MSFS News

BeachAV8R · November 17, 2021, 7:38pm

Good luck PMDG with getting X-Box user “PunchFartBox69” to use his real name for product support.

Deacon211 · November 17, 2021, 8:16pm

That’s Captain PunchFartBox69 to you!

fearlessfrog · November 17, 2021, 9:46pm

Still not really feeling it for the Reno Races release tomorrow, but if it moves the sim forward for better multiplayer, effects etc then it’s all good.

fearlessfrog · November 18, 2021, 1:53am

I missed the hint about the 757 in the Q&A bits. PMDG apparently have fourteen (14!) MSFS projects on the go at the moment, so it makes sense that it’ll come as well I guess. I’d love to see a @smokinhole review of that one.

PMDG is now working in very close collaboration with Asobo for the development of many new airplanes for MSFS, such as the 737, the 777 and the 747. We already knew this, but Randazzo has revealed that the team currently has 14 products in the pipeline ! One of these undisclosed products will probably be the B757 , whose model Randazzo seems to briefly flash during the stream. Hype!

smokinhole · November 18, 2021, 3:59am

Don’t wait for me to try it. But… if it is the finest, most exhilarating winged bus you’ve ever imagined, they probably got it right.

Bearhedge · November 18, 2021, 6:33am

I am disappoint

fearlessfrog · December 2, 2021, 1:05am

As a heads up, the new Nvidia 497.09 driver released today crashes to desktop with MSFS. If you want it to crash then it’s the driver to use.

PaulRix · December 2, 2021, 2:02am

Is there anything in particular that causes the CTD? I updated the driver this afternoon and have been flying MSFS with no issues so far.

fearlessfrog · December 2, 2021, 2:11am

Not sure of the pattern as yet, as seems to be 2xxx, 3xxx or Win10 or 11 - just starting flights even.

PaulRix · December 2, 2021, 2:17am

Hmm… I’ll go check again. I guess worst case, we can always roll back.

chipwich · December 2, 2021, 2:28am

Looks like an NVidia employee already stopped by the forum and asked if users would go to their forum and post a bug report. Also, it appears that DX12 users are not getting the CTD. Rollback works in any case.

boomerang10 · December 2, 2021, 6:52pm

FBW A320 just keeps getting better and better.

The chances of me buying the Fenixsim when it releases keep getting smaller and smaller.

fearlessfrog · December 3, 2021, 1:15am

I think if it wasn’t for things like FBW and Microsobo’s willingness to let it happen then MSFS would be in quite a different place right now. Love that mod, and probably spent more time in it than any other MSFS aircraft.

Btw @boomerang10 - I’ve noticed some of your super high scores on those Landing Challenges in MSFS, you should really consider a career in aviation or something

fearlessfrog · December 3, 2021, 1:18am

SU7 Fixes News or Why Never To Do A Major Game Update Before A Vacation

As per

The important bits:

COMMUNITY TRIAGE UPDATE

There are several bugs our dev team is currently tracking for fixes ASAP and will provide an update as soon as we can. Here are some of the top reported bugs in the community:

Sim disables Track IR when tracking is lost or paused - This happens when you are using Track IR and you look away from your screen

The team has confirmed and identified the issue. A fix is in place for an upcoming release.

Toolbar Broken in VR - While using a VR headset and controllers, you are unable to select any of the options in the toolbar menu, or they appear to do nothing.

The team has confirmed and identified the issue. A fix is in place for an upcoming release.

Weather transition is not smooth after SU7 - Currently there is start transition between different METARs.

The team has confirmed and identified the issue. A fix is in place for an upcoming release.

Are cloud bases in new METAR system in AGL or MSL?) - There appears to be clouds at ground level in some weather situations.

The team has confirmed and identified the issue. A fix is in place for an upcoming release.

Unable to pan/drag the World Map with a custom Mouse Profile. The current workaround is to reset your mouse profile to default.

The team has confirmed and identified the issue. A fix is in place for an upcoming release.

