Keirtt

Agreed. I try not to read into things but it's hard not to after reading this.

So, I'm not trying to be a "llama drama" here, but does anyone else interpret that as a problem? This was posted today on the official PMDG forums and just screams problems.

Personally, I’m leaning towards the late Spring/Early summer. Seems kinda crazy to think that far out, but just my two cents.

I've been saying this since the first images were released of the sim. These clouds look just like a volcano erupting.

Do you notice the white circle spinning in the bottom right corner? I had frequent micro stutters closer to the ground and especially on takeoff and landing. Come to find out after finding others on the official forums, that white circle was causing the microstutters. If you’re having this, you can go into dev mode > console > clear console of errors. That stupid white circle will go away and the microstutters are gone. Hope that helps!

Do you notice it closer to the ground and improves at cruise?

I agree with everything you said! I also agree with this particular statement. I've noticed frequently an overcast layer has a "Gap" where there are just large holes. Typically I see them right above a field. It's irritating to see this, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this.

I own FSDT KORD and purchased the KMDW add-on from DD. No performance issues for me, but I'll admit that I don't own Chicago Landmarks.

Stumbled across this being posted yesterday! I’m personally super excited for this. I’ve been missing a good payware model of MDW since FlyTamp created theirs. Looks like this was posted yesterday evening on their forums. Plenty of pics, but no release date or price yet. Also looks like a video hasn’t been uploaded yet. https://drzewiecki-design.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=525 http://www.drzewiecki-design.net/prodKMDW_MSFS.htm

Fortunately, I can say I’ve been involved in several large, multi-million dollar government projects, and will completely agree with you about the ups and downs. However, I don’t think anyones being overly complicated by pointing out the obvious and that’s what I previously said about the cold and hot. When I referenced a “hidden agenda”, I was implying more that PMDG may be using their platform to push Asobo/Microsoft along and using the community as the force (which I see nothing wrong with). To make things appear less complicated, I’ll simply say (and have said in other posts) that when posts are made that share this hot/cold tone, you have to expect the community will interpret things their own way. With that said; I don’t want any of this to come off as someone who doesn’t support or appreciate the work PMDG does. Simply an observation as many others have made.

Admittedly, I agree with this and I don't think we are alone. I feel like most of the community is starting to catch onto these "hot and cold" posts. I've been a customer of PMDG since 2004 and I absolutely love their products, but I really wish we would get a straight answer. I also wish we could see more than just simple pictures of the cockpit. I'd like to see a video of the FMC in action for instance or other parts of the sim working. For me personally, the communications this year from PMDG have soured my opinion about how things are really going behind the curtain. Part of me is still concerned when reading between the lines that we will receive an inferior product compared to p3d and that's hard to choke down. With that said, I don't want to be a "llama drama" and stir up any arguments, but I wanted to reply and say that I agree with you about the back and forth.... unfortunately there hasn't been a ton of consistency between his regular posts. Then again, maybe there's an agenda behind each one. Hard to tell.

I'll preface this and say I'm not typically one to come online and rant about a bunch of different products. For full transparency, I've been extremely happy with my Honeycomb products until recently. I was one of the first pre-orders for both the Alpha and the Bravo. Early last month, I reached out to Honeycomb because the reverse thrust on my Bravo stopped working for the #2 lever. I called their customer service and spoke with a gentleman who was very easy to talk to and walked me through some basic troubleshooting steps. He agreed that the Bravo unit was defective and admitted there have been some challenges with the original batches and wires detaching (See video of the problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR-QUxHw1oA. So anyways, I was a little miffed when they told me I would have to ship back my unit first, but they agreed to cover shipping. I also didn't realize my new unit would come from Hong Kong. After waiting a couple weeks, the new unit finally arrived and I was in love again! First flight in the CRJ went smooth and no issues. The second flight I decided to take out the 747 and I immediately noticed my #5 lever was not working. After doing some more troubleshooting, we discovered there was a clear issue with wiring between the #5 and #6 levers and something was either shorted or crossed. So I was a bit surprised and called back their customer service number. Got ahold of someone on the 3rd or 4th call. When I did get in touch with someone, they were great again. The gentleman explained that he hadn't seen that before and watched the video I uploaded in the ticket. He was great and said he would send out a label that evening and would have this one shipped back to him directly. To help out, he even offered to send out a unit from their office instead of overseas to help with the delay. This was wonderful! But that's where it stopped. First, I never received that label. Waited until the following week to follow up. For the last 7 days, I've called their office no less than 20 times and it always rings for two minutes and goes to voicemail. No return calls. I finally got in touch with "Kate" via their ticket system and tried to explain the situation to ensure I would get a unit from their office and not overseas. She agreed to follow up. That was almost 10 days ago. No replies via email. I've called their office atleast 50 times today and no one will pick up. Even tried different phone lines wondering if my number was blocked hahaha. Emailed "Kate" back three times with a 2-3 day gap in between each email. Reached out to their customer service via Facebook messenger and surprisingly got a reply, but they claimed they would forward my info to their team... still no reply several days later. Honeycomb, if you're reading this... get it together guys/gals! This is ridiculous. Why do you have a customer service number if you will not answer it? Why have I not received replies in your own customer support system. My next step will be notifying the BBB and posting on any social media forum that'll listen. I refuse to pay this much money for a product that doesn't even last a year and only to have the RMA be defective out of the box. RIDICULOUS!

