marsman2020

1 hour ago, fogboundturtle said:

I think I will have this quote on standby at all time. this is from RSR from PMDG. The issue has nothing to do with the sim but the aircraft developer. It's on them to model all the short coming you guys are talking about. 

I have been mostly-mis-quoted ten thousand times this week as having said something along the lines of "the MSFS SDK isn't capable of supporting what we do" or "MSFS isn't capable of supporting what we do." I want to be very clear in stating that this new sim is highly dynamic and changing continually. What may have been true in June of 2020 is not necessarily true any longer. From the standpoint of development, we are not currently seeing any major limitations to prevent us from bringing our product catalog into MSFS.

BS. Not every aircraft developer should be forced to create their own flight dynamics engine outside of the sim (which is what PMDG does).

The article that claimed "20%!!!" was 20% to 10th Gen Intel....NOT to AMD 5000 series.  Also without knowing which version # of the sim was benchmarked, it's impossible to know if the data is valid.

Plus there are other major issues with 11th Gen Intel, look at the Gamers Nexus clock speed graphs, it's clocking lower then 10th gen in many instances. 

My vote for the "thank you" aircraft is a steam guage Bonanza (strictly based on what I'd like to see).

There are some nice non-Garmin avionics out there now that drop in for the GNS430 and GNS530. It would be nice to have them in the sim as well.  It's really too bad Asobo didn't think ahead to swapping out avionics, and everything in the bezels, etc is baked into the aircraft 3D models.

You can only fly so many aircraft but a nice 50s GA aircraft would a fun addition to the sim.  Thanks for reviewing the patched version!

I have a mechanical keyboard nerd numpad that runs the QMK custom keyboard firmware that I need to dig out and program with a few custom keybinds for AP stuff.

My experience with things like this is that it's best to initiate a private conversation with the moderators if you disagree with a decision they made. 

In the Options (ESC) menu "General" section there is a tab "Flight Model", and it needs to be set to "Modern" for all MSFS aircraft. 

Legacy is only for use with the most basic of FSX portovers (many more recent FSX portovers use Modern as well), and causes major issues with aircraft intended for MSFS - aircraft stuck on runway, no rudder, etc.

3 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Some geometrical information is better than none, which is the case in FSX/P3D. What matters most is if end result matches global coefficients, which seems to be the case for Cl and Cd and less so for Cm (and other stability related ones)

Otherwise P3D wouldn't allow a true biplane flight model either.

There is way more to the flight model then the global coefficients, if you want behaviors to be correct at the edge of the flight envelope (like stalling the inside wing during the base to final turn).

4 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

MSFS' normalization algorithm has a single task - finding the correct set of local aerodynamic coefficients which will match global aerodynamic coefficients in all flight conditions. In order to accomplish this, MSFS starts by distributing global aerodynamic coefficients to surface elements proportional to their surface area. After that, an iterative optimization algorithm will further tune local aerodynamic coefficients so that when all element forces are integrated (when a “zero-order” solution is reached) resulting global aerodynamic coefficients will match the global aerodynamic coefficients entered in tables. I am not sure why they try to estimate local aerodynamic coefficients for wings though, as they are already available in the form of airfoils, which is what X-Plane uses. I assume this is for backwards compatibility purposes, so that FSX tables still can be used the same way as before.

I did lots of experiments and it looks like MSFS almost perfectly matches Cl vs AoA and Cd vs AoA tables for almost all flight conditions. However, Cm vs AoA tables and other moment & stability related data seem to be rather off - maybe this is the reason MSFS aircraft feels twitchy / inertialess: Unlike other local aerodynamic coefficients, Cm and other moment related coefficients have a worse fit. I hope Asobo addresses this and allows for a more complex fit with more data points. Several days ago I've noticed someone else reporting the exact same thing - local Cl and Cd fitting the aircraft really well while Cm having a worse fit, so I think this is reproducible too.

