This makes no sense to me
Can someone explain how MSFS still doesnāt have an autosave
Start making a list of all the things that have to be saved, to resume a fight in both a C172, a PMDG 737, and the yet to be released Bell X-1, and by the 3rd page, you will have your answer.
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Would an autosave be written like that, though? itād have to be save as much state as possible based on what information was exposed to the game by the aircraft. I donāt think this is a hard problem to solve as this feature exists in previous simulators
previous āsimulatorsā maybe , FLIGHT simulators - I donāt know of any that even Can !
As I previously said, by the time you get to page 3 of things you need to save, you will realize it is not so simple - especially for Asobo to write one that would work with ANY plane.
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For those with PCs that are maxed out already it would almost certainly cause freezes the duration of which will depend very much on hardware and configuration ā¦ However I do think it an idea to have a one touch key assignment for state saving without UI interaction on the understanding that it will freeze until saving is complete.
Iām not trying to sound difficult but I would never use such a feature myself.
When Iām (simulated) piloting Iām taking an aircraft up and part of the idea is that you bring it down in one piece no matter what. Saving a flight wouldnāt coexist with my sense of immersion.
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Well no one says you have to use it. Some simmers like to practice say a particularly difficult approach or test best speed/flap settings for a particular airport and conditions etc.
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I just need it for long haul flights, the simulator crashes often during those. I think itās a must have feature
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Oh right, I do get how that would help new simmers. Hadnāt really thought of that.
Iād still advice touch and goās though. Practice your approach skills while practicing everything else too. Flying is overwhelming at first but but repeating repeating repeating cuts through that pretty quickly Iād say. Once you genuinely feel comfortable (somewhat) handling an aircraft, thatās where the true indepth learning starts. Then youāll start fiddling with your knobs and switches and hear yourself mumbling āoooh what does this button doā 
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Well yes but I guess the right answer would be to look for a cure.
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The problems that cause this definitely need to be solved, agreed. but even with extreme stability Iād still want an autosave 
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Yes but solved by who, thereās a pretty extensive choice? MS/Asobo, Windows, Nvidia/AMD, 3PDs, the users own system and config, fluffed up heatsinks and fans, dried thermal paste etc. The list is endless.
If you have a Volanta premium account, it has this feature.
You canāt save if youāre in Live Traffic, Live Weather, Real-Time. These are session based factors that ākeep on tickingā for lack of a better term beyond any state factors that could be written to an autosave file. FSX was a standalone application with no session state other than local to the PC it was installed on. There are tons of additional factors and external layers that make up MSFS today that never existed in FSX.
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Besides what was explained above regarding the Live features, here is a very easy tubeliner simmer answer to this:
Explanation is rather straight forward and easy:
Have you tried to load new session in MSFS? It takes like good 1-2 minutes, and it doesnāt even load everything completely for the sake of chasing after the āload timeā - custom 3rd party add-on airport buildings would be rendered after you are loaded.
Now on top of that add the following complexities:
- Panel state - and its consequent systems state (battery switch off means everything turned off, but when it is on, does the avionics switch on? Any loaded flight plan? Autopilot mode settings, selectors, etc etc etc etc? Which was the last radio frequency tuned? Navigation antenna frequency?
- Aircraft state - are you loading in mid flight? At what speed, what weather (icing conditions, precipitation, humidity, etc etc etc) - how it would impact your aircaft immediately, how should the panel state (autopilot on) react to the ālaunchā when you unpause the sim?
- World state - they will have to immediately repopulate everything with traffic and all, and have to accept that fact that you are already in the middle of your IFR route or something. That would be a chaotic moment. The weather state: how heavy was the icing build up in your plane? As your plane is in the middle of the sky, static from the newly loaded state, how should it interact with the jetstream at the cruising altitude?
That is quite a lot to unload. PMDG 737NGās autopilot still struggles to smoothly chase after designated cruising altitude or MCP selected alt. Let alone having its complex systems being saved one-by-one in the middle of a flight and the reloaded to the complex simulated world of MSFS. The autopilot canāt even keep up with time compression beyond 4x (they will miss the pre-programmed waypoint route let alone the climb path and destination altitude).
This is also something that is non-existent in other serious simulator like X-Plane 11. Even that one also struggles with replay feature, with some of the complex aircraft simulations not working in replay motion. In MSFS, some of the control surfaces like flaps and functions like landing gear donāt make it into replay save.
As for the solution to your woes (which I also suffer from): well, just read more sim optimisation tips & tricks. Having the sim CTD in the middle of Atlantic Ocean after 5 hours is indeed heart-rending. But autosave is definitely not a solution at this moment.
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I agree although a snapshot of the weather would probably be enough if the user keeps the ability to set up similar in custom weather before replaying, of course it wouldnāt be seamless. Live traffic I agree couldnāt be saved but even as it is landing on a already occupied runway is possible, existing aircraft would just have to be ignored (or can be reacted to).
I would be completely fine with most state being discarded after loading an autosaving, Panel state, world state and aircraft state include, except for aircraft position. Just prompt me to load back into the flight after I load the game back up, turn on live pause by defaultt and let me reset everything up. This is currently possible by spawning at your waypoint but I really want a better solution.
As for optimisation, my sim is highly optimized from what I can tell and Iāve tried to find material about long flights but couldnāt find much so far
If this had been the first reply, all the others would have been totally unnecessary. Thank you for answering the question directly.
You can indeed use dynamic pause to reprogram everything in the panel and aircraft if there are no saves in the panel / aircraft state - meaning you lost your FMC programming and the aircraft is flying blind and autopilot will disconnect.
What will happen is what you get when you load complex add-ons like FSLabs A320 or PMDG 737 or Level-D 767 into FSX/FS9: the plane will tumble out of cruising altitude, losing control. The outcome is either the autopilot remains engaged and regains control, or you manually put the aircraft back into stable flight path and re-engage the autopilot.
But then again, back in the previous FS, there are not much to be simulated in the game engine anyway, a lot of complex addons did their own processing outside the FS through interface (e.g. FSUIPC). If the addon is poorly interfaced with the save features, you may not be able to save or load some of the simulated features.
Autosave would have been nice to have when I was on decent after a 3 hr flight. I was adjusting the FMC flight plan and the sim CTD
While on that topic, CTD is a huge problem iāve had with PMDG