edu2703

I requested a refund for the Aeroplane Heaven 707 when it was released because it was simply garbage, Mscenery level. I was actually surprised that Microsoft granted the refund without much questioning, considering the Marketplace's no-refund policy. I believe they themselves recognized that AH had really dropped the ball on that plane. This new 707 is in a completely different league. Very well made, decent sounds, good textures and modeling, realistic systems and it flies exactly as I expect from an old jetliner with cable controls. Very realistic flight modeling. If it weren't sponsored by Microsoft, a developer would easily charge $50-$60 for it, and I'd still say that's a reasonable price for the quality. At $15, it's basically a steal. I'm really enjoying flying it. The virtual flight engineer does all the heavy lifting, leaving you focused only on flying the aircraft, so it's much more straightforward than it appears, plus it comes with two other navigation options if INS navigation scares you.

Development update: Synaptic A220 - August Development Update | Synaptic Simulations

I'm looking forward to compatibility with FSRealistic+ Since I bought FSRealistic+, I stopped using FCR for replays because something in the recording caused FSRealistic+ to trigger very exaggerated touchdown effects, as if every landing in the replay was extremely hard, which isn't the case. I don't have this issue with other replay tools and was kind of forced to use them instead. But I definitely want to go back to using FCR when this issue is finally fixed.

I saw a performance improvement on my PC after the 1.0.3 update. Not a huge difference, but it's noticeably better. I'll still do some flights to get a better idea of this improvement, but this is already a good start for optimization.

I believe you completely misjudged my comment and put words in my mouth, thinking my comment is a emphatic defense of developers for broken add-ons on launch. You claim I am "shifting goalposts," but you are actually moving mine. Nowhere in my comment did I state that game-breaking bugs, CTDs during normal SOP, or fundamental system issues (like broken LNAV/VNAV logic) should be excused because "coding is hard." If an add-on launches with this type of problem, it's clear there was a QA failure and the developer shouldn't release the aircraft with that kind of problem. I believe we both agree on that. You mentioned that day-one bugs are usually "standard SOP-related." The issue is that this standard SOP is executed across thousands of different hardware combinations, peripherals, frame rates, third-party weather injectors, camera add-ons like Chaseplane, custom control bindings (FSUIPC, SPAD.neXt, etc.), etc. A bug that appears to a user as a "simple SOP failure" is very often the result of an unforeseen conflict at the system/hardware level that no reasonable beta testing could caught. Complex coding isn't an excuse to shield developers from legitimate criticism when a product fails to deliver its promises. At no point did I say otherwise. What I said was this complexity is the explanation for why obscure edge cases and system conflicts inevitably slip past beta testing, regardless of price tag or developer competence. And also, at no point in my comment did I say that it's wrong to judge add-ons solely based on reviews without buying them. Depending, of course, on who is doing the review and their intentions, reviews are very important and useful in deciding whether or not to buy a product, recognizing that different people may have different experiences based on the reasons I mentioned above. But when everyone mentions the same positive and negative points of a product, it becomes evident these points are in fact inherent to the product itself. My criticism was solely and specifically directed at certain users in this thread, directing harsh criticism at Synaptic and iniBuilds developers directly, going far beyond the level of constructive criticism of the product itself. And the fact this is based on what they read online is what makes it even more infuriating. That was my criticism, not of those who base their opinions on reviews in general. In short, there is a clear difference between bugs and serious problems related to the aircraft's core systems being triggered by normal SOP and bugs triggered by specific combinations of hardware, configurations, simulators, add-ons, frame rate, peripherals, etc. My entire comment specifically referred to the latter. A developer doesn't have a crystal ball to guess that a specific combination of all possible variables could cause a serious problem that could render the aircraft unusable, and no beta testing would have the slightest chance of detecting it. Is it fair to criticize the developer for this, or even say that the entire addon is broken because of it, even though thousands of other users are flying it without many problems? My entire comment could be summarized in this paragraph. Now, if the problem is something more serious, that happens to everyone and is triggered by normal SOP, then there's no defense. The developer is entirely to blame, because this is easily detected in the beta and even by the developer himself, and if they choose to release aircraft with this kind of problem, they must take responsibility for it. I don't defend, and never have defended, releasing broken addons, still with serious and fundamental problems to fix it later. Synaptic shouldn't have released it without first addressing the low performance issues. Even if the devs had a beefy PC with a 5080, it's impossible that nobody in the beta had a weaker PC and didn't notice how demanding it was. Even with a 5080 this would be noticeable, and considering this plane was released for Xbox, which has performance equivalent to a mid-range PC, optimization should have been a priority. This was a serious mistake by Synaptic and they deserve all kinds of criticism on this point, as I myself criticized. There's no defending it. Now, I'm not going to use poor performance to say that the addon as a whole is broken. The aircraft itself works, despite some other bugs, but it has serious performance issues, to the point it shouldn't have been released in its current state.

