eltair

Sometimes I buy addons directly, from third-party stores, or from the in-game marketplace depending on the situation. I have a number of issues with the marketplace that usually make me prefer other options: Encrypted files prevent third party mods. Slower updates. Lack of receipts, purchase history, refunds, or really any management at all of purchases. Particularly for aircraft, I avoid the marketplace unless the plane is exclusive because I anticipate situations where an MSFS update breaks an airplane and 1) the developer patches it but needs to wait for MS to validate it, 2) the community finds a workaround or hacks together a mod to fix it, or 3) the developer completely abandons the plane and the community keeps it going. When I buy from the marketplace it's generally scenery and driven by the following combined advantages: Price/sale. Convenience (no third party installer, easy updates). Wanting to support continued development of MSFS itself.

I use it because honeycomb bravo axis mappings need to be different depending on the aircraft and it's annoying to have to change the mappings in the game all the time. Axis and ohs automatically detects which aircraft is loaded and loads the appropriate mapping profile for me.

I think you might be conflating g-sync working properly with smoothness although it somewhat depends on your definition of "smooth". I define "smooth" as a combination of two factors: 1) consistent time in between frames, 2) a high enough frame rate to not perceive choppiness. G-sync plus v-sync provides an ideal configuration for delivering tear free frames to the monitor with low latency. G-sync has no direct impact on the smoothness factors I listed. It is best understood as a tool to eliminate tearing without introducing latency. This is important for fast-paced, high-framerate games like first-person shooters, where low latency matters. Some people are more sensitive to one factor than the other. If you are sensitive to low framerates, you might prefer not to cap the FPS at 30, allowing MSFS to run faster when it can, but you may be more likely to notice slowdowns when the game or GPU can't keep up. For others, a sudden drop in FPS might immersion breaking and very undesirable. These folks might prefer to cap at 30FPS for consistent frametimes. If you prefer a balance you might use an external tool like RTSS to cap at something like 40-50FPS or whatever your hardware can handle.

The resolution slider is useful for a number of reasons: If your GPU is the primary bottleneck, obviously you can lower it to get better performance. If your CPU is the primary bottleneck, you can increase this to force the GPU to to become the bottleneck. This can sometimes improve stuttering, particularly if you don't want to cap the frame rate. Any setting other than 100 I believe will trigger a temporal sampling algorithm which can improve aliasing artifacts at the potential cost of some blurriness. The higher this setting, the better anti-aliasing and sharper image you get. However this is subject to diminishing returns as you noticed. Some people are more sensitive to aliasing artifacts than others.

In the past, I never used this feature, but after SU5 I tried to turn it on and found that I couldn't get it working. I ended up using DDU to uninstall my graphics driver and start over. Now it works.

Yes, it seems there are issues with geforce cards. Some over here suggest rolling back driver version: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/glitchy-pixels-at-top-of-screen/430295. I haven't tried it yet, but plan to as I have other worse rendering glitches than just the render scaling one.

I fly in multiple sims myself (MSFS, X-plane, and DCS) and I'm quite interested in statistics like this: Because it's interesting. It helps me make informed decisions when purchasing addons. Microsoft and third party vendors have not been forthcoming with actual numbers. Is the sample data small relative to the total user base? Maybe, but if so that means there's a lot of flying going on ;). Is the sample data biased? Maybe, but we don't know in which direction if any. However, we can look at many other data sets and try to make some conclusions. The sheer number of addons being worked on or released for MSFS is impressive. The steam data posted in this thread shows strong numbers and growth. On twitch, MSFS has 228K followers, X-plane has 75k, DCS has 102k, and P3D only 11k. The fact that a company as big as Microsoft actually mentioned Flight Simulator next to Minecraft as one of their most popular titles helping to double their "creator economy" in their last earnings call is crazy (source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q4/press-release-webcast). Clearly, MSFS has added a lot of users to the flight simulator community and has helped stir up the third party content market. I'm not sure why some people are trying to dispute this with anecdotal stories from friends. I love all three of the sims that I fly for different reasons, but from the evidence I've seen I believe that the size of the MSFS market is at least an order of magnitude larger and the OnAir numbers seem to support that. If it's true, there's no reason to be upset about it. If not, then I'm wrong and who cares. We can enjoy all of our simulators and there's no reason to be defensive about your choice of simulator.

For me, MSFS pulled me back into flight simulation, which got me trying x-plane 11 again, which got me looking for certain aircraft that simply don't exist for MSFS yet (or at least not to the level of realism I was looking for). I'm happy to run more than one sim depending on what I want to do. While I'm not willing to spend a bunch of money on scenery for X-plane when I can get much better looking scenery in MSFS, I'm happy to buy high quality X-plane aircraft for IFR flying, particularly if there's not an imminent port to MSFS.