Rollercoaster of emotions here, but I hope they take their time. Captains, Tonight's update is going to be a bit more wide ranging than the last few. I have been keeping MSFS topics and non-MSFS topics separated during the past couple of update cycles primarily because most of our activity is focused on the MSFS side of the house. Some of the information I have for you today on non-MSFS topics will be new, but some of it is repetitive and is brought in here simply to "re-state latest" on the slow moving agenda items: In no particular order of importance, here are the bits of information: PMDG 747 Queen of the Skies getting LNAV and Flight Director Updates to Testing: This has been a slow process of late, because MSFS development is necessarily consuming development resources like a wildfire in a stiff wind. Dr. Vaos has been time sharing between the 747 and 737 development process and if there is one thing that slows a developer down it is having to constantly shift between topics while working with complexities. The last update we handed our betas was a few months back, and after collecting feedback, consulting with our technical experts and implementing changes, we have also been working to update the flight director logic as it is responsible for guiding the airplane along the path defined, so this needed sprucing up as well. We had originally envisioned pushing this update to 747 out prior to moving Dr. Vaos to the 737 full time, but a combination of factors upset this plan so he gets the unbridled joy of splitting his time and serving two projects at once. We have increased the nicotine dose on his favorite brand of gum to keep him going. The current plan is still to push this update out to 747 users on P3D, but the timeline for that update is not yet clear. If the build we give to the betas works perfectly- you'll have it pretty much right away. Reminder: We are no longer maintaining or updating 32bit platforms, so the 747 update will be only for P3D v4 and P3D v5 users. Updates for 777, 737, DC-6, J-41 on P3D Platform: Given that the vast majority of our development resources are currently focused on the 737 in MSFS, we are not currently at work on any updates in this category. We have a number of items planned and on the agenda such as LNAV, Navdata and Flight Director updates for the 777 and 737, a platforming update for J-41 and DC-6 and some harmonization between P3D DC-6 functionality and MSFS DC-6 but we are not actively moving on any of those items and due to the workload currently being experienced by the team there is no new information or timeline to give you. Future P3D Development Thoughts: Some folks have expressed concern that we might never return to development in the P3D environment. I think such a decision would be premature at this point and hasn't really been discussed internally. There is also the "wildcard" factor that the MSFS development environment for C++ based development doesn't really exist- so a good portion of our testing still takes place in P3D and any *new* feature development is absolutely taking place in P3D... So while we might not be talking much about P3D, this is the foundation of the process still. NAVDATA Source Update: We have been talking or some time about moving all of our airliners away from a legacy data format that has been in use in all PMDG products since 2002, moving instead to a modern format deployed by Navigraph a few years ago now. That work has been done in a branch of the P3D 737NGXu and the plan was to move this capability tot he 747 in concert with the LNAV update. That plan has changed and the NAVDATA source improvements will be moved to the PMDG 737 for MSFS initially and tested in that product line in order to keep our development team as centralized on the 737 as possible for the near term. Once implemented we do intend to roll it out across all MSFS and P3D product lines. This change will bring in improved use of navigation capabilities that largely didn't exist when we first built our structure twenty years ago and we are looking forward to that. For 99% of users the change will be practically invisible. PMDG DC-6 for MSFS: We have a couple of small items that we are going to roll out to users in an update for the DC-6, but we want to wait until Microsoft has gotten the Xbox version un-stuck before we do so- as an update might potentially obscure problems that aren't anticipated with the XBox fix. (That sentence is a mess... I have re-written it four times and **I** know what i mean...) We have now rolled out our beloved DC-6 to MS Marketplace and thus far we are mostly happy with how that transition has gone. We are struggling with some commonality issues with the PMDG Operations Center that we had hoped to have resolved last week, but now it is looking more like next week? (that is a big question mark.) Normally we like to have these things worked out for users ahead of time- but the Marketplace is a closed environment that doesn't give us an opportunity to test the user experience and adequately prepare for it ahead of time. Given the encapsulated nature of how MSFS installs content- we had to wait until the DC-6 was live in Marketplace before being able to test Operations Center's ability to install liveries for Marketplace users- and we found that some of the assumptions we made were incorrect and required a re-factor that is taking some time. Fortunately, Marketplace users have some liveries preinstalled and the wait won't be too much longer. PMDG DC-6 for Xbox Rollout Issues: We are still waiting on further updates from Microsoft or Asobo on this topic. Last update we had gave some very high level information that leads us to conclude that there is a conflict between MSFS and the Xbox itself that appeared for the first time with the DC-6 release. I am being very careful not to offer any conjecture here because I think it is important not to share information that may be incorrect or incomplete. Once we have specifics that we are specifically cleared to share with you, we will- including whatever information we can obtain on the timeline for the fix that will unblock Xbox users from enjoying our DC-6 masterpiece! PMDG Global Flight