The panel detects a sim flightplan loaded and puts up a popup EACH TIME asking to load it. How about stick this in the “Flights → Import Flight” menu so I don’t have to close it each and every time I open it - which can be multiple times per flight.
The side panel opens by default. How about it opening to the last state? 90% of the time I have to hide it.
The FAA sectionals map does not always display. Sometimes I get the VFR map, sometimes the world map, even if it’s selected. Irritating to have to select a different map, wait for it, then reselect the sectionals map.
The panel resizes itself about 50% of the time and won’t retain the last window size it’s left in.
The zoom level resets to 100% on occasion. If I set the zoom level to 60%, I would expect it to stay there, and not revert to 100% when it wants to.
Map takes too long to open, causes pauses in the sim. Maybe not loading EVERYTHING at once is the answer? Not loading with the open side panel would help.
With some aircraft, when shutting down it closes to just the header bar, and the only way to remove it is to click the button on the toolbar again. Something about it closing is causing an error.
Really the only recourse is to use the actual application itself in a separate window, the in-panel charts app is an absolute disaster.
I can see that you are frustrated, but there is no need to type in caps. We’ll try to help you, don’t worry! I would prefer to have a respectful conversation without big words. Regardless, thank you for the feedback!
Hmm, I can see how this would be annoying! The popup is there as a convenience, since we assumed that you would want the flightplan to be the same for the panel and the simulator. The prompt should not show up if the route is the same.
What is your use case where the simulator is running a different flightplan than the one in Charts? Have you had it pop up multiple times after importing it once? Or do you just not want to have the flightplans synced?
Please note: Closing the panel with the “X” button in the top right completely resets it. From the panel’s perspective, you might as well have restarted the simulator. There is nothing we can do to prevent this, and it inevitably results in a new popup (if the flight does not match) and stutters when it is opened again.
You can work around this by using the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + N) instead! This way, the panel visibility is toggled instead which results in the panel state being kept and speeds up the experience a lot. Looks like this will help for some of your later bullets here too!
Again, I am curious about what your workflow looks like. Do you use the Charts panel as a map only? The vast majority of our users often want to load a flight to follow the progress. That is why it makes sense to open the menu on the first launch.
However, things are slightly different in the panel - especially if you open/close it using the X button. It could be good to rethink our strategy here since those who do not use the shortcut will have the menu automatically open as soon as they close & reopen the panel!
This is a known bug at the moment, you can read more about it and related things in this topic:
We plan on looking further into this as soon as resources become available!
Hmm, you’ll need to elaborate on this one. We are not in control of the panel sizing at all - that is controlled (and remembered) by the simulator itself. If I understand you correctly, there is nothing we can do here.
This is also a known bug that seems out of our control, unfortunately. Please see this topic for more details and debugging instructions:
Of course we don’t load everything There are millions of files to be loaded, if that was the case the simulator would crash immediately due to lack of memory! The thing is, the environment that the panel runs in within the simulator shares resources with the simulator itself. This means that whenever an image needs to be downloaded and rendered in the map, this takes up frames from the simulator itself - causing a noticeable frame drop.
Again, the shortcut from the beginning of this post helps a lot with this. If you haven’t already, I recommend you try it out! It’s drastically better!
The original cause behind the frame drop is not possible for us to mitigate. We have some ideas on how we can improve it slightly, but it will always be noticeable due to the environment, which we cannot affect. The best way to get good FPS is to run the desktop app or web app instead if that is an option! The desktop app has an “always-on-top” mode which works fine if you don’t use VR. You can find it in the settings!
Do you have a concrete example of this that I could try to reproduce? Are you using any keyboard shortcuts to shut the aircraft down? We do not have any code that would trigger the panel to be minimized in that manner so I am fairly confident that this is not our fault, but I would be happy to check it out if you provide me with some steps!
We have been quite open with the fact that the panel is only for those who absolutely want to use our app within the simulator - it is, without a doubt, an inferior way to use our product and will always be because of the environment. But hey - at least it exists! For some, it is the only option (when using VR for example).
As mentioned earlier, we highly recommend using the desktop app over the panel if that is an option. It is in general a much better experience since it can run our GPU-accelerated data-driven maps along with several features that will never make it to the panel due to technological limitations.
That said, we’ll always try to make the panel as good of an experience as we feasibly can! Your feedback is therefore much appreciated, and I look forward to your responses to my follow-up questions!
