marsman2020

Does this include cabin heat? It's gotten pretty frigid inside my G36 flying up around Alaska with no working cabin heat!

A good point. I've been making screenshot threads for my flights in the specific screenshot section of these forums based on the Screenshot Rules here - https://www.avsim.com/AVSIM Pages/screen_shot_rules.html/ I'd be curious if the expectation is that these rules still apply here in the MSFS forum.

There is not a 1:1 correspondence between what you download and used storage space. A lot of the patches are updating files you already have on your PC, so overall space use won't increase. The Japan update has some totally new content in it, but it's optional (you don't have to download it in the content manager). I'd expect most of the other patches so far have been pretty neutral in terms of the actual space used.

I mean...those mods probably help, and some of the aircraft-specific mods I use have incorporated them, but how did the current stock aircraft make it through QA testing if you can't see to land them at night?

Very useful comparisons. There does seem to be some directional effect to the lights from some angles (like the runway lights showing up as yellow and red as you approach the far end of the runway, but white when you look at the same lights from the opposite direction on approach), but agree it's not correct in most instances. The biggest problem I have with night flying in MSFS is actually that none of the aircraft taxi or landing lights actually illuminate anything in a useful way from inside the cockpit. I'm very surprised there is no post on the MSFS forums with 1000 upvotes for that.

No hot fix has been released, so any changes in behavior you are seeing are just the general "roll the dice and see how it behaves today" experience Oh boy, better tell my wife I'm going to disappear for a while 😉

About an hour left before COB Pacific time to push a hotfix out....

I saw this the other day, neat little Part 103 ultralight with a fully enclosed cabin -

I was also successful last night with the TBM930 in starting a flight with no world map flight plan, picking a random airport 'Direct to' and then loading/activating an approach on the G3000. I'm 99% sure this was broken in the past. No mods installed. Will try the G1000 and G3X later tonight.

https://github.com/Working-Title-MSFS-Mods/fspackages/releases Has all the latest WT releases. Latest G3000: https://github.com/Working-Title-MSFS-Mods/fspackages/releases/tag/g3000-v0.2.2

This is a tough nut to crack. On a local level, I'd probably use the density of AI placed buildings within a given area as one function. Roads are not usually lit away from densely populated areas, so if the Blackshark AI isn't placing a lot of buildings, then tone down the street lights to match the building density. There are also global light pollution maps - https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=10.57&lat=34.9859&lon=-117.7772&layers=0BFFFFFTFFFFFFFFFF and the outputs of whatever the local function is should be cross-checked against the global results to make sure they make sense.

I made a wishlist item for this. Sitting at 76 votes right now. If more people vote for it, it might end up in the Feedback Summary 😉 https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/add-a-learning-center-or-other-official-documentation/284765

No issues with the install for me, and the launcher downloader now uses ~50% of my 200mbit internet, a big improvement from release where it used >25%. No CTDs w/my CH products setup on a USB hub. Went around the pattern in the C152, feels a bit smoother in pitch. I took off from KMHV with no flight plan in the TBM930. Climbed in a 124kt FLC climb to 31,000ft. This is the recommended speed for max rate climbs in the POH. Previously this caused a bunch of oscillations starting at around 20,000ft. Rock solid on the climb (even after engaging FLC mode at 172 kts and dialing it back to 124 kts to see if it would get 'upset') and it captured the altitude nicely (very smooth nose down motion dialing back the ascent rate gradually) with only 30 feet of overshoot. (Nice!) Did direct to KRAL on the G3000, then loaded and activated the ILS approach. Everything loaded in just fine with the right waypoints despite no flight plan being set ahead of time (need to try this on a G1000 aircraft, this has also been a problem in the past). Set VS to -1000, A/P captured this fine with no issues. It also leveled off really nicely at my selected altitude to intercept the ILS. G3000 automatically switched to the LOC once I turned to the approach course. AP was 'ok' at following the glidescope (still somewhat off at times, but within 1 pip of deflection). Probably could have done better myself. I turned off the A/P at about 500ft and hand flew in the rest. The general control feel in the landing configuration did seem a better and less 'twitchy' than the last time I flew the TBM930. I don't know why people have such different experiences with this sim. I feel for everyone with issues. Hope it's resolved for everyone soon.

