MSFS has an amazing collection of artwork for landmarks and points of interest. They are best seen by low, slow aircraft. To facilitate beginner flyers, casual sightseers, ultralights, and occasional flyers who have a limited amount of time, I have been uploading simple, short flights on flightsim.to. The concept is that you can load the flight plan, and simply follow the on-screen markers in a small geographic area.
Today is a milestone: more than 50,000 downloads of my Short VFR flight plans. Clearly, there is an appetite for these types of flight plans.
But they are very difficult to create because of the behavior of the on-screen waypoint markers. Because the distance between markers is often only a couple of miles, and because MSFS uses its own logic to determine the elevation of markers, there are a variety of issues with premature disappearance, conflicting markers, non-display, … it is a long list of issues. For every Short VFR plan I create, there are at least 4 other plans that I unsuccessfully attempt. It can take hours of trial and error to produce a plan with just several waypoints. And even then the on-screen markers behave unreliably based on which aircraft is selected.
Unless someone has a creative idea for overcoming this problem, I will no longer be producing the sightseeing plans.
Note: Before folks reply with the usual suggestions of Little Navmap vs World Map, importing-exporting-editing, SDK information, etc., etc., etc. … please note that I have decades of experience with most of the flight sim programs and have contributed content to many. I am hoping for suggestions that are beyond the conventional knowledge that is already available in the documentation and forums.
And to be clear, I love MSFS. Visual waypoint markers, not so much.
Thanks!
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I didn’t know your work, very impressive. I’m going to download some of them.
Hopefully you can solve the problem with the waypoints. I agree with you that they aren’t very useful sometimes. A powerful tool but not very well implemented. Like the cities’ POI markers, great and useful idea on the paper, but very awkward when you want to select one among several (even having trackir).
I hope you enjoy them.
And I hope that Asobo, or a creative utility programmer, finds a way to reliably place persistent waypoints in close proximity to each other. They have invested a lot of time and money to create a gorgeous portfolio of locations. But flight planning is optimized for aircraft that fly too high and too fast to truly appreciate the work.
In case Asobo notices this topic, and for anyone who may be curious, here are the issues I have experienced creating sightseeing flight plans.
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On-screen markers often disappear far before reaching the target. In crowded cities, it can be impossible to find a location after the location waypoint disappears.
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The next marker is often displayed long after the current marker disappears. In other words, the current marker disappears and it is a long time before the next marker is displayed. It leaves the user wondering if they should continue forward, or wondering if waypoints will no longer be displayed. The destination marker is always displayed, misleading the flyer into thinking that it is the direction to follow.
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The next waypoint is often displayed long before reaching the current waypoint’s location. The current waypoint may be the sightseeing location, which you may not yet see, but now the current waypoint is gone and MSFS is showing you a new marker indicating a change in direction, when you should not yet be changing direction.
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Visual waypoints are often sticky. You fly over a waypoint and the directional marker does not change to reflect the next waypoint. Instead, it continues to point to the waypoint you just passed. Flying further away does not break the connection. It’s like a bungee cord on your aircraft caught the waypoint and won’t release it.
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If AI Radio Communication (ATC) is enabled, the instant that the Pattern Entry marker for an airport is displayed, all interim waypoints are suppressed. In other words, if you are at WP2, and WP3 and WP4 are still ahead, the moment the Pattern Entry is displayed then WP3 and WP4 will not be displayed.
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A consequence of the previous item is that if the same airport is used for both departure and destination, then the Pattern Entry marker often appears soon after takeoff and waypoints are not displayed, at all.
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In mountainous terrain, it is always difficult, and often impossible, to get waypoint markers to display correctly, if they are displayed at all. This is because you cannot configure the altitude of individual waypoints. Marker altitudes are loosely based on the flight plan’s cruise altitude. If a route includes valleys and mountains, the cruise elevation sets the markers so high they are difficult to see, or they are too low and are hidden behind mountains or buried within mountains. Choosing which method to use is frustrating because MSFS uses its own logic to determine marker elevations during the simulation.
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If the distance between waypoints is short, 1-2 miles, then the next waypoint marker is often not displayed, or may only briefly flash on the screen, or the display may repetitively alternate between the current waypoint and the next waypoint. This is a problem for flight plans that require a dense collection of waypoints, such as sightseeing in major cities. It is also an issue for routes that require multiple waypoints for tight turns, such as navigating mountain valleys.
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The selected aircraft affects waypoint display behavior. For example, when creating a flight plan, selecting the Zenith CH701 resulted in waypoints disappearing one mile before reaching them. In the same flight plan, selecting the Cessna 152, flying at approx. the same airspeed and altitude, resulted in the waypoints disappearing two miles before reaching them.
After yet more testing, I’ve learned that sightseeing waypoints behave better when airspeed is less than approximately 85 knots per hour. 50-60 KPH is optimal. So I am updating my “Short VFR” plans to be “Ultralight Sightseeing” plans, including placement of waypoints, documentation and screenshots, as needed.
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I am very happy to see you touching your very nice Short VFR plans series again. Thank you. 
Thank you!
For now, I am spending most of my time updating the existing flight plans and will periodically upload new plans. Once the existing plans are up to date then I will have more time for new plans.
The updated plans will have their title changed from “Short VFR” to “Ultralight Sightseeing”. I am not marking them as “updated” in flightsim.to because that would cause users to get notifications for every update and there are more than 200 existing plans.
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Thanks fort the headup, very welcome.