I am writing this as I just crashed out again after my 6th attempt at a short hop flight between KSBN and KPWK. I made that run 3 times in the past week with no issues after an entire weekend spent getting everything “working” again after SU5. I filtered outdated mods from my community folder and updated all my payware, I updated my GPU drivers (noticeably helped btw), and suffered through seemingly endless CTDs and stuck load screens while I got my personal livery mods updated… and then it all started working again! And, like I said, 3 smooth test flights this week. Maybe I can hop back into the FBW A320 this weekend for a longer trip? Then, tonight… Nothing altered (well, except it was dark this time), just crash, crash, crash. What was different? What did I not do right? After all the effort of cleaning things up, I feel exasperated. It’s just not fun anymore. It’s not even just the random crashes. I look around in the sim now, and in many ways the game is just in a worse state than it was a year ago. Live traffic executing endless missed approaches, what little traffic is left, the user interface is Mickey Mouse, I see lightning now in the middle of the clear blue sky, my drone crashes my parked airplane if I venture too far away now, and on and on.
I’m not even blaming the developers here. I’m a software developer myself, I don’t think it is on them. This smells like they are being pushed, and pushed hard to put out new features as fast as possible. And when you rush, the code gets messy, bugs multiply, segfaults crash, and all your fancy features and new tricks don’t really mean much. This is a letter to whoever is doing the pushing. Maybe it is management and/or marketing, maybe it is us as a community demanding a 100% IRL SIM RTFN. This isn’t working. Sure, this iteration of MSFS is an absolute triumph in software engineering. It is a quantum leap forward in amateur flight simulation IMO. But, what good is all of that if many of us now have to try 6 times just to have one nice short flight. What good is that to the loyal modder base that builds the freeware aircraft, scenery, and addons that make this game truly unique, only to have their creations broken without notice and being left to answer to the trollmob themselves (have a look at some of the comments on flightsim.to, they don’t deserve that). Even the payware “partners” were seemingly left out, and that is truly worrisome because they are risking actual capital developing products for this community.
Games did not used to be like this. MSFS did not used to be like this. We shouldn’t have to accept this. Here’s hoping lessons are learned and there are better days ahead.
The issues you described are some of the numerous reasons as to why the MSFS producer, his colleagues ( note: this doesn’t include the community managers and forum moderators) and the development team he hired have lost my trust. They will have to do radical things to get it back, and get me to re-install, use it and recommend this product to veteran pilots, simmers and newcomers again. The franchise has been in development since 1982, and the current version has been in development since 2016, yet there’s absolutely nothing ‘aviation’-related in this product that actually works as realistically as they do in other products. And even if one or two things seem to work, my brain paints the letters “SUS” in big bold letters all over the screen.
My suggestion for you would be to just use the drone camera aircraft, fly around, take screenshots etc and have fun. It’s the best aircraft in this product with the most realistic systems and flight model so far (that is until a CTD occurs).
What you are describing fits the bill for most companies. The devs are not helpless… its a very complex piece of software. It may take a bit of time to get it running great on hundreds of different PC configurations… it will get there.
Actually I don’t think Microsoft are “like any other people” - of all the major tech companies Microsoft seems to stand alone with some sort of unique blend of arrogance and a desire to self harm.
They seem to want to compete with Google with regards Bing search and maps but it then seems like they just don’t want to invest quite as much as Google.
They wanted to make a phone themselves, fired their experienced phone manufacturer partner but then seemingly dropped all development for the hardware itself and the ecosystem in general about 6 months after it launched.
They want to convince us that Edge is awesome but rather than make it awesome and give you the option to try it they force it on Windows users as mandatory bloatware that cannot be uninstalled. (This is not how you gain trust and win hearts and minds.)
Finally, their Quality control for updates has gone downhill…if it even exists.
But moving around with the drone camera is also not really possible… If you move some miles forward, i got always an aircraft crash, with the text message: you crashed and damaged your landing gear…
I’m just unable to understand why the fixes for the most crucial bugs can’t just be released before the world update 6. We’ve been told in the snapshot yesterday, that there will be some with wu6.
Imo almost everyone is suffering CTDs since SU5 - for most of the people it seems to be a somewhat rare event, but there are still a lot who are suffering them more frequently, or even - like me - almost every flight.
So if there are identified and fixed problems, a patch to solve them should be released at least every week till all (or at least 95% of all) crucial problems are fixed.
For me the delay of WU6 means 2 more weeks of an unplayable sim.
i understand you OP, maybe just give it a rest, come back in a few months.
this sim as it is now is not for the casual gamers, you need to be active finding workarounds. not everyone likes that.
play other games, its true this game has an overdose of issues.
Microsoft set the date for the series X release with MSFS and Asobo and Co had little or no choice in the matter, yes they probably hired more coders but it’s unlikely that many could just jump in without significant familiarisation of the project and that includes DX12 and cutting edge Direct Storage.
All credit to them for making that deadline despite the collateral damage caused by the rush and all credit to us patient simmers for putting up with it but now that episode is over all the repairs will need to take priority … and to be fair that is exactly what I see happening now. The newest roadmap if I was writing it would be hardware compatibility, functionality and then aesthetics in that order and only then can we talk about inspecting the guttering on your house from the seat of a Toprudder 103 Solo.
It surely never would have come from Asobo (nor do I think many would want it to). Many want renowned third-party developers with the expertise and experience to be handling that stuff.
You make it sound like the default’s are all rubbish just because every last button doesn’t work … But I can tell you as a low end user they are by far the easiest on my system which I’m sure was a big consideration from the start. They also look pretty fabulous too.
For me MSFS has become a lesson in adjusting expectations. When it launched I was really disappointed with the low FPS on my newly built rig. And after some good old tweaking in settings en configs (I really hoped I was beyond that misery) It worked OK-ish.
Then after every update there was something that had changed for better or worse (mostly worse).
For now I have accepted that this sim is nothing more than a fancy RPG flight sim, do some airport hopping in a C172 pretending flying around tourists or something.
I’m sure the day will come I can fly a study level 737 again like in X plane (wich I still have installed), but for now I accepted this will have to do for MSFS.
There is a reason that a very good majority of my flying in MSFS is done with the 152 mod by JPLogistics and why I personally simply went with the Standard Edition. I really don’t care much for tubeliners (actually have no time invested with the FBW A320) but I’ve heard it’s very good. I’m used to stuff from A2A, Airfoillabs and SimCoders. It’s hard for me to enjoy stock aircraft after being exposed to addons that are much, much better. Do I expect stock aircraft to be akin to that of pinnacle level addons? Of course not, my post was just a reaction to your emote about “study level” addons. Addons that can be flown by the POH / IM and worth picking yourself up a copy of to use as you use the aircraft in a flight sim.
The term has a different meaning to everyone. Leonardo (who actually use the term “study level” to describe it) has an MD-80 aircraft addon for P3D (and are actually making it for MSFS). My father who flies for AAL prior to getting moved to the 737 used to fly this aircraft and I’ve let him have a go at it, he says it’s nothing short of incredible. I also have the PMDG and Zibo 737 let him have a go at it and that too he loves.
stuff.