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This is all really encouraging to hear. I’ve just pulled the trigger on an upgrade to the 7800X3D and RTX4090. I’m also switching over from Intel with no prior AMD experience so I’m intrigued to see how everything goes. The new PC itself comes with Win10, but I’m planning to upgrade immediately to Win11 (mainly for the ability to calibrate HDR mode), as my current setup is really overblown on the monitor. Are there any other considerations when it comes to Win11 (or arguments against the upgrade? I’m thinking 11 is pretty stable at this point).

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this may be the sky jumping airfield near Dubai Marina and an in-depth city scenery to complement it.

@lancealotg - I experienced this too, but I think it no longer feathers when you're in Beta range? If you increase the throttle to idle, then it will feather correctly. One issue I have (also had it before this update, and might not be aircraft specific) is with the weather radar. If I enable the NexRad radar on the GNS530, then I lose my weather radar bitmap (it appears to "smudge" on the radar display). The GNS weather displays fine. As soon as I turn off the NexRad on the GNS, my weather radar displays correctly again. Is this a known issue?

I can see I’m going to need to make a cross-country trip to shake out the new TBM 850 update and land at this amazing airport. Well done for again building such an amazing airport!

I think it’s a persistence bug that will be fixed (with a bunch of other ones) this week.

Thanks again for a really detailed response. I must say that, personally, I'd happily live with the horizon line if it was the only way to retain the rest of the lovely atmospheric lighting and shadowing effects that we have now. But I typically fly in non-mountainous regions in the middle of the day, when the horizon effect would be minimised. Also, I agree with you that Asobo are clearly very skilled when it comes to the graphics. Let's hope the've got a solution for this one already in place 😉

Hi @Biology When comparing the two methods the other day, you wrote this: By moving away from Bruneton's method, does this mean that it will be harder for them to render the light shafts in the sky? Or are there other potential ways they could retain some of their spectacular atmospheric effects?

I have both the 414 and this (as well as the Comanche for reference). I've not been able to put this one down since I got it. The systems are great (and more complete I'd say, than the 414), the immersion is fantastic, and I also really like the handling (although I understand that it's about to get a big overhaul in an update later this week). The performance numbers are also really good, and are within a couple of percent of the figures calculated by ForeFlight when planning a flight. One little thing I love about the 414 was the feeling and sounds of landing, with a beautiful touchdown sound. The 850 has an almost identical sound, and it's one of those things I find really satisfying about it.

I know several of Steveo‘s videos have been posted here already, but I always found this to be one of his very best, where he goes into detail about everything he’s doing through each phase of flight! I just noticed he even explains something that caught me off guard yesterday when I accidentally over-torqued the engine while pulling the RPM back for cruise. https://youtu.be/TAcLd0h2PHk?si=iV7Lk1xlENBQDNOQ

You can use the regular W&B menu from the MSFS toolbar while loaded into a flight. No need to exit the flight back to the main menu. (If you have GSX, using that for refuelling will also work).

I’ve been shooting approaches in this thing, down to minimums all day in the fog of New England and upstate New York. It performs beautifully. No twitchiness for me, at least and the FPS are excellent on my three-year-old system.

Thanks! I just tried it by using the IAS button in the plane itself, and it worked correctly. I think my issue is that I was pressing the IAS button on my hardware RSG GFC500 unit, and it's not correctly mapped (yet).

I bought the plane last night, and I have a couple of questions - one likely dumb, the second hopefully less so: How should I be using IAS mode? I couldn't find anywhere on the panel where my speed could be set. I also didn't find anything in the manual about it. I spent most of the evening trying to set up a Spad.next profile for my HC Alpha/Bravo. I wasn't able to find the correct LVARs to change the mixture controls (I was trying to setup a custom axis to mimic the three positions). Has anyone else had any luck with this yet? Aside from these issues, I'm really enjoying the plane so far. There's plenty to keep you busy in the cockpit compared to the 930.

Great! I thank you for the quick response (but my wallet, on the other hand… 😆)

How’s performance with this new plane? I’m guessing it’s not too heavy on the frames but wanted to check before buying. The two aircraft I’ve been flying the most lately are the Comanche and Vision Jet (if anyone can help compare it to those?)

I should have said since before KSYR, as I’m very happy with that airport already.

