While I have been waiting for my installation to update I have been fairly active on these forums expressing my disappointment at the experiences many have been encountering. I have also voiced my exasperation at the entire updating process and the frustrations I have suffered throughout. Finally, everything was updated, my community folder was empty and I decided to dive into the plain vanilla game and take a flight in the C172 with glass cockpit.
The flight was a short one, from London Gatwick (EGKK) to Shoreham (EGKA) IFR. Real world traffic was turned off as was real world weather. No fps meters were being used as I preferred to rely on my visual response to the graphics.
Setting up the flight on the world map it seems I’m still waiting for the ability to minimise the departure and arrival boxes so they don’t obscure the route. I began cold and dark and taxied out to the runway using in game ATC. My initial response was that the display was brighter than before and the colour pallet seemed slightly different too. This was confirmed as the flight progressed. I may need to adjust the gamma to take account of this in future.
It looked like all my settings had been saved from before. Taking off I found a couple of oddities with the ATC. On lining up the plane seemed to request another pushback all on its own or perhaps I had inadvertently pressed a button. On climb out tower handed me off to departure who contacted me without any contact from myself.
I was flying with scattered clouds and I found them OK, certainly nothing to complain about. Ground textures too were OK although I wasn’t flying high enough to make any comment of pop ins. What I did notice however was that the ground elevations were easier to appreciate. The approach into Shoreham is over the South Downs and the rolling hills were far more noticeable.
Panel textures seemed more crisp and the hotspots appeared to be altered so that adjusting knobs was more precise. During the flight the fps seemed to produce a silky smooth experience although as I neared Shoreham on approach I did experience some minor stuttering. The IFR approach into Shoreham is an RNAV which worked fine although to be honest this was always an airport where the glidepath was captured correctly.
Touchdown and the rollout was where the biggest issue occurred. As I ran to the end of the runway I switched to chase camera mode in order to assist with seeing the taxiway. As I did this the game froze entirely for maybe 10 seconds. Fortunately it didn’t CTD and I was able to taxi to parking with no further issues. Overall the flight took just over 16 minutes.
I am one of the unfortunate users who has been experiencing frequent CTDs since around January after an initial period from release where everything was fine and stable. My rig is based around a Ryzen 5 3600XT and RX 5700XT with 32gb RAM running mainly with everything set at HIGH at 1080p. My dream was that this update would solve my issues. Well, the jury’s out on that one at the moment. A 16 minute flight isn’t enough to convince me things are back to normal, especially with the freeze at the end, but at least it doesn’t appear to be any worse at this stage.
I felt I needed to post the results of this first flight as I had been particularly scathing of the developers in the past. I tried to write an objective account and hope that the results hint at a new dawn on the horizon. Next I will try a longer flight then slowly begin to incorporate some of the mods I have been using…Navigraph, liveries, Garmin mods etc. Maybe I will add to this thread as I progress.