Jealous of the RV. I doubt I'll ever get my PPL in real life, but if I did Vans is high on my list of aircraft to get to fly. I've done some flying recently in the Bush League Legends 215 hp X-Cub mod and the VL-3 Rotex 915 mod with this G3X and it's great as usual. The VL-3 with the 915 especially is a little rocket ship of a plane, and the folks working on it are learning a lot about improving the flight handling.

A lot of modern outdoor lights are 'cut off' lights that only cast light down - this mitigates light pollution of the night sky and also avoids blinding people with spots in their eyes. The 'before' lights look a lot more light what I would expect with cut off lights. Now it's like a city full of bare bulbs.

Funny thing, on Asobo's official troubleshooting site, they have one Knowledge Base article that says to upgrade to Windows 10 2004 to fix issues with the Windows Store version of the sim. Just below it is a Knowledge Base article saying that Windows 10 2004 may cause CTDs and one fix is to downgrade to Windows 10 1909. Totally typical Microsoft BS.

I think the 'before' was better, but a lot of people complained really loudly on the official forums...so things get changed.

Hows your fuel balance between the left and right wings?

Obviously everyone is struggling a bit right now. We all have been. My biggest thing is this - the community has offered time and time again since launch to participate in a testing process that would allow some of us to be on a 'Beta' or 'Insider' or whatever you want to call it track that might allow some of these things to be resolved before it goes out to everyone. It's clear that they don't have enough internal QA resources to properly test everything. I get it, it's Microsoft, it's like turning the Queen Mary 2. But this thing is headed for an iceberg if they can't come up with a better process here. As cool as some of the features of this software are, every update with these problems consumes some of the goodwill people have toward the product. I honestly think they need to stop doing any patches until they can standup a new user beta program. That needs to not be Update 9, it needs to be Update 6. Three more updates with problems like the last few will completely tank the reputation here. Or.....if offering a 'Beta' is too much of admitting defeat, they could allow users to hold back the update of their copy of the sim to the prior patch to allow people to asses the potential issues before upgrading (which basically turns every release into a Beta without saying so...)

The Carenado planes being broken is not good. They can't expect aircraft devs to fix things that get broken every two weeks. Every year or two for a major API version update maybe. But not these biweekly updates. (I'd actually go further and argue that if it's an in-sim marketplace item it's implied it will keep working for the life of the sim. So it should be on MS not to break things.)

The thing is they have shown already that they won't do hotfixes. So it will likely take 2 weeks to path any of this. Maybe they can mail us all free XBox controllers to play with, since apparently that's all they test with.

Most likely cause of the CTDs is that they changed the controller profiles to handle the new options for the sensitivity settings, but didn't put in any code to handle the old profiles. So when it loads the old profiles it cause some kind of buffer overrun or underrun....and they have no exception handling...so instead of throwing up an error and falling back to the default profile....the whole sim crashes. We need the $%$#$# beta channel. Their testing is clearly not sufficient. I'm not sure it even makes sense to have more patches at all without the beta channel program being setup. They are just not capable of testing these releases adequately.

What I've observed is actually that the ILS heading is locked to the runway heading, not the location of the ILS beam 'start point'. So at airports where it is offset but at a slight angle (generally setup so it intersects the runway heading at around the MDA), the angle is missing and the ILS just runs parallel to the runway. Also at LDA approaches like say PASI (Sitka), the localizer heading = the runway heading even though it doesn't in reality. Since LDA approaches are often setup to avoid obstacles, this can result in some issues. I was hoping to nail down if this is the case for every single airport in the sim, in which case I can make a big generic bug, or if maybe it's only some airports (which would make it a lot harder to get attention on because it becomes a per-navaid fix).

The patch notes say this: It's possible TAA was not working at all for people with render scale <100% and now it is working, resulting in an FPS drop now that it's fixed

The next bullet on the patch notes is this: It's very possible people using Render Scale < 100% on their 4K monitors had broken TAA before this fix.