For the sake of completeness I suppose one should hear some non-news on occasion as well.
I am one of those first day customers for whom everything has just worked from the start. The download and installation was fast and without any problems. My first flight with the keyboard was uncomfortable but it worked. Tried to plug in my old MS FFB 2 joystick and it was immediately recognised. But obviously it is not supported so no bindings. But I pretty quickly figured out what was required so I configured the joystick with the basics. And it worked.
I too found the joystick sensitivity way over the top but I read on this forum about sensitivity adjustment and it worked: after adjustment I am quite happy with the sensitivity.
I used to own and fly a Beechcraft Debonair in real life. For those not familiar with the Debonair: the first conventional tail Bonanzas were called Debonairs for a few years until they were “renamed” to F33 Bonanzas. The Debonair was a 225HP aircraft so the FS2020 aircraft’s performance was not too badly out of whack from what I was used to. But I did install the updated performance file from the Bonanza thread on the forum in the Community folder… and it worked. I found out how to change the aircraft’s registration to my own registration from years ago, edited the CFG file… and it worked.
Wanted to get colours at least somewhat similar to my own former aircraft’s scheme, found the livery file on the forum, installed it… and it worked.
In real life I did IF training up to just before getting the rating but in those years I only did NDB and VOR letdowns. So I tried to teach myself how to use the Garmin G1000 systems after a fashion… and it worked. I can happily do VOR to VOR flights and ILS landing by hand. And yes: I largely fly by hand because that to me is what I enjoyed and what single engine aircraft are all about. FOR ME: not saying that this is right for anybody else.
Applied the first patch… and it worked. Downloaded and installed quickly and painlessly.
Applied the second patch… and it worked. Downloaded and installed quickly and painlessly.
No, the patch has not improved my framerates or made the graphics any better. It looked good to me before and it looks good to me now. It has sped up starting the program: less than 2 minutes to the main menu and around 1 minute from setting up my flight and clicking the button until ready for the flight.
Setup:
Ryzen 7 3700X
32GB DDR6 3200 memory
1 x 250GB WD Black NVMe SSD for system
1 x 1TB WD Black NVMe SSD for the data
RTX 2060
BenQ 32" 4K monitor using Displayport
Settings are pretty much plain vanilla default High end. I get between 25 and 30 FPS consistently. Never had stutters. Is that a great frame rate? No, not so much. But it looks great and it is good enough for me. It is GPU limited so I will update the video card at some stage.
Not trying to be a fanboy or anything. Mine is a simple use case. And my results have been great FOR ME with essentially no frustrations. And no, I am not doing this to brag or ignore the fact that people are having problems. Just wanted to let people know that when/if the stars align, there are satisfied customers out there. And maybe this can encourage someone out there that is struggling and might also be happy with running things in a simple, basic way. It CAN work and when it does, it is perfectly fine for what I am doing and what I want and expected.
And yes: I did try hand flying the 747 without reading up and preparing for it. I was totally not used to the weight and inertia so it took me a fair amount of time to get the hang of it. But I took off from Vancouver, flew around a bit and then tried to land. Repeatedly! I wasn’t used to the fact that with a 747 you are determining the success of your landing AT LEAST 10 miles out. So I visually and manually hand flew an approach… and had to go around. And then I came around again… and did another missed approach and overshoot. I think I did it 10 times: clearly a slow learner!
But then I did get it right and landed it quite gently. So OK, it was on the edge of the runway but at a good speed and without any bouncing or anything. And I was able to slow it down gently long before the end of the runway without hard braking or reverse thrust (did not know how to do that…)
I am really enjoying it.