kaosfere

Perhaps a little. If you're already installing it in some place other than your C drive you're going to be avoiding the biggest of the hassles that you might run into. The one thing that installing it into its own partition could do would be to make it easier to move to the new disk when you get it installed, because you should in theory just be able to clone the partition to the new drive and be done with it. But I haven't tried that with MSFS in particular and wouldn't swear to that working due to the complications potentially introduced by it being a UWP application. Perhaps someone who's tried that can share their experience here.

I must be doing something wrong. 😂🙃 (Hi, my name is Rob, and I'm a data hoarder.) Seriously, though, even a cheap SSD is going to be miles better than launching the sim off spinning platters. The upgrade from SATA SSD to NVMe is a notable improvement, but it's not life-changing the way the difference between HDD and SSD is. (My startup time decreased by about 15 to 20 seconds when I switched from a SATA SSD to an NVMe one. Better, for sure, but not like the multiple minutes saved by just not using an HDD.)

It may well not be the overclock, but it would still be a good (and easy) thing to do to rule it out. If you're getting that many CTDs, and it's not due to the overclock, it shouldn't take you long to experience one with it disabled and rule that out as a culprit.

If you're limiting yourself to things in-sim and don't insist on something that is "study level", you might want to think about Carenado's just-released Seneca. Piston engines, so you're not paying to keep turboprops running, a twin that can hold 16000' feet on a single engine, which could come in handy flying over remote mountains, a 25000' service ceiling and a reasonably quick (if not truly fast) cruise seem like ingredients for a decent candidate here. The one limiting factor might be the range, with a long range cruise limit of about 950 miles.

Sounds like time for us to once again reference the single most important video on the entire internets: 😄

You may be more right than you know... either that or you're already aware of the recent increases in demand for COBOL programmers. 🙂 Many of the folks who know it are aging out of the workforce, but the systems they built aren't, and the demand has really heated up in the past few years. Learning COBOL and getting a nice quiet job keeping legacy systems in a bank or airline somewhere running smoothly has long been one of my plans for when I no longer feel like keeping up with the constant grand of staying ahead of technology and just want something useful and stable that I can build my retirement on without much bother. I'm not there yet, I still love the new and ever-changing, but maybe someday. 😄

I don't feel like it's appropriate for me to comment too heavily in this thread, as it's about us on a professional level. But since this concerns an underlying fact that some folks have misunderstood in the past: We are indeed hiring directly. We are not employees of Microsoft, we are our own business entity -- Working Title Simulations -- just like Asobo or Blackshark or any of the other first-party development partners. I won't go into contract details, but that's the basic idea, which has confused some folks. 🙂 Hope that helps.

Actually, yes, to an extent: https://store.steampowered.com/app/493490/City_Car_Driving/ I haven't played it, but I've read surprisingly good reviews of it.

Generally speaking, any plane that uses the stock instruments will also automatically get the benefit of any mods of those instruments installed, whether is uses encrypted bundles or not. You should be able to use the pimarc 530 in this just like you can in the Mooney, and just like you can use the WT G1000 in the 182.

Hehe, OK, that's a fair point. 😄

Photogrammetry on its own should not cause the sim to crash. It's indicative of some other problem with your system that is probably triggered by the extra load of rendering the photogram. I'd still suggest going through the steps folks have suggested in this thread to find the underlying cause.

If you sit at the main menu then fire up procmon to watch file system access from the flight sim process, it does a lot of reading from \Official\OneStore\fs-base-soundbanks\SoundBanks\MUSIC.PC.PCK. I'd reckon that the data's probably in there somewhere. 🙂

Here's what I would do if I were you: Turn off that overclock. Flight simulators have a way of breaking overclocks that people swear are stable. While you're at it, check your CPU temps to see if it's overheating. And on that note... Do something about your GPU temps. I believe 84C is the point at which the 1080Ti starts throttling itself; running above that temp for an extended duration is not good. Check the cooling, make sure the fans are set to max performance... if nothing else works, turn down your graphics settings so the card doesn't work so hard. Monitor your RAM usage. 16GB really doesn't leave you a lot of margin if you are doing anything else with your system. If you're capping that out and having to write to your page file (or, especially, if you're one of those folks who disregard expert advice and disable their page file to save on disk space) that's not a good place to be. Temporarily disable all your addons. If you're having crashes just sitting idle on the runway it's unlikely that they're the issue you're having, but it's still something that should be ruled out. Disable rolling and manual cache. It shouldn't be an issue in normal operation, but corrupted data in the cache can create problems. Disable multiplayer traffic. This has caused issues for some folks in the past. If you do all these things, get your temps within range, monitor your resource consumption, and still can't get it stable you can look at deeper issues. But the first thing to do is rule out the common culprits and, if that works, enable things one by one until the issue pops back up. Edit: One more -- if you have an XMP profile set on your RAM, disable that, too. Those are often designed with more of a focus on being able to advertise high speeds than offering a rock solid configuration.

I suspect, if it keeps people buying stuff through the marketplace (where Microsoft takes a cut) or paying for Gamepass (which a lot of folks on XBox probably will rather than buying it outright), and it keeps people interested enough to also purchase any future enhancement packs that come out... the answer may well be "indefinitely", or at least "for a very long time". Microsoft already own Bing data and use it for other purposes. They already have a massive cloud platform in Azure, and the cost of using that to stream aerial photos to MSFS users is probably like pennies lost in the couch for them. I may well be wrong, but that's where my money would go if I were betting on it. Now that's a compelling argument. Clearly no sim can succeed for long if people have issue after issue with it. And everyone knows that the MSFS forum is full of nothing but complaints about it, right? Here's a little visual I did of the MSFS vs P3D fora, highlighting the posts on the first page of each that were from someone struggling with something related to the sim, using what I thought was a pretty inclusive definition of that. (The pages are different lengths because I omitted pinned posts.) Can you guess which is which? 🙂 Answer: MSFS is on the left. P3D is on the right Now, to be fair, a number of the P3D complaints were folks having problems with specific add-ons, not the core sim itself, but I still think this refutes the idea that one can say MSFS is uniquely bad just by looking at forum posts. And the content is certainly not "largely" in relation to its failings.

I'm never sure whether it's more hilarious or depressing that we keep having this same old argument as if anyone has ever changed their view one iota because of it. But as long as we're waving our colors here for no particular reason other than that it justifies our own feelings, I've said it before and I'll say it again: Unless I can log real-world training hours with it, then, to me, it's not a simulator. It's a game. Now matter how much following "real world" procedures you can do, or how much you spend on hardware, or how seriously you take it as you're sitting in your rickety office chair, to use @VFXSimmer's phrasing -- or your $800 cockpit chair, for that matter -- it's a game. It may be a "simulation game", in that it at least attempts to accurately simulate reality, but it's still a game. Heck, I'm currently being paid to work full-time to make it more closely model reality, but in my mind it's still a game. I want to make it as good and as realistic as I can, and I'd personally love to play a hand in getting it to the point where it could be used to log real-world training hours. But, until that point, should it ever come to pass, it's still a game. Putting any grander import on it would be for the benefit of my own ego.