kholt

Ah, but I wish that were true. The MS Xbox Store constantly becomes corrupted, a “feature” that has transcended a fresh reinstall of Windows 11. Combined with the fact that the MS Store encryption prevents backup/restore of the XboxGames folder, and the Store version really pushes up against my level of patience. Steam on the other hand is rock solid. However, I didn’t come here to debate Xbox vs Steam, I’m just interested to know if purchases made inside the MSFS Marketplace will transfer, or are locked to how the base MSFS product was purchased.

I have the MS XBox Store version of MSFS 2024 and lots of 3rd party content (airports) installed via the MSFS Marketplace. Are those purchases transferrable to the Steam version or would I have to purchase them all over again? Can both the XBox Store and Steam versions be installed and used interchangeably until I decide for certain which one to stay with?

I couldn’t agree more. I had to quit flying out of KJFK because the goofy controller was an embarrassment. I don’t want “personalities” to entertain me. I want a serious ATC product. I’d love to have usable vectoring, but I am losing hope, because there has been no improvement IMHO since the beginning. This other stuff is just SI trying to throw a bone to users to distract them from the fact that the ATC is apparently much harder than they anticipated.

I love the SI pushback and checklist features. They work almost flawlessly. The problem is those features aren’t worth anything near the subscription price, because the ATC features are in large part unusable. For example, I have yet to get SI to provide vectors on departure for airports where that is standard procedure, like KIAD. Also, the tower rarely hands me over to departure. I almost always have to ask, *long* after such handover should have been provided. I could take off westbound out of KLAX and fly to Japan and the tower controller would never let go of me. I’m pretty much at the point where I just use ATC for background chatter and ignore it otherwise. Ground works in the sense it gives proper routing, but I usually have to taxi “through” a few other aircraft it puts on the taxiway unavoidably in front of me. Pre-departure clearances work well, which is nice, including CPDLC. So it’s really hit and miss. If they ever figure out vectoring it would be worth the cost. Unfortunately I have seen no progress on that over the last year. At times it feels like it’s getting worse, not better. The problem is they are charging a premium price for an ATC product that is no where near being usable for its core feature. I can’t help but feel that all the product bloat is really an attempt to distract users from the fact that the ATC is proving to be far more difficult than they imagined, and thus they can’t really deliver on the original promise. This is my experience. I’m sure other’s experiences and perception are different. I imagine it all depends on the type of flying you are doing and what your expectations are for it in comparison to real world ATC. Maybe someone flying VFR out of small airports is happy with it. Flying transport category aircraft out of major airports just isn’t viable.

Exactly, except that a Windows Reset at a minimum uninstalls ALL third party application software. That didn't happen. Everything was intact minus the one Xbox app. I certainly did nothing that requested a reset. My only theory is that there was a glitch of some sort related to the big update to 25H2 that is being rolled out. I guess if I really wanted to dive deep on this I could go through my system logs and see exactly when in the last week my system was updated to 25H2, and whether the timeline matches up. Assuming of course that the system logs weren't wiped clean.... From Google AI: "Failed or interrupted updates: If a Windows Update fails or is interrupted, the system might not properly finalize the changes. This can cause the computer to revert to a state that triggers the OOBE on the next reboot."

No username change was required, and I was back up and running within an hour after repopulating my community folder. Not a big deal, just quite odd. I suspect the issue was related to another Windows 11 weirdness which happened shortly prior, which was that rebooting also caused Windows to go through the whole OOBE (Out of Box Experience) process as if the OS had just been installed for the first time, showcasing all the wondrous bounty that Microsoft has bestowed upon me. I think Windows sometimes does this after a major OS update. I don't know, but it's happened before more than once on various hosts. What hasn't happened before is that Xbox purged my one "game" and deleted the community folder. I have had Xbox lose track of what is installed before, forcing a reinstall of MSFS, but not quite this. A new PC with AMD 9950X3D and Nvidia RTX 5090 with a relatively clean install of Windows 11 with not much else installed other than MSFS 2024, Pro-Sim A320, Skalarki Profiler for a full A320 hardware cockpit, SayIntentionsAI, ActiveSky, Brunner CLS2Sim.. No cruft or other stuff here. Pretty simple setup really. Microsoft is just doing its thing I guess.

You can relax and breathe. MSFS reinstalled just fine for me. Just curious, what exactly do you think I “did” in that other thread? Are you a Microsoft fanboi that feels a need to defend them against criticism or comparison to other products? More maturity please….

A discussion of missing weather radar features vis-a-vis XP12 makes it difficult to “believe me”? Huh? Funny how no matter what someone posts the weirdos always come out with their personal attacks.

I rebooted my PC to discover that MSFS 2024 was uninstalled - completely. Even the community folder was gone. All remnants of the app were gone. Nothing else appears amiss on my computer. I don’t have any other XBox games, so I can’t say if it is an XBox issue overall, or MSFS 2024 specific. How is this possible? How does it delete itself from disk, including the community folder? I could restore the system from a backup, but I think I’m more inclined to just do a fresh reinstall. This is really, really weird….

