ngc427

Usually I'm a lurker on forums these days, but this just really struck a wrong chord with me. First they miscommunicate the date, OC2 was completely shut off today, 4 days earlier than the May 31st timeline. Then, Mathijs on the PMDG forums says that there are no plans to bring any P3D products to OC3. Anyone still using PMDG products in P3D are essentially swindled of their money and the product they rightfully paid for and have the right to use, 4 days before the expected date. The very least they could have done is released an end-of-life update to either disconnect it from OC2, or released official solutions for livery installation. Unbelievably scummy behavior.

After some deliberation, and a personal tough stretch of two weeks, I decided to treat myself and finally upgrade to P3D v5, and holy wow was it worth every single penny, even if I had to re-buy some aircraft to get the full experience (thankfully early Black Friday sales saved me a bit there). But, all of that to say, I did try out Prepar3Ds SimDirector, and creating missions with basic formation flights and things work exceptionally well, and is very intuitive after a few hours of learning and tutorials. I did get the FlightReplicas B-17 formation "aircraft" working with a simple mission plan, just starting on the runway and following along with the AI formation, and it works very well. Unfortunately, just with the way that the formation is a single "aircraft", means that trying to hold a formation in a turn is impossible - the left side suddenly speeds up 20kts, and the right side suddenly drops 20kts. Though, just flying in a cloud of B-17s without holding a formation is still very impressive looking, essentially moving scenery that greatly enhances the experience of flying a mission flight plan. It is a little difficult to tune altitudes and speeds that I can follow along with in the A2A B-17, but after some tweaking and some firsthand knowledge of good climb and cruise speeds, it all turned out pretty nicely.

I found a really cool scenery/aircraft(?) on Flight Replicas, that is an entire bomb group of 126 B-17s as 1 "aircraft", so you can have a massive swarm of B-17s for simulated missions without the tedious formation making or extra polys causing lag. The issue is - how the heck do you get it to follow a mission plan!? In this case, I essentially just want 1 AI aircraft, to follow a loop of coordinates (about 12), no takeoff or landing, and enough to where I can fly along in formation. I've been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why nobody has figured out how to do this in FSX yet? I'm using FSX:SE, so the default mission editor SDK will not work (which I've heard it's not very good anyway). I've tried FSX Mission Editor 2, but the documentation on it is lacking, and I can't find anybody who has tried to make an AI aircraft follow a set of waypoints, or even uploaded a screenshot of their setup for it. I've tried AI Flight Planner (AIFP), but that seems to not be much help (just the same A-B airport planning). I have also heard that you can make fake floating airports with runways enroute so your aircraft do something that resembles making a waypoint, but I have concerns of how good this works, and also how to set it up (I wasn't able to find a concise tutorial about that either). Am I trying to do something that just isn't possible? Is there a way to just have an AI aircraft follow waypoints at all, in any way, shape, or form?

After trying the flight again (this time properly programming the route in the FMC), and I had the same issue, but this time on the departure side of things. The aircraft rolls left/right, and then starts rolling back the other way to get back on the LNAV path, making an ugly bump in the flight path. My best guess is that the aircraft bugs out (maybe on an Alt-Tab?) to follow heading mode, and if the heading bug isn't aligned with the flight path, it starts turning off-path. I did find one other post on here from 2012 with a very similar issue, but no solution. I'll do more tests and reading to see if I can figure out why this is happening, or if someone else has already solved this issue.

Yep, I did it on a relatively short flight so no simulation rate required, with hand-programming in the route. I haven't done a second try yet, but while programming the route, I had some issues regarding programming the approach and such, so I'm curious if that might have messed it up.

Fat chance I'm going to get support for an aircraft that's turning 18 soon, but here goes... Just on a whim of nostalgia, plus general frustration of modern sims, I re-installed FSX, as well as the Wilco 737PIC. For some reason, on my first test flight, it kept "dodging" waypoints, it would turn sharp left/right right before hitting the waypoint, and then at some point it would correct itself and turn back, creating these annoying unrealistic bumps in the flight path. I'm not sure if fiddling with my flight plan while programming the FCU caused it to bug out, if I'm missing something, if an update broke it recently, or it's just known to do this?. Otherwise, it still works very well in 2025, albeit surpassed visually by other aircraft.