I wanted to try to reproduce my first flight with PMDG’s 737 as a passenger. However, I got the bitter situation that you can no longer add a new camera position from the VR as it was done before in the replay function.
When I hit play, I get a screen that is not even VR, it’s as if I were playing a video on a flat screen, and when I go back to 2D, the screen disappears directly. Oh Microsoft, you always have problems with you! You fix things and ruin other things that used to work. For God’s sake! Couldn’t you at least make sure that all the problems have been solved and that the functions that were working before are still working?
I don’t know what’s wrong with the developers but I’m starting to get tired of this situation. So please Asobo. Before releasing a new update of the simulator … Please make sure that everything is working correctly! and that the things that worked before are still working. Otherwise, we are going to get to Sim Update 85 and we are going to keep having the same problem over and over and over again. Fix something, damage something.
There are two distinct scenarios for me personally, both 100% flown in VR.
- I fly, and later I would want to check on my landing, view that from the outside, from a passanger seat etc.
- I fly, and later want to compose the flight into a YouTube video, with multiple scenes repeated and shot from different angles, but also record my actions in the cockpit.
I don’t mind if those work differently, or require to record the actual flight as a video, and later on add scenes from a replay, or if this all can be done from a single tool though.
However two requirements: It should be possible to record my VR cockpit view in high quality somehow, which is now only possible using stupid workarounds with OBS Studio, upscaling, etc - which all have a HUGE performance impact, and second, it should be possible to replay the airplane as accurate as possible (Control Surfaces, best also FMC state, etc.) for the replay scenes to show an accurate plane state. Another one would be to be able to also view the replay in either VR, or switch back to 2D for recording.
All I need is to have all my flights recorded to a file by default (without the need to manually enable feature and start recording) - maybe when exitting from flight add a checkbox to let me decide if the recording should be kept.
As way too often I don’t plan recording/forgot to turn it on and during the flight something interesting happenes that I want to be able to review - but it is already too late.
It should be hassle free - just quietly save given flight to new, self-explanatory named file, so I will easly find it when I want to.
This is probably why current mechanism is not as much used as expected.
Most people just want to be able to keep/review their flights not as much create a video from it.
Can we have normal Replay function like the old FSX or XPlane, In msfs2020 you need to click the record button and then change somehow the camera, its just so much specially when you are in short final and already have so much to do.
Problems are:
- No documentation
- Baffling interface
- No documentation
- Baffling procedure
- No documentation
Every time I want to use this, I waste 15 minutes trying to use it, then another 30 minutes watching YouTube videos that kind of explain it, but not really.
If you’re going to dump something like this on the community it really behoves you to explain how to use it, despite the permanent “beta” tag.
To be fair I don’t think they ever claimed it was end user ready. It was something they could provide nearly for no effort which is useful to a subset of the community and that’s better than not providing anything just because it’s not suitable for all.
It’s clear that Asobo aren’t planning to properly implement replay this year so hopefully they make it a priority for 2023.
Some suggestions:
- Allow all camera tracks to be exported as .MP4 files. It would be much easier to have every track in a video editor and use that to switch between tracks.
- Ability to edit a sequence and remove unwanted parts. The easiest way to use this tool would be to record the entire flight, and at the end decide which parts you want to use. This would be preferable to recording individual sequences during the flight.
- Instead of having arrows obliging you to cycle through all of the camera tracks to find the one that you want, display them in a panel so that you click directly on the one you need.
- Allow the timeline to be nudged with keyboard keys rather than dragged with the mouse.
- Make it possible to scrub through a not-currently-selected camera track. Currently, if you try to view the sequence using another track, it returns to the selected track as soon as you click play.
- Update this document, especially 5.1. It’s not clear what is expected. As far as I can see, as soon as you click record, you have created a new track for the entire flight, even if you click stop immediately after you click start. This tool really needs a video to explain all of the functionality and how the features are intended to be used. YouTubers each seem to have evolved their own idiosyncratic way of using small parts of the available functionality.
- In the same document, under Known Issues, we have “No camera recording in VR mode”. That supposedly refers to part 7 of the tutorial, but part 7of the tutorial has nothing to do with VR. I was able to record a sequence and tracks in VR, but the instruments in the cockpit don’t move.
Fair enough. I assumed this was something they had released as beta and which they intend to soon release to the live system.
For me, these 2 would be great.
- What XPlane-11 provides would be good, or at a minimum what FSX used to provide would also be good, just extended to the entire flight, instead of 30mins – from what I remember used to be the max replay it allowed.
