of crosswind to test the handling further.

Probably related to VRAM management. I don't see the issue often, and the times I do it's when switching from internal to external views and back, and I usually only do this at altitude when VRAM requirements are at their lowest. I also use the in-sim dynamic settings and only purchase native 2024 airports and aircraft. I would guess using addons not optimized for 2024 would just make this problem worse. For me the blurry gauges clear up within a second, so it doesn't bother me when I do notice it, but I could see it being annoying if it happened more often and took longer to clear up.

I believe the issue is most noticeable with analog gauges, if you fly mostly in glass cockpits you may never see the issue.

...for half-baked advice. Pretty sure the sim does not even have the ability to touch the Windows Narrator settings, but by reposting this it just adds to the algorithm and gives this bad advice to more people. Settings -> Accessibility -> Narration and audio -> Enable Screen Narrator This is also available right when you start the sim, I believe there is a direct button to the accessibility settings.

And lately, more and more people have then been posting the incorrect or partially correct "answers" here or Reddit or Discord or name your forum of choice. If the poster wanted an AI response instead of a response from a human that knew what they were talking about, they could just go straight to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or name your AI of choice. LLM's do not know the answer. They do not know how to reason. They take the massive amount of data they have access to and churn out a response. The source of that response could be a sarcastic troll or a combination of information that may be related to original question but isn't actually the answer to the original question at all. I've asked AI about things readily available online... I asked the length of a 5090FE and it gave me random lengths from (presumably) other 5090 cards. I've asked AI the location of MSFS 2024's application folder and it gave me the location of 2020's folder instead. And it gave those wrong answers very authoratively! AI isn't taking jobs because it knows how to do anything... it's taking jobs because the former human employees wrote very detailed processes and the AI was trained on that data. It's why AI is good at coding: there are millions of GitHub code repositories out there that helped train AI. But AI doesn't actually know how to code... it just knows how to spit out code that was already used, hopefully in a working application. AI doesn't have access to the MSFS source code. It can't give any super special tips and tricks for MSFS that aren't already available online. Sometimes those tips and tricks are valid, and sometimes they are snake oil... just like AI itself.

Have you tried disabling any audio devices you don't use? If you go to the Windows Control Panel -> Sound, you can right click any playback and recording device you don't use and disable. I remember seeing this fixing the audio issues for some people... I personally haven't had any audio issues since SU4.

The EFB is also crooked for me at the start of each flight, but you can right click drag the edges to rotate the EFB so it's horizontal, or you can use the scroll wheel while the mouse is along the edge to rotate. Then left click drag will angle the EFB up or down. Hope this helps!

I am fine with "unrealistic" products as long as they're marketed correctly and priced fairly. Plenty of casual users want to fly simple planes that look nice... with MScenery they were getting an overpriced product with flashy marketing pics and ended up sitting in a cockpit that looked like it came out of Minecraft. It would be nice if they added a marketplace filter for realism so the more arcade-like products could be filtered out.

Big respect for AvAngel calling out MScenery in one of her recent videos. It takes some guts as one of the top MSFS content creators to push back on something that was obviously making MS money. We'll never know how many gullible console users forked over real money for sub-FSX-freeware-quality aircraft, but hopefully the bad purchases won't keep those users away from the many great marketplace products. MS/Asobo really need to follow this up with new marketplace rules: No AI-enhanced product images and no review manipulation.

There is also the issue of bandwidth... higher satellite and TIN resolution = more data to stream. People like to blame the consoles for Asobo downgrading the satellite resolution in both 2024 and 2020, but I would wager the real reasoning behind the downgrade was someone at MS took notice of the bandwidth being used and forced Asobo to cut the resolution to reduce costs. Apple Maps seems to have higher resolution elevation data for many of their 3D locations than Google or Bing maps... I wonder if this is less about any technical differences and more about the lower popularity of Apple Maps negating the extra bandwidth needed for higher resolutions. The resolutions available for commercial and government use are probably crazy detailed.

Have you downloaded any of the world updates or marketplace airports or planes? Downloading any of the streamed content will increase the sim load time... the more you download, the longer it will take to load.