Operations: Global Flight Operations has also been victimized by the amount of developer resources the 737 has been taking up- and that has slowed down our progress along the roadmap to Early Access for this new product. In spite of this we have managed to add in some interesting new features that I am not quite ready to share- and we are also working on a few others that will really make the product pop for users in the way we want. As always- I am using a lot of words to say something without saying anything- but suffice to say that we are looking forward to opening up the Global Flight Operations environment to users. Pulling PMDG 737 for MSFS Release Timeline: This is a complicated topic that some folks will understand, and others will not. We have been planning for some time to release the long awaited PMDG 737 for MSFS prior to year end. We have made the difficult decision to remove the 737 release timeline from discussion temporarily. Tl;Dr: There are some changes and fixes needed on the MSFS platform that without, we cannot release the 737. We do not currently know when to expect those changes/fixes so we aren't comfortable putting a mark on the calendar until we have that information in our hands. That is an oddly shaped turn of phrase- and I want to explain a bit further what we are trying to convey: We are not just announcing a delay, or that we are moving the release timeline 30 days or 60 days or 120 days or 365. We are not saying the 737 won't release in January, February, or any other month in 2022. What we **are** saying is that we are putting a temporary hold on giving you any expectation as to when the release might happen because the release is going to be dependent upon some changes that we have requested from Asobo and we do not currently have any clarity as to when we might expect those changes to be made, if at all. If the changes will not be made, then we will be faced with removing some core functionality that we feel is important to the full enjoyment of the 737, no matter what platform you sim on. For that reason, we are hoping that our requests will be acted upon and we want to give the requests time to be digested, researched and understood by Asobo. Even if the changes we request are acted upon today- we will need to wait for them to wend their way through the testing and release process for MSFS, and such action and a timeline is unclear and thus we want to clarify that information before we simply move the 737 to a new date and hope things work out for the best. Additionally, we have hit a few key areas of the 737 that we did not anticipate would give us this much trouble because the code for the 737 is very mature, well vetted and thoroughly tested. Unfortunately, the lack of adequate debugging tools, combined with a series of problems that were introduced to the developer tools with the release of SU7 caused extensive build-times and CTDs when working in the developer environment and this brought all 737 development to a stop for a few weeks unexpectedly. Asobo has provided us with access to some changes based upon the problems we were reporting and these changes have helped to eliminate some of the issues that appeared with SU7 and we are slowly ramping back up to our previously glacial speed. I must be honest though and say that we are very concerned about continued disruptions to forward progress because of problems introduced by updates in this manner. The worst that might happen is that all development stops while we wait for the next update cycle to roll around so that we can get a fix for a breaking change- and that truly is a worst-case-scenario that I didn't worry about until this last update cycle. Once we have a bit more clarity on the things we have requested- we will be able to give you updated guidance on when we think the release will happen. I shall keep you posted as this unfolds. PMDG 737 for MSFS: In spite of the release timeline woes, the 737 development continues slowly along it's agenda. There are still some risk technology areas that we are feeling our way through and a few key components that are finally being connected and tested, such as panel back-lighting, flood and wash lighting, etc. Work on the EFB has begun in earnest and we are in the process of finally evaluating functionality areas that might need adaptation to live within the highly restrictive confines of the MSFS environment. The airport map display in the EFB, for example- is driven by technology that MSFS has specifically locked us out of, so we are evaluating how we might retain that functionality while living within the restrictions. These sorts of things are part treasure hunt, part innovation, part sheer willpower exercise- but we will get through them. At risk of sounding all doom and gloom- there are some fantastic areas of progress! The flight model is being dialed in, as are cockpit and model animations. We are adapting our aero and engine models to the new environment (literally!) and in-house testing of the airplane is taking place throughout the day and night. Visually it is coming along magnificently, with Vin deep into the detail work and cleanup now- bringing an entirely new look to the cockpit using lighting and detail that heretofore we have only dreamed about. In this image, you can see that the reflection of the MCP LEDs on the panel diffuse lighting cover, for example, and the ambient reflected lighting from other surfaces in the cockpit makes for very interesting and convincing lighting play on the top left corner of the MCP. You are in for a real treat when we do finally deliver this magnificent simulation to you- and we cannot wait for that day to arrive. Meanwhile- I have a gaggle of other images that I want to sort through before letting you see them. A friend of mine is going to help out in showing them to you- and that will make it a bit of fun. More on that at around 1700Z today... I'll give you a recap when I get back to the office. Robert S. Randazzo PMDG Simulations http://www.pmdg.com https://forum.pmdg.com/forum/main-forum/general-discussion-news-and-announcements/154537-08dec21-a-quick-round-of-updates-on-various-topics-across-pmdg-p3d-msfs-dc-6-737

