I agree, that is a really bad thing… that I and every other AMD card user has been experiencing ever since VR support was launched. Then SU5 came and all our CTD’s went away like a long, bad nightmare… for one week. Their “hotfix” for all the negative issues experienced by those who’d been enjoying the sim since launch basically broke the sim completely for me, and now it won’t even launch to the first splash screen!
But by all means, let’s prioritize all of the lesser issues being suffered by Nvidia users first before fixing AMD’s users inability to even launch the sim at all.
The majority of the sim’s size consists of textures. The actual logic doesn’t take much space. So file size doesn’t say much about the amount and severity of bugs.
Also a 20GB download doesn’t mean they actually changed 20GB of the data, it could also mean they changed 1kb in a 20GB package.
The point for me is if they give us a sim update every 2 months, and the bugs resulting from those updates take more than 2 months to fix, there will only be more bugs after each update. They should start to push out quality of life updates without changing much core functionality and bring stability to the platform…
I’ve been a software engineer for a long time. Yes, there can be defects and bugs, and as customers we certainly have to allow for them and understrand when one or two sneak into a release. And we don’t know the office or business politics going on there - who knows what kinds of pressures and influences they are subjected to? I can understand and sympathize.
However, I am also experiencing weird (bad weird) behavior, almost as if the sim has gone partially insane. Aside from the numerous CTDs I get at random points, it does things like putting me on a runway I did not request. If I start at a gate and get the engines running (or start that way), and access the options menu, when I come back, the engines are shutting down, and they completely refuse to start again. These are just examples that make the sim essentially unusable for now.
Since it’s more of an online service than a standalone app, where everyone is put on the same version whether they want it or not, they have additional responsibilities to ensure that the service and client are stable and can at least perform their primary functionality correctly, since issues can affect everyone - no option to revert to a previous version. Without blaming any particular individual or class of employee (devs, QA, DevOps, product managers, etc.), they do need to at least do a post mortem on this release and find out what went so wrong, and take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Let’s hope that they do (or did) just that.
Until then, I will mess around with P3Dv4 and X-Plane again, just to keep my skills in practice. Hopefully I (and the rest of us) will be able to get back to MSFS again soon.
P.S. If Asobo or any 3rd party developers/partners are listening, I have also put off any further purchases of add-ons for MSFS until things are fixed. Why spend the cash on things you can’t use?