Hi all,
Apologies in advance for the extremely long post.
I hope everyone is enjoying their flying time, though for some of us in the community, that’s hard-done at the moment. I was having a great time before SU7 dropped. I was flying mostly in VR in my Reverb G2, had the settings dialled in so that I could fly a big airliner into any city in the world in any kind of weather and maintain smooth performance. My younger self would be amazed at that, when I think of all the hours I spent trying to get FSX to run at more than 20 FPS on a laptop. Kudos to the devs for that achievement.
However, SU7 dropped with some pretty glaring issues, particularly affecting those of us who like to fly in VR or use TrackIR-like devices. There were other issues as well, problems with reverse thrust being among them, but I’m going to focus on the VR one here, because it’s not an obscure bug. It’s not something like “If I do a barrel roll over the west coast of Ireland on the third Wednesday of October, the sim crashes”. It’s a bug that affects every single person who flies in VR, and it’s a bug the devs knew about before the release, as they included part of it in the “Known Issues” section of their patch notes. I say part of it, because the patch notes only mention the toolbar, that it’s unclickable. They don’t mention the in-game panels such as ATC, weather control, checklists, Navigraph Charts if you use them…these are all also unclickable. They’ve released an update that completely broke the user interface for VR users, and they did it knowingly. There are various workarounds that get things sort-of working again, but none of them are perfect, none of them work for every scenario, and the bottom line is that we simply shouldn’t have to be doing these things.
I’ve seen people complaining about things like the VR controller implementation, the new haze effects…I don’t mind these things. Development takes time, it’s a complicated piece of software, and everything has to start somewhere. But releasing an update that fundamentally breaks the UI is something I can’t wrap my head around. What is the point in having the community beta test the updates if they’re not going to fix the most basic and fundamental things that they report? What’s even more frustrating is the radio silence from any and all official channels since then. We’ve heard absolutely nothing about when these issues might be fixed, or why the update was allowed out the door in this state. I hoped that the development update this week might shed some light on the matter, but there was no development update this week…only a post advertising a Black Friday sale in the marketplace.
Come on, guys…your community deserves better than that. We’re the ones you’re trying to get to spend money in your Black Friday sale, after all. These kind of experiences leave a bad taste in my mouth, as although VR users and TrackIR users are probably a tiny minority of users, we still paid for the sim like everyone else, and the very least we deserve is some communication about the most recent raft of issues you’ve thrust upon us.