marsman2020

What I generally see is that the photogrammaty looks 'melted' ahead of me. If I look directly below/behind me it looks great. If I turn around and fly over an area again, it keeps looking great. Most of the screenshots MS uses to show off the sim are looking back at the aircraft. 'High-end' graphics presets and all data options turned on, with 200mbit internet. I do think they expanded the load distance a bit in update 7, I see 'melted' things further away now! Great.... I actually experimented once with flying around Tokyo with the photogrammatry turned off, vs turned on. The autogen buildings are not as nice as the fully-loaded-in photogrammatry, but they never look 'melted'. Something to consider.

I doubt a lot of people do 4-5+ hour play sessions with their VR headsets. I'm still disappointed that a vocal minority of people in the Alpha/Beta convinced them to move VR up the priority list vs more basic core sim features.

There is a concept in programming called "exception handling" which most modern programming languages have some form of. Why should interacting with something in an aircraft cockpit ever cause the entire sim to CTD? Asobo should have wrapped things like that with exception handling such that the user gets a useful error message (which can be reported to Asobo and the aircraft developer), and the rest of the sim keeps on humming. Sure, things like the altitude knob and sun visors still wouldn't work, and users would have a valid complaint. But at least it wouldn't CTD. Imagine how much of a pain it must be to debug an aircraft with the CTDs, having to reload the entire sim from scratch after every CTD during testing! It just don't make any sense, wouldn't they have wanted some kind of error handling from the start just to make their own lives bearable while creating the stock aircraft???? They have a legal agreement with Microsoft as an official Marketplace seller and providing 'sideloaded' updates may be forbidden by the agreement.

Did you go into the Marketplace and 'Buy and Download' the free US World Update DLC?

The Bird Dog (not released on the Marketplace) is also broken (pressing the light switches causes a CTD). Different developer.

I don't think they do. I put this more on Microsobo than Ceranado. They didn't think this Marketplace process through at all. "The platform" that the Microsoft head dude loves to brag about is not stable. It can't take longer to approve updates than the increment between sim updates, as is the current state, or there is no way third party developers can ever keep up with the pace of addon-breaking updates.

"Not keeping up with the development of the sim" - how the word not allowed are they supposed to? There is no beta program, so the third party developers only get access to new versions at the same time as the public. Asobo changes things in the sim that break the third party content, while giving them 0 opportunity to test. Asobo performs 0 regression testing of their changes against any of the Marketplace content that THEY are making a cut off of selling (even when it's broken like the Mooney). Then it takes WEEKS to approve updates to the Marketplace content (3 weeks+ for an airport in one instance). But updates to the sim come every two weeks. So even if a third party developer patches a problem on the day a new release comes out and sends that patch off to be approved - there may be a new patch that breaks more stuff before the fix for the prior patch is approved!! In fact, it's very possible that we will see that this is EXACTLY what has happened with the Mooney. This is a totally untenable situation that renders the Marketplace useless, and it's 100% on Microsoft/Asobo for their poorly managed Marketplace process.

If it worked when released and Asobo changed something that broke it, can you really blame Cerenado? This is mostly an example of Microsobos broken development process for the sim.

There is a lot that is weird about the package management. For example, why do I have to scroll through the Content Manager and update a few things manually after every update. It's really kludged together.

So this one worked "ok" for what... 5 days from the time it was released to the time Asobo broke it with an update that now causes CTDs? How is any 3rd party developer to be expected to deal with this?

Did you go into the Marketplace and 'Buy and Download' the free US World Update content?

USGS has maps of their available DEMs here - https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/3dep/3dep-product-availability-maps

I believe the demonstrated crosswind for the Bonanza is only 17kts, just something to keep in mind. But I agree, the sim grossly overstates the effect of crosswind on the ground. Even if you crab and decrab nicely just before touchdown, after touchdown it's like there is some giant Star Trek invisible hand shoving you off the runway.

The logbook is broken most of the time. I think it worked better before one of the early updates, and then they made it worse. My wife bought a refurb PS4 on sale recently and we picked up Gran Turismo Sport on sale for $9. It's amazing - everything in the UI works the way it should, nothing is half broken. There is even a complete manual for everything in one of the menus, imagine that!

