Mac6737

OK. I found it now. Didn't understand there was a folder named "fs-base". I tried to figure out what they must have meant. My bad. Still, the second and third instructions say this: "Mod will be overwritten every update / hotfix, make a new back-up of the en-US.locPak file, reinstall. "Reinstalling the Mod or when installing a newer version, first revert back to the original en-US.locPak." OK, so when SU 7 hits us next week, I should assume the mod is overwritten and gone. Then I make a new backup of the file (as altered by the update, I guess). Then I reinstall the mod, right? Oh, but wait -- it says when I do so, I must "first revert back to the original file." Huh? Does that mean before I reinstall, I'm supposed to replace the file with my first backup? If so, then what was the point of making "a new back-up" after the update? What's that for? As I said, incoherent. Too many pitfalls. Murphy's Law (which applies to MSFS): "If something can go wrong, it will go wrong." (BTW, I appreciate your help, but don't spend more time on this thread. At least my sim is working pretty well, except for the nagging.)

Thanks, Tim, but I won't install that mod. For one thing, the install instructions are incoherent: they tell me to FIRST backup the en-US.locPak folder in the fs-base folder. Not sure what the "fs-base folder" is, but I searched FS and found hundreds of files with that name. They may know what they're doing, but I don't. Plus there's complex advice about accommodating future updates to FS. Too many pitfalls. I'll listen to the nagging.

Negative toward ATC? Moi? Hardly. I'm negative toward dysfunctional software.

. . . really annoying! I'm working on developing AP skills and VOR-VOR and IFR flight plans. I'm learning! However: When I am flying a plan, ATC keeps up a constant chatter about planes other than my own. I mean, like, FIFTY continuous messages to other planes to "expedite descent" by ginormous amounts. Constant nagging! (And he sounds like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, from the Bulwinkle cartoons.) As for me: I was flying a plan above FL 300 when the control tower started telling me to "Expedite descent to 11,000," and "Expect FL 590." Constantly. My Cessna Citation can't go to FL 590, and I'm not sure who can. Is this a bug? Is there some way, at least, to stop the tower from its incessant nagging of all these other bad boys who seem to be thousands of feet off their assigned altitudes? IRL, this degree of deviance from assigned altitudes would be disastrous. So, might ATC be like HAL in "2001"?

Thanks Tim, but: planes like the 320 don't have a Menu button on the GPS, since there is no GPS panel as such. On other planes, like the Cessna 172, there is a Menu button, but clicking it gives 3 options: "X Fill," "Change fields" and "Restore defaults." But the thread was helpful, and I have found other ways to defeat the bug. In one case, I didn't turn on AP until well past the point where TIMECLIMB appeared in the NAVLOG. Or you can use HDG to follow the plan. Or, go to the IFR plan.

Thanks. Got it now.

A few weeks ago, someone here quoted the Fly-by-Wire Discord channel as to the FBW Airbus320neo: "Asobo has just released an update to SU7 for MSFS - 1.21.18.0. Please use our Development or Experimental branch to continue flying the A32NX. We will release a patch to the Stable version at a later time. As a reminder the use of DX11 is still recommended for best performance and compatibility." Yesterday, flight.to listed the FBW Airbus320 as a newly released download. Can anyone tell me if this is the patched "Stable version" promised? BTW, I went to Discord, but searching for "fly-by-wire" (several formats) yielded no results. Personally, I find Discord basically impenetrable and a visual mess.

I've had a recurrent problem trying to get my AP to track the GPS or VOR-VOR flight plans: unpredictably, the plane (any plane) will sometimes head off on its own to a heading seemingly unrelated to anything, but clearly still in AP mode. Last night, I was in the Cessna 172 heading for Idaho Falls (KIDA), AP set on HDG. Then, when I switched to NAV, the plane set off to the east on its own, and I had an "AHA!" moment: I looked on the panel and saw that, while the CDI was set on GPS, the destination at the top of the screen was "TIMECL." I had seen this mysterious notation before, but had not associated it with my tracking problem. At that point I clicked on "Direct to," and re-entered KIDA. Problem solved. Of course I had entered KIDA as my destination at the beginning of the flight, and the GPS track showed up clearly and accurately on the panel. So, why does the sim sometimes change the duly entered destination to the mysterious TIMECL"?

No. I already did that. It still doesn't work consistently.

Five days later, after multiple attempts: it does not work consistently. About half the time, actually, little better than my experience when I don't save a .PLN at the outset. While the saved plan is not displayed on the panel or the VFR map, it IS displayed in the LogNav tab on the Task Bar. Also, when I contacted Salt Lake Center this afternoon, ATC told me to "proceed to DBS as planned." DBS was my next waypoint. So the tower knows my plan, but I have no way of following it.

I sympathize with the OP. I couldn't find the update either, before reading on this forum about the tiny "Library" icon at lower left of the Store's home page. It does not leap out at you. Even then, the next screen was also confusing: it gave me a choice of downloading the update for MSFS Standard, and (and/or?) updating via xBox. I chose the former. But guess what? After doing the DL, opening MSFS and installing, I wasn't finished! -- If you have the "Deluxe Premium" edition, you have to do two more DLs, from the Content Manager. Who would know to do all of that, in that order? As I recall, you used to be able to go to the Store, click on the cryptic 3 dots at top right, and a pull-down of available updates would appear. (Of course, you had to learn about the 3 dots, first.) Once we learned how to do that, of course, they changed the whole procedure and visuals, to keep us off balance and to add a note of screaming frustration to what could and should be easy as pie. All this is emblematic of what I have come to call the "Computer Morons." These are preternaturally smart people who nonetheless display an imbecilic lack of awareness of what someone on the other side of the interface will see and readily understand.