To be fair, A2A and Black Square primarily develop small propeller-driven aircraft with relatively unsophisticated systems, making development naturally easier with fewer things that can break or cause major problems, even though the level of realism and complexity of A2A and Black Square aircraft is extremely realistic, to the point of simulating even the effects of oil viscosity on the engine. Meanwhile, iniBuilds develops modern airliners with very complex systems and a myriad of code to make them work, naturally being much more susceptible to breakage and bugs. If A2A and Black Square were to develop a modern airliner, would they be susceptible to the same level of bugs at launch as iniBuilds? I think so. Even if they were more careful and more concerned than iniBuilds with delivering something as polished as possible on release, some bugs in the mountain of code of a complex aircraft would naturally go unnoticed in the beta and appear to some users after release. Someone here mentioned that, aside from the Fokker 70/100, all Just Flight aircraft releases have been smooth and without major bugs. Does anyone here have a clue as to why the Fokker 70/100 didn't have a smooth release compared to other JF releases? That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Some comments here demonstrate a great deal of ignorance regarding the development of an aircraft for flight simulators. To begin with, there is no such thing as a perfect aircraft at launch. Every aircraft released for simulators, from the very beginning to the present day, has been launched with bugs that were either fixed or not later. You can cite any example of an aircraft that had a "perfect launch" in your opinion, and I can cite at least 10 bugs it had at launch that you ignored. Regarding beta testing, this has important limitations. Beta testing usually involves dozens or hundreds of users testing aircraft. It's very common for a bug to go completely unnoticed or not be experienced by hundreds of users in beta testing, but appear to a random user after launch. I see many comments like: "How come this wasn't caught in beta testing?" Well, because it probably didn't appear in beta testing. A developer cannot fix something based on guesswork, having to imagine that something might break for someone, or even imagine the various possibilities that a user will press the wrong button, or perform an incorrect procedure that could trigger this bug. Furthermore, imagine the exorbitant number of different variations in computer specifications, hardware, simulator configurations, and even simulators that users can have? This is something that cannot even remotely be replicated in beta testing, so completely new bugs will always appear when the aircraft is released, and in most cases, it's not the developer's fault for not fixing them before release. Aircraft development is very complicated, and many people don't give it the due value. There are people who have never coded anything in their lives, but they're already ready to throw stones at the developer if an aircraft is released with bugs, treating them as if they were scammers wanting quick money. People who haven't even bought the product and base their criticism entirely on random comments they read about it. I'm not asking to treat developers as divine beings. Developers can be criticized, yes, when the fault is justified and directly theirs. One should always be careful about trying to elevate criticism of a specific product to those who create it to avoid pointing fingers at the wrong person.

I believe the Synaptic devs intentionally coded the A/P approach mode to be bad at capturing the localizer in an attempt to replicate a limitation of the real aircraft, which relies exclusively on raw localizer and glideslope radio deviation data, entirely ignoring inertial data like groundspeed, drift, or wind. However, they overdid it and made it virtually impractical for ILS approaches, unable to handle even slight deviations from the runway centerline in calm winds.

After 10 flights on the A220, I can say the main issue with it is solely poor performance. All other bugs and problems I experienced are secondary and not game-breaking. Some of the bugs I noticed on my flights: - Autobrake is overpowered even on low and causes the nose landing gear to slam on the ground on landing (Fixed in 1.0.3) - Pause on TOD doesn't work - Sim rate 4x is unusable (Probably due to low performance) - ILS behavior is unrealistic. The real aircraft has certain limitations when capturing the localizer in A/P, but it's not as bad as in Synaptic, to the point of not being able to handle a slight deviation from the runway centerline. (This has already been noted by the devs, who promised an improvement on this). I'm aware that on Synaptic discord, people have reported more serious issues like WASM crash when editing flight plan, aircraft cartwheeling on landing, excessive bouncing, CTDs, etc., but so far, I haven't experienced any of that. People with different specifications, hardware, and even different simulators, since it was released for both MSFS 2020 and 2024, will have different experiences, and that's natural. But what I can say about my experience with the A220 is that, by fixing the poor performance, this aircraft will be almost perfect, with only a few bugs left to fix and improvements in certain areas like the sounds. I'm enjoying it so far, but I'd like it more if it were less FPS-intensive. I'm really looking forward to the 1.0.3 update, and from what I've seen from streamers already using this version, it seems very promising in terms of performance improvements over the current version.

Pause at TOD is not working. I did 7 flights and it didn't pause on any of them.

Update 1.0.2 has already been released on the marketplace. It may take a while to appear for some users.

I believe you were on the ROUTE page in FMS. When you fly again, make sure FMS is NOT on the ROUTE page. Only select the ROUTE page if you need to change something there, and once you're finished, select any other page. It's a known bug that causes performance degradation on the ROUTE page. It has already been fixed, but it still depends on Microsoft pushing the update to the marketplace.

It's rough for me even without being on the ROUTE page in the FMS. This performance degradation bug on the ROUTE page has already been fixed and it up to Microsoft to push the update.

Performance is very rough on my system. It reminds me of the FBW A380 in its early days, with very similar performance. Because of the poor performance, it's not possible to use sim rate 4x, even though it's supported on the EFB. The aircraft starts to oscillate until the A/P disconnects.

I'm surprised by FSS's decision to push this update to the general public. Their custom A/P still needs a lot of work and is far from being in an acceptable state, with one of the most visible issues being its complete inability to hold an altitude, going up and down like a rollercoaster. Also, there's a bug with nose wheel steering lagging, introduced by some modification related to the tillers' controls, which the FSS devs are the only ones who can't reproduce it, so they can't do anything about it. Yes, and now it's possible to update the navdata via EFB. I don't understand this talk about ditching the E-Jet when the A220 is released. They are two different aircraft. Are you guys like forced to fly the E-Jet only because it's one of the few regional aircraft options available in MSFS?