marsman2020

We can control a lot of the variables that cause the large variation in the video above, in sim. Set 'Clear Skies' and the atmosphere exactly matches the ISA atmosphere. Turn off all wind. There is no wear and tear on the engine in the sim. So in my mind, we should get closer to POH values in sim then you can in reality. I agree it's unlikely to be right-on for every value, but I'd expect within 5-10% for most items, on a Clear Skies day at a sea level field. Personally for GA I care more about things like cruise speed and range of the aircraft, rotating at the right speed, and flying approaches at the right speeds, those are the things I'd like to see within 5%. If the exact power settings needed to get those speeds are a little different from the real world, so be it, if the takeoff/landing distances are 10 % off, fine. Asobo isn't even close for a lot of things (range off by 30%, cruise speeds off by 20%, etc). Obviously once you turn on Live Weather, there will be a greater variation.

If you turn on the MSFS internal Developer Mode from the options menu and then turn on the MSFS FPS display, the display tells you what the limiting factor is (CPU threads for main and render, or GPU). Cruising at high FLs with no ground details being rendered is not going to be taxing on the GPU in many cases. It can easily flip from being GPU limited at altitude to CPU limited near the ground or near busy airports.

Is it possible that by locking the framerates it is making GPU utilization so low that the GPU is down clocking and causing further slowdowns? I've seen some people observe behavior like this over the past couple years as GPUs no longer run at fixed clocks in 3D mode.

Super excited about this!

The Logbook is like most other things in the sim right now, "works" at 50-75% with 0 actual feedback from the devs on when they actually plan to fix things.

The only CTDs I have ever had were when the one patch broke the VFR map. Maybe a couple random ones otherwise. But I only have aircraft mods, no scenery mods. If you turn on Dev Mode there is a console window that shows errors. I haven't used this myself. I did see one person mention that there are 100s of errors even in the stock sim.

It takes weeks for third party developers to get their fixed pushed to the Marketplace. The Carenado planes will probably be broken for 6 weeks plus by the time they get it fixed.

I think they may be applying "ground winds" the instant your wheels touch the ground, and "low winds" the instant you lift off. Agree there is something very wrong with crosswind landings/takeoffs.

Thanks Robert for all of your hard work. Flew a 4 hour flight across the Aleutian Islands, awesome as usual. Fought a 40kt wind most of the way, the non-turbo G36 would have been so slow!

A lot of the highest resolution digital elevation models come from government organizations like the USGS in the United States I'm betting they found a single source for the whole world in a single data format they thought was "good enough" for an initial release, but getting the highest resolution for each area might require a lot of requests to governments and additional work to translate data in different formats into the streaming back-end. Sometimes there is raw data that has been collected and not post-processed into a usable output format as well, which is "available upon request", and with government and academic organizations, requests like that take time.

There is only so much this third party mod can do. Asobo will have more flexibility in their implementation I'm sure... When they finally get to it on the backlog.

I got this once. The sim auto-reset a bunch of the streaming data and photogrammatry settings to 'off' afterward, things looked very FSX-like until I realized that and went in and turned them back on. Might be worth checking your settings if you got this message.

Update 7 is the US world update and per the Dev Q&A will have a new digital elevation model (1m or better) and new otrho imagery for many parts of the US)

One thing to keep in mind with comparing colors to photos is different camera settings/post-processing/monitor color calibrations can produce different results. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of foliage photos on the internet had been tweaked for extra 'pop' This should have been in the sim to begin with though, great start adding some more variety.

This is a known thing that happens just before every patch. You'll be able to install the newer versions of the packages after the patch.

Seems like Honeycomb should work with MS to get their expensive controller working in the sim. Not users buying extra software for another $25. What have they done to try to resolve this? It's been present since launch. Didn't MS ship Honeycomb yokes to the YouTubers who hyped the sim up pre-launch?

Somewhere the forum system database knows who voted for what, since you can 'un-vote' for things later. So they should be able to merge only non-duplicate votes. I think this distilling of the essence could be improved a lot, based on the back and forth in the last Dev Q&A. Having a community manager with more aviation, flight sim, or other relevant experience would have really helped, vs assigning someone who needs to get flight sim lessons as community manager of a flight sim....another poor decision on Microsoft's part IMHO, treating this like they would treat any other game.

DDR5 RAM isn't available yet, and will likely carry quite a price premium when it first comes out. Also, there were a lot of 'teething' minor issues with X570 boards when Ryzen 3000 first came out, which have been addressed over the last year and a half. Personally I think there's a lot to be said for a stable motherboard that has been tuned for over a year now, with this new CPU with a huge single threaded performance increase. It should make for a fast and reliable platform for running MSFS. AM5 will likely have its own set of 'teething' issues when it first comes out, in addition to high RAM costs. The 11th gen will *maybe* (napkin math based) reach parity with AMD again in single threaded applications. However it's going to max out at 8 cores, and that 8 core part will draw up to 300W of power when Turboing, in order to push the 14nm++++++++++ silicone to higher speeds. Compare 8 cores drawing 300W at turbo to a 5800X, 5900X, or 5950X all of which have a 105W TDP and a hard limit on the max package power the CPU can draw of 142W. Or a 5600X where the TDP is 65W and the hard power limit is at 88W. Intel 11th gen is ancient technology being pushed to the max, hugely inefficient and with 2 less cores than 10the gen so they can try to eek out a few more Mhz from the 8 cores that are there.....

Since I don't have ties back to any prior sim, I'm really trying to avoid buying more "stuff" until Asobo get a handle on a lot of the basic issues that need to be fixed. From the perspective of a new person, I'll look for free alternatives and exhaust those before trying anything else. This might change 6 months or a year down the line if I feel like I can trust that the APIs and SDK are stable and things I buy won't be wiped out by some poorly thought out change on Asobo's side.

The only way the Community Managers at MS has come up with to 'combine' things is to merge the posts in the threads, but the votes from 1 thread are lost. They haven't come up with a way to merge votes. (I'm sure the information is there in the forum database because you can 'remove votes', so in the database somewhere is a list of everyone who has voted for a thing) Personally what I would do is combine them manually on the back end when the Feedback Summary is generated. That would allow other items to occupy the other lines in the Feedback Summary. But then they would have to discuss their plans for the other lines. The cynical part of me says they don't mind the duplicates, or keeping things that were fixed in Update 3 on the list (instead of letting a new item enter the list) because it's less that they have to talk about/give updates on.

This sounds exciting

Thanks for the update Robert, looking forward to V3. I also enjoy your honest feedback about what is going on 'behind the scenes' with the SDK/aircraft. I feel that some of the commercial developers are choosing their words carefully so as not to impact potential future support from MS/Asobo, so your perspective as an 'independent' subject matter expert is useful.

Looks realistic to me. Let's not create another situation like with the night lighting where everyone was up in arms and they made it worse. Adding the missing water masks that have been shown in all of the "captured in realtime 4k" Wold Tour videos is a much much much higher priority than making this move.

A bunch of people called them out on this on something a few weeks back (I think one of the Live Weather items) and the Community Manager was like "I'll go check and see if we left that off on purpose" and then it showed up on the next one. I suspect they do indeed leave things off on purpose.

This is a known issue with the UI (or knowing Asobo's approach to thing now, it's working s intended). It happens just before any upcoming patch. It will unlock when they patch the overall game.