Does their announcement mean, in plain English, that the FBW320 is not functioning after the update? I hadn't tried it since the update, but was about to. (I don't know what their "Development or Experimental branches are.)

Thanks, Steve, but no cigar. As I said (line 1), first I hit Escape. And no, it doesn't stop the clock from running -- at least not for me. On Day One back in August 2020, we all learned that ESC pauses the sim (unlike a soft pause where the plane stops moving, but everything else remains displayed). It pauses everything, that is, except the time. Of course, if you are not running a saved .flt or .pln, you can simply dial the clock back in your weather menu; but not in a saved flight, for reasons that remain mysterious to me.

Sometimes, when I need to do something else mid-flight, I hit ESC, then ALT + Enter to go to Windows mode and minimize MSFS. Then I can do other things on my computer or go away. When I return to my flight, the plane is as and where I left it. EXCEPT FOR THE TIME OF DAY WHEN YOU'RE IN A PREVIOUSLY-SAVED FLIGHT! Why doesn't that pause like everything else in the flight parameters? If you pause your flight at sundown, when you come back after an hour or so it's pitch dark! Is there a trick I don't know? (Yeah, I know, you can resave the flight and reload it when you return to MSFS. But this usually won't save your active flight plan (see my separate thread on that flaw). And it's cumbersome. It seems to me the hard pause you get with ESC should pause everything. This should be an easy and obvious fix, since there's no conceivable advantage to anyone in having time continue to pass when you're not in the sim.)

OK, it worked. Assuming it works consistently (which is yet to be tested), I leave it to greater intellects than mine to explain why the belt-and-suspenders approach of saving both a .pln and a .flt file (presumably with identical data) should have any effect on which parameters get saved when you subsequently save only the .flt file en route. When you do so, the .pln file is left to itself, and you wouldn't think that, as it slumbers, its data would somehow "bleed over" to the re-saved .flt file.

O I C. Happy New Year!

Tiger, I didn't think that would work, and it didn't. I saved BOTH a .pln and a .flt file before takeoff. When it was my bedtime, I saved a .flt file titled "en route." Next day, I opened it. As expected, the plane was located where it should be, but there was no flight plan on the panel or in the VFR map, so I couldn't even locate the waypoints, let alone set the AP on "Managed Heading." The waypoints did appear, however, in the pull-down from the taskbar, but there was no way to see where I was in the flight

For several months, I've had very smooth sailing in MSFS. Among other things, this was after I (a) limited my MSFS max frame rate in my Nvidia control panel to 32, (b) turned V-sync off in MSFS. (This was in accordance with advice from this forum.) After those changes, my CPU and GPU percentages were usually around 20 and 45, respectively. I thought this was pretty great, and assumed it was one reason why CTDs were so infrequent. Having changed absolutely nothing, today I noticed that my FPS was around 65, so I checked. Now my CPU is around 25, and my GPU 99 to 100%! I checked settings in both my Nvidia control panel and in MSFS Graphics. Everything OK. Just to be sure, I reentered the values, and applied them. But I was still getting FPS around 65. Tried it with V-sync OFF and ON (which shows a max FPS of 30). Nothing I could do could change that frame rate or the percentages of CPU and GPU utilization. Any ideas?

OK, I'll try that. But, if I overwrite the original .FLT file en route, then of course I'll no longer have "the .FLT file saved from world map," because it will have been overwritten. If you're saying I should open the new .FLT file (the one saved en route), that seems to me to be what I have been doing all along: create a .FLT file en route, and open it the next day. The only difference in your procedure is that there would also be a .PLN file situated at the airport. Anyway, we'll see . . . .

Tiger, Yes, but that is not responsive to my post. Nonetheless, after reading it I saved a .pln file at takeoff. After an anomalous CTD, I reopened and reloaded the .pln file. No problem. After an hour or so, I went to save my flight, and the only option (as I said previously in this thread) was a .flt file. So be it. Tomorrow, when I load that saved .flt file, the flight parameters will not have been preserved. Count on it!

I believe the only time you can create a .pln file is before you click on "Fly" to begin the flight. When you save a flight after it starts, you have no choice but a .flt file. And so, all .pln files begin at the airport. Unless I've missed something, there is no way to conserve an in-flight situation except as a .flt file. In any case, the parameters of a saved flight, including progress in a flight plan, shouldn't be lost.

This always happens: Flying a flight plan, AP engaged. Save flight (.flt file) and shut down the computer. Come back next day, reboot the PC, open MSFS and load the saved flight. It opens with the plane where it's supposed to be, but the flight plan is gone. No waypoints in the display, no red line in the VFR map. Reengaging the AP doesn't change things, either. Is there a way to make sure your plan survives the night?

OK, so I guess the bottom line for MSFS pilots is: If you get the warning, slow down!

TG, Thanks so much for that exegesis. It is most helpful. (Actually, I did know that Mach 1 changes with ALT, but that's about all.) So next I'll have to find out what the mach limit is for planes other than the 320. I'm sure there's a way. What still remains a mystery to me is how I've been playing around with flightsim since FS 2.0 on an Apple IIc in the early 90s, but had never before encountered this can of worms.

FWIW: I've cheated the system by extracting, not to Community, but to my Downloads folder itself, then simply moving the extracted folder into Community. It shouldn't work, should it? But it has for me.