For a commercial developer, this is terrible. You have to constantly retest and rework your project. And to make matters worse, some PCs tolerate projects while others do not.
But it is a pretty sim, and the market will force developers to enter it or be left without customers.
For the reason stated above, I have suspended scenery development, because the disappointment factor is as real as it gets. So I started working on an aircraft, a missile actually. It had been a lark, an offshoot if a model I developed for someone, that I got my own model for and continued to develop the flight characteristics. I made a VC for it, which is a table, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, because the thing is entirely fictional anyway, but it is easier to fly from cockpit view and I wanted a place to locate a PFD.
I started testing it at Edwards Air Base, because where else would someone test a manned missile anyway and the optics seemed good for screen shots. Lifting off and turning west, one can see there is an absolute
cloud of player ID's and my first reaction is to go over there and
really test it.
Arriving on scene, is a bit of a let down, I must observe. Easily, over 90% of the ID tags indicate the user is flying default aircraft. Occasionally I see an "Airforce" designation, "F22", or "Tomcat." Extremely rarely, I see tags that I cannot guess what they represent. This morning I saw a user "HazeBlue" with some numbers, 22 I think and his vehicle was "haze." I usually practice intercepts on the Tomcats and Airforce tags, but HazeBlue and I
definitely stirred it up - until he vanished.
I suspect it is a connectivity issue, because large swaths of user icons vanish simultaneously. I have no idea what my tag tells them, probably "Airforce," because I remember typing it into the aircraft.cfg, maybe "scramjet," because that is what my .cfg says where theirs would say "Tomcat."
Besides HazeBlue, I have also had interaction with Tomcat pilots. I have a video of repeatedly breaking from a furball and dropping back onto one's tail, the scramjet is fictionally fast, light and will turn tightly in any speed range from 600 kts to 150 or less, it burns off E quickly and will boost to 40k, or more, in seconds, so there really is no competition with anything modeled under the burden of real world physics. I'll Immelmann up to where I can see the Earth's curvature, nose over the top and look below for the Tomcat, clawing his way up to me, smoothly drop onto his tail and if I overshoot, I'll just do it again. All by the seat of my pants.
The thing that amazes me, is that all of the players that would frequent LAX area, all lining up like lemmings getting their virtual certifications acing final into KLAX, all the sky kings hovering overhead in their F-14's and Raptors, HazeBlue and I are the only one's "making our own."
Lately I have been thinking my ID tag serves as an "advertisement" and I should put a link on there somehow. I haven't uploaded video of my furballs, but here is one of me intercepting some poor pilot on final.
But the overall flying experience in MSFS is a bit sterile..
I'd call it vacuous. For a sensationalist like me, to find any entertainment at all, it
must be dumbed down.