A straight wing vs a swept wing vs a delta wing will have different spanwise distribution of lift.  Different fuselage and engine mount configurations will also have different local coefficients around them.  Yet the normalization algorithm is "one size fits all", mapping every aircraft to the same idealized geometry with only a handful of parameters to adjust that geometry.  It also doesn't allow for things like a true biplane flight model.

It may be an interesting way to try to have some local effects like stall, etc derive "naturally" from the flight model while maintaining backward compatibility with the FSX tables, but I'm very skeptical of the results thus far. 

2 minutes ago, Republic3D said:

I'm having the same issue with the Carenado Mooney. Is it the same bug for all Garmin equipped planes?

Every aircraft in the simulator with glass cockpits.  Check out the 'Known Issues' linked above.

I'm not sure why this cargo cult thread from October was dug up again.

3 hours ago, KevyKevTPA said:

That article may as well have been written in Mandarin for all I could understand of it lol...   

It doesn't help that they ported this from the downloaded help file that comes with the SDK, and the LaTeX equations don't work, so it's basically unreadable.

They even made a big deal about how the SDK documentation was moving to a website, but apparently no one ever clicked through the pages and scrolled down to realize it's unreadable.

I replied to a thread that had community manager participation on the MSFS forum pointing this out, to no avail.

Maybe someone with closer ties and working on the SDK could mention it and get the equations fixed.

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Of course, you don't have to take my word for it! I feel the proof will be in the pudding over the next year or so.

I hope so.  I know the WT folks have been at the pointy end of the spear on fixing a lot of things since the very beginning, but to me Sim Update 3 was a huge disappointment and I'm getting exhausted with waiting for the promised content and improvements, which are constantly pushed back in time (based on many interactions I have observed, this is likely because the full scope isn't really understood when the initial promises are made).

If you create a login to the site Flightsim.to will track the last version of addons that you downloaded vs the current version.

But that only helps for addons that the authors had chosen to put up on that site. (Like GotGravel's Cubs, etc)

So I too have a giant list of links to various websites and forum threads that I use to check my addons once a month or so.

Robert's Turbo Bonanza is still at Version 3.

Doing a flight right now with both mods and no problems.

There is a 'known issue' in MSFS with avionics not starting that was introduced in Sim Update 3 a few weeks back:

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On rare occasions, Aircraft screens might not initialize correctly upon loading a flight. Please restart the flight to fix the issue.

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/release-release-notes-1-14-5-0-sim-update-iii-now-available/375519

I've seen the rudder 'twitch' on takeoff roll, haven't flown through enough weather to see if it's 'twitchy' as far as  bouncing around.

It feels so nice in the roundout/flare that I'm willing to forgive the takeoff roll 'twitch'.  I've probably made my best landings in this aircraft. 

There are lots of things in the MSFS flight model that make it very challenging to tune aircraft right now.  You tune one parameter and it breaks something else.  There are new factors and parameters stacked on top of old FSX parameters.  This is one of the better aircraft I have flown. 

14 minutes ago, Phantoms said:

I made a post about just this thing on the JF forums and people chime in with the constant "just use Spad" jabber. The Logitech/Saitek panels are some of the most common things added to flight simming after yoke/pedal/throttle/rudders. This doesn't bode well for future aircraft purchases if the only way to get the panels (Switch, Multi, Radio) to work is to use Spad and program every single fucntion for every single plane instead of just using the drivers made for them,. Also, if you use Spad then you are committed to it as you have to remove the logitech drivers (you can not run the drivers and spad at the same time).

You may want to keep this in mind if you're considering purchasing the JF Arrow and you use the Logitec/Saitek panels.

Other addon aircraft are running into similar issues with controls.

This seems like something that "the platform" ie MS/Asobo should have addressed.

7 hours ago, somiller said:

Just in case God was listening, sd_flyer did NOT mention anything about checking fuel tanks before flight IRL...that's right, we weren't even talking about fuel. So don't be thinking he said he has never not checked fuel!

Not superstitious or anything, but never hurts to be safe, right?