All assistance options automatically gets set to easy every time you relaunch the sim or sometimes between flights

The team has confirmed and identified the issue. A fix is in place for an upcoming release.

So they are going to do a test build for volunteers on Dec 6th, and hopefully for the revolting peasants soon after.

Bonus ‘I prefer the clouds in DCS’ pic:

HiFlyer · December 3, 2021, 3:36am

FS Live Traffic Liveries

https://youtu.be/hizFD1hW6wI

FSLTL is a free standalone real-time online traffic overhaul and VATSIM model-matching solution for MSFS. Join our Discord for FAQ and more info: [FS Live Traffic Liveries](

Features:

MSFS independent online IFR/VFR traffic injection system with stock ATC interaction based on FR24
Worldwide sensible parked aircraft spawns based on historical data
No more random parked, Austria and Australia are finally different countries.
Unique liveries based on a tail number.
Intelligent fallback system if no model or livery is found for the particular aircraft.
Can be used with stock Asobo’s Live AI, however it’s very broken since SU7 (nose gear up/no departure bug).
Fully animated, enhanced low-poly models.
Native glTF - no stutters and CTDs.
Full PBR and parallax materials.
Realistic dynamic turnoffs/landing/taxi and other lights.
Over 700 made from scratch liveries at the time of writing.
All in 4K.
Native VATSIM support with all lights and animations .
Various fixes for Asobo’s AI bugs present on generic aircraft.
Every plane correctly uses all ground services and jetways
Bigger planes favor a second door for boarding/unboarding.
Each plane has a realistic ground roll on takeoff and landing (unfortunately AI still has no idea what a high-speed exit is).
Heat, contrail and other effects.
Custom Wwise sound for each aircraft (and engine type in close future) including startup, spool up, reverse, different power setting and shutdown.

Installer/Traffic manager features:

Quick install/uninstall everything or liveries/airlines/airplanes you want. For example you can install liveries exclusive for your region and international only to save up some space.
Optional VA install - No ugly mess in your Community folder - everything is manageable through the app.
Self-repair. Don’t be afraid to damage the mod by your custom edits - you always can revert it back without huge redownloads.
Selected 3-rd party aircraft support via provided compatibility patches. - Make an AI yourself from a flyable payware aircraft and custom liveries for it through the friendly UI. (Most likely won’t be available on launch).

Aginor · December 3, 2021, 8:32am

Wow! @sobek will be thrilled about the lack of venomous spiders!

boomerang10 · December 4, 2021, 5:57am

Me? Hardly!

I actually find it humorous to think it’s probably a bunch of 10 year-olds, with zero real-world flight experience, in the top ten for each challenge. It wouldn’t surprise me if the thought isn’t that far from the truth, to be honest.

Same here, reminds me of my experience with the Zibo in XP11. I would’ve never thought we’d get aircraft of this caliber for free.

fearlessfrog · December 4, 2021, 6:15pm

I think the top of the lists has been devalued a bit by the exploit of people using the new replay tool to ‘fix’ their bad landings in those challenges, so yep - I ignore ones from people I don’t recognize on the board (I think it shows friends scores around your own, which is why I noticed I was always failing to get near your scores every single time. ). I’m the userid ‘notsofearless’ on that side.

boomerang10 · December 24, 2021, 10:15pm

Captains,

…But this would go seriously wrong.
Because we all know I can’t rhyme, or write out in song.
My post must be well crafted and worded with care.
Because some bloke from Australia will just tell me its already Christmas over there.

We’d much prefer to give you a preview, you see.
Of the work we’ve been doing on our new Seven Three.
Backlighting’s installed and more tweaking we’ve done.
The dimmers now work which just makes it more fun.

The flap handle moves and it clacks and it clatters.
The stick shaker shakes so you know something’s the matter.
The flaps you can set to your every whims
the trimwheel will rattle and grind while it spins.

Panel flood lighting floods and annunciators flash.
The TCAS ain’t yet working, so maintain visual on that Dash.
The non-reflective coating is on the screens with great care
So you won’t have problems reading the screens through a glare.

