Just a thought here, but is there any reason that in your own home that you actually NEED the PC to be locked when you’re AFK? I understand that being a thing in a business or corporate environment. But in your own home, it seems to be unnecessary.
It’s really a simple matter of disabling the lock. And like you noted from StarlessLion, you can look down to reduce GPU load if you’re concerned about power usage while you’re AFK.
Apologies here if I’m missing the point.
On a side note, Xbox users also experience this. Xbox has a feature built in that after X amount of time (not sure how much, I don’t own one) without detecting any controller inputs, the Xbox will go to sleep. That prevents folks from doing AFK long-haul flights on that platform. It’s likely that the underlying code is linked on both platforms and why MSFS can’t run in the background of a locked PC like XP can.
That’s a fair point I hadn’t considered. My mini-me is an adult now, but even as a kid had his own computer to play around on since he was 6, so I never had that issue on this end.
Or curious cats
On a side note, I am doing an around the world flight in a C182. While do my panel check regularly I dont look every 5 minutes and such ATW flights take weeks to complete. Thus its nice to be able to do some real life things meanwhile
Have you at least tried the suggestion that’s been made a couple of times, ie screensaver with password? A screensaver doesn’t normally stop programs from running.
That’s the key word here. I haven’t tried this to see if it would work or not, but wouldn’t be surprised if the underlying code it shares with Xbox would pause it under this circumstance as well.
I suspect it gives those user types a HUGE number of reported hours flying in MSFS.
Perhaps, they should give those hours to the “Computer” instead of the Human ?
There are people that basically set up their flight, give control to the AI copilot, and leave for work / go to bed. And they take over and land the plane on final at the end of their flight.
I don’t get the appeal of that, nor the “look how many flight hours I have” comments based on that. But whatever floats their boat.
Well, a screensaver is simply an application that places an animation on the screen. It doesn’t interact with other apps; they should continue in the background. In fact, there’s no way for the sim to know (as it were) that the screensaver has been activated.
The screensaver password is not to unlock the computer; it’s to stop the screensaver - not the same thing
I think the OP should at least try it; if it doesn’t work, what has he lost?
Nah, won’t work. The screensaver lock is the same as locking the computer with Winkey-L. As @Crunchmeister71 notes, when you move the mouse or click a key, you’re going to get the usual Windows Lock Screen.
I’ve actually never tried the minimize + lock thing; I can minimize the sim and walk away if I need to do something and it happily flies in the background with very minimal CPU/GPU usage (this was added in one of the Sim Updates after Feb 2021). But I don’t have my computer set to lock the screen, just turn the monitor off. When I come back, I move the mouse and everything wakes up and I’m back at the desktop - crucially, I don’t have the “Lock” option so no password. Then I maximize the sim and get back to flying.
I’m travelling right now so I can’t test what happens if the lock option is enabled - probably what OP is saying.