Disclaimer: While I am a software engineer, I have no experience developing software for flight simulation. One thing I've learned from working in the cybersecurity domain for many years it's that anything is possible. If you've ever played with tools like cheat engine you'd get a taste of this as you can find important memory locations in another process and manipulate them. However, with MSFS you don't need to do hacks like the above for many aspects of the simulator due to simconnect which makes it easy to access many important variables in a supported way. I'm not super familiar with what's available here, but I have seen external tools which let you slew the aircraft anywhere you like instantaneously. I can imagine that with a bit of clever engineering, you could run an entirely external simulation and then update these slew variables to keep the aircraft in the correct position. This could be extremely crude (I'm not sure of the accuracy of these variables or the frequency at which it is reasonable to update them). There may be other approaches as well that still utilize the built in flight model in some basic way while you continually update parameters to stay in sync with the external model.

Wow, a lot of people here and over on the A2A forums really misinterpreted what Lewis was saying and took it out of context as he said further down that thread. He was simply talking about the different markets that P3D and MSFS target and made no statements about whether A2A is working on MSFS products. All other indications from other A2A posts actually indicate that they are in fact planning to release MSFS products: https://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=72238 https://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=72335 https://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=72611

When you fly around, the simulator fetches world data from the cloud (eg textures, photogrammetry, etc.). Rolling cache avoids repeating the same network requests by saving the responses to disk and reusing them. I think it's important to have at least a small cache to avoid wasting bandwidth (if I remember correctly, Seb recommended 8GB in one of the Dev Q&As). Note that sim upgrades can cause old cached data to become incompatible with the new version and may cause crashes, so you should always delete and recreate your cache with new versions. If your bandwidth is not great or you have aggressive data caps, you can go big on the rolling cache and maybe get a dedicated drive. If you mostly stay within the same part of the world this should help quite a bit with performance and data usage. However, in most cases this is probably excessive. Edit: A couple of other things. Even a good internet connection can experience random performance issues and rolling cache helps mitigate that. Also, keep in mind that the cloud hosts petabytes of world data and you won't realistically be able to cache a significant percentage of that so you get diminishing returns as you increase the cache. Overall consider how much disk space you're willing to give up to save bandwidth.

Hi Chris & Esther, I bought both products and based on the description, I definitely did not expect to get only a handful of ship models. That said, after installing your mods along with Henrik's I've been having a blast flying around in a spitfire hunting for ships. Together, these mods really help bring the MSFS world to life, so thanks to all of you for the countless hours you put in on this. My review for others considering these products: I think together, they are pricey for the small number of models you get, but I also recognize the time it must have taken to enter all of the route information. I hope that Seafront will add more models soon. If so, I would definitely recommend it. By the way, I spent an embarrassingly long time looking for ships unsuccessfully until I finally read the documentation and turned up the slider past 60%. -Matt

I haven't tried trackir, but I made a head tracking "clip" using popsicle sticks, LEDs, a CR2032 battery holder, a switch, some wire, solder, and a bunch of hot glue. It attaches to my headphones using velcro. I use a cheap ps3eye camera and opentrack software. My first attempt used a wire coat hanger but was not rigid enough and easily bent out of shape, but worked reasonably well. Then I used the smoothtrack mobile app for a while, but it has a bit too much judder for me. Using the clip and camera is much smoother. I used blue LEDs which I already had on hand as a test to try out head tracking with the intention of switching to IR later, but it works so well I just stuck with blue. As a bonus, I didn't need to modify the camera filter. Opentrack has an option to use only the blue channel from the camera which helps to avoid picking up ambient light. Luckily I don't have any lights behind me which would cause issues. Camera position is important. Initially, I had it sitting under my monitor, but had issues with things blocking the camera view. Also if I looked up too high it would sometimes lose track of the LEDs. Placing the camera on top of my monitor angled down slightly and a little off to my left side where my clip is works much better and rarely gets blocked.

I went with steam for the following reasons: I've used steam since they first rolled it out for the original half-life and it has always worked well for me. I find the file structure and permissions used by MS store apps to be annoying. I heard many complaints about download/update issues with the MS store. I have found the DRM to be more restrictive and problematic with MS store. Some downsides to the steam version: DLC is not managed through steam and this causes issues with receipts/proof of purchase. It also makes refunds difficult. As a result, I generally buy directly from addon developers. License will not transfer to the Xbox version. Overall, I'm happy with the decision to use steam.