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I believe they are working on the vast majority of these already: avionics: they hired Working Title to do this; I think we should be seeing some major improvements over the next couple of releases. weather/ATIS: there have been many improvements already over the past few months, and in many aspects the weather is far better than FSX; they've said they will be continuing to invest in the weather system going forward. SDK: this is being continually improved - every week there is an update on the SDK, they seem to be working pretty closely with many 3P developers to add missing features. I'm not a developer myself, but feedback from many developers (including but certainly not limited to PMDG) seems to be pretty positive - they clearly released the sim with the SDK in a highly unfinished state, but all the evidence is that they see the importance of a comprehensive SDK to support third parties and are working actively to achieve this. "lockout of proven flight simulator industry developers" - has anyone actually been "locked out"? I think there was one developer who in previous sims had products that integrate actual Garmin software with the sim and wasn't getting support from MS/Asobo (I could have misunderstood the details), but that's a highly specialised case where there may be legal or fundamental technical obstacles to integration with MSFS. I could be missing other cases though - don't have time to follow all the threads! ATC does indeed need lots of work, and so far they haven't really said they'd do anything to improve it. I really hope there is an investment in that at some point. I agree that some of the smaller issues (like hangar sizes) seem to take an inordinate amount of time to fix. I hope this is just because they've all been swamped on DX12/XBOX and once that's out they will dedicate some time to going through the backlog of small but annoying issues like this.

These look like fun. Are they "realistic" (in the sense of being similar to customized real bush planes), or more like "fantasy" planes?

Note that only MS Store users can sign up for the beta program currently - May 6th, 2021 - Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) - The AVSIM Community. This may well change, but I wouldn't be surprised if occasionally there are minor limitations like this with the Steam version, given that it's a MS product. Probably not a strong reason to choose MS Store if you have a specific reason for using Steam, but worth bearing in mind if you can't decide between the two.

Sorry if this is a silly question, but can someone give a bit of context on what we're voting for? Are these GTN/GNS addons - if/when available for MSFS - intended to replace glass cockpit instruments (such as G1000), or do they replace radios in steam gauge aircraft? If the former, how does this overlap with the WT addons? Also, what is the difference between GTN and GNS? Yes I have looked at the reality-xp website, but it's not entirely clear for those of us new to simming.

I see the same thing in London: it was raining heavily yesterday here, and today is sunny; just loaded up EGLC in the sim and it's overcast and raining.

I'm speculating here, but the reason could simply be that MS/Asobo don't want the cost of supporting another API. Supporting an API in an app that's continually being updated can be pretty high-cost: you need to make sure that whenever you change something, you don't break third-party apps that use the API, and in some cases it can constrain the changes you can make to the core engine. This is quite different from FSX, which only had a few releases. APIs for 3rd party aircraft and scenery are worth that cost, as there is almost unlimited scope for 3rd parties to add functionality there, whereas with the weather engine the cost/benefit case is far less clear-cut: the core engine is already pretty good in how it combines forecast whole-world weather with METAR-based airport data for the critical parameters that affect takeoffs and landings (wind, pressure & temp), and they're working on further improvements.

As a "casual" and fairly new simmer (I played FSX and early P3D versions a few years ago, but only really got back into it with MSFS), I'm interested to understand why many people consider accurate (as opposed to realistic / forecast) RW weather - in particular, closely matching the RW METAR at particular airports - to be a very important feature. Is it because you fly on Vatsim, or use flight planning tools that use RW METARs as their weather inputs, or simply that you fly in your local area and like the weather to look the same as out of the window? Just trying to understand more about how the more "serious" simmers on here fly using RW. From my limited viewpoint, I think the weather depiction is absolutely stunning in MSFS - far more "realistic" looking than FSX with weather addons, which had abrupt weather transitions if I remember correctly - and it generally more-or-less matches what I see in Little Navmap (I don't use any other planning tools), if not quite accurate. But appreciate there are other viewpoints, as this topic is often discussed.

I recently upgraded to a new PC (i9-11900K, 3090) and was initially disappointed with the smoothness with frames unlocked (yes, fps was a lot higher than my old PC with a 1080 Ti and an ancient i7-4770K, and I could now set everything to ultra), but it still wasn't perfectly smooth. I'd had bad experiences with locking FPS to 30 on my old machine (even though I could hit 35-40 regularly unlocked), but following the suggestions in this thread, I thought I'd give it a try again with the better PC - and wow, it's incredibly smooth, even in urban areas on full ultra settings at 3840x1600. Counterintuitively, it seems that locking frames only really works if you have good hardware (both CPU & GPU) that could run significantly faster than 30 if unlocked. But when it does work, it works really well. I guess this is because the 'amount of work' needed to render each frame varies significantly from frame to frame, so only with the extra horsepower can you be 100% sure that you'll meet the target on every single frame (with my old PC, although dev mode was reporting 35-40fps unlocked, there was probably a frame every second or two that took more than 1/30 of a second to render, resulting in stutters). An added bonus is reduced noise and heat, since most of the time the GPU is only running at 60-70% load.

Indeed. The devs confirmed on one of the Q&As that the rolling cache is simply a cache of http responses, so it will only hit the cache if it would otherwise have made a request to the MS server. Any SSD (even an SATA one) will be much faster than a fast internet connection; even an HDD will be faster in most cases. In any case, I would be surprised if the MS servers are fast enough to use the full bandwidth of a fast internet connection. Unless there is a bug in the rolling cache implementation - which I've not seen any evidence of - it makes no sense not to use it. And as you say, the more people that use it, the less load on the MS servers, benefiting everyone's performance on a cache miss.

That seems fairly consistent with their results. The improvement at 1440p will be less than at 4K, a 1080Ti is more powerful than the 1080 they compared against, and your CPU is slightly lower spec (9900k rather than 10900k) meaning you are more likely to be CPU-limited.

Their 'feedback snapshot' suggests an improvement to ATC phraseology is scheduled for Sim Update 4 (probably around April). Let's hope they improve the logic and make it more flexible, rather than just modifying the messages.

Yes, in the FSUIPC7 folder you should find a file FSUIPC7.ini. Just add ProvideAIdata=No at the bottom of the [General] section in that file, and restart FSUIPC.

There is a bug relating to SimConnect access to AI data. So if you're running an app that connects via SimConnect (eg FSUIPC or Little Navmap), it can trigger this crash. For FSUIPC, adding ProvideAIdata=No to the [General] section fixed it for me. The latest version of Little Navmap is supposed to fix it, but I still get the crash.

Yes, the MSFS lessons are quite disappointing. However, one shouldn't forget that with all the YouTube videos the community has produced since the launch, the total amount of free training material available to new simmers far exceeds what was available when FSX was released. Sure, it would be nice if Asobo could spend some time adding more lessons - they just added a couple of very basic Airbus ones, and have hinted they will add more at some point - but even if they don't, I don't think newcomers to this hobby have a lack of info. In fact, quite the opposite - it's sometimes hard to keep on top of all the info that is out there!

I figured out the cause - the squeaks weren't an engine noise but the brake sound! My pedals were giving a continuous tiny brake input which was triggering the sound repeatedly. Setting a dead zone fixed it.