Do you work completely self-determined and free from the requirements of so-called decision-makers?
Can the developers do it?
It’s not always the carpenter’s fault when the table wobbles.
The best example for design vs coding is the “Press any key to continue”. As a design feature in the 21st century, that’s the silliest thing ever. There’s no key that can be pressed to not continue so if forward is the only option, what’s the point of asking if you want to go forward. That’s a design that devs were required to follow.
But when we squawked like mad and they “removed” it, they ADDED code to go around it. So when the last update failed for many, we were greeted with the “Press any key…” which led to nowhere other than a CTD
That’s bad design AND bad coding
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Kind of off topic but if you could one day make that follow me car replace the taxi ribbon… OMG 
By then the self driving tech will allow the aircraft to follow the pucks in the taxiway through complex, predefined routes. The pilots can get all the paperwork and checklists closed out before the aircraft shuts itself down at the gate. Just think, for the first time in commercial air travel the pilots would be the first ones off the plane.
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I’ve been curious about this since the Sim was released. Do you have more details? Like, what was the reasoning behind having this in the design spec? And where did you get that info from?
I’ve watched the Performance Tab in Task Manager during the startup and I don’t see any activity with ethernet, disk or memory for the first 30 seconds… seems like it’s just dead time.
Every single time I launch the Sim I wonder about this 
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I just chalk it up as a simulation all of it’s own. It simulates turning on an old INS. “DO NOT MOVE THE AIRCRAFT UNTIL THE INS LIGHTS TURN GREEN!” You click the startup shortcut and wait for the gyros to spin up before doing anything else.
Oh I don’t have any insider info. We know a few things…
1 The sim was introduced with no feedback upon startup
2 That was changed to introduce a “Welcome to MSFS” or whatever it said during the initial startup so at least you knew something. That lasted about four days
3 Then it was removed so that we are back to no feedback on startup!!!
To me, that’s a design choice from someone, not some coding oversight that slipped through temporarily.
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I have no idea how to do that.. But you can get a pseudo-follow me car if you maxed out the Airport vehicles slider. Those cars drive all over the place on the taxiways, etc.. 
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I have pretended just that on a few occasions 
You’re right but thats not the point I want to notice.
What I like to say from my own painful experience is, that as an employee you often feel like the caller in the desert.
Do we know how often one of the developers pointed out this pointless “Press any key …” dialog and how often he got the answer, that doesn’t interest me, but I want a purple button in the top left corner by yesterday?
And the fun really starts when the same decision maker stands in the door the next day and says to you, “why is there this pointless nagscreen, our users complain, remove it!”
You know, head, wall, pain … head, wall, pain …
It’s also not that they can, but that they did some, and shifted priorities to more urgent tasks. Opening doors for example. Some models like the TBM have it all modelled. Some have the exterior modelled but not the cockpit yet (like the DR400). Others not at all yet. They couldn’t have one aircraft doing something that others don’t yet.
There may be legal reasons why a feature can’t be added, or issues regarding how stable that feature is. Then, there’s also a massive list that they just haven’t gotten to yet.
I’d rather have this sim stable and working before further features are added personally.
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You are correct, we all use the sim differently. I use the sim many different ways myself. I certainly enjoy night flying in solid IFR - and during those flights I notice none of the visual improvements any of my enabled mods might be implementing. But my next flight might be a low and slow VFR flight in a 152, where bland vs high detailed scenery makes all the difference in the world for an immersive VR flying experience. As far as all airports looking “terrible and uninspiring” after you’ve flown into a few thousand of them (I don’t think I will fly into that many in my life!), I still prefer the simulated airport to look like the actual airport when it is one that I fly to frequently and have familiarity. To me, once again it adds to the immersion when I can taxi around a life-like airport and see static and other aircraft with realistic liveries. Right now, mods are a requirement to get that level of visual fidelity.
You seem to have quite a distrust of mods, with your fear that installing any mod will render your sim non-stable. I admit I have encountered a couple of mods that caused issues and needed to be removed or updated after a sim update. But that is literally a couple of mods out of probably hundreds that I have installed on my PC. And I promise, the 20-30 minutes/week I might spend managing those mods doesn’t come close to the time I spend flying in the sim, so your fear of spending more time managing mods than flying might be a bit of an overstatement 
I would argue why choose between modded default aircraft and payware “professional” aircraft. There are obviously some quality aircraft in both categories, but I would absolutely not agree the “professional” payware aircraft are necessarily better. There are plenty of payware aircraft that I would not install in MSFS, even if the developer released them for free, as they simply lack quality.
Also, you have more confidence than I that Asobo will quickly fix the AI aircraft lights issue they introduced in SU5. It has already been 2 months (and a world update plus a couple of hot fixes later) with no fix implemented yet…
You are correct though, we all have different tastes. It’s just… some tastes make more sense than others JK
I wouldn’t call it a mistrust or a fear. I was directing my concerns and cautions at those new to our hobby.
Too often, I see posts where a user says, “I wish I could [ enter sim desire here ],” Only to have a string of posts list two or three mods that will do what they asked. That will usually be followed by a dozen or so posts about which one is best.
After that new user has done that a half dozen times they start browsing the flightsim.com downloads and plug in everything that looks interesting. Half of them don’t work because the were not installed correctly and half of them conflict with the other mods that were working. Eventually after months of frustration and way too many hours on the forums complaining about weird crashes and strange scenery/aircraft glitches, they finally develop some of the skills and understanding required to properly use mods and add-ons.