Fair enough on the caps, it didn’t let me bold it.
I don’t ever load a flightplan into the sim itself. There’s no reason to do so. I need the starting location to spawn, and since I’m flying entirely on an online network, I don’t need the sim involved in the flight itself. It’s just a waste of time to enter it, and I do not use the in-game map or other tools. There are a few aircraft that will sync to the sim if you import a simbrief flightplan, and those instances are when the “Simulator Flightplan Detected” popup is triggered.
Not to mention, there are times my flightplan needs to be altered either by ATC or a change after loading into the sim, such as different weather or existing traffic. Many people don’t load a flightplan into the sim itself. Unless you use the sim features (I hate to call them that), there’s no reason to do so. I don’t fly any default aircraft, but I do fly some of the modified versions, like Black Square’s fixes for the C208 and King Air, Hans’ ATR, or the Horizon and Kuro 787’s. Those aircraft also sync the flight plan with the sim since they’re based on the default aircraft and systems. In most of the payware study-level aircraft it doesn’t matter since they aren’t synched to the sim.
Very interesting on the CTL+N shortcut, I did not see that in any of the documentation though. Does this do the same thing as re-clicking the panel app in the toolbar to minimize it? The workaround has been to minimize the panel to just the “bar” itself and tuck it in a corner so it’s mostly out of the way.
I don’t follow the flight at all in the app, I do not have Simlink installed either. The charts panel is used for charts, getting weather or ATIS, finding navaids, etc. The FAA sectionals charts are used because Vatsim is now trialing CTAF frequencies at US airports where there’s no ATC online. The CTAF to be used for each airport is found on the sectionals charts. On occasion I’ll use the sectionals charts as well for navigating through a Class-B airspace in VFR.
The frustration with the panel reloading each time someone closes it with the X extends well beyond me, it’s a common frustration borne by many. Had no idea the X fully resets it, there really isn’t a lot of documentation in the app panel on this.
The side panel opening each time is really annoying when the interface rescales back to 100%, as it now covers the entire panel and the “hide” button is now obscured because I’ve sized the window down to what might be it’s minimum.
Ok that’s good to know. Is there a place where existing bugs can be found? Usually I’ll check a developers Github for info, but since yours is in house and closed source, I can’t.
A video would be the best way to show this, but I’ll try to give a good example. Flying along, charts app open to an arrival to keep tabs on the altitude and speed constraints, while managing a descent. This phase of flight can involve a lot of back and forth between ATC and their instructions (if online), and cross referencing with the charts and the aircraft. Between clicking back and forth on the chart to move or scroll it, and the aircraft controls in the sim - like scrolling an altitude, going direct to something, or in freelook.
On occasion and seemingly randomly, clicking back on the charts app will cause it to “blink” and suddenly resize itself, covering half my view. I honestly don’t know what causes it, but imagine the chart being sized pretty small and stuck in the lower left corner, then - click click click - on things, go back to the charts app, and bam - it’s now twice as wide as it was, and seems to reload the page again. Then I have to drag and resize the app back down, and you can probably understand there’s some frustration there. If the sim isn’t remembering the panel size, or allows it to get resized, I do understand that’s not your fault, but I haven’t seen that behavior with any other panel app. They all stay the size they’re set to. In fairness, the only other panel app I use with any regularity is the simbrief panel app. I use that because it’s cumbersome to display the OFP in the Charts app and requires a lot of scrolling to the section I need.
Ok didn’t know about this bug as well. It is one of the most irritating right now, and it just started back in Feb.
Yeah, I am aware of the shared resources and how this works, the shortcut would help greatly.
What would really be better is to have a button that does that so I don’t have to take my hands off the stick or yoke to do a shortcut on the keyboard.
Yes, FSS E-Jets do this on shutdown. It might be a bug with the aircraft as it’s still in early access, but when shutting down the engines and systems, with the panel off, once the power from the generators is offline, the panel opens (even from closed) in the panel header bar, seemingly squeezed there, and it has to be closed via the toolbar. This is currently reproduceable 100% of the time. But again, it’s only affecting the Charts app.
I have been doing that from time to time, but then it becomes a pain to hide it completely when I need my whole screen and not obstruct a view or access to something in the cockpit I need to click on, and getting it back on screen. Just knowing two of these are known issues is good, and it seems the sim is at fault in them as well.