One of my around the world flight legs I have been flying in the Bonanza, I neglected to check fuel for at takeoff and only had 50%.  Realized it not too long after takeoff, did some math and it seemed like I could get to my destination, so I opted to press on.

Along the way I ran into some winds which significantly slowed my forward progress.

Landed with like 30 min of fuel left, at a grass airstrip, in fog down to around 200ft, using an "approach" defined in LittleNavMap....  Couldn't go to any alternate due to lack of fuel.  I was very glad that I has practiced flying the Bonanza 'by the numbers' to get a 500fpm descent in approach configuration, so I could focus on looking for the runway through the fog.

Always check!

Looking forward to trying out v 0.3 of the Arrow, Just Flight is really pumping out the updates with a level of responsiveness beyond almost any other aircraft 3DP!

I guess tomorrow we will know if it's actually fixed or "Asobo fixed"

Personally if it were me I'd go find some FPS "black holes" that haven't been mentioned in any forum threads and keep the private until after the patch.  It wouldn't surprise me if they just manually fixed the locations people have explicitly called out but left all the others.

There aren't any

14 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

It's different team working on different thing.  Xbox version is important for MSFS and the flight sim community in general. Even if it doesn't appeal to you, it appeals to a lot that can't afford a PC to run MSFS. You guys really have to stop this nonsense.  

Not true.  They have discussed in multiple Q&As that they have so many branches of the source code that it's getting hard to track, and that a lot of the work is happening in branches associated with XBox.

8 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

I understand you are frustrated but this idea that because there will be a xbox version that it weakens the PC version is utterly ridiculous. MSFS is PC first platform as stated by Jorg like 5 millions times already. Get over it. 

It's already weakening the PC platform because a large portion of Asobo's resources are going into re-writing huge swaths of the sims for XBox, all of which is happening in branches of the code that we won't get to benefit from on PC until after the XBox release.

Many of the big improvements to things like weather are very unlikely to happen until after the XBox version is out and the branches have merged back together.

There are so many branches that the devs can't even keep track of what features they have fixed/added in the Q&As.

Us paying customers get a half-broken barely Beta product and the devs are off making an XBox version instead of fixing what they have already sold.

On the MSFS Forum someone noted that elevator trim doesn't actually seem to work correctly.  The elevator does not deflect due to the trim setting - trim seems to just add extra elevator authority that magically appears from nowhere.  

The consequence of this is that you need your trim setting during roundout and flare to match whatever was used to tune the aircraft flight model, in order to have the same elevator authority the person doing the tuning had. 

In a real aircraft being mistrimmed might increase the control force required significantly (for aircraft without fly by wire) but in MSFS it seems like having the wrong trim setting might make it impossible to flare properly at all.

1 hour ago, sightseer said:

I think the Dallas area frames situation may be due to an upcoming change in scenery.

My speculation is that Dallas would become PG and we already know they said London was delayed because of the Bing map people using a new PG technique.  We also know that Asobo sometimes accidentally put code in they didnt mean to.  So...maybe Dallas is suffering from multiple pointers to scenery that doesnt even exist yet or something like that.

but there is an overall performance degredation and it appears to be something to do with mesh.

I suspect that "make photogrammetry better" and "fix overly rounded mountains" were part of their intention.  They'll figure it out eventually Im sure.

I don't think Class B airspace has anything to do with anything because I fly in and out of Bravo airspace all the time with little impact. 

If you read the thread on the MSFS forums that was linked, you would see that the performance problem is not within the airspace, but in a corner-shaped sliver to the northwest of the airspace.

People identified this based on the boundaries of the 1-2 FPS "black hole" at the 76T airport.  They then used that observation to predict the location of other FPS "black holes" that had not yet been identified.

Something in the math that determined the airspace boundaries seems to be messed up, producing geometric areas just outside the airspace that become FPS black holes.

Avoiding the area to a the northwest of circular airspace might really improve people's flying experience for now......