MultiMediaWill

50 minutes ago, btacon said:

As is Rob. I have pretty much every product they have ever made, some times two and I’ve never regretted a purchase. 
-Braun

Agreed. After a nightmare experience with the CRJ customer support forums (multiple threads locked, and staff blaming users for coding issues), it was a huge breath of fresh air when my DC-6 problems were well received and addressed on the PMDG support forums. 

I understand now why PMDG has the reputation that it does... 

18 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

From the time I have flown sims, decades ago, almost everyone understood that if you moved the sliders to the left, you FPS increased. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. So in reducing what we see on the screen in SU5, we get more FPS and less memory usage. What is ground breaking about that? I see the target of 6GB of memory used, why did they pick that amount, why not 10, or 8 GBs? Could it possibly be that this is what is available  in an X box? Just trying to figure out what happened here causing the roll back of quality in the images we are seeing. So many are saying this has nothing to do with X box, but it sure smells like  it does.

Agreed 100%. Based on the fact that the sim now doesn't use more RAM/VRAM than the Xbox speaks volumes to why these changes were made. To say it has nothing to do with Xbox would simply be a lie. Now time will tell whether this was deliberate or if they just ran out of time and pushed a really buggy update. Either way, PC users need a way to access the full extent of their hardware again. 

4 minutes ago, Slides said:

All game engines use culling to some level. You wiring optimization in quotes won't change the fact what this is.

I understand that. The point you're missing is that whatever they changed in Sim Update 5, made the culling way too aggressive. In prior updates, the scenery may have culled, but it was likely hundreds of miles out in the distance in a way that the user never noticed. Now, it's all I see when I change views which bothers me to the point where I don't really want to fly anymore. So for me and my setup, their 'optimization' was a big downgrade. 

1 minute ago, Slides said:

That's how all game engines work.

That's how this game engine works as of July 27th 2021. Before that we had something much better in my opinion. Glad the sliders are on the way at least.

1 minute ago, Slides said:

You seem to not know much about graphics rendering development and it shows.

It doesn't matter what I do and don't know about rendering development. What I do know is that for 11 months, I saw one thing, and them BAM Sim Update 5 I am now seeing something downgraded compared to before. That is all, don't over complicate it.

1 minute ago, urthgental said:

What a conspiracy theory. Ridiculous, I hope this thread will be locked soon.

Conspiracy theory? To me this is a fact. What I see in Sim Update 5, to me, is unequivocally a downgrade. That's with over 1,300 hours logged on MSFS since release so I have seen A LOT and not just making baseless theories. 

Just now, Matchstick said:

I absolutely agree with you there, which is why I explictly mentioned that in an earlier post.

But to me that's not a visual downgrade, that's a performance issue.

It's both. It's certainly a visual downgrade for me compared to what we had for the first 11 months of the sim. 

1 minute ago, Matchstick said:

They talk there about optimising memory but as I'm sure you are aware that doesn't actually mean changes to what you see.

That's where I believe that you're wrong. Asobo 'optimized' memory by reducing the amount of scenery stored in RAM when not viewing it directly with the camera. Therefore, when I quickly change my view (to see down the wing for example), the scenery now has to load in for the new view. So in this case, their 'optimizations' certainly changed what we see. 

9 minutes ago, Matchstick said:

So that's evidence that the visuals have been downgraded, but where's the evidence that it's the result of a deliberate decision not bugs ?

From Asobo's own mouth, “We tuned the distances, the draw distances, of objects and the way the LOD’s are being used in order to minimize the number of meshes and textures in memory at the same time.”

Doesn’t get more clearer than that. A literal and deliberate downgrade for anyone who owns a PC more capable than the Xbox.

11 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Certainly not suggesting that this is the case here, but it is statements like this that make dev teams on games in this kind of position wonder if the backlash in these cases is truly about degraded visuals or actually about maintaining PC elitism, when the titles end up looking similar graphically.

The reality is that the Series X is actually quite a powerful piece of hardware with a pretty stout GPU (just under a 2080ti) and architectural advantages that are not available on the PC, such as storage DMA and shared VRAM/system RAM. I would venture to say that even in this crowd, most users have PCs that are not hitting those specs, necessarily.