Believe it or not, the majority of users joining this journey showed up because flying is cool. They don’t come into the hobby with years of home building their own systems and solid understanding about how all the bits in the box interact. Many don’t even have a solid understanding of the storage system. Now toss in a complex cloud based software that has some serious mysteries and shortcomings in the way it handles files, memory, networks and hardware and install that on a poorly built Wal-Mart “Gaming Computer” and already we have a recipe for frustration. Now let’s start throwing GBs of basement built mods into the mix…
Mine is a cautionary tale to those that are joining us. Work your way into this hobby slowly and try not to push your own boundaries of knowledge too far at once. By all means, experiment, learn, gain the skills and knowledge that will someday allow you to build a fully functional home cockpit. There are more ways to screw up your sim than there are available mods, if you do not know what you are doing. And guess what? The number of mods is growing at an exponential rate.
Over the years, I have found a handful of useful mods that I always upgrade as the sim evolved. But only a handful. I strongly recommend shopping carefully. If you decide to install a new mod, disable all your other mods, test the new one thoroughly. Not just concerning its stability and impact on your performance but also its usefulness. Decide now if it is worth it. If you are on the fence, delete it. Otherwise, continue testing by adding your previous mods back in, making sure there are no conflicts. If you run into one, decide now which one you want to keep.
Point is, the size of your community folder is not going to win you any contests. Performance and stability will always be trade-offs when adding features. Don’t be greedy. Pick and choose,
and test, test, test.
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In general, the “you get what you pay for” mantra is true. However, when it comes to 3rd party add-ons or mods, those lines get muddied significantly.
Look at the shovelware that’s being pushed in the marketplace. There are a lot of garbage planes that you can easily tell were rushed in there just to get peoples’ money. In some cases, they don’t even come to the level of quality of freeware planes available from other sources.
Then we have what are arguably the best non-stock free planes in MSFS atm:
- Working Title CJ4
- Fly By Wire A320NX
- MixMugz’ TBM improvement mod
These free modifications basically ■■■■ all over 75% of the paid 3rd party planes in the marketplace currently, and they’re free.
Then you look at other free mods:
- Working Title Garmin G1000 0.3x (pre-NXi)
- Working Title Garmin G3000
- Working Title Garmin G3X
- Pimarc / PMS5050 GNS 530/430
There are many more out there, but I’d say those are the most commonly used and most popular.
To suggest that free = garbage and paid = good as some suggest is truly being short-sighted, uninformed, and profession of a personal belief from a position of ignorance.
To be clear, I’m not targeting anyone in particular with this post. I’m just saying that this is a mindset that I’ve seen people professing over the last year, and I believe that it’s wrong. It may be correct in some cases, but to issue it as a blanket statement ignores the reality of the situation.
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I agree with most of what you say. But let’s not forget the original point I was trying to make: the more mods you install from undocumented hobby modders the more risk you run of having an unstable msfs app.
How do I know? I don’t. All I know is that I constantly read on the forums how unstable MSFS is, and how unreliable the update process is. It isn’t in my case, while playing MSFS every day since release day, I have only ever had one CTD, and not a hint of a problem with installing any of the updates. So, what makes the difference?
I’m a scientist by profession. And every scientist knows that the most important thing to solving a problem is to keep the number of unknown variables to a minimum. Every time you install a poorly documented mod, every time you change a config file, every time you make a poorly researched hardware modification, you increase the number of unknowns and the complexity of the system at hand. And the potential for trouble often increases exponentially with complexity.
All I’m saying is keep your install as pure and simple as possible, and if you really have to mod something, choose your mods and add-ons carefully…
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I tend to look at the base MSFS sim as purchased as a sandbox. They gave us a decent rendition of the world (to be fair, by far the best rendition ever seen in a flight sim) and a few simple to mid-level aircraft with which to start. But I think many serious flight simmers, including myself, immediately hoped for more accurately modeled aircraft to fly. Just like with FSX, I never expected study or near study level aircraft out of the box. That is where 3rd party mods - both payware and freeware come into play. I was also disappointed to see how most all airport scenery in MSFS looked no better than in FSX, which stands out when the surrounding terrain looks so realistic. Again, mod developers have solved that issue and now the vast majority of airports to which I fly in the sim look as great as the surrounding scenery.
For the record, my virtual community folder (I use an add-on linker utility - fantastic mod!) is about 200Gb. My only CTD’s were right after SU5, and were unrelated to any mods I had installed. The sim hotfix that came after SU5 eliminated any CTD’s, so they cannot be attributed to mods. Clearly it is possible to have a sim full of mods and yet have the sim be as stable as the default install.
You are correct it is imperative to read instructions and install mods correctly or you absolutely will encounter issues. I consider flight simming a rather “techie” hobby, so I don’t mind spending a few hours a month updating and optimizing the experience. Your final statement basically reads one should only mod the default sim if he/she absolutely has to do it. I can honestly say I install mods because I WANT to do it. I don’t have to fly the FBW A320 into my modded home airport KCLE with better looking trees due to the 4-seasons mod, while seeing AI aircraft with real life liveries all around me. But I sure wouldn’t choose the base MSFS installation over what I have!
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