If a small team of developers at Laminar Research can provide a feature as essential to serious flight simulation as weather radar, why can’t the army of developers at Asobo get it done? Because they don’t care, as it’s “just a game?”. Missions and careers and giraffes and elephants and ships are more important it seems than core flight simulation functionality. Seriously, this has been at the top of the most requested features since forever. In fact, the community seems to have tried to make it easy for them by largely just requesting an API so that 3rd party devs can provide the missing pieces. Still nothing. Hat’s off to the X-Plane developers for their new release. It’s sometimes impressive what a small team of dedicated enthusiasts can accomplish compared to a corporate bureaucracy. If I wasn’t tied to Pro-Sim and some other tools for a full A320 hardware cockpit I’d be all-in with them. I know I should be happy for all the good things we have in flight simulation, and MSFS certsinly has much to offer. We are all spoiled. It’s just frustrating that something so basic and so critical is completely neglected for so long, especially when a vastly smaller team with far fewer resources is able to show how it’s done.

I guess I didn’t get the memo. Is SU3 officially released already?

I tried to get this but it refuses to be enabled, saying I need to update MSFS 2024 first. What? I’m already up to date with SU2. I restarted several times to see if MSFS would try to update itself but nothing. Tried to update from the XBox app, but nothing. What on earth is going on here? Did Microsoft release something that won’t run until SU3 is released? That would be a weird strategy, to release add-ons they can’t support yet. Is everyone who is able to use this on SU3 beta?

You’re right. It’s their loss they haven’t…

You are absolutely correct. I tend to buy most high quality airport scenery add-ons that come to market (and virtually all MSFS 2024 specific versions) just to have a wide range of options where to fly. My list of purchases is rather long, and as a result, I have many options indeed. What I don’t have is patience to deal with businesses that make it difficult to take my money. But that’s just me.

If they lose 90% of potential sales, but keep 100% of each one, I guess they feel they have succeeded. Good for them. Meanwhile, everyone else has figured out how to make money. Being a mom and pop is irrelevant, which most other scenery developers are as well. The others are just smarter.

If they sold through a major storefront I would buy it. However, I won’t because I’m not going to add yet another store to check for updates, retrieve serial numbers, store my credit card info, etc. If they want to sell their wares they need to get in the Marketplace or Contrail or one of the bigger storefronts. I suspect they lose a lot more sales than they realize by being a PITA to do business with.

I use SI on every flight, or at least I try to. I've yet to complete a flight though without it completely losing it’s mind. Some examples are ground controllers at KLAX that issue takeoff clearances on the ground freq, approach controllers talking on clearance delivery, and tower controllers that never tell you to contact departure and suddenly act like they’ve never heard of you if you request clarification. Another common example that occurs frequently is a tower controller that tells you to land on the reciprocal runway heading after you’ve already been cleared to land and are on short final, gives no clearance as to how they want you to proceed, and still remains silent even after you’ve fully executed a GA procedure to the holding point wondering “what just happened?”. On the other hand, I’ve found the copilot feature to be far from gimmicky. I use it to read checklists which works reasonably well. And the pushback feature is brilliant. Far, far superior to GSX or anything else on the market. I know this is still early days in AI ATC. It can only get better over time, and indeed it has.

Heaven forbid we allow someone here that is articulate, unlike many or most others with their 5th grade level language skills that are the norm in internet forums.

I recall reading an interview with the product manager for P3D in which he seemed to indicate that, due to the millions of users they “inherited” from the Microsoft product, they felt some sense of obligation to the community to not just cut off access. MSFS 2020 didn’t exist as an alternative. However, that will not be the case for a future release from LM. The landscape has changed dramatically from the early days of P3D. LM will not be self-constrained by any feelings of goodwill to the consumer sim community.

Considering that there have been no updates or even hot fixes to v6.1 for nearly a year now, since February 2024, I think it’s safe to say that ongoing development on any current or future version of P3D is dead. That doesn’t mean LM isn’t developing an all-new simulator. I’d be shocked if they weren’t. But to think it would be an evolutionary step from P3D is probably wrong. It is in my mind also highly uncertain that it would be released and priced in a way that would support consumer flight simulation. There is no reason for them to support this market for any purpose other than perhaps to support technical education and encourage a new generation of LM employees. I wish it weren’t so. I plan to hang on to P3Dv6.1 until MSFS hopefully matures a bit more. If LM releases something new down the road that isn’t priced beyond reach, hopefully Pro-Sim and/or Jeehell FMGS will support it. That is the ideal outcome I wish for.

I thought one of the big advantages of 2024 was supposed to be faster load times. However, I have seen no difference compared to 2020. Perhaps it is because I have very fast NVMe drives. In 2024’s favor, I also have 1Gbps symmetric internet service via fiber.

…and thus you prove his point.

One plausible reason LM still sells to consumers is that it provides them with an army of unpaid testers that report bugs, and thus help improve the product quality for the smaller target market that pays the bills. It is not unheard of for software companies to take this approach, to the point of sometimes even opening up the source code.

It’s been a while since v6.1 was released and since then, nothing. It seems that either LM has completely stopped P3D development altogether, or else they are working on a new product that replaces it. Either way, it has been *very* quiet. I recall a while ago reading about them working with Unreal on a new simulator, but even that rumor trail has gone cold. Is there any indication of life at LM? I can understand LM no longer has any interest in supporting the consumer market. That is to be expected. I just wonder if there will ever be another release that is sold externally that add-on vendors like Pro-Sim would be inclined to support. I have to say, it seems quite unlikely to me, as much as I would like to see it. There is a place for a simulation platform whose primary focus is not casual gaming. Does anyone have current, credible information that points to a less bleak future?

Given their target market is XBOX and casual gamers, I’d say the odds of eventually getting P3D level support in MSFS for home cockpits is not good. But with P3D dying a slow death, we just have to live with what we get. Win some, lose some. It’s a mixed bag for sure.