-Matt

This has nothing to do with PC elitism. I could care less about the sim being on Xbox, in fact, before sim update 5 I was in the official forums advocating to the community that flight sim expanding to Xbox is a great thing for the community.

However, the fact is that Sim Update 5 downgraded the visuals. In prior updates, I could swap to my wing views and pan around outside and everything was loaded in no problem. However, now every time I switch to the wing view, pan around outside, and even move my head in VR, I am forced to watch the mountains and scenery constantly morph into existence. Not to mention the significantly reduced VR performance. I am now forced to watch entire cities spawn in right before my eyes due to the pop-in and drastically reduced draw distance. This is enraging when just a week ago the sim was running smoothly without any of these new issues. For people like us, the latest update was a huge disappointment. 

23 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Sure, and I understand that. At the same time, while I did see some extra load-in, I was also able to crank up the settings in other ways and get more detail than I could get before, personally, and that felt like it would be on average a win for everyone. And definitely some people in flighting did sound the alarm, but in general it's hard to tell how beta tester feedback will translate, because beta testers are a self-selected segment, and so you tend to get a big bias, even if the pool is really large.

Nonetheless, of course, nobody is ignoring the lessons that can be taken away from this, from the dev end.

-Matt

The problem comes in for those of us who were already playing on Ultra settings. We only saw a visual degradation, at the gain of some FPS but those FPS were not worth the visual downgrade for us. That combined with the fact that we were promised no 'dumbing down' results in the outrage we have seen. 

Also, when a new 'update' comes out with more bugs than initial release, 11 months later, you're bound to upset people. I'm not quite sure how this update passed QA with the amount of new bugs it has... that alone is enough to outrage people even if it weren't for the downgraded visuals issue.

14 hours ago, snglecoil said:

@Dillon, My experience with ATC has been about the same as yours. I gave up. 

This is feedback I gave through Zendesk:

 

I did a flight from KLAS to KLAX in the TBM using a routing frequently assigned to turboprops in the real world. No SID but the KIMMO3 arrival starting at the Palmdale VOR (PMD). Filed altitude was FL220.

1. After taking off and contacting departure, I was told to climb and maintain 10,000 and proceed to CRESO (my first fix) "as planned". What should have happened was a heading to intercept a course to CRESO i.e. "turn left heading 130. Intercept V538. Resume own navigation" or cleared "direct CRESO" since the plane is RNAV equipped. "As planned" phraseology needs to go. 

2. I was never cleared to my filed altitude. Instead I was held at 10000 until I figured out that I could request higher a little over halfway through the route. ATC should automatically clear to higher altitudes without the pilot having to request manually.

3. I was given so many frequency changes, I lost count at around 25. That needs to be refined somehow. It is completely unrealistic to get a new frequency every time you cross a sector boundary. 

4. I was given a descent to 13000 and flew the KIMMO3 arrival but was never allowed to descend to the altitudes depicted on the arrival. Instead I was held at 13000 all the way until the final fix on the arrival at the DARTS intersection. 

5. At DARTS I was told to expect the ILS 24R approach and then directed to maintain less than 170 knots and proceed to CRCUS as planned. DARTS is 15 nm from KLAX....CRCUS is an initial approach fix for the ILS 24R 46nm east of KLAX. That caused me to fly outbound from KLAX for 30nm just to turn around and fly back inbound on the ILS (which actually went fairly well...ATC assigned descents too often but I can overlook that for those that don't have the approach plate sitting in front of them). 

Now as to the repeated instruction to maintain less than 170 knots, I was flying around 150 indicated airspeed...My true airspeed and groundspeed, however, were showing around 190. I'm guessing that ATC was referencing ground speed and that caused the repeated . Indicated airspeed should be reference, not TAS or GS.

My experience is exactly like you described above. Point 5 happened to me as well and was super annoying. I ended up just ignoring ATC and riding the ILS in without clearance. 

I am a real life PPL and feel that the 172 in the game is under powered. I find myself having lower than expected air speeds especially on takeoff. Anyone else having this issue? Lowing the weight doesn't seem to really help.