Trying to figure this one out but I’m also not totally sure this is a bug. I’ve tried without any custom vmr files (Stock) and with a custom VMR file. What I’m finding is the NAV lights on the aircraft will reflect off the ground, but until they get into the air, they’re not very visible on the aircraft itself. If I move the camera up close to the aircraft I can see it on the tips, but just barely. From any distance you can’t see it at all. Strobes, beacon, landing, and taxi lights seem to be working fine. I’m just trying to understand if this is a problem with my sim or a bug. Anyone else able to look on their client and see? If you look closely in this pic, you’ll see the nav lights reflecting off the ground. As soon as they’re in the air, they become super bright and visible

I still remember the days of the PSS (Phoenix Simulations) 757 and how folks were so eager to get that over the LevelD 767. Really was an awesome plane. Too bad they went belly up.

I’m very curious on the relationship with PMDG and Asobo right now. Reading between the lines of some comments that Rabdazzo is making on their official forums makes me believe things are sweet and sour. Some posts there seems to be a lot of upbeat positivity about how great and advanced the platform is and other posts that talk about debugging like it’s the 90s and culture that Asobo has developed of being silent to partners like PMDG. I’m really hoping we don’t see things go south between the two.

I suspect from what we’ve read before, this won’t be implemented until Asobo does some leg work.

I see what you did there 😂😂😂

I agree, but it's exciting to see something that talks about an official statement. Maybe it means we are closer than we thought?

Received this from Parallel42 in my email today. Was reading through it and came across this little gem. Would be great to see ChasePlane make its way to MSFS and looking forward to this official announcement.

Exactly what was posted above. That’ll improve when VATSIM implements their new technology.

This! This has worked for me since SU5. Thought I was going to be stuck on an old driver until I came across this recommendation. Glad you beat me to it.

I personally stopped using REX and continued using Unrealwx. For me, the experience is the same except I don't use an external client with Unreal. With that being said, I feel like I'm one of the few who tends to switch back and forth, or atleast I'm one of the few that admits it hahaha. Below FL180 in the US, I prefer to use Unrealwx, but above FL180 I'll shift to the MSFS Live weather system. I'm still hoping Jorg has something up his sleeve for us with the weather accuracy. Blows my mind I can see every square inch of earth using their Bing maps, but some how I'll load up the sim to find a clear day when it's totally overcast outside. Just blows my mind we have excelled in some aspecs of the sim and regressed in others. So much technology out there that should allow me to practically see the same cloud above my house in the sim, but then I'm again, I'm not a programmer so it's just me living in my fantasy world haha.

I share the same concern. That this will be another WIP product like so many others. Atleast by their own standards it will be.

I swear I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat and making conspiracy theories when I say this hahaha. If that's how he meant for that statement to be interpreted, then that has some potential to be disappointing for many end users who have enjoyed many of the features we have currently.