Autobrake works but is still subject to tweeking,
for proper acceleration gives you the brake distance you are seeking.
The FMC is running and draws a nice magenta line.
Follow the Flight Director and you should do just fine.

You’ll have options by the hundreds you can choose with a click,
Along with ground maintenance support In case a valve it should stick.
The Ground Ops is there, just like in P3D
with Lav Trucks and Cleaners, chocks, belt loaders, or even AC.

EGPWS is griping about flaps, gear and terrain,
Nav display shows it like a green, yellow and red stain.
The same screen will give you a nice VSD.
STARs are easier to plan when the profile you can see.

So things are progressing, in spite of knee knockers.
Performance is fast, even if you aren’t an over-clocker.
Each week I think “Ah! I shall shoot something for YouTube!”
Then my schedule explodes which makes for a bad mood.

We still have components to wire into place.
But we are sure when see, this will put a smile on your face.
We are taking a few days off, but soon this bird shall take flight.
For now Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good DC-6 flight.

image_149291920×1050 121 KB

Okay, okay okay… If that doesn’t get an award for the most horrible butchering of a pithy poem, I don’t know what would.

On a more serious note, I wanted to drop a few images for you to kick off this Christmas weekend. BIG BOLD REMINDER THAT THESE ARE IN-DEVELOPMENT IMAGES and the images are about a week out of phase with the latest build, but it has taken me a few days to cleave out some free time to get them posted for you.

The last two weeks have been busy. Much of the focus is on stuff you can’t see, but Vin and Henning have been hard at work on lighting related functionality. One of the things I particularly love is that we have gotten the non-reflective coating in place on the displays and you can see from the image above that the main panel flood lighting gets gauzy as it plays off the lower display unit and the CDUs from this angle. I have had the misfortune of sitting on the jumpseat in the 737 on more occasions than I care to recall (you don’t sit IN the 737 jumpseat, you sit ON it…) and the lighting quality and mood conveyed in this image is exactly as I recall it. Fortunately, I don’t have to do that any more- as one’s backside can only take so much 737 jumpseat- and you REALLY haven’t lived until you have sat on the second jumpseat, but that is a story for a different day.

The backlighting is being tweaked and most of the flood lighting is now working properly. We are doing a bit of research on the specifications for a few of the different lighting elements and bulbs used in some key places, as getting their emissive qualities just right takes a bit of technical data. As we dial them in, things really start to look convincing, especially at night when surveying the flight deck while at high altitude with the ground lighting well below the airplane. It is a really impressive look, especially if you have VR to work with.

Next up in the lighting department are some of the point lights and purpose lighting, such as the environmental lighting, etc. I have lost track of whether Jason has finished tweaking all of the lighting options for the exterior model, but we have variations with standard lighting and others with LED, along with their various property differences and emmisive qualities.

image_149301920×1050 111 KB

We are currently working to finish implementing the various load-states that are customary to MSFS. These are the “pre-configured” states in which you might load the airplane from the flight menu in MSFS and include configurations such as parked on the ramp, taxiing onto the runway, climbout, cruise, descent, approach, etc. These have to be knit tightly to the sim’s expectations and norms so that when you load the airplane and choose, say, a spot where the airplane would be expected to be in a specific configuration- it should match that expectation immediately upon load. We have been working through these and while some of them are quite straight forward, others are not when you have thousands of realistic system inter-dependencies modeled within the airplane, so we are slowly working through stamping out the problems.

For those who like them, we will also ship the product to you with a number of scenarios from Cold/Dark to various stages of preparation so that you can load those as starting points just like you can do in the Prepar3D version. Our main goal here is to avoid capability loss so that you have as much of the functionality you are used to as we can possibly deliver.

Some other good news is that we have eliminated the much maligned 20 second timer that we introduced back in 2008 with our MD-11… This was a necessary evil in Prepar3D but we have managed to remove it finally in MSFS- and this will mean that you will have the airplane running normally the moment you enter the sim, which is a nice thing.