Is MSFS licensed for commercial use? Many years ago a medium sized aerospace company used the free Orbiter Space Flight Simulator to make an animation of their spacecraft for a NASA program bid and then posted it publicly. The only thing was that the license for the base Orbiter sim expressly forbids commercial use, and they also incorporated some 3D models from addons that were not licensed for such use. There was a bit of a kerfuffle over it....I think agreements were reached smoothing things over in the end. Just something to think about. I don't know exactly what your "application" is.

I'd certainly call code that probably dates back as far as 2004, being interfaced with a new simulator using compatibility layers that weren't part of the new sim's original design, that the 3DP developers are depending on Asobo to implement - "legacy code". "A different way to program" would be doing the same thing different ways with the native APIs that MSFS came with. I'm sure this is an unpopular use of language though because it sure sounds like a lot of these companies want Daddy Asobo to make their 16-year old stuff work for them, so Asobo has to be accommodating and say nice things about this ancient stuff because $$$. In order for this compatibility strategy to work, the Asobo team not only has to have a complete understanding of MSFS, but also of the old ACES releases that they are emulating. I wouldn't stake my business on that either.

Regardless of the politically correct comments they have to make to not hurt anyone's feelings......Based on the experience thus far with bug fixes and introduction of new bugs in updates, I think it will be easier for Asobo to maintain the APIs for the new coding methods that they implemented in the sim from the very start vs these compatibility shims they are adding for older code.

I wish there was a way to know before buying an aircraft what 'code type' it is using. I'd put a higher value on aircraft using the new tools. I'd expect they will be less likely to be broken somehow in the future.

Even if the 3DPs dug in and used the new tools vs waiting for Asobo to add backwards compatibility layers...if they hired 4x the people and somehow compressed the time to start over from scratch down to say less then a year. Asobo might still issue some update and break the thing and cause negative repercussions for the 3DP brands and MSFS while MS takes weeks to approve a fix. Just like we are seeing now with the Mooney. If I magically had a full study level airliner ready to release sitting here in my PC, I'd need to get some serious behind the scenes info and assurances from Asobo before I would release it, vs saying let's wait for a Sim Update or 2 to make sure no core aspects of the sim are going to change and break stuff. Also, to be honest I am skeptical of Asobo actually delivering on their promised backward compatibility layer. They seem to struggle with some of the design aspects of their own code let alone writing shims for another teams API from 10 years ago.

0 issues with Steam here. It only installs and updates the base launcher. Everything else is in-sim. There is no in-sim content managed in Steam. From the descriptions I have has people give of the Windows Store version, Steam sounds easier. My understanding is the Windows Store version puts the Community folder in a location the user doesn't have write access to by default for some people and you also have to manually trigger the updates to the launcher in the Windows Store app. The only Steam pitfall I am aware of is the using the 'verify game integrity' option in Steam will cause the entire sim to re-download.

In the prior Dev Q&A in September they said the USA terrain data would be even better than the new Japan data. I think they mentioned the Japan data was 5m.

I've noticed that there are a lot of areas of the US in the sim outside of major cities that could use a lot of improvement in terms of the aerial imagery and terrain - greenish tinge, low-ish resolution, terrain super smoothed etc. I'd hope they are prioritizing based on areas that need the most attention.

The person saying things are "flat" posted again on the MSFS forum - PEBKAC:

I'm curious - in the simulator, what does OBS course have to do with following an ILS? In real life it's just convenient visual reminder for the pilot, since the horizontal guidance represented by the localizer needle is determined completely by the physical orientation of the localizer beam and its two different frequency lobes. There are no 'radials' on a localizer and adjusting the OBS doesn't change the needle deflection at all.... Maybe this is different in the sim?

I am not sure. That's just what was stated in the Dev Q&A. Maybe they take periodic snapshots from Bing - I have no inside info but I imagine processing the imagery through the Blackshark AI to generate the buildings is resource intensive, so it might not be possible to constantly track the latest Bing.