Hmm, I see! And you don’t ever load the flightplan into the panel either then I assume? Since this message should not appear if the route is the same already.
It is mentioned in the release notes a couple times, last here:
This is not the most visible location to advertise this feature, but we try to raise awareness for it whenever we can! It does not do the same as minimizing the panel - the difference is that the shortcut directly hides the panel without animations, and leaves no bar visible on the screen.
This is not a limitation that has always been there, and it is not a limitation introduced by Navigraph. While we do inform users about this here on the forum, it’d be great to have such information somewhere more visible to our users! We don’t have any obvious places for this at the moment, but perhaps it could become a feature of a planned refresh of the Navigraph Hub!
If you have any suggestions on where you would prefer to find such information (simulator limitations & keyboard shortcuts), we’d be happy to hear about that too!
Yeah, I totally get that it is annoying that the scale resets. The reason behind it is also causing some other issues, such as the feature showcase (“Annotations” at the moment) showing up every time the panel is opened. We have asked Simulator devs for help, but so far not arrived at any answer.
This forum is where we handle bug reports, and the search function should lead you to a couple of related topics! If you don’t find any topics for your issue, feel free to create one!
This sounds infuriating! I have never seen it myself, and you’re right - a video would be great! If I understand you correctly, the whole panel is resized. This is what I mentioned as something we don’t and can’t control at all even if we wanted to, but it is interesting nonetheless. The forum supports video uploads, but YouTube, Streamable, etc. works fine as well if you manage to capture it!
Yeah, it’s not fun. Did you try the debug steps? What was the outcome?
Oh believe me, we think this would be awesome too! We did look into it but unfortunately, this does not appear to be supported by the simulator at the moment. A solution that I have seen elsewhere is to remap a joystick button to the shortcut key combination, which essentially has the same outcome! This is hard to achieve if you don’t have such customization software though, of course.
This sounds insane hahaha! I will try to get ahold of one of their products to try it myself, but if it only happens with their addons I am not sure we are to blame… It sounds crazy though, I’ll try to take a look!
Yeah, it’s a tradeoff of course… Perhaps we could set up a keybind for that as well in the future! If you’d like to see that or have any other suggestions, feel free to post in the Wishlist !
I do import the flightplan from simbrief to the panel, as that’s the only way to allow it to pin charts for easy access. For those aircraft that do sync to the sim, the message pops up, every time if you close the panel with the X, but your CTL-N shortcut did solve that from happening. For those that don’t sync, there is no message since there’s no flightplan in the sim.
I did test this shortcut yesterday and it indeed works to hide the panel and it doesn’t reload on opening. If there was a way to stick a “hide” button in the panel or somehow get the sim to just toggle it from visible to hidden that would be ideal, but that might be too much for Asobo to handle since they keep breaking stuff. As you said, you looked into a way to do a button to do what the shortcut does, and there could be a way to do it. Many 3rd party sim apps use .NET as an overlay that stays on top, similar to what the actual application does. You could add something like that as a hotkey that maybe auto-hides, and is visible when you mouse over a specific area of the screen that can be defined by the user.
If you do a refresh of the panel or hub, a quick FAQ or hint button on the sidebar would be helpful to a lot of people. There’s room above the “settings” button.
In order to get a video of the unexpected panel resize I’ll have to record a few flights, it doesn’t happen every time, it’s random, but yes - super annoying when you’re hand flying an IFR approach and the panel suddenly blocks half the screen. As far as debugging it, I haven’t even attempted to do so since it’s during flight. I’m using a 50” HDR TV as a monitor running in 4K so I have to size the panel down or it covers so much of the screen area. 60% works ok but I’d prefer it just slightly smaller, however I also noticed it only scales in 20% increments.
Can you provide an example of such a flightplan? As mentioned earlier, you should not get that popup every time if the same flightplan is loaded in both the panel and the simulator. The scenario you are describing sounds unintentional!
They intentionally made the change to throw it away completely, most likely due to performance concerns. As mentioned earlier (and you seemed to know already), all panels share resources with the sim!
Would you prefer a button to hide the panel over the shortcut? How would you expect to open it again?
This goes way beyond the scope of an MSFS panel, so at that point, it is definitely easier to recommend a remap of a joystick button to a key combination. I don’t see us requiring you to run an external app to use the panel anytime soon! Thank you for the suggestion though, much appreciated!