- The option to save the flight and resume at a later time. Like it used to be in FSX.
Once you’ve set the Replay icon to display using Developer mode, it should stay in the toolbar permanently. I have to re-enter Developer mode and reset it every time I restart the sim.
Hello!
The replay functionality in the dev mode is not all that user friendly.
Could a replay functionality be implemented where you can always review the last say 120 seconds, from ALL cameras?
Right now you have to record separate camera tracks.
It would be really great if the aircraft could retain all cockpit settings for the replay, displays, flaps, gear, spoilers as in the original
After trying out 2 or 3 3rd party replay tools, out of frustration I came back to the Devolper Mode one. I actually find it easier and smoother to use but it has it’s issues.
I don’t understand the point of the two plus symbols. One is apparently a keypoint for cameras and the other for weather but after much messing around, I found it easier to just switch cameras on-the-fly during the recording instead of pausing all of the time (which doesn’t seem to save cameras much anyway).
Plus any chance of working on the zoom and auto focus features please? The tool has a real tough time focusing on planes touching down. They blur, un-blur then blur again. Also as I have a camera at the side of the runway, when the plane starts to roll past the camera, it would be nice if it could zoom itself out on it’s own. Zooming in/out during the recording makes the final piece look quite shoddy as the zoom movements are quite sudden and abrupt due to guessing the right value on the slider.
Thanks
Hi @MSFSCommunityTeam, wanted to bump this topic as there have been several streams where the devs have mentioned lack of feedback on the replay tool. Have they seen this thread?
I do have some feedback on the replay mode and user friendliness, which can hopefully help improve user experience.
- Availability Outside of Dev Mode
-
Dev Mode automatically disables any flight logging, hence enabling it to view a replay will prevent you from logging a flight
-
Having to go out of our way to enable Dev Mode to see the replay seems a little counter intuitive, and it would be nice if we could access it from normal flight to avoid the issue I mentioned above
- Flight Control and Aircraft State Memory
- It would be awesome if replay mode remember aircraft and flight control states so that we can see flight spoilers etc being deployed/retracted etc. when watching the replay itself. If you go into the replay mode while flight spoilers are deployed, you will see them deployed in replay mode rather than retracted as they were on final approach.
- Live Camera Angles
- It would be awesome to be able to switch cameras while in the live replay mode rather than having to record different segments with different angles. I’m thinking of something similar to what existed in FSX where you can view the same replay from any camera view or angle without the need to record.
Hope these are some things that could be considered. Thanks for the work! Hopefully more people will continue to contribute to this thread.
Thank you! Making sure they will see this feedback. 
Appreciate the summary here.
One additional thing, there should be a replay mode state along with calls that allow add-ons to tell the sim to enter and exit replay mode. Additionally, there should be callbacks for recording so planes can optionally provide full state fidelity during playback (really the whole survey state story is broken and in need of a common interface for capturing custom state). When in replay mode, no flight logging should occur and crashes should be disabled. It would be really great if time and weather were captured as part of the replay.
I don’t use the MSFS replay mode because of the need to go through dev mode, but the existing replay solutions suffer from the fact that they have no way of telling the sim that a replay (rather than a flight) is happening. Currently replays get logged as flights and often trying to grossly fast forward results in an aircraft crash.
Sort of concurrent with replay is the idea of full sim control; ie to be able to have a panel to put a plane in an arbitrary state and fly from there. An example would be to be able to easily put the plane on an approach and fully configured—which again would require better custom state handling for an aircraft like the PMDG 737 to plug in. Anyway, if the core interfaces were done right, it should be possible not only to build a good replay, but also a simulation control panel.
I don’t understand Asobo claiming lack of feedback for replay system, yet the replay system is hidden away in the developer options.
Look at how the replay system works in FSX and XPlane, and then implement something similar as a starting point. And don’t hide it under the developer options. That is how you will get feedback, not by having the option hidden away in developer options.
Replay function: make it like FSX. That is all.
- I’d like to have default tracks for built-in cameras. It’s annoying to go through the whole flight replay to have a track for a camera on its default position. Having default cameras available automatically would be very handy.
- Also, I tried to see in VR a track that I had previously recorded as “pancake” and it showed me the original non-VR track in front of me instead of positioning the VR at the place of the non-VR comera. It should place “me” at the original camera position and let me see and capture in VR.
my feedback is :just copy xplane11,the repaly function is easy to use and user friendly,do not tell me no
one in Asobo never played xplane11
I miss old FSX Tower replay view the most. would be awesome if they can implement the PDMG aricraft views with an extra tower view.