Hot Swappable Instruments -- the Good, the Bad & the UGLY

Discussion Hub Aircraft
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Hot Swap-able Instrument on the VC panel are a neat feature, but do they come with a reliability price ?

If Instrument are swapped out , what happens to the previous replaced instrument that was loaded, and does it affect the new Instrument ?

Bottom line, if you sit in your Cockpit and choose to change Instruments, SHOULD you restart the sim, so that the old Instrument does not potentially run in the background ?

I see a lot of the major Devs, making warning comments about Hot Swap-able instruments, and the issue of actually doing the swap without re-starting the sim,

Is this a know issue, or nothing to be concerned about ??

Is this an issue in MSFS, and does it need to be addressed , and if so, HOW ?

Note: Very few actually t READ any documentation that may come with a plane, that may warn you of theses issues !!

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According to @Bishop398 on the Offical Working Title Discord channel, even when swapping an instrument and then reloading the flight, the initial load of the flight still occurs with the default instrumentation and then the hot swap occurs prior to the load of the flight being completed as the user’s config choice is read during the load.

Therefore, the issues involved with hot-swapping instruments still have the potential to occur.

All of the kerfuffle I read over SWS not having hot-swappable instrumentation on their PC-12 is a bit of a drag, because their choice to not offer hot-swappable instrumentation is actually doing right by everyone.

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Yes, I read that.

Was this an issue BEFORE the highly more complex WT Garmins were introduced as default Asobo Instruments.

I do not recall theses issue with the old Asobo or PMS50 Garmins

Certainly, a lot of MSFS seems to have become more PC speed sensitive – ie some things work better or differently on slower systems, that they do on faster systems.

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I’m not sure.

As a recent (April of this year) migrant to PC, I’ve not had too much experience with hot-swapping of instrumentation in the past on Xbox.

I will say that it seems recent changes to the GNS, specifically, have had a knock-on effect on aircraft systems.

It seems to be an ever moving target for the devs to stay on top of.

I don’t quite know why some aircraft seem immune and others highly sensitive to these changes.

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If you knew the answer to that one, the Plane Dev would be fighting over you, to work for them !!

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I haven’t used the 750 in ages now. In the dark times, when I was getting a lot of CTD’s, there were reports of issues between the PMS 530, and the PMS 750. Map pages, airspace messages etc. This was shortly after the JF Arrow’s were released, the first plane I had that allowed hot swapping. I stopped using the 750, and the amount of crashes I got dropped away substantially.

I’m sure its improved since, and with the advent of the WT 530 as well so I should probably revisit. I have a good baseline for sim stability, not having a single in-air sim crash in the whole of 2023, so any changes that caused issues would be immediately apparent.

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