This is an interesting suggestion for sure! Would you mind creating a dedicated topic to it in the Wishlist section?
Hmmm, I see. That is not a very usual use-case, but I’m sure that there are some cases! Could you take a screenshot of what the panel looks like compared to one of the built-in panels, such as the weather configurator?
Just to circle back to this: I tried to reproduce this with the 195, but I was not able to.
Could you provide step-by-step instructions that I can follow to make sure that we are doing the same things? Thanks in advance!
I’ve got 2 videos for you. Both are in the FSS 175. One is how the panel behaves when starting it after loading a flightplan into the 175. Because it’s using MSFS as the flightplan until their custom FMS comes out, the panel gets the repeated “Simulator Flightplan Loaded” messages, and the panel is sized different from closing. The 2nd one is how the panel opens back up when you shut down the engines. This time it opened fully, but sometimes it doesn’t. I did not hit any keys or click anything other than the engine shutdown for it to do that.
Where can I upload them, they are in MKV format, in full 4k. About 11gigs for one, 8 for the other.
I have no idea where you can upload such big files right away. The only thing that comes to mind is YouTube! This forum does not handle such sizes directly.
Can you upload them as “unlisted” on youtube and share the links?
I can’t reproduce the panel opening on shutdown issue in the 190. Can you? I don’t have the 175 at this time, so I can’t verify there.
As for the SimBrief import prompt, please see this previous question:
Please provide the full route so that I can set up a reproducible scenario!
I don’t think this moment was captured in the video, right? Perhaps during the initial opening, but I could not see what the “previous size” was then. I believe it has been mentioned already, but we do not in any way control the sizing of this window - it is all up to the simulator to control it and remember its size, position etc. We only control the contents. If the behavior is different from other panels then that is indeed puzzling - we use the same panel project as everyone else.
Here is what that configuration looks like if you are interested:
Perhaps you are hitting values below the “minHeight” and “minWidth” somehow? There is no reference for this really so the number could mean anything, not sure what the units would be but it definitely isn’t pixels.
As for the flightplan on the popup, it isn’t route-dependent, it happens on every opening of the panel if the panel was previously closed with the toolbar or the “X”, and a plan is loaded into the sim. I did check and it does not happen when using ctl+n to hide the panel, and the Windows charts app seems to only display it once as you suggest the proper behavior should be. (Been using this lately with the “keep on top”, works lots better!)
I’ll do another video with the 190 today and give you the route, but it also works to just start up the engines, then shut them down. Same behavior. Very possible this is related to the FSS jets, as they’re still early access. Haven’t seen that behavior on any other aircraft though.
About the resizing, it resized from what it was on previous close, but I do get that you don’t have any control over the window sizing except the default values. In my video, it opened larger than I had it set, and I resized it down to where I usually keep it. I’ll have to open it and close it a few times, but at some point doing that it changes size. I really don’t use any other panels aside from the Simbrief Profile panel, and that pretty much stays the same size and I never touch it. I guess I could be sizing it below the minimum, I do drag it down to about the smallest it’ll allow me to go. There’s a point where it cannot go smaller, and that’s usually where I leave it.
I understand that this is the perception, and it may very well be true! But for the sake of being able to make an accurate reproduction, I would like to make sure that I have the same scenario. Looking forward to your update!
Could be for sure! But so far I can’t reproduce it, and I do not understand how they could trigger the panel in any way. Does the Navigraph Charts icon go from off to highlighted in the toolbar when this happens? That is, does it happen even if the panel is completely closed, not just hidden with Ctrl + N?
I see. Unfortunately we’ll likely never know, we have not been able to reproduce this and since we don’t control it, there’s nothing we could do even if we were able to reproduce it
Sorry got busy yesterday and haven’t had the time to get a video made yet. Will work on it today. I will get you the route also, so you can double check it.
About the Ejets, I have the toolbar hidden, so I don’t see whether it’s highlighted or not. It’s only when completely closed. No idea how it does it either.
I’ll try to do more examples in a video and stitch it together so it doesn’t run 20 minutes!
There are millions of files to be loaded, if that was the case the simulator would crash immediately due to lack of memory! The thing is, the environment that the panel runs in within the simulator shares resources with the simulator itself. This means that whenever an image needs to be downloaded and rendered in the map, this takes up frames from the simulator itself - causing a noticeable frame drop.