I only notice "melted" buildings when there are trees around the buildings that cause the building to basically morph into the blob of the tree, or at a distance with smaller objects. For instance, the antennas on top of the Sears Tower in Chicago look more like spires at a distance, but as you get closer the higher LOD kicks in and the antennas become more detailed. The same can happen with bridges, cranes and towers. As mentioned above, Bijan cleans up some trees in his Seasons product, and if this is something affecting your home airport he does take requests. For me the benefits of PG outweigh the negatives and I just deal with the occasional building-tree blob. If this affected my home airport though, I could see being more annoyed by it.

I loathe the default ATC as much as everyone else, but I just find it a bit sad that even the add-on products have the same issues as the default ATC. Basically the only time the default ATC is somewhat reliable is when flying into larger airports. Maybe its a core sim issue in the end, but from what I've read of other sims they have similar issues. I'm not knocking BATC, but as someone who is stuck with the default ATC in career mode, it IS serviceable for the most part when flying into large airports, and it gets tripped up in the same way I've read other add-on products get tripped up.

Under these constraints the default ATC works fairly well, so the only thing you're really gaining from BATC are the more realistic voices and chatter.

Texture-wise, I think the new satellite imagery and PG come close to the resolution of DD's Chicago Landmarks, minus the crazy performance hit. You can see signs, murals and graffiti on buildings and read billboards along the expressways. The elevation data also seems to have been updated, at least on the PG, which makes things look more sharp and less "melted". I'll take the darker buildings downtown over the light-colored buildings speckled throughout DD's scenery that stood out like a sore thumb. The dark buildings are unfortunately a result of the satellite data... glass buildings tend to be too dark and while there is some reflection on some of the buildings, it's not as intense as the reflections you see off a glass building in real life. Once you add shadows as well it all becomes too dark at a distance. It would be nice if there were a "lite" Chicago Landmarks addon created some day that only included the most popular landmarks with less of a performance hit than the DD scenery. Giving proper textures/materials to 20 or so buildings downtown could go a long way to brightening up the area, but it may be tricky to make it fit in with the PG.

It is strange that this person seemingly created an AVSim account solely to bash this plane. It's almost like too many good things were being said about the iFly and they wanted to bash it a bit for the "algorithm". Anyways, I'll leave those conspiracy theories at the door.

Last I checked, it wasn't compatible with 2024 (duplicate taxiway markings and other weird stuff). It was a great airport in 2020 tho!

They finally updated the 15-year-old satellite data in Chicago... Maggie Daley Park is no longer an ugly construction zone, but the sim overdid the trees as usual. Would have been nice to see a bespoke KPWK, but I'll take the updated imagery (even prior to the update, the PG in Chicago was pretty high res).

The marketplace version has been updated. Flies like a different plane, in a good way! Much more stable and predictable... in the past I was always fighting with the rudder/rudder trim to try and keep it coordinated. Now I can set full right rudder trim on takeoff and not touch it again until cruise. Turns don't send the turn coordinator flying all over the place anymore, I can easily predict how much rudder it needs. Pattern work was much less work than prior to the update. Short final was also predictable. I won't resurrect the Kodiak vs BS Caravan thread, but @sd_flyer , you can now bring this bird in fully loaded at 75kts without falling from the sky. I floated it to test the stall speed and it matched up to the speed tape, although I don't think it's normal to bring it in that slow IRL (and controls were unbearably sluggish at those speeds). I just did some pattern work and a quick skydive career mission to make sure that was fixed (it was), but my initial impressions were good. The Kodiak has been collecting dust in my hangar, but suffice to say I will be flying it a bit more now. I'd encourage anyone else who has shelved it to give it another go!

Some aircraft are modified as well... I read there are aftermarket autothrottle systems available that some Phenoms have installed. The factory-available autothrottle has only been around for a year or so and none of the real pilots who tested this addon have used it, which is why it was omitted. Looks like 72 Phenoms were delivered last year and I'm sure not all of them are fully decked out, so the autothrottle versions are likely still pretty rare in the wild.