Question regarding Public Test starts on monday (06.12.21)

A long term simmer and a CPL H IRL.

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Please pardon my ignorance but I don’t understand what difference it makes installing the sim to a custom location.

If I move the ‘official’ and ‘community’ content folders to a non default install location such as C:\MSFS as suggested and then tell the sim where that new location is, how is that different than just leaving it at the default location? If I join the public beta, will it not just update the content in the new location? and at the end of testing the sim would still want me to redownload everything would it not? If not then great but I am sure that all open beta testing will be this way in the future and I’d like to get involved in some of it – specifically the more weather related updates that should be coming.

What people actually want is an open beta where feedback and bug reports are acted upon before the build that’s being tested is actually released. So far, with every single beta test, the next build was released with all the bugs testers had reported in the code. If they’re creating beta sessions but not actioning the bug reports, then it’s just PR to appease the masses.

Now, perhaps they will actually get it right this time. Time will tell. I’m hopeful, but based on their historical behaviour, I’m also not holding my breath.

That sounds like a good idea !! Reading through the posts in the section for the Beta testing it seems to me as though peoples position/perspective are becoming slightly more polarised in terms of what is right and what is wrong . Not sure how the Dev’s are going to pick the bones out of this, it could go on for some time.

Yeah, it’s not looking good. Honestly, my prediction based on past betas is that the code that’s in the beta right now is what gets released as a patch next week some time, regardless of bugs or issues testers are reporting.

I’m still baffled that people are defending the horrible state of clouds in the beta though, especially considering what we had pre-SU7.

Completely agree ! If I had my choice I would like to see what we had before return and then they take this blended METAR solution away and work on it, bringing it back to the table when it is in a much better state than it is now. I am not a developer though, so I am guessing that maybe that is not possible as there is probably a lot of this done on the server side backend and a lot of people are requesting it.

It will never go back. You always patch forwards, never backwards.

I don’t disagree though. The whole METAR thing seems half-baked at best. From my first couple of flights, I could see it was already out to lunch. Rather than making the 3 weather sources they had previously match up (world map, predictive model and ATIS), they’ve added a 4th weather source that doesn’t match any of the other 3, and now causes those instant weather transitions that completely breaks the incredible sense of immersion weather previously had (accuracy to actual real world conditions not notwithstanding). Combine that with clouds at or below ground level, the lack of any clouds other than cumulus, no more stratus clouds (no more overcast conditions), no more working cloud layers, and the whole weather system is now completely borked. And it doesn’t seem like the current state of the beta is much of an improvement.

The “test” or “beta” build updates packages from the current live build, rather than completely installs a new build from scratch, which I guess you suspected.

However, at the conclusion of the testing period, when reverting to a “live” build or “release” build, the MS Store uninstalls the test build app from the MS Store (before installing the new “release” build app).

As part of that uninstallation process it has been known to delete all the content that is found in the default location where it stores downloaded packages, i.e. the package folder containing Official/OneStore and the Community folder. If, however, these are stored outside of the default installation path for MSFS then this uninstallation process does not touch all that downloaded data.

When the “release” build is then installed all that is required is a pointing to this “external” directory where all the downloaded packages are found. In the majority of cases to date, on exiting from the beta test flight back to the “release” build, on release day, this means only a minor update (or sometimes none at all) is required for these packages and MSFS is good to go.

I hope that helps.

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