This week we finished implementing the terrain awareness capability on the NAV display. I will try to remember to include that in our next round of cockpit visual updates so that you can see how nice it looks in MSFS. The good news is that the display logic for the terrain is the same display logic that gets used to apply a weather radar layer, so once the community convinces Asobo to give developers access to the weather layer, it will be a quick thing to tap into it in order to draw the radar returns as appropriate. We haven’t heard much other than innuendo on this topic- but I am sure it will come around eventually.

The plan for 737 is still to release her on both PC and for Xbox. She will be made available both on our site and via MS Marketplace. Those who qualified for promotional pricing on the new 737 by purchasing the PMDG 737NGXu for P3D back when it released two years ago will obviously need to make the purchase from us directly in order to have the promotional pricing applied at checkout. We will have more information for those qualifying customers as we announce an actual release plan for the PMDG 737 for MSFS.

On the topic of releases: We are still awaiting confirmation from Microsoft to tell us when the update required on the Xbox platform will allow PMDG DC-6 for MSFS to get turned back on for sale on the Xbox platform. We are hoping it won’t be long and we shall keep you posted with any information we learn.

Many folks have asked if we will be doing videos to preview the 737 and also if we will have a video tutorial series. The answer on both counts is yes.

When? That is a bit harder to nail down. I am pretty task focused on areas of the 737 development that are my responsibility and forward progress is miserably, painfully complex at the moment so it is taking longer than I think any of us like. Once I have my areas of responsibility secured I will transition to production- and you’ll know that has happened when you see things start trickling into the youtube channel. I always think “it might be next week” and every week, I prove myself right.

All of us at PMDG hope all of you have a pleasant weekend ahead and a Happy Christmas. The last two years have been particularly difficult for all of us here on this marble we call Earth. I know that we all come from different places with different perspectives and sometimes our community can get a bit grumpy within itself. We hope that in spite of this, each of you can take a few moments to say hello to someone you might not normally acknowledge, greet someone new and welcome them to the community, and share a few laughs and smiles with those who’s company you enjoy here in the PMDG forum.

We are glad you are here, and we are really looking forward to an exciting 2022 with all of you!

fearlessfrog · January 26, 2022, 11:01pm

Dev Q&A session, will add youtube link when it comes up so you don’t have to see the chat

They are up to 2 million users, about double from where they were in mid 2021.
Some sort of Orbx and Carenado stuff I skipped.
The PMDG stuff was funny, as they answered ‘We heard him say we hadn’t communicated for 100 days, when we’d spoken to him that morning’. Plus the technical hurdle was apparently something simple and in the docs, and they couldn’t get why PMDG didn’t work it out, as others had already. Jeez, drama-lamas.
The PMDG DC-6 being pulled from the Xbox store was due to security concerns in the C++ code, as consoles like the Xbox don’t like exploits ('Buy this plane to crack the Xbox! etc). It should be fixed up in the next few months, but it’s slow as Microsoft want to roll out a console update to protect stuff like this first.
World Update 7 - ˙ǝɔᴉu sʞool ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀
World Update 8 is ‘Iberia’ (Portugal and Spain). :pt: (wow, poor Portugal doesn’t get a flag…)
The local legend for that is the first Spain → South America transatlantic aircraft, the Dornier Superwal - Dornier Do R - Wikipedia
New ‘Famous Flyer’ Beechcraft D17 in April.
New Propeller / Airflow / Propwash surface modelling, that X-Plane people will ignore exists.
ATC and Traffic getting reworked, pretty much from scratch as the old FSX bones aren’t helping.
Some big VR news coming (unless they just made that up). My best guess would be adding some of the stuff from the NIS scaler OpenXR guy in the sim direct, or maybe even (let’s get @Troll frantic here) they are working with Varjo on proper fovated rendering support through OpenXR!
DLSS coming in the DX12 branch and it works really well. Kind of odd as Xbox is AMD, but I’ll take it.
Sim Update 8 beta coming next week.
Sim Update 9 will concentrate on stability. They think crashes are bad.

The roadmap, with ‘mystery boxes’:

A Superwal.