This is completely unrealistic. That TSA queue was non-existent! 😉 I love Vertical Sim’s work. They’ve really upped their game since Syracuse. Outstanding stuff.

As the OP of this topic, I'm happy that @Krakin wants to bring it back to life. But I also wanted to add something similar to what DAD said: In the last few weeks I've been flying around the US North East a lot (where the weather has been pretty shocking) and I also noticed that the cloud density seems much improved. Flying in Europe yesterday I also got the same feeling (in fact, I think that the cloud depiction in Europe tends to be much better generally than in the US anyway - not sure if this is because Meteoblue weather models are more detailed/accurate in Europe?). I think it's still the case that the low-level, "thin" cloud layers (those only a couple of thousand feet thick) lack enough density compared to the early days, but I've yet to verify that in the sim. I've actually been investigating another weather-engine related issue in the past week, that I intend to log as a bug in the official forms, regarding the cloud draw distance. At launch it was said that cloud draw distance was 600km (taking clouds over the horizon at almost all altitudes). But I see now that depending on your aircraft's location, the draw distance is massively less than this (I think it's based on latitude and perhaps their geodetic modelling). So in New England, for example, cloud draw distance is only 140km from your aircraft, and down in Florida it was 185km - I've still not investigated this as fully as I'd like. While testing I've seen differing behaviour when using live weather vs. weather themes. Sometimes the weather themes have massively greater draw distance than live weather, but when testing the same location again later, they both have the same (smaller) draw distance. This implies there may be a bug here. But this issue means that if you're flying in clear air towards a weather system, the distant clouds will continuously load in ahead of you, with a clear horizon beneath them. At launch, this issue was solved, and was one of the great advances of this sim compared others, because the clouds would appear to go over the horizon giving a much more immersive experience. Anyway, I'm going to look into it some more and will create a bug report in the coming days. While testing this, I'll also see if I can find whether the cloud density issue is resolved for thin low level cloud layers as well.

It's now available on Orbx: https://orbxdirect.com/product/samscene3d-usamoderncity1 Coming soon to Contrail as well.

Well, not quite. Since making the change locally, I have noticed a visual few side effects as well, such as the line through the horizon turning white in some situations (becoming much more noticeable than before) as well as what I can only describe as a lighthouse light effect on the clouds at sunrise (and possible sunset, although I didn't see it) where the rising sun shines an orange search light on clouds on the horizon until the sun has risen properly. As Biology has already mentioned, there are various other changes likely needed to the atmospheric model related to light scattering, especially around sunset and sunrise, to get the desired results in all situations.

I would say that this is the only tweak we'll need in the exe for MSFS (and I share your pain about tweaks needed in previous FS versions), but one other tweak I might consider if anyone ever figures it out, is how to extend the live weather draw distance back to the original 600km distance that we had at launch (to ensure higher level clouds drawn to the horizon). I'd happily make that change, if there's were an easy way to implement it.

...And visually a no-brainer. It's a (subjective) massive improvement to the skyscape.

I'm also on the latest beta, and was able to make the change successfully to my MS Store bought version. (I used the trick of enabling Dev mode in the simulator, clicking "Open Project" from the dev menubar and then copying the FlightSimulator.exe file within that dialogue to somewhere else, to make a backup, and apply the change). I'm using it in conjunction with the Xbox app, which I noticed afterwards gives me easy access to the exe file in C:\Xbox Games. The daytime colours are also improved, and I'm not sure if it's a placebo effect, but I have also noticed some other improvements (I always had some weird artefacting when passing through clouds that had multiple layers of clouds behind them - the clouds would have a weird overlapping effect in some instances). I spent last night flying through a lot of different clouds (both live weather and different weather themes) but the artefacts were gone.

I didn’t see any night pics for the product anywhere so thought I’d provide one here for Boston: (Sorry about the quality. I’ve got an HDR monitor so took the photos with my phone)

It's a shame he didn't show the night lighting, but I have to say I'd agree with his opinion on it. Like I said before, I'm really happy with it, and while I can't speak so much for the other cities, Boston is really spot on. And the PBR/reflective materials on buildings like the Hancock Tower look really good. Also, while not on-topic, I'd have to agree with him regarding the latest update that I got yesterday — my performance has tanked since then across the whole sim (also out in the sticks over Kentucky, Indiana). Really not sure what happened, but it was clearly more than just a navdata update.