Hello! Welcome to our forum!
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!
Kind Regards,
Malte