I’ve already voted here, but another part of the situation here is about actual flight plans for said races. What is also important here is the ability for someone on an XBOX to import the plan they need - without needing to have the sim installed on a PC. At the moment, XBOX are second class citizens here, which means any racing capability would also need to address how these community flight plans are addressed. I’ve posted in OneDrive to import .PLN files from Xbox - Community Support / Wishlist - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums but will re-post this.
FS community, please consider voting for the .pln portion of the problem as well.
Asobo/Microsoft, please address this gaping deficiency.
The sim is fantastic for the ability to do cross-platform gaming. Unfortunately, for anything other than a relatively simple flight plan, xbox users are left out when it comes to flying in cross-platform multi-user events because of the inability to easily get a PLN file (and potentially weather preset) into their sim.
Many events are driven from complex flight plans, that are not necessarily simple to recreate in the world map, if at all possible. Specifically, complex bush trips with many waypoints along a flight path down a valley, or these days glider “competition” tasks that have height restrictions at varying waypoints - these two examples are not possible to exactly recreate in the world map.
Sure, if they own a PC they could install the sim on that, and sign in, do the load-from-pc and save-to-xbox-cloud. But if you don’t have a PC that’s capable of having the sim installed, you’re stymied. Not every person using an xbox for MSFS has a PC sitting alongside it, and that cuts down the usefulness of the sim for xbox users.
There’s clearly a couple of ways that this could be dealt with.
- One way is for the sim to allow a load-from-onedrive rather than only the closed xbox-cloud location that is currently in place. The xbox user can load the file into that from the browser or OneDrive app on their chosen device, and retrieve it in the sim.
- Another way is to expose the xbox-cloud save location to OneDrive so that you can do the above but direct into where the Sim looks for plans and weather.
- Another option would be to allow the sim to load plans and weather from external https locations; this in my mind has a greater set of risks to it but would allow for community event hosts to load a plan somewhere, once, and have anyone access that same plan without the download&save/load process.
- Another option (and in my view the most palatable) would be to provide a MSFS specific webpage that will allow a signed in user to load files into the xbox-cloud locations. This means it’s completely within the MSFS ecosystem and control, doesn’t need to touch OneDrive, and means the xbox simmer doesn’t need to install a 100+Gb (and growing) sim on a PC even when not capable of running more than the world map for loading and saving…
Please, make this happen so we don’t have two communities that can’t really participate to the same level in each other’s events.